Tag: Apartheid

  • La Biblia como arma de genocidio o casa de vidaSliman Mansour. Revolution was the beginning (2016), oil on canvas, 200 x 500 cm

    The Bible as a weapon of genocide or a house of life

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

     

    The State of Israel began this week a new phase of the strategy of control of the territory of Palestine (Israel approves controversial West Bank settlement project). Israeli settler settlements in the West Bank will expand to divide the territory, which was the result of the 1993 Oslo Accords to relocate Palestinian residents into two isolated groups, leaving only one outlet to the Jordan River on the Jericho side.

     

    Christ at the Checkpoint, August 21, 2025   

     

    The ultimate goal is the creation of Greater Israel, once the possibility of a Palestinian state has been destroyed because, as Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said this week, “there is nothing to recognize, and no one to recognize” (Israel approves illegal settlement plan that would split occupied West Bank) once the genocide of the Palestinian people has been consummated.

    This plan of contemporary Israeli expansionism "after Gaza" suggests at least two main objectives: the first is the isolation of Palestinians in apartheid zones, in addition to the invasion of the Gaza Strip, with the goal of their expulsion or subsequent extermination; and the second is the control of the Jordan River as a strategic source of water resources for times of global scarcity.

     

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    But this is not merely the military strategy of a rampaging Zionist state supported by global capitalism, particularly the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom. The ongoing Zionist plan demonstrates the perversity of an ideology of genocide that manipulates the Bible to justify the supremacy of one state over others, subordinating peoples of diverse ethnic and religious origins to a selective process of annihilation in the name of a supposed divine promise.

    Both Jewish and Christian Zionism, in fact, are the modern version of the manipulation of the biblical promises recounted by the saga of Abraham and Sarah as ancestors of the believers of the three monotheistic religions. The biblical account, in fact, tells us that God the Eternal promised the primordial couple offspring "as numerous as the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore" (Gen 22:17). Hebrew Talmudic and ancient Christian commentaries saw in this double metaphor of the heavens and the earth the proclamation of the universality of the promise: the stars of the sky evoking the daughters and sons of Israel, and the sand on the seashore representing all the nations of the earth.

    The ideology of the “chosen people” was later developed in the Bible by a religious movement that perverted the announcement of the promise of the land, focusing it on the conquest of a territory as an exclusive monopoly of one people over other Semitic peoples. This “political theology” was devised by an interpretation of messianism in a Davidic key, present in the Bible since the time of the judges of Israel, which is called the “Joshua factor” by the Palestinian Lutheran theologian Mitri Raheb (Imperial Theology, Colonization, Settler Colonialism, and the Struggle for Decolonization: A Review Essay) as a source of the theology of empire.

    But the prophets of Israel, from Moses to John the Baptist—and Jesus of Nazareth and his community who were part of that lineage—were always critical of the powers that be, which have sought to supplant divine glory under various masks. Theology prophetic It is found at the origin of the Abrahamic faith as a universal vision of the promise and the land that includes all peoples. As the French Dominican biblical scholar Philippe Lefebvre (Conference: Jésus et le pouvoir – P. Lefebvre), prophetic messianism is present like an underground river throughout the Bible, from the book of Genesis to its fulfillment in the Passover of Jesus of Nazareth.

    And the Jesus movement in Galilee takes up this prophetic vein to radicalize it with the innovation of a messianism scatological, as another Dominican, José Luis Espinel, commented a few decades ago in Salamanca (Eschatological Messianism of Jesus from his prophetic actions). A prophetic tradition that announces the fulfillment of the promise for all peoples as a call to the universal love that flows from the wounds of a crucified Messiah.

     

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    Palestinian Christians, as the Palestinian Lutheran theologian Munther Isaac (Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza) call us today to decolonize the Bible, which has become the weapon of war of Israeli and Christian Zionism against the Palestinian people. There is no chosen people to conquer a land in the name of God, stealing it from its original inhabitants, from the ancient Canaanites and Jebusites to the Palestinians of today. Nor is there a promise of the land that justifies, in the name of God, an Israeli state imposed by war on territories inhabited by Semitic peoples for millennia.

