At the church where I serve, we have been working to decolonize how we think and worship. We have removed every image of “Jesus” that is not historically accurate. We center the voices of Black women and women, recognizing them as sacred. We hold the Roman Empire responsible for the state-sponsored assassination of Jesus, rather than Jewish people. And we rely heavily on what scholars call Exodus preaching and teaching.
Every Sunday, every week, and at every opportunity, we lift up the struggles of the marginalized, the oppressed, the weary, the poor in spirit, and those on the outside looking in—people waiting for a liberating word from Jesus as they battle the empire for freedom.
An Anglo woman came to the church I serve to worship with us. And we were discussing the state-sponsored murder of another black body, taken from this earth, from a mother who loved, a community that embraced, a Creation given by God.
I heard later that this Anglo woman had left in a huff, because she didn’t believe she heard the right words, any words, about Palestinian people and their plight. My first thought was to commit this matter to prayer and then call this woman to have a dialogue about her feelings with the hopes of finding common ground with her.
I committed the matter to prayer, but I was led not to call the woman. Not because I didn’t want to attempt to have a thoughtful dialogue regarding her feelings. But, I didn’t reach out because I don’t know that we would have been able to say anything to each other that the other would have been able to fully understand.
Because for me and a few others on my side of the diaspora and universe, to speak of what is happening in real time within the Holy Land is to stand at the convergence of two distinct, monumental rivers of trauma.
For a Black observer, looking through the lens of a people who have known the catastrophic weight of being dispossessed, uprooted, and systematically subjugated, the landscape speaks a familiar language. It is the language of structural grief. Yet, true moral clarity requires that we do not let our kinship with one struggle blind us to the deep-seated fears and rights of another.
Believing in Israel’s right to exist is not a political concession; it is an acknowledgment of history. It recognizes that the Jewish people endured millennia of displacement, pogroms, and the ultimate horror of the Holocaust. The creation of a sovereign sanctuary was born out of the absolute necessity for survival and self-determination.
To deny that right to exist—to demand the erasure of a home built from the ashes of global betrayal—is to wander dangerously into the territory of antisemitism. Antisemitism is an ancient, shape-shifting hatred that must be rejected unequivocally, wherever it surfaces. But a calloused and big heart expanded by the Black American experience knows that justice cannot be zero-sum. To honor Jewish survival does not require the erasure of Palestinian humanity.
When we look at the West Bank and Gaza, we see a people enduring the heavy, grinding machinery of occupation: checkpoints, walls, and the daily indignities of second-class existence. This is where the mirror of history reflects so sharply. It is entirely possible—indeed, it is a moral imperative—to look at the plight of Palestinians and feel an overwhelming sense of compassion and solidarity. Recognizing their right to freedom, dignity, and self-determination is not an attack on Jewish safety; it is the fulfillment of universal human rights.
The tragedy of the region is that it is a clash of two traumatized peoples, both deeply rooted in the same soil, both carrying generational wounds. The true “message” for any writer or thinker or anyone seeking justice is to refuse the easy comfort of picking only one side to humanize.
We must hold both truths at once. We must defend the right of Jewish people to live in safety and sovereignty, while loudly demanding that Palestinians be freed from the weight of oppression. Only by honoring the scars of both can we begin to imagine a horizon where both can breathe.
And I’m not so sure that woman would have been open to hearing that.
