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By Erin Hancock, former WSCF-US National Organizer  Our third day in the West Bank felt like an entire week packed into 12 hours. The day began with a 45-minute bus ride from where we were staying in East Jerusalem to Dar Al-Kalima University in Bethlehem, where we would be meeting with Palestinian Christian theologian and pastor, Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb. We were fortunate on this day to be joined by Omar, the director of the grassroots Palestinian liberation theology movement, Sabeel, that was hosting us and had organized our trip. Omar never missed the opportunity for a teaching moment or a clever joke (and we learned that there was often a lesson contained within his humor), so as soon as we were all seated on the bus to Bethlehem, Omar hopped on the bus’s intercom and asked our group to raise our hands if we identified as Christian Zionists. We all laughed as Omar continued the bit, reassuring us it was a safe space for any of us who wanted to raise our hands. Eventually Omar went on to talk about settler colonialism, Christian Zionism, Jewish Zionism, and the ways in which each of these ideologies are intertwined in the logics and machinations of the Israeli state. Always steps ahead of us, Omar was laying the foundation for our upcoming conversation with Dr. Raheb as well as what we would be witnessing later during our visit to the South Hebron Hills and the Old City of Hebron. When we arrived at Dar Al-Kalima University, Dr. Raheb greeted us with a warm smile and tiny cups of Arabic coffee. We all gathered around a conference table as Dr. Raheb invited us to go around the room and introduce ourselves. Many of us were already familiar with Dr. Raheb either from reading his books or hearing him speak at our own seminaries or universities in the states. Almost as if it had been coordinated, Dr. Raheb picked up right where Omar had left off in our conversation on the bus, speaking about the four major challenges facing Palestine: 1) settler colonialism, 2) the Israelization of the world, 3) the Zionization of theology, and 4) the militarization of the region and the world. It would have been impossible to speak about these challenges without talking about the role the U.S. has played in each of them. Notably, just days before we left the states to travel to Palestine, Renee Good was murdered by ICE agents in Minneapolis. In response, Vice President JD Vance claimed that ICE was “protected by absolute immunity,” a phrase, Dr. Raheb informed us, that was borrowed from Israel. Not only is ICE being trained to use the Israeli military’s tactics of terrorism, they are also following their example of how to evade consequences for their own violations of the law. Dr. Raheb ended our time together by offering a few signs of hope as well as a call to action. The first sign of hope is that settler colonialism is failing. That is why Israel opted for a genocide in Gaza, as a desperate and strategic attempt to continue toward the goal of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their land. Second, global Palestine is on the rise, particularly throughout countries that have suffered under settler colonialism, but also more broadly. For example, the watermelon has become an international symbol of solidarity with Palestine. More and more films centering the voices of Palestinians are being produced and viewed across the world. In my own circles, it’s rare to attend a social gathering where there isn’t at least one person wearing a keffiyeh. And yet, with this hope, there is a responsibility, particularly for those of us from the U.S. Again, harkening back to our conversation with Omar on the bus, Dr. Raheb remarked that as U.S. citizens, we are each, by default, cultural Zionists. I couldn’t help feeling some shame and discomfort when he said this. Should I have raised my hand on the bus after all? What began as a joke - which, in hindsight, was likely intended to stir up some feelings of discomfort - had become one of the main takeaways of our time together that morning. The reality is that Zionism - similar to racism, sexism, ableism, etc. - is built into the fabric of our everyday lives in the U.S. It is our responsibility to recognize and disrupt it, whether it is in our politics, our theologies, or where we spend our money. Palestine will be free. In the words of Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, “There are cracks in the wall, and it is our job to keep chiseling away to let the light in.  The WSCF-US group at Dar al-Kalima University.
