This fall, Palestine advocates in Rochester, NY, will host the eighth annual Witness Palestine Film Festival.  From October 14 – November 9, the festival will present five films and will end with a Celebrate Palestine event.  The first of the films will be shown at St John Fisher College.  The other four will be screened at The Little Theatre, Rochester’s finest and best-known independent film venue.

The festival was born in 2012 as a project of Rochester’s ecumenical group, Christians Witnessing for Palestine.  The festival planning committee is open to members of our local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, the Muslim community, and secular activists.  Committee members contribute as they are able to a wide range of tasks, including evaluation of possible films for the following year, securing licensing agreements, recruiting panelists (whenever possible, a person associated with the creation of the film), fundraising, publicity, coordination with the venues, and logistics at the showings.  It’s a significant effort spanning many months that is made manageable by a dedicated mix of experienced and more recent volunteers.  The festival is the largest advocacy effort of Christians Witnessing for Palestine.

At the festival’s website, we have descriptions of this year’s films along with the dates, times, and location of the screenings.  The archive section lists films shown each year since the festival’s inception in 2012.  Where do we find the films?  In a variety of places!  Festivals in larger cities such as Boston and Toronto are often helpful resources.  One of the films we’ll show this year was mentioned in a footnote of a book that one of us was reading.  When one starts to look, ideas emerge!  And, now that we’re somewhat established, film makers and distributors reach out to us suggesting that we consider a new film of theirs.  Once we’ve identified a number of possibilities, we contact the distributors and request “screeners”, which provide us with links and passwords enabling committee members to view the films privately for evaluation.  When we’ve made our selections, we then proceed to work out a licensing agreement to show the films publicly and charge for admission.

Celebrate Palestine this year is an example of a special event we attempt to include each year.  It will feature an afternoon workshop on storytelling, led by Boston-based, Palestinian American Nadia Abuelezam, creator and host of Palestinians Podcast.  Our hope is that the workshop will offer members of Rochester’s Palestinian community an opportunity to tell and share their stories.  That evening, we’ll host a dinner open to the public where Nadia will speak.  In recent years, the special events of our festival have featured Palestinian human rights attorney, author, and activist Noura Erakat and author Susan Abulhawa.

And the costs?  Our 2019 festival budget is about $7,300.  The budget includes expenses associated with using The Little Theatre, honoraria to our panelists and guest speaker, advertising, printing, and film licensing.  Most of our revenue comes from two sources – donations and the sale of ads in our Program Booklet, which is distributed to those attending the films.  Ticket sales are another source of festival income.

During its first seven years, the Witness Palestine Film Festival has attracted an audience of over 3,200.  It is perhaps the most visible form of Palestine advocacy in the Rochester area.  We have no paid staff, no endowment, nor do we receive any grant funding.  We have made it work.  And we would welcome the chance to share our experience and resources with you.

Thanks to EPF PJN member Harry Gunkel for this update.

The Episcopal Peace Fellowship’s Palestine Justice Network (EPF PJN) recently gathered in retreat to chart its course for the remainder of the 2018-2021 triennium. For three days, approximately 30 PJN members worked together to determine organization goals and how best to operate to achieve them, while remaining responsive to events on the ground in Palestine and Israel and honoring members’ own obligations to their baptismal covenants.

The PJN retreat was the organization’s first gathering since the Episcopal General Convention in July 2018. The General Convention was a momentous one for PJN, as the Church’s House of Bishops and House of Deputies concurred on six resolutions to address the ongoing tragic violence and injustices taking place in Palestine and Israel. The six resolutions, which built on actions by previous Conventions, addressed Episcopal Church policy regarding aid to Palestinian refugees, safeguarding the rights of Palestinian children, the status of Jerusalem, the right of both Palestinians and Israelis to self-determination and sovereignty, violence and abuse of human rights in Gaza, and developing an investment screen for Palestine/Israel based on human rights.

Monitoring the progress of implementing these resolutions, as well as educating members of the Church about the resolutions and more broadly about the situation in Palestine and Israel will form the major part of PJN’s work during the current triennium. Efforts will be made to establish dialogue with deputies, bishops, and church leaders, as well as to build grass roots presence in parishes and dioceses for education and advocacy around these topics. Simultaneously, PJN will seek new relationships and strengthen existing ones with organizations of allied interests both within and outside the Church. 

PJN’s work during this triennium carries a sense of new urgency, as the situation on the ground in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza deteriorates rapidly, while national leadership in the US disregards Palestinian interests in favor of Israel. Both federal and state legislatures are moving to criminalize forms of opposition to Israel’s long-running military occupation and mischaracterize its criticism as antisemitism.

