Research Article
30 October 2024

A Sin against Humanity and God: the Genocide of the Palestinian People and the Churches’ Silence

Publication: Toronto Journal of Theology
Volume 40, Number 2

Abstract

Video Abstract A Sin against Humanity and God: the Genocide of the Palestinian People and the Churches’ Silence
At its annual meeting in June 2024, the members of the Canadian Theological Society passed a motion of solidarity with Palestinians and student protesters in encampments at universities around the globe.1 The statement lamented the loss of over 40,000 lives in Palestine (at time of writing), including 15,000 children; condemned the scholasticide in Gaza; and articulated our condolences and solidarity with those students and faculty members there who continue to learn and teach in the most horrific of circumstances. The statement was also an articulation of the society's commitment to learning from Palestinian Christians and to heed their call for Western theologians, educational institutions, and churches to repent of their long-standing indifference to their suffering and to their complicity in their ongoing genocide. In this essay, the authors unpack the impetus, meaning, and significance of this motion for Canadian theology today as they urge Canadian theological institutions and churches to critically and urgently assess their historical indifference to and complicity in the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people. The authors also call on Canadian theologians to investigate the abiding connections between the theological justification of settler colonialism in Canada and Palestine, and the genocide of indigenous peoples.

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Notes

1.
The ideas expressed in this article represent the views of the authors and do not represent the position of the Canadian Theological Society.
2.
Canadian Theological Society, “Canadian Theological Society Statement Calling for an End to Violence,” June 28, 2024: http://cts-stc.ca/2024/canadian-theological-society-statement-calling-for-an-end-to-violenc/.
3.
Kairos Palestine, “A Call for Repentance: An Open Letter from Palestinian Christians to Western Churches,” October 19, 2023: https://www.kairospalestine.ps/index.php/resources/statements/a-call-for-repentance-an-open-letter-from-palestinian-christians-to-western-church-leaders-and-theologians.
4.
Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020).
5.
Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8: 4 (2006), 388.
6.
Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), 35.
7.
“Balfour Declaration, 1917” Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale University: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/balfour.asp.
8.
According to Khatib, McKee, and Yusuf's recent article, the number of dead in Gaza is probably closer to 186,000 people, or roughly seven to nine per cent of the population of the Gaza Strip. “Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult, But Essential,” The Lancet 104: 104449 (2024): 237–238.
9.
“Rashid Khalidi: Violent Settler Colonialism Caused this War,” Jacobin (May 7, 2024): https://jacobin.com/2024/05/rashid-khalidi-settler-colonialism-palestine.
10.
Indeed, according to data from Global Affairs Canada, Canada accelerated the sale of arms to Israel after October 7, 2023: https://www.readthemaple.com/trudeau-government-authorized-28-million-of-new-military-exports-to-israel-since-october/.
11.
United Church of Canada, “Letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, August 13, 2024”: https://united-church.ca/sites/default/files/2024-08/letter-to-pm-trudeau_aug2024.pdf.
13.
Resolution A160.
14.
“Rashid Khalidi: Violent Settler Colonialism Caused this War,” Jacobin (May 7, 2024): https://jacobin.com/2024/05/rashid-khalidi-settler-colonialism-palestine.
15.
Michaël Séguin, « Conceptualiser la colonialité d'Israël : retour sur la trajectoire d'une analyse polémique », trans. Jane Barter. Cahiers d'histoire. Revue d'histoire critique, 131 (2016): 135–154.
16.
The Hundred Years’ War, 13.
17.
See Jeremy Wildeman, “A Shared Settler Colonialism” in Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine, eds. Wildeman and M. Muhannad Ayyash (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2024), 17–54.
18.
Néstor Medina, “The Doctrine of Discovery, LatinXo Theoethics, and Human Rights,” Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology 21: 2 (2019), 157–173.
19.
Alexander Zukas, “Terra Incognita/Terra Nullius: Maps, Deception, and Modern Imperialism,” Lived Topographies and their Mediational Forces, eds. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 49–76.
20.
Palestine Exploration Fund: Quarterly Statement (London: Richard Bentley & Sons, 1875), 116.
21.
Palestine Exploration Fund.
22.
Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 79.
23.
William Cockran, cited in Frits Pannekoek, “Protestant Agricultural Zions for the Western Indian,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 14 (1972): 55–67, at 61.
24.
Said, The Question of Palestine, 73.
25.
John A. MacDonald, Canada, House of Commons, Official Report of the Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada, 5th Parl., 1st Sess., Vol. 14 (May 9, 1883), 1107.
26.