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By Ailih Weeldreyer, WSCF-US National Organizer In January 1997, two young, white, American Christians from Michigan and North Carolina traveled from Union Presbyterian Seminary to the Holy Land, and were transformed. My parents witnessed apartheid amidst visits to holy sites, and were invited into conversation with Palestinian Christians from Sabeel. Disturbed and touched by the experience, their perspectives were changed. Later that year, I was born. Unlike many white, Christian Americans in a culture that is by default Zionist, I grew up with the word Palestine, with the knowledge of the occupation, and with a faith that encouraged me to be in solidarity with Palestinians. In January 2026, I made the same journey to Palestine. My time there has left me transformed in the way that we are called as Christians to continuously turn toward God. I have turned back towards a knowledge I have had since birth, and will orient my life towards it going forward. I am a testament to the power of the stories and ideologies we learn as children. My parents’ stories and those of the Palestinians they invited into our home were formative for my worldview before I could even fully understand them. In the same way, Israeli and Palestinian children are formed by their environments and the stories they are told. I and others in our delegation were struck over and over by the ways that children are taught, either to become oppressors or to resist oppression. On January 19, we visited the Tent of Nations, Bethlehem, the Walled Off Hotel next to the apartheid wall, and Aida refugee camp. At the Walled Off Hotel there is a museum which documents the occupation and Palestinian resistance, with barred windows overlooking an expanse of concrete. In this museum, there are artifacts that illustrate the ways that Israeli children are taught from birth to respond to the world around them with violence. An Israeli Defense Force onesie was displayed next to an elementary counting worksheet with cartoonish tanks and fighter planes. In a video sharing testimonies of soldiers, one recalled, “At 18 years old I was given a button, a big red button…You press that button and 4 kilometers away someone will die.” Another recounted, “I gave up on humanity, I gave up on who I am and just became more and more aggressive, to become a part of the society where I live.” Earlier in the week, two settler children shouted slurs at one of our Palestinian guides as he showed us the now-deserted streets of his home in occupied Hebron. I am deeply saddened for the children who are raised to be violent, taught to abuse people simply for their identity, and deeply concerned about the effects such a society has on the rest of the world. Our journey to the Tent of Nations was circuitous and brought us through “Area C” of the West Bank, where settlers are taking as much land as they can from Palestinians. The farm, which now serves as a faith-based community dedicated to nonviolent action, sits on a hill not far from Bethlehem which is the only hill in the region without an Israeli settlement. The farm is owned by the Nassar family, and we were privileged to speak with Daoud Nassar, who leads his family’s resistance to the attempts by Israel to take their land. For thirty-five years, the Nassar family has been in court with the Israeli government. Their orchard and olive trees have been destroyed and they have received 28 demolition orders despite holding documentation for their land from the state of Israel. Despite the constant threats from settlers and the state, the Nassar family remain steadfastly committed to their principles: We refuse to be victims We refuse to hate We act on our faith We believe in justice
The day I returned from Palestine, my heart was broken again by the murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. I am struck that those scenes of violence mirror those in the West Bank, and it emphasizes to me the way the violence of empire is entwined across borders. In Palestine as much as in Minneapolis and our own communities, Christians have an obligation to speak up and stand in the way of empire. We must be a prophetic voice in this time, or - as Rev. Munther Isaac reminded us on Sunday - we render our churches and our messages of faith irrelevant. At the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the main entrance to the church is kept intentionally short to require pilgrims to bend down before God. Entering the church, I was viscerally reminded of the humility necessary to admit our complicity with the sins of the world before God and our siblings facing oppression, apartheid, and genocide. May we all find this posture of humility and allow it to move us to action.
On the left, in 1997, Ailih’s dad (Seth Weeldreyer) exits the Church of the Nativity. On the right, Ailih exits in 2026.
By Logan Crews I admit, I was a little surprised to learn we would be traveling to Haifa for one day of our delegation. The pretty, seaside city with palm trees and hip establishments that I see in propagandized social media posts to show off the “civilized,” Western oases of Israeli cities in the Middle East—why were we going there? I was humbled over and over again that day as we learned about the experience of Palestinian citizens of Israel who live in Haifa. Who have always lived in Haifa. These are people I often leave behind in my prayers and advocacy. I was angered and shaken that the Zionist project had done its job keeping the Palestinian identity of this place from my American view. The Haifa we saw on January 16 wasn’t the rubble of demolished homes and brandished assault rifles and military checkpoints we saw throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem. But the more we swept the dust from the surface of the city, as one of our guides put it, the more I could sense the claws of ethnic cleansing and occupation just underneath. “Persecution has many faces and many ways.”