PJN has reorganized in order to be more responsive and effective in this work. At the core of PJN’s structure is a Steering Committee who will determine the organization’s goals and objectives and have ultimate decision-making authority. They will be guided by an Advisory Council, a diverse ecumenical group whose members have experience in Episcopal Church governance and policy, as well as extensive knowledge and experience in Palestine and Israel. PJN’s day to day operation will be centered in Working Groups, focusing on Communications, Local Organizing, Education, and Budget and Membership. 

PJN will be led by Convener, Dr. Linda Gaither. Linda  is a retired Religion Studies professor living near Ithaca  in the Episcopal Diocese of Central NY.  She served for 10 years on the National Executive Council of EPF, acting as Chair (2009 – 2013). She served with PJN Core Leadership in the previous triennium.  Serving with her in leadership is Dr. Harry Gunkel, PJN’s Coordinator of Communications.  Harry was the PJN convener during the 2015 – 18 triennium.  

At really successful art openings the crush of excited people makes it hard to check out the art. Similarly, the annual “Israel Lobby and American Policy” conference in DC was so jammed with fascinating people from all over who are working to break Israel’s death grip on Palestine and on U.S. policy that it was easy to miss the actual program! Luckily, it’s easy to catch videos of the presentations on a free “playlist”. You won’t get the networking and positive energy of having been physically at the National Press Club on 22 March, but you can see and hear the powerful speakers buoyed up by a rapt audience of hundreds of activists and experts. 

Most awesome, perhaps, was the keynote address by Susan Abulhawa. A trained scientist with great literary gifts, she led us on an eye-opening tour of Israel “Beyond Apartheid,” asking us temporarily to look away from the system of Apartheid that has blighted Palestinians’ existence for the last 70 years. Instead, she tallied some of Israel’s other sinister accomplishments in the areas of ecological destruction, the development and global spread of “death, surveillance and suppression tech and tactics,” support of anti-democratic forces worldwide, and destruction of the ancient histories and cultures of Palestine and of its non-Jewish religious heritage: You’ve heard of Israel, the “environmental wonder-worker” who made the desert bloom? Well, Palestine wasn’t a desert to start with, she noted. As for making it bloom, check out the Jordan River, or what’s left of it, the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee; or the dumping of toxic waste on Palestinian villages; the destruction of olive orchards and the planting of fire-prone European trees; the draining of precious wetlands, etc.

Is Israeli innovation celebrated? It’s all about military and police weaponry and tactics to control unhappy populations. Abulhawa ran the numbers to show Israel is second only to Saudi Arabia in military spending per capita and way ahead of the world in military/police exports per capita. Their success is due to Israel’s ability to test its lethal products on live Palestinians.

Abulhawa surveyed a long list of genocidal, pariah regimes that Israel has supplied with weaponry and training, often covertly and often by breaking UN arms embargoes. Passionate support for Apartheid South Africa set the standard early on. Along with selling weapons, Israel’s alliances have given moral support and cover to thuggish–and even overtly anti-Semitic– regimes from Southeast Asia to Europe to Central and South America – and above all in Africa.

She outlined decades of destruction and vandalization of mosques, churches and cemeteries, along with the destruction of archeological sites and artifacts from non-Jewish cultures in Palestine’s uniquely significant territory.  She warned that Israel is “moving forcefully against al Aqsa, perhaps the last frontier.”

Abulhawa argued that Israel is bad news for many more people than just Palestinians, calling it “a global force for violence, suppression, plunder, paranoia, greed, war, ecological destruction, erasure of history and culture, and supremacism.” The good news, she said, is that Palestinians are “on a time-tested trajectory to liberation,” however “difficult and bloody” it may be.

Earlier, Grant Smith of the Institute for Research on Middle East Policy (IRmep), which co-sponsored the conference with the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, had focused on the many tentacles of subversion and perversion of U.S. laws and government agencies, from the White House on down, brought about by the Israel Lobby. Detailing three prolonged campaigns by IRmep to win court orders to get access to information on what our government has been doing, Smith showed how the Lobby “supplants, silences and exploits” the functions of U.S. and state governments.

Good news was shared by Martin McMahon, the attorney who is litigating a potentially game-changing lawsuit against Sheldon Adelson, Eliot Abrams and some 40 individuals, non-profit foundations and banks which have enabled the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. He spoke in the wake of a federal appeals court’s resounding vindication of the legitimacy of the lawsuit, which invokes jurisdiction under the Alien Tort Statute and alleges the aiding and abetting of genocide against the Palestinians. Al Tamimi, et. al. v. Adelson (No. 17-5207, D.C. Cir., decision Feb. 19, 2019).

