ISRAEL/PALESTINE

RESOURCES & FAQS

For Peace Catalyst’s overall approach to the Palestine/Israel crisis, see our our Israel/Palestine main page.

As a non-exhaustive collection of articles, videos, and websites, this resource page is intended to be a starting place for you to increase your understanding of the primary issues driving the Israel/Palestine crisis, cultivate empathy for Israeli and Palestinian foundational needs, and begin connecting with Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders to support their work to dismantle oppressive ideologies and political systems so that all people in the land might live with safety, freedom, dignity, and justice. 

To learn more about Peace Catalyst and why we approach the Israel/Palestine conflict in this way, see our values, our understanding of God’s holistic and just peace, and FAQs.

  • “Sharing the land is the biblical vision we see in the Hebrew Scriptures and thus must be the prophetic vision of the church in this land and all around the world. The reality on the ground is that of ‘walls,’ yet what is needed is a vision of ‘bridges.’ Palestinians and Israelis must think collectively in terms of a common future in which they will cooperate together, not a divided future in which they are separate. I echo the words of the Kairos Palestine Document, ‘Our future and their future are one: Either the cycle of violence that will destroy both of us, or a peace that will benefit both.’”

    ~Munther Isaac, The Other Side of the Wall , pp 218-219

    The Palestine/Israel crisis is not just a local issue for those living where Jesus walked. For decades, western Christians have contributed to building “walls” in Israel/Palestine. We continue to sustain them through our theologies that justify, condone, and even amplify violence; with our political beliefs that fuel tensions and distrust among Christians, Muslims, and Jews around the world who are watching this crisis; and in our policies and tax dollars that directly fund ongoing conflict and war. We are culpable for this crisis - especially because of Christian “stand with Israel” theological and political postures - and we are called as peacebuilders and followers of Jesus to repent, or turn, and work to make things right.

  • “As for those not directly affected by this struggle, it would be helpful if more conversations could hold greater complexity—the ability to acknowledge that the Israelis who came to Palestine in the 1940s were survivors of genocide, desperate refugees, many of whom had no other options, and that they were settler-colonialists who participated in the ethnic cleansing of another people. That they were victims of white supremacy in Europe being passed the mantle of whiteness in Palestine. That Israelis are nationalistic in their own right and that their country has long been enlisted by the United States to act as a kind of subcontracted military base in the region. All of this is true at once. Contradictions like these don’t fit comfortably within the usual binaries of anti-imperialism (colonizer/colonized) or the binaries of identity politics (white/racialized)—but if Israel/Palestine teaches us anything it might be that binary thinking will never get us beyond partitioned selves or partitioned nations.”

    ~Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Canadian Jewish author and activist

    The Israel/Palestine crisis is both a story of competing traumas that have largely been generated and sustained by western Christians and modern western colonization empowering Jewish Zionists to dispossess indigenous Palestinians. The historic Jewish experience of Christian antisemitism, pogroms (organized massacres of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe), and finally the Holocaust contributed to a longing in some Jewish communities to find safety by establishing a new home in the land of their ancestors, where they could live out their values and traditions authentically, publicly, and safely. During the British Mandate for Palestine (1918-1948), Britain had given a proclamation of support for a Jewish national home, which resulted in the Jewish population growing tenfold in historic Palestine, the gradual dispossession of Palestinians, and growing Jewish-Arab conflict. The deteriorating situation resulted in Britain retreating from Palestine and shrugging off responsibility to the UN. In 1947 when the UN offered the Jewish minority the majority of the land for a new state called Israel, the lives of the indigenous Palestinians who lived there were uprooted and actively destroyed. Local Palestinians and neighboring Arab nations rejected the UN partition plan, and Zionist militias began ethnically cleansing Palestinian towns, declaring independence on the day after the British mandate ended in 1948. In response, several Arab states invaded the new state of Israel. By the end of the fighting in 1949, the newly established Israeli state had wiped out hundreds of Palestinian towns, taken 78% of the land of Palestine, and refused to allow more than 750,000 Palestinians to return to their homes. The new state of Israel had created a massive refugee crisis and relegated more than 100,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel to the status of second-class citizens, living under martial law for almost two decades, literally in walled-off communities. This was called the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), and it tore the fabric of Palestinian society and culture, creating the ongoing trauma for Palestinians as foreigners and refugees in their own land and abroad.

    These competing traumas, Jewish and Palestinian, are the basis for decades of conflict that have brought us to today: the Jewish people in need of security and safety after centuries of persecution now dominating traumatized Palestinians who have been left without land, resources, and rights.

    “Palestinians have become the indirect victims of the Judeocide of the Second World War. The Jews were the direct victims and the Palestinians are the indirect victims. They are not responsible for what happened; the responsibility rests firmly on the shoulders of Christian civilization, which wiped out six million Jews—not on the Arabs, the Muslims, or the Palestinians.”