See Khalidi on the Mandate system's treatment of Palestinian intellectual life: “… [T]hey censored the newspapers, banned political activities when it discomfited them, and generally ran as parsimonious an administration as was possible in light of their commitments. As in Egypt and India, they did little to advance education, since colonial conventional wisdom held that too much of it produced ’natives’ who did not know their proper place.” The Hundred Years’ War, 39.
27.
Chandni Desai, “Israel has Destroyed or Damaged 80% of Schools in Gaza. This is Scholasticide,” The Guardian, June 8, 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/08/israel-destroying-schools-scholasticide.
28.
Committee to Protect Journalists, “Journalist Casualties in the Israel-Gaza War,” August 22, 2024: https://cpj.org/2024/08/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/.
29.
See Mira Sucharov, “Canada's Israel Lobby and the Palestinians,” in Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine, eds. Wildeman and Ayyash (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2024), 207–228.
30.
“A Call for Repentance.”
31.
“A Call for Repentance.”
33.
Michel Andraos has commented elsewhere in more detail on the theology of Kairos Palestine and its contextual theology of reconciliation. See Andraos, “Palestinian Theology of Reconciliation: A Cry of Hope in the Absence of All Hope,” Voices: Theological Journal of Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians xxxv: 1 (2013): 47–59.
34.
Munther Isaac, interview with Mouna Al-Amry, Atheer program, Aljazeera, June 10, 2024, in Arabic, trans. Andraos: <https://youtu.be/29a5EkgYJP8?si=RS7VT-cf-V-nhgeE>.
35.
Isaac, interview, 44: 20–53: 30.
36.
Isaac, interview, 56: 35–45.
37.
Isaac, interview, 1: 32.
38.
Isaac, interview, 1: 48–51.
39.
Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, the Bible (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2023), 38–45.
40.
Paul M. van Buren, A Christian Theology of the People of Israel (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1984).
41.
Rosemary Radford Ruether and Herman J. Ruether, The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
42.
Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine, 43.
43.
Isaac, interview.
44.
For an analysis of Holocaust Christian theology and its theological blindness to Palestinian suffering, see Ruether and Ruether, The Wrath of Jonah: The Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 203–219.
45.
Marc Ellis, “Exile and the Prophetic: The Interfaith Ecumenical Deal is Dead,” Mondoweiss, November, 12, 2012: https://mondoweiss.net/2012/11/exile-and-the-prophetic-the-interfaith-ecumenical-deal-is-dead/
46.
Ruether and Ruether, The Wrath of Jonah, 217.
47.
Kairos Palestine document.
48.
Gregory Baum, introduction to Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1996), 7.
49.
Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: Oneworld Publications, 2006).
50.
See Naomi Klein, “I understand the primal terror … because the same trauma has been passed down through generations to me … And not just for Palestinians and Jews. Because the deal Erez offered us is a version of the same poisonous deal all who are relatively fortunate on this partitioned planet are being offered. Take the gun. Accept the cages. Fortress your escape pod, and your borders … Ignore the Shadow Lands. Play the victim.” Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2023), 315.
51.
See Klein's compelling piece on Passover that names Zionism as idolatry: “We Need an Exodus from Zionism” The Guardian, April 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/24/zionism-seder-protest-new-york-gaza-israel.
52.
Jewish Voice for Peace Statement, October 11, 2023: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/10/11/statement23-10-11.
53.
See the United Nations report on the targeting of women and children in Gaza, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/05/onslaught-violence-against-women-and-children-gaza-unacceptable-un-experts. See also the much-neglected Report of the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada: https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca.
54.
Wildeman, “A Shared Settler Colonialism” in Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine, eds. Wildeman and Ayyash (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2024), 17–54.

Information & Authors

Information

Published In

Go to Toronto Journal of Theology
Toronto Journal of Theology
Volume 40Number 2October 2024
Pages: 222 - 233

History

Received: 18 July 2024
Revision received: 27 August 2024
Accepted: 27 August 2024
Published in print: October 2024
Published online: 30 October 2024

Keywords:

  1. indigenous peoples
  2. evangelization
  3. decolonization
  4. indigenous church
  5. settler colonialism

Authors

Affiliations

Michel Andraos
Biography: Michel Andraos is Dean of the Faculty of Theology at St. Paul University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Michel Andraos is Dean of the Faculty of Theology at St. Paul University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Jane Barter
Biography: Jane Barter is a Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture at the University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
Jane Barter is a Professor in the Department of Religion and Culture at the University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

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Toronto Journal of Theology 2024 40:2, 222-233

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