The three-judge court unanimously reversed the trial judge’s dismissal of the suit, which she had ruled presents a “political question” reserved to the Congress and the President. The appellate panel ruled that claims of genocide against violent Israeli settlers could be proved at trial, if the plaintiffs, Palestinians and Palestinian Americans, submit solid evidence.

“This ruling provides an unprecedented opportunity in the U.S. for the Palestinian victims of

Israeli aggression and ethnic cleansing to fairly prove their claims in a court of law,” McMahon said in a statement. He made clear, however, that his team is in need of a lot of aid and support from supporters of Palestinian rights as the defendants have the toughest lawyers money can buy, as well as all the other political and media assets of the Israel Lobby. 

Other fascinating and important speeches were given, including by Ali Abunimah, the founder of the Electronic Intifada, who discussed an extraordinary undercover investigative report on the Israel Lobby that Al Jazeera was afraid to air. A leaked copy of the video is available on the EI website. It details the techniques and names the organizations that are behind the smears and deceptions perpetrated by the Lobby. 

James North of Mondoweiss served up a biting analysis of the many ways “The New York Times Rigs News on Israel-Palestine” to hide the misdeeds or soften the image of Israel. 

Brad Parker of Defense for Children International-Palestine explained how best to reach members of Congress and other political figures with tightly targeted human rights issues, such as Israeli child-detention practices. 

Three local activists from Virginia described how they have created remarkably successful groups and campaigns to counter increasing efforts by the Lobby to influence state and local policies, from opposing anti-BDS legislation and policies, and pro-Israel economic “advisory” groups to fighting Lobby moves to politicize K-12 textbooks.

All of the program offerings are well worth viewing online. But when the Israel Lobby conference meets in Spring 2020 at the Press Club, dedicated activists really should try to be there.

EPF PIN activities coordinator Harry Gunkel writes about funding cuts to USAID programs in Palestine.

When USAID completes a construction project or funds the acquisition of new equipment, for example at a hospital, it places a plaque stating that the work is “a gift of the American people”. During the past year, by actions of the current American government, this phrase has become a cruel joke for the Palestinian people.

The US has now completely shut down all projects of USAID (US Agency for International Development) in the West Bank and Gaza, about $200 million worth. The agency had been the primary supporter of food aid in the Palestinian territories, as well as an important supporter of infrastructure development in the water and sanitation, health, and education sectors. Additionally, US AID projects in the West Bank and Gaza primarily employed Palestinians, jobs sorely needed in a place where jobs are life-threateningly scarce. 

And within a week of first announcing the USAID cuts, the Trump administration also slashed its support to UNRWA by about half. UNRWA is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the Middle East, established in 1947 when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees as they were displaced from their homes to make way for the new state of Israel. Today, about 40% of Palestinians in the West Bank and two-thirds of Gazans are refugees who depend on UNRWA for housing, education and health care. 

US officials made no secret of the reason for their actions – to try to force the Palestinian Authority to accept its new, still secret “peace plan” for Israel and Palestine. Although the plan itself, long in coming, has not been presented yet, early indications are that it will continue to enforce Israeli hegemony over the region, ensuring that Palestinians remain unfree and stateless. In yet another display of willful ignorance, the administration’s plan will throw money at Palestinians to try to purchase their silence and acquiescence. It won’t work as anyone who has spent any time at all with Palestinian people will know. 

But however ill-conceived, these moves will result in millions of Palestinians, already suffering grotesque injustice and deprivation at the hands of the government of Israel, suffering more. Less food, poorer housing, fewer opportunities, and poorer health. All at the hands of the American government and the people it represents. You and me. No longer gifts from the American people, now we will deliver lashes of the whip. Now in Palestine we will make ourselves known by our malice and cruelty. Indeed, as Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic, “cruelty is the point” of much of this administration’s actions.

This is no paean to USAID, which is hardly a paragon of altruism. As an agency of the US State Department, the strings attached to projects are strong and stretch straight back to Washington, DC. I worked for a USAID healthcare project in the West Bank that was terminated two years into its five-year plan because a member of Congress got miffed at the Palestinian Authority. That pettiness was repeated on a Gaza project soon after, but this bad behavior does not negate the good that was done during the lives of the projects. The chimerical character of US AID is not the point; harming and abusing helpless people in need is.  

