Glen Ellyn, Ill. (RNS) — Earlier this year, Lydia El-Sayegh got the good news that her beloved grandmother was able to escape from Gaza.
While thankful her relative was no longer in a war zone, the news was bittersweet. “It’s a blessing and a tragedy,” said the 25-year-old El-Sayegh, sitting on a bench outside of Parkview Community Church in Chicago’s western suburbs on Friday (Sept. 12). “She should never have had to experience all that or had to leave her home in the first place.”
El-Sayegh was one of several Palestinians speaking at the Church at the Crossroads conference, a three-day event held at Parkview this week that aims to rally Christians to speak up for their fellow believers in Gaza.
The hope, organizers said, is to move American Christians from feeling bad about the war in Gaza to taking action to end it.
“We are at the crossroads,” Palestinian theologian Daniel Bannoura told some 800 attendees at the conference’s opening session on Thursday. “There’s a time right now for us to choose. Are we going to choose the path of peace or the path of violence?”
Several of the speakers expressed exasperation at Christians who express sympathy for the suffering in Gaza but offer little beyond thoughts and prayers in response.
Bannoura said that because America has supported Israel’s military operations in Gaza, being passive is not an option. “If you are not doing anything, you are doing something,” he said. “If you are in the U.S., then you are complicit.”
Gary Burge, a New Testament scholar and author of “Whose Land? Whose Promise,” rejected the notion espoused by Christian Zionists that the Bible requires Christians to support the modern-day state of Israel. That belief, common among evangelicals, has fueled much of the conservative Christian support for Israel.
“Modern Israel is not biblical Israel,” said Burge. “Let’s be clear.”
Anton “Tony” Deik, associate director of the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice, which organized the conference, is a Palestinian Christian now living in Bolivia. He told conference attendees that linking current-day Israel to biblical history was “one of the greatest theological scandals,” meant to excuse the violence of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” as Israeli militias drove Palestinians from their villages at the founding of the Jewish state.
But Deik was not interested in debates over Israel’s right to exist. Though he believes the founding of Israel was unjust, the fact is that Israel exists, he told RNS in an interview, “That’s just reality. The question is, how can Israelis and Palestinians live together in peace?”