As we traveled around Haifa, I wondered how many of the older homes and businesses I saw belonged to someone who is still waiting for the day they can return. I also saw new high-rise apartment buildings and office complexes and wondered what had stood there before. (To learn more about how the demolition of Palestinian homes to build luxury buildings is part of a plan to turn Haifa into the “Barcelona of the Middle East,” I recommend this Mondoweiss article by Jaclynn Ashly.)
In Haifa, I began to realize two things: the world’s rightful focus on the genocide in Gaza as the current “Palestinian experience” had given me a tunnel vision the last two years that left out other parts of the Palestinian story, and that what I was seeing in Haifa was a city under the same occupation I saw in cities in the West Bank, perhaps just further down Israel’s timeline. Our hosts from the Social Development Committee (SDC) in the Arab neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas and Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, urged us to resist looking at Palestine through a lens of hierarchical suffering. There is no hierarchy of suffering. There is just suffering. The experience of all Palestinians—citizen or resident of Israel or stateless, in the land or in the diaspora, urban or rural—are connected. To see them as separate is to fall for Israel’s ultimate strategy of “divide and conquer”—if Palestinians are cut off from each other, it becomes more difficult to resist oppression. Palestinian citizens of Haifa live along lines of apartheid. Haifa is one of Israel’s “mixed cities,” where the population is made up of both Jews and Arabs. But we learned that “mixed” does not mean “shared.” The differences of Palestinian and Jewish experiences here reminded me of American cities in many ways: the infrastructure in Arab neighborhoods is worse than in Jewish ones, there is an achievement gap within education, etc. But I was most struck by how precarious everything felt in Haifa; even in times of calm between all the residents, there is real fear among Palestinians to speak the truth about the Israeli government, Palestinian history and culture, or even to call themselves “Palestinian.” The entire time we were in Haifa, I felt uneasy, as if the facade of the progressive city could collapse in one second. When we went to look over the sea (my first ever glimpse of the Mediterranean), I could only think about Gaza’s beaches that were a mere 2.5 hour drive down the coast. That Palestine is this Palestine, too. It was amazing to hear about the SDC’s projects to support the Arab population of Haifa through education initiatives and the creation of an Arab map of the city that includes past and present sites in an attempt to preserve Palestinian history. Adalah, although situated in Haifa, is constantly representing communities across Palestine, like the 37 unrecognized Bedouin communities in the Naqab who are threatened with displacement, Palestinian students who are disciplined for showing even an ounce of empathy for the people of Gaza, and most of the Freedom Flotilla participants, to name just a few. We also visited the church that houses House of Grace, an organization dedicated to supporting vulnerable groups such as the recently imprisoned. I left Haifa feeling disturbed, honestly. I learned so much that I could never relay in one blog post. It feels so bad to see the “clean” results of apartheid and ethnic cleansing right in front of you, in the middle of a trip spent witnessing these systems at different stages. But I was and am so grateful to have witnessed for even one day the resilience of the Palestinians in this city, many of whom survived the Nakba by hiding in churches and convents and remained to resist the erasure of Haifa as a Palestinian city. I continue to pray for their safety in a city where they are still not free to organize and speak out or from random attacks from settlers who infiltrate their neighborhoods, for their ability to find peace under the sharp watch and control of the Haifa municipality, and for non-Palestinians like myself to remember them, always. In mixed cities like Haifa, the criss-crossing lines of oppression throughout the land of Palestine all connect in a way that makes twisted sense and tied my own stomach up in a knot. The liberation of Palestine will never be complete without the liberation of these cities, too. Of Haifa. |
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