Tag: Israel

  • 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

  • Muerte y resurrección del pueblo palestinoPeace in Times of War | Mouneb Taim | 2019

    Death and resurrection of the Palestinian people

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

     

    Since November 2023, following the Hamas terrorist attack that killed 1,159 Israeli citizens and took 251 more people into captivity, a new phase of the extermination of the Palestinian people that began decades ago has been unleashed.

    Foreseeing the uncertain times ahead, Palestinian Lutheran theologian Mitri Raheb convened a group of fifty colleagues from around the world to form a network called "Theology After Gaza." He invited us to think together about how to confront the genocide of the Palestinian people that began with the Nakba or Catastrophe in 1948, which is reaching its final phase with the current extermination in Gaza and the West Bank.

    Since then, we have met numerous times, in person or virtually, to organize research projects aimed at raising awareness in our academic, religious, and civil society circles around the world about the cause of the Palestinian people. We must not forget other forms of violence, such as in the Congo, South Sudan, and Ukraine, nor the victims of terrorism and the necropower of criminal mafias around the world, as is the case in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia.

    Thanks to this initiative of the rector of the University Dar-Al-Kalima, based in Bethlehem, Palestine, we have been sowing seeds of social and intellectual resistance in universities in Asia, the United States, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean, through research programs on the culture of the Palestinian people and other peoples in resistance. A primary source for our work is the ancestral Palestinian wisdom of Sumud, or firmness with constant perseverance in the face of evil. It is a long-standing resistance, where the connection to the land, mutual care, and the arts as guardians of memory have played a preponderant role in keeping the dignity of the Palestinian people alive amid the Israeli army's bombardment of Gaza and the control of their territories by insatiable Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

    The arts have been an essential part of people's resistance throughout history. The Zapatista youth reminded us of this a few days ago with the festival "(Rebel and Revel) Art. A Gathering of Art, Rebellion, and Resistance Toward the Day After," held at the Caracoles in Jacinto Canek and Oventik, and at the Cideci in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas. A similar initiative, with a more academic tone, will be the congress. Decolonizing Power: Rethinking the Politics of Art and Religion which, if possible in the context of the current immigration policy against foreign intellectuals in the United States, is being organized by Dar-Al-Kalima University in Boston next November, in conjunction with the annual convention of the American Society of Religion (AAR) to bring together more than seventy speakers of decolonial thought around the theme of the arts as an essential means to strengthen the imagination of peoples in resistance to the current neocolonialism that is spreading across the planet.

    But today it is urgent to remember that the destructive force of the capitalist hydra does not abate, but rather threatens with new heads that devour everything in its path. It now deploys a strategy of fear to control freedom of expression, as is currently happening in the United States with the criminalization of human rights thought, international law, and peace processes. This strategy has led to the cancellation of research programs, as well as the harassment, detention, and deportation of foreign graduate students and professors, accused of antisemitism and of being a threat to national security, for their academic and social activities in favor of the ceasefire in Gaza.

    However, this is only the beginning of a broader strategy that seeks to dismantle critical thinking in American universities as part of a master plan of the new white imperialism, of extractive capitalism controlled by 9/11, with a toxic masculinity bias that reinforces millennia-old patriarchy, and with an ideology that corrupts Christianity by justifying racist colonialist projects around the world as an expression of a populist political messianism.

    In recent weeks, Israeli bombings of Gaza have continued to kill the civilian population, especially Palestinian children. Meanwhile, the expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank continues, with international indifference. Muslim and Christian holy sites are being closed as places of worship by Israeli authorities on the most important dates in the religious calendar for both traditions.

    I began writing these lines on Holy Saturday, when the Christian community commemorates God's silence following the public execution on the cross of Jesus the Galilean, accused of being a criminal by the Roman Empire and a blasphemer by the authorities of the Temple of Jerusalem. That silence from the tomb of the crucified is shared today by the Palestinian people and by so many other victims executed for the sake of necropower. A time of silence that portends a new world yet to be born. But that day will not come soon, for the night is long. Today, in the silence of the ruins of Gaza, as of the extermination camps in Mexico, the murmur of the survivors who resist is the bastion of humanity that can save us all. Do we hear it?

    Forty days of silence and hopeful mourning, represented in that symbolic Christian religious calendar with Hebrew roots as a time of passage or Easter, give rise to a time of rescue of the innocent in the Merkaba or chariot of fire that symbolizes the divine and human compassion that dignifies the righteous people of history, such as Elijah and the Galilean.

    It is the powerful symbolic background of Jesus' ascension to heaven that Christian communities celebrate these days. It is not merely a myth of the past for a community mourning its murdered Rabbi. The chariot of divine fire is a way of expressing that every creature in the cosmos, especially the innocent victimized by necropower, live in the divine and human sphere of loving compassion.

    May this be an opportunity to trust in this human-divine movement that rescues and dignifies the Palestinian people and the innocents of history, disfigured faces of our humanity, but a presence that is "like a splinter that hurts" and that calls us to live radical compassion to stop the spiral of hatred that is sweeping the planet today.

     

    Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro

    June 1, 2025.

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