Dear Soulful Revolutionary,
Monday marked 52 years since the assassination of celebrated Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani. He was just 36 years old — killed alongside his teenage niece in Beirut, Lebanon by a car bomb installed by Israeli intelligence forces.
Recognized as one of the greatest writers in the Arabic language, Kanafani’s work mirrored his experience as a survivor of the Nakba — Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians that took on full force in 1948 and continues unabated to this day.
I read Kanafani’s novella, Returning to Haifa, last fall. It is a sobering, heart-wrenching story of a Palestinian couple going back to their home, years after it was stolen from them and occupied during the Nakba. They are looking for their son — mistakenly left behind amidst the violent chaos created by the Zionist militias who drove them from their neighborhood — only to discover he has been raised as an Israeli Jew.
Reading this fictional account of one family’s experience of the Nakba drove me to seek out more Palestinian stories from that period. Among these was that of a new friend, whose father’s family also left behind a child in their frenzied flight from the Zionist gangs. Devastatingly, that child did not survive.
All of these stories — the fictionalized and the historical — have radicalized my politics surrounding Palestine. They have illuminated the true nature of the occupation and its heinous system of different rules for different people; its maintenance through military might and Western cooperation.
That Kanafani’s fiction would have such a politicizing effect is not surprising, given the way the writer saw himself. He once said:
“My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite".
Kanafani’s politic was built on the foundation of his vocation as a storyteller. A gifted artist committed to plumbing the depths of the human experience and telling the truth about what he had observed, he was quickly cast as a powerful voice in the growing political movement for a free Palestine.
Kanafani has had me wondering about the places in our lives from which authentic politics spring. When I say politic, I mean, quite simply, how you believe power ought to be organized in society. I mean the principles and practices for which you are willing to advocate and fight in service of that vision.
Like Kanafani, I cannot separate my vocational identity and practice from my politics.
As a priest, my core commitment is to follow Jesus — that Palestinian rabbi who operated outside of established institutions to bring healing and hope to occupied and oppressed people. As one charged with the responsibility of proclaiming the Gospel, I cannot escape what I have understood as Jesus’ core message:
that God desperately loves the world, and is particularly attentive to those who are oppressed;
that the world we have at present is not the world as God dreams it would be;
that God becomes one of us, so there is nothing about being human that is foreign to Divine love — including death;
and that God is already making all things new and inviting us to join in this holy work.
Suffice it to say: my radical politic is the direct result of seeking to follow Jesus and heed his teachings.
Deeper than the two-party duopoly of US society, and resistant to easy labels (though aspects of democratic socialism and anarchism are certainly discernible), my politic flows from a theological conviction that liberation is inevitable because it is divinely inspired and supported.
I cannot help but hold a politic that challenges the status quo of domination and oppression. This is because I am a theologian with a sacramental imagination: believing God to be present everywhere — and especially with those who are oppressed — I practice looking for sacredness in places where others only see death, destruction and despair.
On the margins of society, amidst people who have been written off and disposed of, again and again, I find it: hope that refuses to be crushed, love that deepens under duress, faith that grows under pressure. A liberatory politic that is alive and well.
As poet Arundhati Roy (currently being prosecuted under India's retrogressive anti-terror law) has written,
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Of course, I did not come to such a politic on my own. It has been honed in me by many people — writers and preachers, activists and artists, community leaders and ordinary people loving in extraordinary ways. It is a joy to discover others whose politic resonates with my spirit, while elevating and expanding my perspective.
I regularly find community with those whose politics spring from a spiritual source. They come from wildly different traditions, yet a common thread is a profound sense that love — liberating and life-sustaining — is at the center of everything. Like me, these folks find their spirituality to be inseparable from their politic.
What about you, dear Soulful Revolutionary? Where does your politic spring from? What vocation, passion or gifts lead you to have the convictions that you do? And with whom do you find yourself in community?