Faith Leaders Travel To the West Bank
For ten days this fall, thirty members of the U.S. Interfaith Journey of Justice—ministers, rabbis, kohenets, nuns, and Quaker, Buddhist, and Hindu peace activists—traversed the West Bank by bus and on foot to show their solidarity with the Palestinian victims of Israeli violence, apartheid, and displacement.
The trip was organized by Christians for Ceasefire and Rabbis for Ceasefire in the United States and led by Sabeel, a Christian liberation theology movement based in Palestine. Photographer Will Allan-DuPraw also traveled with the group to document the trip.
As U.S. citizens, what they found even more disturbing than the suffering among Palestinians was the complicity of the U.S. government underlying nearly every Israeli injustice they witnessed.
August 27, East Jerusalem: The interfaith group met with Roland Friedrich, deputy director of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the West Bank. “UNRWA facilities have been searched and ransacked since October 7,” Friedrich told the group. “A lot of school buildings are being destroyed in Gaza, and the military action is now coming to the West Bank. Ninety staff members have been killed in Gaza. In the West Bank, they are exposed to aggression and insults.”
Later that day, delegates visited the nearby Shuafat Refugee Camp, where residents say marauding Israeli soldiers fire their weapons at night as a terror tactic. Friedrich said the U.S. ban on funding for UNRWA has cut 25 percent from its already hard-pressed budget.
August 28, Silwan: Long-time residents of this Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem face continuing destruction of their homes to accommodate a City of David theme park.
The Israeli government “issues a demolition order and you don’t know when they’ll come,” said Fakhri Abu Diab, whose home was demolished in February. “It could be tomorrow, a month, five years. And they do it at random to keep everyone guessing. Can you imagine going to bed at night not knowing if they are going to come in the [next] morning and destroy your home?”
Since 2019, Israeli authorities have demolished more than fifty-four homes in this Palestinian community for lack of building permits. The permits needed to build any structure, including additions and sheds, in the occupied territories are rarely granted to Palestinians.
August 29, Gaza crossing at Kerem Shalom: Near an Israeli checkpoint into Gaza in the West Bank, each delegate delivered an impassioned prayer for peace in their own faith. The prayers were often muffled by the roar of passing supply trucks en route to the checkpoint and, across the security fence in Gaza, the rumble of an occasional Israeli armored vehicle.
At times, they could hear bombs exploding in Gaza. Many delegates said the prayer vigil in an empty parking lot so near the violence in Gaza was the most moving yet frustrating moment of the trip—a cry for peace and justice for the victims in Gaza with no one to hear.
Delegate Kim Redigan, the director of campus ministry at a Catholic high school in Detroit, spoke for many when she said soon after the vigil, “I was crying through the whole thing. And then I thought, if we would stop sending arms, it would stop immediately. Immediately! And then I got angry. I think if we would all punch together, the wall would fall. In the end, I don’t know whether to cry or punch a wall.”
August 30, U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem: Six members of the delegation met with a U.S. Embassy liaison, urging the United States to put greater pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and advocating for an end to the war in Gaza and a halt to settler violence in the West Bank.
The other twenty-four members protested U.S. arms support for Israel’s war in Gaza outside the Embassy with songs and chants. Ten minutes into the demonstration, embassy officials requested the Israeli police push the protestors one block downhill, out of sight from the embassy. U.S. State Department officials have not responded to repeated requests for comment on why embassy officials dispersed a peaceful protest by U.S. citizens on U.S. property.
August 31, Birzeit: At an Anglican Church, delegates heard an emotional plea from Lulu Nasir for the release of her twenty-three-year-old daughter Layan, who has been held in an Israeli prison without charge since April 7. This is the second time that Layan Nasir, an Anglican Palestinian student studying nutrition at Birzeit University, has been detained by the Israeli military.
In July 2021, she was charged for her alleged activities with the Democratic Progressive Student Pole (DPSP), a Palestinian leftist student group that was declared unlawful by the Israeli military in August 2020. Nasir was released a month later after paying $7,500 in bail but never faced trial before she was detained again in April. Nasir’s mother thanked the delegates for their support: “You’re giving us courage regardless of what is happening.”
In April, the Episcopal Church Executive Council urged “the end of the continued detention of thousands of Palestinians without charge, as particularly highlighted by the case of Layan Nasir.”
September 1, Naba Al Ghazai: Residents of this small village of Palestinian shepherds told delegates about their constant harassment by a neighboring hilltop Jewish settlement. Teenagers from the settlement come in the night to awaken and frighten the Palestinian children. The settlers also graze their sheep on village land and, at times, run their mini-tractors through the villagers’ flocks to scatter and frighten them, causing miscarriages among pregnant ewes.
An elderly villager was run over and killed while trying to protect their family’s cars from the settlers. The charred remains of one car lay at the entrance to the village. Private donors in the United States send tens of millions of tax-deductible dollars each year to support illegal settlements in Israel through a network of tax-exempt nonprofits.
September 3, Al Makhrour: Delegates participated in a sit-in to protest the seizure of the Kisiya family home until Israeli soldiers threatened to disperse the group with stun grenades. The French-Palestinian family has been campaigning for years to reclaim their land. At the end of July, Israeli settlers took the land by force amid a drastic expansion of settlements in the Palestinian territory since the start of the Gaza war.
The next day, Israeli soldiers destroyed the Kisiyas’ meeting tent. The family called on volunteers to help, but nearly all of the delegates were already on their way home.
Omar Haramy of Sabeel hopes to lead other solidarity trips to the West Bank. “International presence is important,” Haramy said. “It empowers us on the ground. If we had not been there [at the sit-in] today, there could have been violence. We want to create a flow of groups to Palestine.”
The delegates vowed to spread the message of what they had witnessed in the West Bank to U.S. media and political leaders. Delegate Sunita Viswanath, founder of Hindus for Human Rights, recalled the words of Tania Nasir, godmother of Layan Nasir: “People like you, trying to feel, trying to help — our only hope is your anger. I pray your anger reaches your governments.”