My Palestinian Friends Taught Me How to Combat Anti-Semitism

I didn’t set out to learn about anti-Semitism from Palestinians. But I did.

My organization the Vulnerable People Project has worked for years to serve vulnerable communities everywhere, from Afghanistan to Chinese-occupied East Turkestan to Nigeria to Gaza. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the first step to defending the vulnerable is to see them clearly. 

A characteristic event that makes a group of people vulnerable occurs when the powerful elites of the world turn their backs on them and even make it socially costly to stand with them. It’s then that you find you can’t defend them at all unless you really love them, because love is the only thing that makes those social costs worth it to you—win or lose. 

But if you can’t defend someone you don’t love, you also can’t love what you don’t see—or a people you don’t know.

Until I listened to the voices of my Palestinian friends, I did not see or know the Semitic people.

I thought I did. I was an American Catholic, steeped in the language of Catholic social teaching and the American founding—the language of human dignity. I knew the slogans. I’d been to Bethlehem, walked the Via Dolorosa, touched the stone where Christ’s body was prepared for burial. I imagined myself to be an advocate for peace. 

But something ugly lived in my blind spots: a comfortable, unexamined anti-Palestinian bias wrapped in piety and slogans about “standing with Israel.” It took a war to reveal it.

Then came the voices of my friends. Rev. Munther Isaac, the courageous Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem, was one of the first to break through to me. He didn’t speak in slogans. He spoke with pain, patience, and prophetic clarity. “We are not collateral damage,” he said, pleading with Western Christians to remember that Palestinians are not abstractions in someone else’s theology. 

His latest book, “Christ in the Rubble,” is both a cry of lament and a fierce act of hope. In it, Isaac dares to proclaim the presence of Christ—not in conquest, not in the ideology of an empire, but in the bombed-out ruins of Gaza, in the tears of weeping mothers.

I listened to Khalil Sayegh, a Christian from Gaza who refused to conform to either side’s propaganda. A man deeply committed to peace, and no less committed to truth, Khalil told me how the Israeli siege, the bombings, the checkpoints, and the walls had shaped his childhood. And he told me about Hamas—about the fear he and his family endured under their rule. He rejected both the ideology of armed resistance and the ideology of ethnic supremacy. He wanted a future. For his people. For the Jewish people. For all of us.

Khalil’s convictions were not born in any abstract study. He lost his sister and his father to the violence of the Israeli military. They were not statistics; their deaths wounded him deeply and shaped his soul. And still, he speaks without hatred. Still, he calls for peace. Still, he refuses to return evil for evil. In that, he taught me more about resisting anti-Semitism than any book I’ve read or speech I’ve heard.

Listening to Khalil and Isaac didn’t just teach me about Palestinians. It taught me how to see the hatred I had allowed to calcify inside me—hatred I had mistaken for virtue. And it taught me something else: that the struggle against anti-Semitism and the struggle against anti-Palestinianism are not opposites. They are the same fight, as I wrote in a piece at The American Conservative. This one battle will be won only by those with enough moral clarity to reject collective blame and ideological hate—wherever it festers.

The face of Christ is disfigured wherever innocent blood is shed, whether in Sderot or in Rafah, whether in a synagogue in Pittsburgh or in a church in Gaza. To love the Jewish people is to defend them from the genocidal hatred that enabled the Holocaust to be perpetrated while the world half-knowingly looked the other way. And to love the Palestinian people is to defend them from the genocidal hatred that has already normalized the slaughter of tens of thousands of their children in our own time.

We are witnessing a global rise in anti-Semitism. It must be condemned with no ambiguity. 

But do not fool yourself: if you cannot condemn the mass killing of Palestinian children today, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the hatred spewed in our churches and on our screens in the name of Christ—then when the mob turns again on the Jewish people, you will not have the courage to stand with them any more than you had the courage to stand with the Palestinian people.

We train our hearts in justice or we train them in cowardice. There is no neutral ground. We train our hearts in justice or we train them in cowardice. There is no neutral ground.Tweet This

Anti-Semitism is a demonic hatred, and so is anti-Palestinianism. But here is the difference: one is socially accepted, while the other, in most polite circles, is rightly reviled. I have seen donors pull their money from ministries that defend Palestinians. I have watched good men become silent.

And I’ll confess this too: I have been tempted to silence—or at least, I have been tempted to speak more softly.

Speaking out against anti-Semitism is important. Speaking out against anti-Palestinian hate is urgent—and today, it is more difficult.

There is no contradiction here. The true lover of the Jewish people must be a friend to the Palestinians. And the true defender of the Palestinians must oppose Jew-hatred wherever it lurks.

Christians should be the first to speak up. Sadly, we are often the last.

My Palestinian friends have shown me what moral clarity looks like in the darkness. They have taught me to see Christ in the wounded—whether crucified by Hamas or by the Israeli Air Force. 

And they have shown me that there is no road to peace, no road to justice, that does not begin with the refusal to hate.

[Photo: Palestinian Catholics celebrating Christ the King at the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City (source: Dave DeCamp)]