    ~Tariq Ali, Speaking of Empire and Resistance, Pakistani-British journalist, historian, and public intellectual

  • “We are horrified by the refusal of some western Christians to condemn the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine, and, in some instances, their justification of and support for the occupation. Further, we are appalled by how some Christians have legitimized Israel’s ongoing indiscriminate attacks on Gaza … Moreover, we categorically reject the myopic and distorted Christian responses that ignore the wider context and the root causes of this war: Israel’s systemic oppression of the Palestinians over the last 75 years since the Nakba, the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the oppressive and racist military occupation that constitutes the crime of apartheid. This is precisely the horrific context of oppression that many western Christian theologians and leaders have persistently ignored, and even worse, have occasionally legitimized using a wide range of Zionist theologies and interpretations.”

    ~ Palestinian Christians, “A Call for Repentance: An Open Letter from Palestinian Christians to Western Church Leaders and Theologians”

    Palestinians ask, “Why do the Palestinians have to pay for what happened to the Jews in the Russian pogroms and the European Holocaust? The Palestinians had nothing to do with it.” The 1917 Balfour Declaration encouraged massive Jewish immigration to historic Palestine with the slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” – invisibilizing indigenous Palestinians. In 1947, Zionist militias ethnically cleansed Palestinian towns, and the day after the end of British Mandate for Palestine in 1948 the new state of Israel declared independence and by 1949 had ultimately wiped out hundreds of Palestinian towns, taken 78% of the land of Palestine, and refused to allow more than 750,000 Palestinians to return to their homes. The new state of Israel had created a massive refugee crisis and relegated more than 100,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel to the status of second-class citizens, living under martial law for almost two decades, literally in walled-off communities.

    Since that time, the state of Israel – not to be confused with Jewish people – has imposed a system of oppression, domination, and apartheid against Palestinians in all the territory it controls: Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Israeli laws, policies, and practices are designed to advance the supremacy of Jewish Israelis and maintain a cruel and comprehensive system of control over Palestinians, who face discrimination, dispossession, and repression of dissent. Palestinians are fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and subject to a constant state of fear and insecurity.

    Many Americans who criticize America do so out of a deep love for their country. Similarly, many Christians criticize Christianity out of a deep love for Christ and the Church. With the same spirit, this criticism of the state of Israel is not discrimination, targeting, violence, or dehumanization of Jews because they are Jewish (antisemitism); instead, this criticism is about inherently self-defeating policies and practices of the state of Israel, which are perpetuating trauma, cycles of violence, and even the rise of antisemitism because of the association of Israeli state policies with Jewish people. Many Jewish voices are leading the way critiquing the ideology of Zionism and the policies of the state of Israel (see Phyllis Bennis, Jewish Voice for Peace, Peter Beinart, Rabbi Alissa Wise, Rabbis for Human Rights, B’TSelem, Breaking the Silence, Combatants for Peace, Americans for Peace Now, If Not Now, Independent Jewish Voices, Mark Braverman, and more). We wish to see a holistic, just, and durable peace, where everyone - Jews and Palestinians alike - are free from fear and living with safety, justice, and flourishing relationships.

    “How then now to create and maintain a state for another people in a land already inhabited? Squaring that circle has been the essence of Israel’s dilemma ever since its establishment and the cause of the Palestinian tragedy…for what the Zionists envisaged was a project that was bizarre and, on the face of it, unworkable: namely to set up an ethnically defined, Jews-only collective, existing on a land belonging to another people and to their exclusion. Moreover, this new creation was supposed to prosper in perpetuity, irrespective of native opposition.”

    ~Ghada Karmi, One State. Palestinian-born academic, physician and author

  • “One of the biggest events in my life that was a turning point was my visit to the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland as part of the Bearing Witness Retreat. In there, as a Palestinian, I met the shadow of my enemy. Even while living under the oppression I realized that my enemy even in their power is driven by fear and trauma. I realized how the collective trauma of the past is inherited by the next generation and carried in every decision they make to the future. Unless we acknowledge and heal the traumas of the past, we will only move forward with mistrust, fear, and suspicion - things that do not allow for true peace.”

    ~Sami Awad, Palestinian activist for nonviolent resistance and trauma healing

    Jewish history is full of persecution, pogroms, and trauma, primarily at the hands of Christians. Like all people, Jews have deeply needed a place to call home, where they can be safe and free to be themselves. Unhealed trauma and ongoing antisemitism have reinforced the need for a strong military to guarantee the safety of Jews and say “never again” to the many attempts to eradicate them as a people.