    Christian churches of all denominations, as well as universities and political movements that appeal to the Bible as their source, face a grave dilemma: either continue to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people in the name of the God of Israel, or decolonize the Bible to recover the messianic and prophetic spirit of the divine and human word that frees all peoples from the slavery of earthly powers that supplant divine glory, with their current avatars, such as Trump and Netanyahu, or Milei and Bolsonaro, who are today's false messiahs.

    The promise of the land that Abraham and Sarah received in that story of origins when they left Ur in Sumeria in search of the Eternal One – as the Jewish thinker from Strasbourg André Neher says in his book The essence of prophecy – is only fulfilled in the silence symbolized by the desert as a land of incessant search for the Covenant.

    Hence, Christianity drinks from that source of original Hebrew prophecy to announce the arrival of “the new heavens and the new earth,” as the book of Revelation (21: 1) said in the context of the devastation of the old, idolatrous Roman imperial world and the Temple religion that perverted the divine promise.

    This radical critique of all imperial theology stemming from a prophetic and eschatological messianism that heralds the end of the corrupt world has been rejected by both old and new earthly powers that seek to continue domesticating the divine promise.

    But from the rubble of Gaza, the promise of the land emerges today, with renewed vigor, summoning all peoples of humanity and compelling all spiritual traditions to care for the lives of the innocent victims and their survivors. It calls us to continue searching for the promised land as a utopia in the midst of dystopia. It invites us to cultivate hope as a promise of life that emerges amid the threat of imminent death, like that experienced by Gazans today and other peoples threatened by necropower.

    The Bible is not a weapon of war but “the house of the people,” as Carlos Mesters said in Brazil in his beautiful and powerful parable (The parable of the house of the people of God). A house we are invited to inhabit, to recognize in our own stories the spring of life that emerges like living water gifted by God from the ruins of the power that kills.

    Let us reread and inhabit these messianic and prophetic testimonies of the promise of the land and the choice of divine love for all peoples, so that we may be inspired by the consolation that comes from God to the victims and their survivors, as a moving promise that is happening in the silence of the desert.

     

    Mexico City, August 24, 2025

  • El cuerpo del mesías: entre incertidumbre y alertaExocé Kasongo, Last Punk, print on demand, 2021

    The body of the Messiah: between uncertainty and alert

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

     

    A collective emotion of panic is sweeping through humanity from all four corners of the globe at the present time due to the war in the Middle East unleashed by Israel and Hamas, which is now spreading from Lebanon and Syria to the ancient land of Iran. This fire is being fanned by the boundless ambition of the United States, a new phase of modern imperialism, with its lackeys in various parts of the world. The recent protests under the slogan "#No King" in that country have only opened a small crack in the wall of white supremacy and Western capitalism, which, as the Zapatistas have been reminding us for a decade (Critical Thinking Against the Capitalist Hydra I) is like a many-headed hydra that reproduces more strongly each time one of its heads is cut off.

    The devastation in Gaza continues in real time, as digital media vividly reproduces scenes of burning buildings in Tehran and a desperate mass of Israelis trying to enter bomb shelters in Tel Aviv.

    Since 2007 René Girard (Clausewitz at the Extremes: Politics, War, and Apocalypse) had seen this "escalation to extremes" coming with a sharp apocalyptic eye, analyzing the logic of war as a final solution to eliminate the rival, from the Treatise on War of a Prussian general named Clausewitz. Girard interpreted this foretold catastrophe by stating that modern society had become the civilization that forgot Christ's invitation to dismantle "the lie of Satan." A path of mimetic violence that consists in believing that by sacrificing a few, the majority will be preserved from destruction. This "ancient path of wicked men," as the Book of Job (22: 15-16) says, commented on by Girard, is false because, despite the scapegoats, evil continues to nest in the human heart, marked by rivalry, contagion, and the sacrifice of others, which will continue to produce new victims until "the righteous people of history" stop this spiral of violence in their own bodies, as Saint Paul evokes in his letter to the Ephesians (2:14) when speaking of Christ on the cross.

    Such a victimizing process is carried out today by the states that perpetrate war. We see it spreading in Russia, the United States, Israel, El Salvador, and so many other countries where elites who govern with the cynicism of privileged minorities are willing to sacrifice "the disposable" for the sake of supposed national security, a prosperous economy, regional peace, or the "free world."

