Category: Palestine

Pablo de la Fuente | Diablo Rojo Graphics | Letting Go | Santiago, Chile, 2022

Water Stories On the cries of a lake and a basin of valleys in Mexico

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

“Un Salto por la Vida” (A Leap for Life) is a civil society collective from El Salto, a municipality in the state of Jalisco, which we visited a year ago as participants in the Re-existe festival at ITESO University in Guadalajara, Mexico. Its residents and activists had foreseen the contaminated water crisis that erupted last Sunday in Guadalajara for years. The brutal pollution and growing shortages have been caused by the industrial mirage of the so-called Mexican Silicon Valley, an environmental aberration continued to be promoted by governments and companies in the region, leaving a trail of environmental and social destruction that has been documented by residents, organized civil society, and universities in Western Mexico.

Gradually, the outcry from families—with children and the elderly sickened by the devastating impact of chemicals in "drinking" water—gave way to resistance from civil society. Scientific studies provided the foundation for social activism to promote the right to water as a priority in the struggle for human rights at a time when modern society seems unwilling to awaken from the nightmare of development.

“The wars of the future will be wars over water,” I recall a historian predicting at the beginning of the millennium. And what seemed like a distant dystopia a quarter of a century ago has become everyday reality in every corner of the planet, from Gaza and the West Bank in Palestine to Wallmapu in the southern tip of the American continent.

In Mexico, Lake Texcoco and the Lerma-Santiago River basin have become a painful thorn in the side, especially due to the voraciousness of the megacities that devour everything in their path. But at the same time, both territories have become breeding grounds for rebellion when their inhabitants put their finger on the wound and begin a painful but hopeful path of socio-environmental intervention to save a lake with an ancient history and a vital basin in the central-western part of Mexico.

The “Charter of Lake Texcoco” was an initiative proposed a decade ago by the People’s Front in Defense of the Land and the residents of Atenco, along with their students, activists, and artists, to sing an elegy to water that would give voice to their struggle and make their vision of the territory visible. The poet, academic, and activist Al-Dabi Olvera paved the way for me years ago to understand this poetic-political resistance through the narrative practices we carried out under his guidance at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City with the research project called Narratives of Resistance. That Charter begins by saying:

“I’ve known about the lake since I was born; it’s my parents’ legacy,

It's the life we have, the one we want our grandchildren to live.

Anáhuac is to be between waters,

fish, frogs and axolotls, ducks, chichicuilotes and swallows.

There was no shortage of quelites, quintoniles, and purslane.

The people knew how to live with the waters,

collecting the ahuautle, the tequesquite.

That lake is called freedom.”.

It was an elegy to lost water and a song to water regained. Years later, that lake has finally been declared a nature reserve by the federal government, and its wetlands are being restored thanks to the arduous and constant work of the community, in partnership with the current government, which we hope will continue in the years to come, beyond today's partisan political interests.

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In our age of Artificial Intelligence, water is being transformed into a coveted commodity. An indispensable "product" for the digital industry because data centers require it: a single standard data center consumes 25 million liters of this vital liquid annually to cool the computers that power "the cloud." A cloud that is more of a hellscape of semiconductors and digital networks at the service of the powerful. Indeed, ecological devastation is already occurring alarmingly in areas of Texas and Ohio, and is multiplying from China to Argentina, wherever the lords of the digital super-industry need it to establish their data businesses where water is plentiful. In these territories, Israeli power is strategically expanding to sell technology, replicating its voracious business and its power over local governments in the name of supposed progress and water security.

The water sequestered by fracking is yet another contradiction of this extractive economy. To extract gas from increasingly deeper underground regions, it is necessary to inject unprecedented quantities of water. The life force of water is transformed into a weapon of death at the service of the devastating oil and gas energy industry, which is currently controlled by the United States, China, and Russia across the globe.

And to make matters worse, the water used by the soft drink industry is another head of the capitalist hydra, as the Zapatistas call it, which transforms a precious resource into poison with every soda placed on the tables of the poor. Mexico is the world's largest consumer of soft drinks, and, as a sad example, Chiapas, the state with the highest poverty rate, is also where soft drink consumption is highest, leading to malnutrition and disease. This is a lamentable example of the Illichian principle of counterproductivity: it takes wasting two hundred liters of water—in the entire water chain, from sugarcane or corn cultivation for processing to the production of the soft drink—to put a single bottle of Coca-Cola on the market. The city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas carries water in its soul, with its Tsotsil name Jobel or land of wetlands: bodies of water that still survive despite the exploitation of springs and the terrible public administration that privatizes wells, monopolized today by Coca Cola, and urbanizes those bodies of water inhabited by reeds, birds and increasingly rare amphibians.