    At the same time, they are no longer a powerless people; the Israeli military is one of the most powerful in the world and receives billions of dollars in military aid and other support from the USA annually. For Jewish Israelis in particular, the fear of being a persecuted minority is accompanied by fears that subjugated Palesetinian people will rise up against them and that the world may abandon them to another genocide. Unhealed trauma and the combined fears of being both the persecuted minority and the powerful colonialist threatened by the uprising of Palestinians trap the state of Israel into a paradigm in which it is constantly fighting for its own existence.

    This creates a complicated psychological state where Jewish Israelis are caught between the simultaneous traumas of being the historically victimized and the new perpetrator, which is exacerbated by the very real and documented abuses of the Israeli military and vigilante settler groups on Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. This is a very important aspect of the collective psyche in Israel which prolongs the dysfunctional state of affairs in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories.

    “Zionism is complicated. Jews really do have a millennia-long ethnic, cultural, and religious connection to this land, despite many years when most (but not all) of us were exiled. Our return in the 19th-20th centuries was also inextricably tied up with European colonialism, and we have behaved like colonists. We have two great fears: One is the fear of the Jews in exile, the perpetually persecuted minority who endured countless Crusades, pogroms, massacres, and ultimately the Holocaust. The other is the fear of the colonialist, that the subjugated indigenous people will savagely rise up against them. Both those fears were fully realized on October 7. We are living through something worse than our worst nightmares. There's a third nightmare, buried more deeply but still very much in our national consciousness. That's what we call "churban" -- destruction. We still remember and commemorate the destructions of the first and second Temples and Commonwealths, and the subsequent exiles. I think we are always aware that there could be a third destruction…so we're scared about that as well.”

    ~Ilana, Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem

  • “Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)... Our aim is twofold: (1) to strengthen the fight against antisemitism by clarifying what it is and how it is manifested, (2) to protect a space for an open debate about the vexed question of the future of Israel/Palestine.”

    ~Jerusalem Declaration, International scholars in antisemitism studies and related fields from Europe, the United States, Canada and Israel.

    As the Jerusalem Declaration articulates, antisemitism is “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).” Antisemitism has a long and horrifying history. Antisemitic violence has also been prevalent and growing in recent years, from the murder of 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 to the dramatic escalation of antisemitic hate crimes in the wake of the Israel-Hamas War in 2023. Antisemitism is completely incompatible with God’s vision of holistic and just peace and flourishing relationships.

    Currently, there is ongoing debate among Jews and Jewish antisemitism scholars about how to define antisemitism in the modern world. The controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition was written in 2016 and includes 11 examples of antisemitism, 7 of which focus on the State of Israel. The Jerusalem Declaration followed four years later, seeking a more nuanced definition of antisemitism and responding to the pitfalls of the IHRA definition, which “blurs the difference between antisemitic speech and legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism.” The Jerusalem Declaration asserts that the IHRA definition “causes confusion, while delegitimizing the voices of Palestinians and others, including Jews, who hold views that are sharply critical of Israel and Zionism. None of this helps combat antisemitism.”

    At Peace Catalyst International, we find that the Jerusalem Declaration definition and guidelines for combating antisemitism most align with a peacebuilding posture and approach, and we encourage all people who aspire to contribute to a holistic and just peace for everyone between the river and the sea to read it in full. Just as Peace Catalyst works to correct ways that Christians have contributed to harm because of our deep love for Jesus, we follow the lead of many prophetic Jewish-led organizations who are working against the harms perpetuated by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories (e.g. B’TSelem, Breaking the Silence, Combatants for Peace, Jewish Voice for Peace, The Parent Circle Family Forum, Americans for Peace Now, If Not Now, Independent Jewish Voices, Women Wage Peace, Zochrot, Green Olive Tours, and more). We believe this is not a sign of Jews being antisemitic but an example of the many Jews who are courageously working to secure Palestinians rights, justice, and liberation. Their leadership inspires us to collaborate across identities, resist antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism, and combat dehumanizing political policies that prevent collective flourishing and a holistic and just peace for all.

    As the Jewish Declaration states, “While antisemitism has certain distinctive features, the fight against it is inseparable from the overall fight against all forms of racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender discrimination.” We believe that safety, dignity, and justice for both Jews and Palestinians is only possible by combating anti-Jewish and anti-Palestinian discrimination, prejudice, hostility, and violence in all their forms, including the structural violence that Palestinians face under the Israeli occupation.

    “As Jews, we also need to be aware that our best hope against antisemitism lies in defeating Israel’s dual campaign to raze Gaza and bind our fate to those war crimes.”

