"The crisis of our time."

On my return from Palestine.

Palestinian voices. Posters in a Bethlehem window. (C.M., 2024.)

5 JANUARY—I recently returned from the West Bank, where I spent six weeks traveling in the governorates of Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. It was my second trip there this year—the first was in April and May. I completed both sojourns with journals full of notes and an iPhone loaded with photographs. As the new year begins, my task now is to sit quietly, keep the coffee pot going, and begin to write of all that I saw and learned. As the title of this series makes clear, this is about sharing the voices of the many people I heard and with whom I spoke.

I sit as I type this at the very desk—in the same small guest room at my parent’s home in Bellingham, Washington—where I sat nearly a year ago, when I first determined to go to Palestine. At the time it felt less like a decision and more of an imperative. Were I not an atheist and instead believed in God, I might say I’d been called to go, so unshakable was my certainty that it was the thing I must do above all else.

And so it was on 26 February last year that I announced my project on The Floutist and Winter Wheat—to travel to the West Bank and write a series of articles called “Palestinian Voices.” At the same time I launched a GoFundMe campaign. Donations rolled in, indicating just how eager people were to hear the voices of Palestinians. By the end of April I was in the West Bank.

I spent nearly three months in Occupied Palestine during the year just passed. These have proven to be the most consequential weeks of my life. I am ever grateful for the opportunity and the financial backing of my generous donors.

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I have come to understand, and I am not alone in this thought, that the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom, sovereignty, peace, and justice against the combined racism and sadism of Israel and its U.S. and Western sponsors may well be humanity’s last opportunity to get it right—a last chance to choose international law, human rights, and basic decency over brutality, authoritarianism, and unhinged, unhampered barbarism. There will be no stopping the West’s descent into chaos otherwise, along with all the consequences for the rest of the world—violence, instability, the increasing risk of nuclear war. As I write, Israel and the U.S. are considering whether the time is right to bomb Iran.

Palestine embodies humanity’s greatest hope and worst fears: the hope of peaceful coexistence and the terror of unending war and slaughter.

Palestine is the mirror into which each of us—those of us who live in the West—must look if we are to understand ourselves and our history. What now unfolds in Palestine is the doomed legacy of Western civilization and the West’s drive for—and various manifestations of—imperial power. It is the 500–year old history of Western racism, colonization, and settler-colonialism being replayed and reenacted in real time—a recycled legacy of brute force and sadistic violence. All of this because of a willful failure among Western nations and peoples to reckon with their pasts and to right a great many wrongs—to use an altogether inadequate word for the West’s numerous projects of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

If, and again I speak to Westerners, we do not grapple with the history and significance of Palestine, we will have failed to understand ourselves—as individuals and nations—and we will have squandered our time on this planet. A genuine reckoning with all that Palestine represents would be an opportunity for those of us who live in the West to come to terms with our history and to reclaim and reimagine the best of what the Enlightenment tradition has to offer.

To walk the Holy Land in this way, even if metaphorically, is the path to becoming meaningfully and fully human.

If the Western world continues to fail the Palestinian people, any light of hope left will dim for all of us. What the U.S. and Israel are doing in Gaza will become the de facto right of the powerful. The genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza will become the international norm. There will be nothing left of international law or the authority of the U.N. to protect people from the naked brutality that is now being unleashed in Gaza and that will certainly be used against others, whose lives are similarly inconvenient to those who wield power. Indeed, this already appears to be the case as we have witnessed recently in Lebanon and Syria.

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For these reasons and in this way, Palestine has become my compass star. It guides and informs my thinking and my actions. I may not be a Christian, but I know a star shines over the Holy Land of Palestine and that it beckons to us, calling us to embody our fullest human and humane potential.

Urgency may be the key word for 2025. It is ever more urgent that each of us step up, take responsibility, and act in whatever way we can. Each one of us—every capable person of responsible age in the Western world—stands at a juncture, a moral crossroad, in what is without doubt an unprecedented historical moment. Each one of us has a decision to make that will determine our character, our personal legacy, the worth of our life.

The genocide in Gaza is made possible in no small part because of the ignorance and inaction of good people—including good Americans. There is no defensible excuse for inaction. With all of the excellent independent journalism that is easily accessed online, there is no excuse for ignorance.

There can never be an excuse for ignorance and inaction in the face of a continuing genocide.

Palestinians have not lost their humanity, even as genocide is being perpetrated against them. But those of us who fail to act—who, after more than a year of genocide, still fail to act—will almost certainly lose ours.

And now to work.

Salam-alaikum.

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