To complete this picture of the environmental horror that has water held hostage in our time, it is necessary to mention the sewage from the drains of the world's metropolises, which have transformed rivers and basins—once home to wetlands, streams, and rivers—into channels of chemical, organic, and energy waste from the plastics, steel, and semiconductor industries. But the most macabre aspect of these flows is that they have also become receptacles for the human remains of people disappeared by criminal organizations, thus becoming rivers of iniquity.

Thus we find ourselves thrown into socio-environmental chaos by the machine civilization, now disguised as an algorithm of voracious power.

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And amidst so many painful splinters in the body of Mother Earth and our people, where are there signs of comfort and hope to rescue and heal this wounded socio-environmental body?

The resistance of the people of Atenco in Texcoco and El Salto in Jalisco is like spores spreading through valleys and canyons around the world, giving rise to new organisms in their wake. They do so on a small scale, but a real one. Their methods of organization, their protest marches, their rituals of caring for Mother Earth and the most vulnerable people and creatures in the community are already signs of another way of being, one that transcends greed.

Without romanticizing these movements, knowing that they also experience tensions over power, control of the narrative, and obtaining resources from the state and international solidarity funds, we recognize that other languages are being babbled there with their decolonial verbs: eating, learning, organizing… and waiting.

Now it's up to each of us, individuals and communities, to live and tell our own stories of resistance. What is your water story?

Jobel, October 17, 2026

October 17, 2026
Antún Kojtom Lam | Ch'ulel Mural | City Theater, San Cristóbal de Las Casas 2012 | Photo: Carlos Mendoza

Weaving a political theology for times of Great Catastrophe Some progress on the collective book currently being published in New York

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

The renowned Canadian author Naomi Klein, along with Astra Taylor, has just published a provocative book on end-time fascism. In the introduction alone—the book is predicted to be a bestseller in the English-speaking world—the authors realistically lay out, with journalistic flair, the threads of fascism as an expression of minority capitalism trapped in its own contradiction: on the one hand, driven by ever-increasing wealth, and on the other, threatened by majorities staging protests in the streets in increasingly prevalent dystopian scenarios.

My friend Pablo Reyna sent me the book from Colombia with a brief message that I read as a provocation to engage with the authors in an alternative reading of the underlying theological framework, which, in my view, lies in the mobilizing role of spiritualities of resistance. Certainly, these thinkers see in the return to place, or "hereness," the key to recovering the vision of a humanity that cares for life in the here and now, contrary to the hegemonic narrative. From what I can see so far, however, they haven't yet explored the vast current of decolonial practices and thought from the epistemic South that we have been describing in our work for several years.

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Such is the central theme of the book that is currently in the editorial process at the prestigious publishing house Orbis Books in New York, which, for six decades, has presented the foundational works of liberation theology to the English-speaking public, publishing its main authors such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Jon Sobrino, Leonardo Boff and their creative readers in the American context and in other latitudes such as South Africa, Korea and Palestine.

This is a collaborative work, the fruit of the colloquia I organized over five years at Boston College, under the auspices of the "Beyond Global Violence" initiative, which I proposed as a platform for my personal research in my capacity as a senior professor at that institution. From there, I was able to invite colleagues from Brazil, Mexico, England, Spain, Japan, Puerto Rico, and the United States to participate in various discussions on emerging social, philosophical, and theological thought following the collapse of the modern dream. In my previous research conducted in Mexico, Switzerland, France, and Brazil, I had been connecting the analysis of late modern phenomenology with René Girard's mimetic theory to explore subjectivity collapsed by the dream of the technoscientific ego. But it was missing the decolonial analysis inspired by Frantz Fanon and Aníbal Quijano that continued the path of Latin American liberation thought, incorporating new theoretical and practical categories to think about “coloniality” as a modern process of five centuries of extractivism of the labor, knowledge and ways of life of the subjugated peoples.

Thus arose the question of the supplanting of the divine promoted by modernity through the deification of reason, technology, the market, patriarchy, and the will to power, to mention only a few of the control mechanisms implemented by Western technoscientific rationality. Hence the need to postulate the "apophatic wellspring" of the political, appealing to "nothingness" as that which we have in common, in Matthew Kruger's apt expression, in the "here and now" of our identities of social class, race, gender, religion, and culture.

In this way, thanks to these conversations, we were able to access the wellspring of resistance and re-existence where decolonial political theology flows for times of great catastrophe. This gave rise to the idea of a collective book that would gather the intuitions and narratives we explored over five years in Massachusetts.

