The Reverend Canon Brian J. Grieves, 7 March 2026: Palestinian Christians have been my teachers for over the last 30 years. I’ve also learned from courageous Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims. But the Christians are family.
Listen to their voices, to their demands for justice, and even sometimes their anger at the worldwide Church. Why anger? For one, our own Episcopal House of Bishops has prevented the Episcopal Church from naming genocide in Gaza and apartheid in the West Bank.
Palestinian Christians like Munther Issac have boldly named genocide for going on two years. They bear an enormous cost of our House of Bishops’ silence and timidity which prevents full throated advocacy to our government to end this gross injustice of 78 years. The silence is muting the advocacy of our existing policies supporting Palestinian justice beginning in 1979.
It is said that the bishops’ refusal to name genocide and apartheid is because the Episcopal Archbishop of Jerusalem, Hosam Elias Naoum prefers we do not. While I have never heard him use the words (he needs to answer for that) he has, to my knowledge, also not publicly ever advised against them. The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, named genocide after a recent visit to Archbishop Hosam in Jerusalem who made no objection. Is it OK to name genocide in England, but not in the United States? Where is the disconnect?
Here is what a Palestinian Christian friend, Samia Khoury, wrote to me last April. She is now in her 90s:
“What is the church doing while this genocide is going on? It seems like the devil is in control. Until when will we keep watching this genocide with people practically buried alive. I know that anybody raising a voice to protest has been harassed in the USA and Europe. Yet to be silent means to be complicit with powers of evil and eventually nobody will be spared.” (italics added)
The same is true of the refusal to name apartheid, with one horrific oppressive system for Palestinians and a democratic, if imperfect, one for Jews. Desmond Tutu named apartheid in occupied Palestine after a visit to the Holy Land decades ago. Decades ago!
Winnie Varghese, Dean of the iconic Cathedral of St John the Divine in NYC wrote just over 10 years ago: “I will never understand why we would not listen first to our brothers and sisters truly on the ground, the lay and ordained Palestinian Christians who have been displaced; who work for justice; and who ask for our help.” She wrote that in 2015!
It’s important to say that the responsibility for genocide and apartheid is that of the Israeli government (enabled by the US), full stop. And many Jewish friends in Israel and here at home are heartsick about what has transpired not just since October 7, 2023 but since 1948. For their sake, our commitment to oppose antisemitism must never waver.
Palestinian Christians have been inviting us to “come and see” for years. I last went in November 2024. On the first day our ecumenical delegation was taken to a site that overlooks Gaza where local Israeli citizens can sit and watch the bombs fall on the Palestinian people and their homes. This was when the bombs were still falling. It was shocking. We offered prayers for an end to this madness.
I made five visits to Gaza, the first in 1993. Even then most were Palestinian refugees and descendants who had lived in Gaza in squalid refugee camps since 1948, having been displaced by Zionist militias. Hamas would not emerge for another 40 years. Since October 7, 2023, the IDF has killed 70,000+ and wounded 170,000+, and destroyed those squalid refugee camps from 1948 in a campaign of genocide, which is increasingly recognized internationally, including by our traditional ecumenical partners (UMC, UCC, Presbyterian and Lutheran), isolating us from them.
On that trip in 2024 we also met in Ramallah in the West Bank with the mother of Layan Nasir, both Episcopalians. Layan, in her 20s, was being held in an Israeli prison on a vague charge. Joyfully she was shortly released, only to be reincarcerated a year later where she languishes today. For Episcopalians, her incarceration is personal. Layan is family.
My friend Samia’s teenage grandson, Shadi, is also awaiting sentencing by an Israeli military court for allegedly throwing stones at soldiers despite witnesses recanting. For Layan and Shadi, this is life under apartheid.
It is in listening to our Christian siblings in Palestine that we will reclaim our place in the movement for justice in the Holy Land. We can begin by embracing the latest Kairos document recently released by Palestinian Christians: "We live now in a time of genocide, ethnic cleansing and forced displacement unfolding before the eyes of the world.” They offer a vision for us to embrace.
Canon Grieves served as the Peace and Justice Officer for the Episcopal Church from 1988-2009. He was awarded the Episcopal Peace Fellowship’s Nevin Sayre Award in 1997.