    The fear of the outbreak of nuclear war paralyzes us. We already saw its devastating effects eighty years ago in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when atomic energy was used as a weapon of war by the United States, which has since controlled global foreign policy, with the complicity of NATO and other states that decide who can or cannot develop this technology. This is a new form of sovereign power which is imposed as a geopolitical strategy of deterrence and control of the planet. We are also familiar with the devastating ecological risks of nuclear accidents following the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011, whose human victims and thousands of animal and plant species continue to be affected by the devastating effects of this tiny, out-of-control atomic force.

    And yet, we must not forget that these same victims have struggled to become survivors who recover their own dignity and historical strength in the midst of horror. Jean-Pierre Dupuy reminded us in 2002 in his book For an illustrated catastrophism  and others who followed him the importance of learning from the victims of nuclear energy abuse their ways of resisting.

    We must subvert the logic of the powerful who capture our imagination with their greed for possession. By listening to those who confront evil in their own bodies and territories, thanks to their indignation and creativity, we can move from panic and uncertainty to a state of alert that allows us to change here and now that logic of death into processes of life and mutual care. It is up to us to take charge of our life stories, rooted in he place typical of our communities and towns, as Jean Robert said from Cuernavaca to inhabit the place from the proportion of the walker (Thinking while walking).

    Peace "from below" and from the reverse side of the history of the powerful is what we can build every day. Searching mothers in Argentina and Mexico have done so for decades. Indigenous peoples do so based on their knowledge and forms of communal organization. Women imagine and create it in their networks of care, confronting patriarchy for millennia. Collectives build it against the current. queer/cuir  who face the various phobias of yesterday and today.

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    I am writing these lines in Durban, South Africa, on the coast of the Indian Ocean, during a break from the workshop on "Hope and Healing" shared with religious and spiritual leaders of the region. One of them told us yesterday of his concern about the tasks pending in this country, after two decades of national refoundation following the abolition of the Apartheid In 1994, the ethical leadership of the South African people continues to bear fruit, such as the complaint filed by the South African State with the International Supreme Court in The Hague for the Palestinian genocide carried out by the State of Israel. However, within the country, there are serious pending issues, such as agrarian reform that would redistribute land still owned by the Afrikaners in the territory's 60%. The working groups told stories of South African youth blinded by the digital world and its vicissitudes, enveloping the imagination of a people with false hopes that make it impossible to face new challenges. Challenges such as the rejection of migration by the population from neighboring countries like Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Lesotho, due to the famine or war they suffer, the successive corruption of governments, and the lack of accountability of authorities at all levels. Searching together for criteria to confront this crisis of uncertainty, we have found that spiritualities of humanity, such as the African healing tradition and the churches of various denominations close to the people in the peripheries, with their admirable wealth of ways of life, meditation and healing practices, represent ways of subversive of community in the face of religious monopoly in all traditions. These spiritualities are an oasis for the people who inhabit "the region of non-being" evoked by Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth).

    But these spiritualities need to be recovered in their inner strength of rebellion against evil and the development of other ways of life. Today more than ever, it is necessary to dismantle the power of religious ideologies that turn spiritualities into instruments for manipulating consciences, bodies, and territories.

    Humanity is called today to move from panic and uncertainty to a state of alert, that is, to creative imagination which mobilizes the forces of each person and community, weaving bonds of life in the midst of death. In the Christian tradition today it is celebrated Corpus Christiyou, the body of the Messiah. This is not a religious mythology that sacralizes objects, but the living memory of humanity and the cosmos as messianic body mortally wounded, fighting for life. In several countries, initiatives by governments and churches to promote peace are emerging. In Mexico, the “National Dialogue for Peace" promoted this weekend by several Catholic organizations is a reflection of this clamor.

    But we must not forget that the call for peace that arises in this context of imminent war in the Middle East and in every region of the planet will be a "flame flash" if that fire is not fanned. inside of each of our bodies and communities with practices of self-care, meditation and mutual accompaniment, new modes of governance and transitional justice that stop the spiral of hatred that is rampant throughout the world.

    In this way, we will be able to move from uncertainty to critical and hopeful vigilance as humanity, which, together with all of creation, resists and re-exists to become the living body of the Messiah.

     

    Durban, South Africa

    June 21, 2025

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