When I told Neto Valiente, my dear Salvadoran colleague at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, about the emerging decolonial political theology—going further than the first-generation liberation theology he admires and knows so well—the one that arises from the intersection of phenomenology, mimetic theory, apophatic philosophy, and decolonial thought, he looked at me incredulously. He asked, “And who has written about that?” I simply replied, “No one has until now, but we will.”.

Laurel, Sole, Matthew, Valentina, Maddie, Francis, Juan Miguel, Martín, and Amirah—among many other master's and doctoral students—who were following my postgraduate courses on liberation, decolonial, and queer theologies at Boston College, witnessed how these seemingly disparate threads were woven into a discursive loom with the plot of vulnerability-conviviality-combative hope as a rereading of the coloniality of power-knowledge-being that we analyzed in class and deepened during gatherings at Mingo and Valentina's house with the splendid Chilean hospitality, where commensality made ideas and friendship flow better.

The colleagues I invited to each colloquium on one of the theoretical sources I mentioned above readily agreed to participate, but when I spoke to them about the correlation between these approaches, many expressed skepticism, while others nodded with curiosity. And that's how the book I proposed to the New York publisher came about, after one of its editors invited me to publish some of my work during a talk at the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) convention in Baltimore in June 2024. I told him I had a better idea: to propose a collaborative manuscript on political theology in times of global uncertainty. He curiously accepted the proposal I sent him, after consulting with the colleagues who had participated in the Boston colloquia to see if they would be willing to commit to writing what we had shared in person.

At that moment, we were entering the Great Catastrophe in which we find ourselves trapped today. Thus, the collective work would take shape as a collective narrative of hope amidst the rubble of the genocide in Gaza, the clandestine graves of Mexico, the fissures of the Palestinian and Afro-Brazilian diasporas, and the detention centers for undocumented immigrants in the United States, among other non-places where, paradoxically, “the political” emerges as resistance to necropower.

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The book is titled “Power and Potency,” a commentary on the important work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “Power and Glory,” where he discusses the supplanting of the divine (Glory) by modern economics and politics (power). We want to approach divine Glory, always ineffable and unmanipulable, from the peripheries of the hegemonic world, specifically, from the “potency” of the poor and excluded, as Jean Robert and Majid Rahmena pointed out, or of “the wretched of the earth,” in the words of Frantz Fanon.

The subtitle “Political Theology in Times of Great Catastrophe” reveals the main thesis running through each chapter: that it is possible to experience and think about hope by living “the political” from its reverse side and with eschatological imagination, in its messianic source and amidst the ruins of the Nakba, as the Palestinian people do today. But now it is necessary to do so on the global scale of Great Catastrophe, as the Puerto Rican thinker Nelson Maldonado-Torres proposes in his reflections in this book. The Zapatistas in southeastern Mexico call their way of living and thinking about the political “the commons,” thus recovering their ancestral Mayan tradition of territory, which, in addition to communal lands, belongs to no one privately, but rather to the community.

The book's four sections are presented in the Introduction, which I have written. They explain the intersection of two axes: the phenomenological-anthropological and the decolonial-apophatic. The first section begins with the reflections of Viola Raheb, a Palestinian philosopher of the diaspora, amidst a decolonial political theology approach proposed by Nicolás Panotto from Chile and Argentina, analyzing evangelical Zionism as a mechanism of the coloniality of power. The second section weaves together the anthropological thread, starting with mimetic theory applied to the sacrificial context of Israeli militarism by Silvana Rabinovich, and its effects in the Trump era, analyzed with keen insight by James Alison to trace the possibility of “catholicity” in times of catastrophe; with a mystical chapter by Brian Robinette seeking the essence of “life hidden in God” amidst the extreme polarization of contemporary societies such as the United States.

The third section is a polyphony of decolonial voices from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Martinique, and Brazil. Nelson Maldonado-Torres opens with an invitation to consider the coloniality of technofascism as a Great Catastrophe, with Palestine as its epicenter; Donovan Hernández, from Mexico, proposes a “critique of the reason for war” as a leitmotif of coloniality; Andrew Prevot, a young African American theologian of the new generation, recovers the work of the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant as a provocation for thinking about the political; Cleusa Caldeira deepens her proposal of “theoquilombism” as a decolonization of thought and praxis that arises from Afro-diasporic subjectivities in Brazil; Aída Hernández, who invited her colleague Gabriela Juárez as a co-author, proposes a reading of the political from the perspective of accompanying the Searching Mothers in Mexico to explore an embodied spirituality amidst clandestine graves; And finally, Ángel Méndez-Montoya, Mexican “queer” choreographer and theologian, reflects on the queer table as a theological provocation to think about the political as “the common” that arises from the subjectivities of sex-gender dissidences.

