An opportunity for action and an essay below…
Dubuque Christians and People of Goodwill Join National Day of Action to Demand a Ceasefire in Gaza!
Monday, March 18, 12-1pm - 1050 Main Street, Dubuque
On Monday, March 18, Christians and other people of goodwill in Dubuque, Iowa will join Christians around the United States in using their public voice to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, a release of all captives - both Israeli and Palestinian - and an end to Israel’s military occupation of Palestine. Organized in concert with Christians for a Free Palestine, our group will gather for a prayerful witness outside the office of Congressional Representative Ashley Hinson, a vocal opponent of a ceasefire, to lament the way Christian theology has been weaponized and U.S. tax dollars have been used to perpetrate the ongoing military occupation of Palestine and to call for peace.
Since the devastating October 7th attack by Hamas on Israeli citizens, the Israeli military has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, displaced hundreds of thousands, and collapsed the health-care system in Gaza. Those who are still alive in Gaza face dehydration, starvation, and disease.
Please Bring Signs with the Following Messages (or similar):
Christians Calling for Ceasefire!
Ceasefire in Gaza Now!
Christians for a Free Palestine
Set the Captives Free
End the Occupation
Stop the Genocide
We believe that only a permanent ceasefire can be the beginning of a journey toward lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis, where everyone can live with freedom, justice, and equality. We demand that Rep. Hinson advocate for:
A permanent ceasefire - an end to the Israeli military’s ongoing siege in Gaza
A return of all Israeli and Palestinian captives taken by Hamas and Israel
A diplomatic solution that puts an end to Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, and guarantees freedom, justice, and equality for all Palestinians and Israelis
Christians in a nation that is the largest funder of Israel’s military have a responsibility to speak out for the humanity of all God’s children, including all Palestinians and Israelis. We are inspired by our Palestinian, Jewish, Arab and Muslim allies who have been in the streets for months, putting their bodies on the front lines to protest our government’s waging war in their name. We listen to both Palestinian and Israeli peacemakers in their calls for a just peace.
If Rep. Hinson is not there, we will call her office with this message.
This first essay on this Embracing Repair substack is by a guest author….my wife, Brenna Cussen Anglada.
Every Land is a Holy Land: From Palestine to Turtle Island
The remnants of our meal of hummus, falafel, pita bread, and yogurt remained on the restaurant table in the Old City of Jerusalem as my Israeli friend Chaim asked me to tell his friends why I had come to visit the Holy Land. It was 2004. Chaim and I had become close the previous year while part of a cohort of masters’ students studying International Peace at the University of Notre Dame. That same year, Israel had begun construction on what would become the 440-mile-long, 30-foot-high wall that now snakes in and around the West Bank, which, along with the already walled-in Gaza Strip, had been under a decades-long occupation by Israel’s military. The wall enables the State of Israel to steal a significant amount of desirable land, while cutting Palestinians off from their families, their livelihood, their olive groves, and their freedom.
It was now an election year, and presidential candidates in the U.S. were deliberately obscuring the truth of this apartheid wall - paid for in large part by U.S. citizens’ tax dollars - by referring to it as a mere “separation barrier.” I told Chaim’s friends that I had traveled with fellow Catholic Workers in order to stand with the Palestinians and Israelis who were bravely, steadfastly, and nonviolently resisting the wall’s construction. In the journalistic spirit of Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, we would return home to write numerous articles and give dozens of talks about our experiences.
Chaim and his friends were Zionists, meaning that they believed in the right of the Jewish people to establish, develop, and protect Israel as a Jewish-majority state in the land from which they had been exiled 2,000 years ago. Zionism began as a political movement in the late 19th century in response to the long history of anti-semititic policies and violent persecution from which Jews had suffered throughout Europe and elsewhere. As the full extent of the horrors of the Holocaust came to light, Zionism gained increasing support. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly partitioned Palestine - then under British rule - into one Jewish state and one Arab, with a shared capital of Jerusalem. The Arab world rejected the plan, arguing that it was unfair to give more than half of the land to Israel when Jews represented only a third of the population, while Palestinian families who had called this land home for centuries would be displaced.
And displaced they were. During the war that followed Israel’s establishment, 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their villages, many of which have completely disappeared off the map. (See Blood Brothers by Bishop Elias Chacour for a personal narrative of this ethnic cleansing.) Today, the five million descendants of those Palestinians who fled are still unable to return to their homes in what is now Israel, scattered instead in a diaspora or living in refugee camps, while Jews born anywhere in the world have the right to become an Israeli citizen. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza continue to be displaced by Israeli military operations, Israeli settlements, land confiscation, evictions, and regular house demolitions.
Despite their Zionism, Chaim and his friends, devout Jews, disagreed with their government’s ongoing military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and expressed respect for my commitment to justice and nonviolence rooted in my Catholic faith. Still, they challenged me: “Why would you travel here to protest Israeli settlers’ theft of Palestinian land, when you yourself benefit from the ongoing theft of land from Indigenous people in your country?”
