In December of 2023, the Palestinian minister and theologian Rev. Dr. Munther
Isaac delivered a nativity sermon entitled “Christ in the Rubble: A Liturgy of Lament” atBethlehem’s Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church. To the left of t he pulpit was a crèche with a baby swaddled in a keffiyeh, lying amidst fragments of stone and concrete. “More than twenty thousand killed,” he said. “Thousands are still under the rubble. Close to nine thousand children were killed in the most brutal way. Day after day, 1.9million displaced. Hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed.” Turning his attention to global leadership, he said, “We are tormented by the silence of the world. Leaders of the so-called ‘free’ lined up one after the other to give the green light for this genocide against a captive population. They gave the cover.”
Toward the end of the nineteen seventies, a group of Black civil rights leaders
decided that they would no longer provide cover for Israel’s occupation and the U.S.’s support for it. They would provide the moral witness that Rev. Isaac would call for decades later. Toward the end of the decade, Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) would assume this charge. Led by Jack O’Dell—the African American civil rights activist, former staff member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and PUSH’s chief of staff—PUSH would work to evolve “a U.S. foreign policy commensurate with what O’Dell called the ‘new period in world behavior’ inaugurated by the end of colonialism,” as the historian Nikhil Pal Singh put it. In other words, O’Dell strived to do for mainstream Black leadership what Malcolm X, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Black Panther Party had 2 done earlier for more radical audiences—situate Black freedom struggles alongside anti-colonial movements in the Middle East.
Regarding the history of Palestinian occupation, O’Dell said: “Those of us who
were present at the birth of Israel, and who went to the rallies supporting it, knew nothing of the Palestinians… When we found that, wait a minute, there’s folks here called Palestinians, who are people of color and Arab, some of us felt that we needed to be better acquainted…” To learn more about Palestinians and their struggles, O’Dell, Jackson and other civil rights activists participated in a series of delegations to Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Israel. While visiting a Palestinian refugee camp outside of Beirut and noticing the open sewage, Jackson turned to O’Dell and said, “Jack, you know, I know this place. I’ve been here. This is South Carolina, where I grew up.”
In 1980, a little-known book—Afro-Americans Stand Up for Middle East
Peace—came out of O’Dell’s growing interest in Palestine and his evolving relationships with Arab and Arab American leaders. O’Dell coedited it with the Arab American human rights leader and scholar James Zogby. The two assembled some of the leading civil rights and religious leaders and organizations of the day to contribute.
The anthology includes an excerpt of a report that then Representative Walter
Fauntroy of the District of Columbia presented to Congress after his participation in a fact-finding mission to Lebanon in September of 1979. The report was delivered just weeks after the civil rights leader and politician Andrew Young resigned as President Jimmy Carter’s Ambassador to the United Nations for meeting with a representative from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In doing so, Young violated an agreement that Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon had brokered with Israel, stipulating that no U.S. representative would have talks with that organization. Fauntroy began his report by invoking what he and many Black civil rights leaders understood as an ethical
mandate to challenge the U.S.’s “no-talk policy.” He said, “We resolved to exert moral leadership with the strong support of a unified Black leadership in opposing what we consider to be an ill-conceived policy of our government with regard to the Middle East.”
Likewise, the editors of Freedomways Magazine—at the time the leading journal
of Black political thought and culture—connected the “no-talk policy” to the suppression of Palestinian history and realities. They wrote, “For nearly two decades the Palestinians were reduced to non-persons, completely ignored in the scheme of things called Middle East politics… Ignoring the Palestinian people and the many injustices imposed upon them became a prerequisite for continuing to give tens of billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry and financial aid to the state of Israel in the name of ‘defense.’”
In its chapter, The Black Theology Project—a network of Black ministers,
theologians, churchgoers, and activists—touched on the ties between the U.S., Israel and South Africa’s apartheid government: “As Black Christians in the U.S.A., we are opposed to the United States providing aid to South Africa and Israel as long as these two regimes violate human rights, international laws, and those basic ethical principles enunciated in the Holy scriptures of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic Faiths.” Focusing on the military aspects of that aid, the Project went on to say, “We strongly condemn Israeli/South African military and economic cooperation and alliances, and we condemn Israel’s supply of weapons to racist regimes in Southern Africa.”
Afro-Americans Stand Up for Middle East Peace is a small but powerful book that critiques U.S. foreign policy as a vehicle for militarization. Since October 7 th , the U.S. has spent $22 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. President Trump’s tariffs and his Big, Beautiful Bill—on the other hand—will cut household income for everyone except the wealthiest. This is just one indication of the moral direction of our current national leadership.
The efforts of the book’s contributors raise another crucial question though. What is the state of Black leadership in relation to Palestine at this moment? This is not an academic matter. We are standing before a crossroads, and we should indeed learn from the contributors’ example before we find that our values—like the babe—are struggling somewhere in the rubble.