And to open critical thinking to its pre-linguistic roots, the fourth section explores the wellspring of life and thought. Raquel Bouso, from Barcelona, recounts the philosophy of nothingness from Meister Eckhart to the Kyoto School, with its implications for thinking about the political. And Matthew Kruger, a young American thinker, delves into the abyssal thought of Nothingness as a wellspring of the political that warns us against ancient and new idolatries in political contexts that manipulate divinity as identity ideologies.

The prologue by Mark Lewis Taylor, renowned professor emeritus at Princeton, announces the urgent deconstruction of the violent sacred in times of Nakba, based on the reflections of the poet Darwish and the Cameroonian thinker Achille Mbembe, to confront the poetics of despair based on diverse resistances, such as the Palestinian Sumud.

And the Epilogue by M. Shawn Copeland, professor emerita of Boston College and renowned author of black feminist theology in the United States, calls us to “the praxis of humanity” to live amidst the rubble with hope.

The book is scheduled for release in February 2027, but it is already available for pre-order on the portal of Orbis Books. Later I will tell you about the virtual and in-person presentations that we will be organizing, together with my fellow editors and authors, of this great collective volume that wants to contribute, in a collegial and critical way, to thinking about possible hope in times of civilizational collapse.

Jobel, September 19, 2026

September 19, 2026
Juan Fuentes | Critical Zionism Studies | 2025

The Zionisms that threaten us On the (ab)use of the Bible in times of the Great Nakba

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

In recent weeks, an alert was raised in Chiapas due to the presence of the Israeli group "Heroes for Life" in primary schools in Zinacantán. This group, comprised of young Israelis, offers activities such as English courses and school facility renovations, presenting itself as an "Israeli youth volunteer" experience with a smiling and friendly "humanitarian work" for vulnerable populations around the world. Apparently, many of them and their advisors are active or retired members of the Israeli army who have participated in various Zionist wars, as Herman Bellinghausen recently commented.

A few weeks earlier, the Israeli consul in Mexico, Hilla Burk, accompanied by Israeli security advisors, was received by the Secretary of "People's Security," Óscar Aparicio Avendaño, at his offices in the state government building in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. To this day, the public has not been fully informed about the agenda of that meeting, nor about the agreements reached. According to news reports, in other states such as Chihuahua and Querétaro, Israeli advisory contracts already exist with the current governments regarding strategic security, which include contracts for the sale of "state-of-the-art" technology and weaponry from the growing transnational military industry.

Adding to this Israeli activism in Mexico are the “healing retreats” organized by the Israeli organization Chabat in Cozumel and other Mexican Caribbean beaches, aimed at active and reserve members of the Israeli army who have participated in “the war to defend the State of Israel,” as reported by journalist Georgina Zerega. This is a euphemism to conceal their participation in the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the invasion of southern Lebanon with the Greater Israel project, which, as analyzed by thinker Silvana Rabinovich, includes the construction of the Third Temple in Jerusalem as the supreme symbol of this religious war narrative. In some countries, such as Chile, Ireland, and Spain, campaigns have been launched to denounce crimes against humanity committed by Israeli soldiers who are identified passing through these countries, and whom organized civil society and some governments are seeking to bring before national and international courts.

There is a plan for Israeli territorial expansion in Latin America beyond the Middle East, as investigative journalists have documented in Patagonia and Yucatán, strategic locations due to their natural resources such as water, minerals, and rare earth elements.

Behind that humanitarian and tourism facade, Zionism deploys a perverse religious ideology based on a misnamed political theology of election and the promise of the land, making the Bible a weapon of war.

Given this scenario, Christianity faces one of its greatest challenges amidst the civilizational crisis we are experiencing today: discerning the idolatries that supplant the name of God to bring about the death of peoples and the control of strategic territories. Judaism and Islam—in the critical expressions of their own spiritual traditions—will also have to discern the challenge of the Great Nakba, or Great Catastrophe of our time, as the Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls the civilizational crisis of the coloniality of techno-fascism.

Pope Leo XIV, for his part, has drawn attention to the “warlords” who control the war economy marked, from now on, by the abusive use of artificial intelligence for the benefit of an oligarchy of digital technocrats, among whom are the owners of the mega-companies of Silicon Valley in California.