Their challenge struck a chord with me. My ancestors, fleeing poverty, had enthusiastically embraced the myth promoted by European colonial powers that the U.S. had once been “a vast wilderness,” ready for the taking. (Those same colonial powers had insisted that Palestine before 1948 was “a land without a people.”) In both the U.S. and Israel, the new ruling power would use military violence to dispossess Indigenous people of their land. In both the U.S. and Israel, settlers continue to cooperate with the ruling power’s active attempt to destroy one culture and replace it with another.
And yet it would be years before I was ready to face their challenge. Instead, I returned to the West Bank several times to work with the Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement, a nonviolent network that included Israelis and international supporters together resisting the Israeli military occupation. During my stays, I witnessed the daily horrors Palestinians experienced: curfews imposed on entire villages imprisoning families inside their homes without access to food or medical care for weeks; the regular humiliation endured by Palestinians subject to military checkpoints that made travel to work or school always arduous, sometimes deadly.
I saw Palestinian women and children getting patted down by Israeli soldiers inside their own village of Tel Rumeida while Israeli settlers and their visitors from the U.S. and Europe openly brandished automatic weapons on the streets. I looked on with gratitude as four Palestinian men carried my friend, a priest having a medical emergency, a half-mile to an ambulance, since settler-imposed road blocks had made travel impossible.
I visited Palestinian families after Israeli settlers had attacked their olive groves and wells with poison in an attempt to drive them off their land. I joined weekly nonviolent protests, and witnessed leaders in the resistance movement face the fierce retaliation of the Israeli military: bullets, tear gas, sound grenades, midnight home raids by soldiers, and the kidnapping of children who would disappear into Israeli prisons with no charges for months or years.
My last visit took place in 2009, a few months after the Israeli military had launched a 3-week assault against Gazan people, resulting in the deaths of 1,314 Palestinians. Israeli and Egyptian authorities had restricted food and medical supplies entering Gaza, a tiny area of 140 square miles completely sealed off from the world by the Israeli blockade. As the vast majority of Gaza's inhabitants were (and still are) imprisoned inside, hospitals had little access to medication.
And so I traveled with five other Catholic Workers, each carrying two large suitcases containing medical supplies and drawings sent by American children for Palestinian orphans. When we were denied entry into Gaza, we sent in our goods via an alternative route, and then traveled to Sderot, an Israeli town that had experienced the brunt of Hamas’ rocket fire. Nomika Zion, an Israeli citizen who had spearheaded weekly phone calls between Gazan and Israeli women, welcomed us. Nomika had recently written an op-ed in which she chastised her government: “The bloodbath in Gaza is not in my name nor for my security.”
We then traveled to the West Bank village of Bil’in, where the villagers had been resisting the construction of the wall for years. The village was in mourning. The week before our visit, Bassem, a villager and beloved leader in the nonviolent movement, had been shot and killed by an Israeli soldier during their weekly peaceful demonstration.
From Palestinians, I learned what it means to truly love the land. It was Palestinians who taught me what bravery and heroism looks like in the nonviolent struggle to protect the people and the places you love. Soon after this last visit, I moved to Dubuque, Iowa, to live and work on New Hope Catholic Worker farm, in hopes that I, too, might fall in love with a place so deeply, and begin to know the land as intimately as they do.
And yet the challenge from Chaim and his friends continued to nag at me. I struggled knowing that my ability to live on this land was rooted in the forced removal and genocide of the people Indigenous to it. And so, as Eric mentions in his article, our transformative encounter with Jim Bear Jacobs has led us for the last decade on a path of trying to repair some of the racial and ecological harm done through the colonization of this land. This work has been deeply meaningful for both of us.
And yet, over the last several months, my heart has been breaking as we have watched the genocide of the people in Gaza unfolding in real time. Following Hamas’ brutal attack on Israeli civilians, well over 22,000 Gazan people have been massacred, and nearly 2 million displaced. In a terrifying statement in January, Israel’s Finance Minister suggested that Gazan residents abandon their homeland altogether, making way for Israelis to “make the desert bloom.”
I feel despair. I feel paralyzed. And yet, I have found some hope in the inspirational leadership of Jewish and Palestinian activists around the world who are speaking truth and taking action. On October 28th in New York, for example, Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization, shut down Grand Central Station as one of their many actions to demand a ceasefire. JVP continues to call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against entities that support Israel's military occupation of Palestine.
Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Christian theologian living in Bethlehem, recently called out the Western Christian world during his Christmas Eve liturgy: “Let it be clear: Silence is complicity, and empty calls for peace without a ceasefire and end to occupation…are all under the banner of complicity.” The true Christmas message, Rev. Isaac argued, is that “this genocide must stop now.”
Dr. Gabor Mate, a Jewish physician and survivor of the Holocaust, recently said of the situation in Palestine, “There was a land with a people living there. And other people wanted it. They took it over and they continue to take it over, and they continue to discriminate against, oppress, and dispossess that other people. That's what happened, and that's what's happening.”