Some will argue that these moves represent realpolitik, playing necessary hardball to achieve our international objectives, but in fact, this is nothing less than collective punishment. It’s not the first time Israel or the US has practiced collective punishment against the Palestinian nation; indeed, it’s a favorite in our bulging arsenal of weapons. Article 32 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits exactly this kind of action against civilian populations, so these actions are not only immoral, they are illegal. They are also as good an example as you might find of racism on grand scale. How else explain causing such injury to entire populations unless the people being injured are objectified into other than or less than? Think slavery. Think brown children in cages at the US-Mexico border. 

Some actions of government can be overlooked or shrugged off as unfortunate consequences of our bureaucratic morass. But others, like this, cross the line. This may be the way of governments and empires, but since Calvary it has not been the way of those who claim to follow Jesus. We must say No, not in my name. We must stand against international objectives that include hurting children and the ill.  

Mind you, Palestinians will not keen and wring their hands over these assaults from the American people. They will set to do what’s needed. They will continue to stand steadfast and rise in resistance. We must rise with them.  

Kairos Palestine recently held a 9th anniversary celebration and gathering in Bethlehem. Read the statement coming out of the gathering here.  We celebrate it with this essay by EPF PIN member Kathy Christison:

The weekly London Economist recently ran an article more or less pronouncing the death of Liberation Theology in Latin America and, by implication, everywhere else as well.  But, from the perspective of those millions around the world who live in injustice and oppression—including Palestinians and the theologians and spiritual leaders who minister to them—this misguided death knell for a theology that gives them spiritual succor and hope in their misery comes as an insensitive assertion that God has abandoned them.  In fact, however, the Economist fails to understand the true nature of liberation theology and the provenance under which it exists and is called forth.

Taking off from the Vatican’s canonization in October of Archbishop Óscar Romero, the El Salvadoran Catholic prelate assassinated on the altar by rightwing militiamen in 1980, the article (signed only by “B.C.”) vaguely hints that Romero’s entry into sainthood marks the capstone of the vast liberation theology movement that arose throughout Latin America in the 1960s and ‘70s.  But it is not clear whether the author believes liberation theology ultimately succeeded or failed.  Observing rather too sweepingly that “the liberationists’ critique of inequality has now passed into the standard thinking of the Vatican,” B.C. suggests that liberation theology might now take its success and pass peacefully from the political scene, like other past transitory social movements.  But at the same time, B.C. says, the Catholic Church is losing numbers precipitately in South America—from 90 percent of that population in 1970 to a predicted 50 percent by the end of the next decade—and so the Catholic Church is losing its grip on theology for the oppressed.

These assertions are mostly non sequiturs, telling us nothing about the spiritual essence of any of the several liberation theologies; nothing about the beauty of the path these theologies offer the oppressed and marginalized in their various contexts, whether their suffering is political, social, economic, or some combination of these; nothing about liberation theology’s connection with God, which comes in diverse ways according to each suffering community’s needs.

Most essentially, liberation theology is not what the Economist describes.  It is not a proprietary office of the Catholic Church or of any particular “theology central,” and it has never been a theology only for Latin America.  The Vatican and the Latin American bishops did in the 1960s enunciate a seminal doctrine asserting that God has a “preferential option for the poor” but, like everything else about liberation theology, this thinking originates in the gospel, not from the Church.  It comes not from the Church preaching the gospel to the poor and marginalized, but from the oppressed themselves speaking out through the gospel about their own concerns, against the collective power of secular governments and coopted churches.

As it began in Latin America and wherever it is enunciated today, liberation theology is a grassroots, bottom-up rather than top-down theology, and a form of resistance by the oppressed to the Euro-centric, colonialist structures that have dominated church and state for so many centuries.  It is the oppressed who preach the gospel of justice to church hierarchies, not the reverse.  Kairos Palestine, issued by local Christian leaders in Jerusalem in 2009 to bring the plight of Palestinians to wider church attention, is a prime example of this grassroots testimony.  The South Africa Kairos Document issued by anti-apartheid theologians in 1985 was the same.

Liberation theology is a set of diverse contextual theologies formulated more or less spontaneously in response to particular forms of oppression in particular geographical areas and speaking out in the particular vernacular of the oppressed.  The late Black Protestant theologian James Cone, for instance, enunciated a liberation theology for Blacks almost simultaneously with Gustavo Gutiérrez’s classic 1970 explication of Latin American liberation theology, A Theology of Liberation, and without knowing anything about the Latin American version.  Feminist and womanist theologies have also developed without particular reference to Catholicism or to Latin America.