    ~Dave Zirin, “How Zionism Feeds Antisemitism”

  • “Despite its motivations, evangelical support for Israel—also called ‘Christian Zionism’—has had disastrous consequences for all Palestinians. Perhaps ironically, it has made the pursuit of peace for both Israelis and Palestinians alike much more difficult.”

    ~Telos Group

    Christianity has a long and messy relationship to Israel/Palestine. Christians tend to feel a sense of religious kinship with the Jews, because Jews gave us the Bible and Jesus. However, that history is complicated by the long and tragic history of western Christian antisemitism on the one hand, and a sense of complicity and guilt associated with the Holocaust on the other. To complicate matters further, since 9/11, Christians have also had strong antipathy toward Islam, which in turn has opened the doors wide for simplistic and one-sided support for “vulnerable Israel against Muslim threats and Palestinian terrorism.” A binary, good-vs-evil view of faith, bolstered by various Christian apocalyptic eschatologies, imagines a battle between light and darkness in the modern state of Israel. These views contribute to a zero-sum approach to the Israel/Palestine crisis and create a simple, impassioned, and compelling rationale for dehumanizing people made in the image of God.

    The most serious threat comes from Christian Zionists who are armed with a violent theology that supports a Holy Land exclusively for the Jews and, therefore, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Christian Zionism developed from John Nelson Darby and his 19th century “Dispensational” theology, which permeated American Protestantism via the incredibly popular Scofield Reference Study Bible and and later with the publication of the Left Behind series. Christian Zionism encourages unilateral support for the state of Israel because of its interpretation of biblical prophecies: that Jesus cannot return until all the Holy Land is occupied by Jews. Some Christian Zionist support for Jews and Israel comes out of a belief in the inevitability of the battle of Armageddon – an apocalyptic war to end all wars – during which they believe a large number of Jews will suffer and perish. In Christian Zionism, war is not something to be avoided, but something inevitable, desired by God, and even to be celebrated.

    Christians must repent and turn from unChristlike attitudes and theologies that perpetuate supremacy, racism, dehumanization, and violence in all their forms. Instead, we must relearn theologies, practices, and political postures that align us with Jesus to see everyone as made in God’s image. We must find creative ways to work toward holistic and just peace for everyone. Only then can we become simultaneously pro-Palestinian, pro-Israeli, pro-Muslim, pro-Christian, pro-Jew, and ultimately pro-peace as we follow Jesus in his liberative work toward shalom/salaam/eirene for everyone.

  • “Our word to the Churches of the world is…a call to repentance; to revisit fundamentalist theological positions that support certain unjust political options with regard to the Palestinian people. It is a call to stand alongside the oppressed and preserve the word of God as good news for all rather than to turn it into a weapon with which to slay the oppressed. The word of God is a word of love for all His creation. God is not the ally of one against the other, nor the opponent of one in the face of the other. God is the Lord of all and loves all, demanding justice from all and issuing to all of us the same commandments. We ask our sister Churches not to offer a theological cover-up for the injustice we suffer, for the sin of the occupation imposed upon us. Our question to our brothers and sisters in the Churches today is: Are you able to help us get our freedom back, for this is the only way you can help the two peoples attain justice, peace, security and love?”

    ~Palestinian Christian leaders, “Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth”, a document written in 2009

    Foreigners cannot be the heroes or the saviors in the Israel/Palestine crisis. Rather than imposing “solutions” we, along with the majority of the world following this crisis, must listen to the voices of those in Israel/Palestine and follow their lead. In 2009, Palestinian Christian leaders wrote “Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth” and challenged the Christian church to act: first, to repent from theologies that justify injustice and oppression; second, to “come and see” and listen to their voices; and finally to follow their lead and “go and tell,” sharing the truth about injustice and all forms of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism.

    By humbly listening and learning, building relationships online and on trips, and speaking the truth about what we learn, we can support Palestinians and Israelis in their efforts to build broader coalitions of people working for a holistic and just peace for everyone. Your involvement in this work matters. Invite your friends, church, and wider network into this learning journey to become pro-Palestinian, pro-Israeli, and pro-peace.

    START SMALL

    • Listen and Learn

      • The first and most important step is to listen, learn, and deeply empathize with the experiences, narrative, pain, fears, and hopes of both Palestinians and Israelis. Familiarize yourself with the history and the core needs above and begin following the Palestinian and Israeli organizations and voices listed below.

    • Build Relationships and Solidarity With Palestinians and Israelis

      • Join webinars and Zoom meetings with Palestinians and Israelis via recommended organizations listed in the Israeli & Palestinian Voices section below

      • Sign up for Israel/Palestine trips or pilgrimages with Telos Group, Green Olive Tours, or Peace Catalyst International (coming soon – contact Andy Larsen or Mercy Aiken for more information)

    RAMP UP YOUR ENGAGEMENT

 FURTHER LEARNING