On May 21, inside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., police handcuffed a man who shot and killed two Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim.
During his arrest, he shouted, “Free, free Palestine.” Soon after this heinous act, Emily Schrader, an American-Israeli journalist and news anchor, alleged that this act of violence was the natural apotheosis of advocacy for Palestinian freedom and human rights. But many Palestinian human rights activists looked on in horror.
This attack, as well as the fatal fire-bombing of a June rally for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colo., must be unequivocally condemned. These heinous acts of targeted violence understandably make our Jewish siblings fear for their safety. When all Jews are held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, antisemitic violence is a likely outcome.
Given Christianity’s sordid history when it comes to antisemitism, we have a responsibility to reaffirm our commitment to combating antisemitism. But we must be vigilant to resist the lie that this commitment requires our silence on Palestine or Palestinian human rights. As journalist Peter Beinart told Sojourners in April, there is a “sense of guilt and anxiety that exists about Christian antisemitism,” and it “is leveraged sometimes by pro-Israel leaders … It’s much easier to level accusations of antisemitism than to actually have an honest conversation about how you justify a system that the country’s own human rights organizations are calling apartheid.”
The way to address antisemitic violence is not, as our current and previous administrations have suggested, by silencing Palestinians or those advocating for a free Palestine. Criticizing the state of Israel’s policies or questioning the ideology of Zionism is not a priori antisemitic, nor does it somehow naturally lead to violence. Nevertheless, public institutions, companies, and universities have reinforced this conflation over the past two years by punishing anyone who has criticized the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, all in the name of Jewish safety. The current administration has only accelerated this trend.
When it comes to combating institutional antisemitism, which is what the Trump administration has said it is doing at schools like Columbia and Harvard, a glaring irony must be highlighted: Jewish students are often co-leaders of pro-Palestinian protest movements. Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have organized some of the most courageous actions of disruption over the past 21 months on campuses and elsewhere to draw attention to the genocide in Gaza. When our institutions arrest and brutally assault Jewish community members in the name of Jewish safety, the inanity of this strategy is hard to miss.
Many Jews recognize that these tactics of silencing free speech in the name of Jewish safety endanger all of us. A diverse community of Jewish students at Columbia University and Barnard College in New York City — including “Zionists, anti-Zionists, Diasporists, non-Zionists, and others” — recently wrote a clear-eyed response to the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, who were both detained for participating in pro-Palestine rallies on Columbia’s campus. The letter acknowledges the weaponization of Jewish safety against Palestinians and their allies:
Despite our range of viewpoints, we stand united in our conviction that while combating antisemitism is an essential endeavor, persecuting minorities and suppressing free speech does not make Jewish students safer. Rather, it serves to increase fear, both for ourselves and for our fellow students.
Structuring a binary in which combating antisemitism and ending the oppression of Palestinians are at opposite ends will not end the expanding spiral of violence in Israel/Palestine nor our communities in the U.S. Rather, such a binary reinforces the lie that dignity, freedom, and security exist within a zero-sum world. Ultimately, it only increases violence. Peace at home and in the region requires us to transcend this binary. The only moral and sustainable pathway toward peace will be one founded on systemic justice, equity, and shared humanity, rooted in the interconnectedness of Palestinian and Jewish liberation.
The only moral and sustainable pathway toward peace will be one founded on systemic justice, equity, and shared humanity, rooted in the interconnectedness of Palestinian and Jewish liberation.
It is brave Israelis and Palestinians who are modeling this best. Organizations jointly led by Israelis and Palestinians, such as the Parents Circle–Families Forum and Combatants for Peace, participate in co-resistance of the occupation through storytelling of shared grief and active interruption of Israeli military and settler activities in the West Bank. These organizations recognize that collective liberation is a shared struggle.
Resisting the ideology of supremacy that enables antisemitism also compels us to vigorously and courageously act to end anti-Palestinian violence in the U.S., the systemic injustice of occupation and apartheid across the region, and the genocide in Gaza. But as a community (and voting bloc) in the U.S., Christians are often reflexively selective in our empathy toward Israel and Jewish communities at the expense of Palestinians.
Until our communities also learn to see every Palestinian as a human being who deserves life, dignity, and freedom, we must continue to say the names of those whose lives have been taken from them too soon: Hind Rajab, Yaqeen Hammad, and Mahmoud Almadhoun, to name the smallest fraction of the nearly 60,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza. When Rev. Munther Isaac wrapped baby Jesus in a keffiyeh and placed him in a creche of rubble, he was offering us a visceral symbol of the reality that Christ identifies with the oppressed. But Isaac was also offering the world an invitation to stand in solidarity with Palestinians — not at the expense of Jews, but in the interest of their own liberation. It is solidarity and resistance with “love as its logic.”
READ MORE: God Is Under the Rubble in Gaza
There cannot be a future of dignity, security, or freedom for Israelis without a future of dignity, security, and freedom for Palestinians in equal measure.
Our activism in this moment requires us to hold this imagination beyond the either/or binary that our society and government are working hard to establish as orthodoxy. God’s kingdom is one of mutuality and embrace, not domination and exclusion. Where there is no justice for Palestinians, there can be no peace for Israelis, and vice versa. As much as they might try to be free of us and we might try to be free of them, we must recognize that we will never be free without each other.
For our Jewish neighbors who fear for their safety, we must stand beside them in support. And we must remind them and their allies that the only pathway toward peace in Israel/Palestine is working to ensure Palestinians are able to live their lives as equal human beings. This means being bold enough to criticize the state of Israel’s policies as unwarranted, immoral, and counter-productive. It also means advocating for a reimagined arrangement that offers dignity and freedom to Palestinians and Israelis in equal measure. Ultimately, it will require dismantling the systems and beliefs of domination and supremacy at the heart of this so-called conflict. It will also require Americans to forfeit our selective outrage and end our overwhelming military support for Israel.
For our Palestinian neighbors, who have been suffering under the boot of oppression for decades, we must stand in solidarity with their struggle for liberation. And for those who claim to be allies of the Palestinians, we must affirm that the only way to end Israeli domination is to offer Jewish communities a future of security and belonging, both in our communities and in the region. Such a future, of course, is dependent on acknowledging injustice and working to repair the damage done by decades of displacement.
Simultaneously fighting against antisemitism and for Palestinian human rights is not a betrayal of either Jews or Palestinians. It is actually the most honest expression of solidarity and love. A solidarity that allows us to free ourselves from the illusion that domination or duality has ever been the source of sustainable peace. By doing this, we enable a future in which Palestinians, Israelis, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and all people can be free.
David Katibah is the former director of communications and Christian engagement at the Telos Group and an incoming master of divinity student at Yale Divinity School.
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