But as pastor and teacher in the See of Peter, the transcultural Pope has also denounced the blasphemy of those who use God's name to wage war, without explicitly mentioning Zionism or Trumpism. Indeed, in his first Encyclical Letter, "Magnifica Humanitas," Leo XIV denounces "the ideologies of death" that cause suffering and wars due to the greed of the modern world in its "posthumanist" version, which prepares the way for a species superior to humankind, generated by algorithms, and "transhumanist" because it subordinates humanity to the system controlled by biotechnological devices. This is an apocalypse of humanity that Ivan Illich had already predicted six decades earlier.

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In this context, Christian communities throughout the world—in their diversity of traditions as collectives of believers, academics, and artists, together with social movements of prophetic and liberation inspiration—are called to understand and deactivate Zionism, both Jewish and evangelical, which lies at the root of Israeli territorial expansionism today, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, with the complicity of the extreme right that haunts political life in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States.

First and foremost, it is about honoring the name of God as divine Wisdom that guides our steps toward justice, peace, and mercy in a world at global war, or, as Silvana Rabinovich calls it, an ongoing “omnicide.” The name of God denotes both the unfathomable divine mystery and the inalienable dignity of creation as the work of His love, which no power in this world can supplant or control. Neither ancient demonology nor the hierarchies of today's necropower lords can replace the divine Glory that always transcends political power, as the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben has so astutely analyzed.

Secondly, it is important to dismantle the political-religious ideology (not political theology in the strict sense) that today turns the Bible into a weapon of war, especially against the Palestinian people and the Semitic peoples of Palestine, both Christian and of other religious traditions. In this regard, Mitri Raheb and Munther Isaac—Palestinian Lutheran theologians resisting the genocide of their people—constantly emphasize the importance of dismantling the Zionist ideology that has manipulated the theology of the land promise and divine election for the exclusive benefit of the Jewish people.

It is important to remember, as the Mexican-Lebanese intellectual Alfredo Jalife-Rahme points out, that the Zionist lobby in the United States and Great Britain created the Zionist ideology in the 19th century as an expression of the colonialism of the Jews of the Diaspora, who are not Semites but descendants of the Jewish presence in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th century. Zionism originated as a political ideology for the control of the territory of Palestine for the exclusive benefit of the Jewish people.

And third, we must remember that the Zionist expansionism that has reached Mexico, specifically Chiapas, requires critical monitoring by civil society, churches, and governments regarding its plans to control territories. This expansion is justified by the ideological narrative disseminated by the Israeli state under Netanyahu and his Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, with its brazenly promoted genocidal and expansionist logic of Greater Israel. The Zionist project is rooted in a powerful war industry that makes Jewish and Christian Zionism a threat to humanity and our common home.

Following the threads of decolonial theology, both Jewish and Christian, it is necessary to reread the Bible as the book of faith of the Semitic peoples in the promise of the living God, who is progressively opening himself to all nations of humanity as recipients of the messianic times that overcome fratricidal violence and establish a new humanity. This is a theology of “the meek who will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5), according to the poetic imagination of Jesus of Galilee, as Mitri Raheb reminds us, stemming from the God of life's preferential option for the poor and excluded of all times. It is a theology of the promise fulfilled in the event of the resurrection of Jesus, the Christ of God, which brings to its most radical expression the manifestation “not of a God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). Promise and choice that the Abba of Jesus always fulfills from those excluded from hegemonic systems of domination to summon all the peoples of the earth to the feast of desire, as proposed by the Mexican queer theologian Ángel Méndez.

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Once the civil society of Chiapas and Mexico discovers the threads woven today by Jewish and Christian Zionism, which is expanding throughout the world in complicity with techno-fascist companies and governments that promote discrimination against peoples and religions, it will be necessary to promote communities of encounter between diverse spiritual traditions, in mutual support, nurturing the resistance to evil with such diverse faces.

Caring for the children and youth of Chiapas in the face of the threat of Zionism today, together with the accountability of authorities at different levels of government in the financing and management of public security, will allow the creation of environments of unrestricted respect for human dignity, with special attention to the most marginalized and vulnerable people and communities.

Then we must promote the celebration of divine blessing for all nations, not only for the Jewish people who in their Zionist version are betraying their vocation to be witnesses of the Eternal, as described by André Neher, the great French Jewish thinker of the 20th century.

Let us not forget that messianic times come to all peoples - in the midst of the history of humanity threatened with death, but promised fullness by the God of Life - thanks to the righteous people of history who give their lives for the world that came from God, not from the powerful of this world.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, June 20, 2026

June 20, 2026

English