Palestinian liberation theology—formulated most notably by Palestinian Episcopal priest Naim Ateek beginning in the 1980s and ‘90s in several books and through the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem, which he co-founded in 1990—is unique among liberation theologies because, by politically challenging Israeli domination and the secular and religious powers that support that system of domination, it is standing up to an oppressive system of nationalism—exclusive Jewish nationalism—that by its very nature denies any notion of non-Jewish equality.  This Palestinian theology, uniquely, rests its call for justice, equality, and an end to oppression on precisely the same scriptural foundations that Israel and Zionism employ to justify Jewish supremacy.  

Liberation theology in all its variations is ecumenical and, although based in Christianity, speaks not for, but on behalf of people of any faith, or of none, who suffer secular or religious injustice.  It is shaped by each community’s view of how God relates to them as communities with distinct needs but universally deserving of justice and equality in their separate contexts.  In calling for liberation from Israel’s oppression, Palestinian liberation theology speaks on behalf not only of Palestinian Christians, but also of their many Muslim compatriots.

God’s relationship with humanity and especially with oppressed humanity is the point at which liberation theology’s universality enters in: this point is God’s love for all humankind equally and concern that all of humankind live in justice.  This point of universality is God’s effort, through God’s own preferential option for the disadvantaged, to raise all people to an equal level of justice and love.  This theology is the cri de cœur of the oppressed seeking God’s help and solidarity as they struggle against the powers, secular and religious, that created oppression in the first place, and it is God’s promise, in response, to be with all those who suffer.

Thanks to EPF PIN member Steve France for attending and reporting on this program.

It seemed maybe it was a dark joke when Yousef Bashir, a young Gazan, said Israel’s leaders sometimes bomb Gaza out of “boredom.” He was talking to an audience at the Foundation for Middle East Peace about the trauma of growing up in Gaza. When question time came he was challenged by a man who said Israel fights in Gaza to protect itself from Hamas, not out of boredom. But Yousef told what he would see the IDF soldiers do who occupied parts of his family’s home for almost five years during the Second Intifada (the home was right next to a militant Jewish settlement): He would watch the snipers sitting around getting bored. Then one of them would shoot a dog or a goat, just wounding it, and another would do the same and a third would fire the kill shot. This was how they entertained themselves, Yousef explained. The leaders are no different, he added, saying they shoot and bomb to entertain Israeli voters.

He might have pointed to something more personal: the day in 2004 that a UN group got a permit to visit Yousef’s home and a soldier randomly shot 15-year-old Yousef in the spine as he was waving good-bye to them. He had already told the audience about this, but had emphasized his good fortune in having the UN group drive him directly to a local hospital. Soon, he found himself in a Tel Aviv hospital for a long stay. The point, he told the audience, was how shocked he was to see Israelis doing good. They saved his life. The bullet is still in his back, but 16 months of rehab gave him back the ability to walk. What sort of irritation or boredom motivated the man who shot him he did not say.

The other young Gazan speaking at the “Gaza’s Next Generation” program Aug. 16 was Mohammed Eid. He told of working as an UNRWA first responder during the 51-day attack on Gaza in 2014 known as “Operation Protective Edge.” That was when he was rushed to a scene of carnage only to see his family’s home had just been blown up. “I purposely avoided being the first one to go in. I didn’t want to be the one to have to identify my family members,” he told the audience. Thankfully, they had gotten out in time and were not injured. But it was the second family home he had seen destroyed, the first one having been suddenly bulldozed a few years earlier to create a larger buffer zone around Gaza. Not being from Gaza, the family had of course already lost their home in Northern Palestine in the Nakba.

Maybe the most amazing part of hearing the two young men tell their stories and discuss the issues was seeing that they had survived the unrelenting hardship, humiliation and terror of life in Gaza not only intact but possessed of such inner peace. They were remarkably poised, modest, highly educated, highly articulate and deeply committed to nonviolence. Yousef, who now works with the PLO Delegation in DC, has a master’s from Brandeis; Mohammed is getting a master’s from Duke and spent the summer volunteering with UNRWA. Their families have been rock solid – Yousef’s father, a farmer and literature teacher, inculcated an uncompromising ideology of peace and is the star of Yousef’s forthcoming book, “The Words of My Father.” His son said that he considers any show of anger to be a “defeat.” Mohammed’s family lost everything three times but had each other and always rebuilt their lives. Leaving Gaza to study in the U.S he had everything taken away from him but enjoyed the generosity of his American hosts. Their commitment to their people and to peace and justice seemed serenely unshakable.