on Gaza and changing my religion
Hugh Williams
In the most recent issue of Island Catholic News (see link - https://islandcatholicnews.ca/), I wrote a piece, used as an editorial, titled “Changing My Religion”. The piece focused on the genocide in Gaza especially of the past two years and how this situation has caused many people around the world to reevaluate their fundamental commitments. There have been some requests to further explain this phrasing less there be certain misunderstandings.[1]
In trying to keep this brief, I will share a recent article “The Grammar of Resistance: Rethinking Palestine Beyond Pity and Fear” by Abdaljawad Omar and Pasquale Liguori from Monthly Review-Online (see attached full article) for which I supply my own short introductory gloss here below. It is an essay that uses both language and meaning as ‘very tough medicine’ …
My Gloss: ‘Palestine is a site of both struggle and radical thought. It is where the word ‘liberation’ is not a metaphor. It is a situation which has caused a deep notion of ‘resistance’ breaking with the dominant grammars of our times. It is a resistance that has become for some epistemological, metaphysical, and even ontological. This resistance is not only to fight, it is to think – to think otherwise, to think against, and to think beyond.
There is now an analysis that starts from a place and position that the West’s dominant political and intellectual culture remains determined to bury having to do with the strategic lucidity of a people who have learned to turn catastrophe into a horizon. The dominant media portrayal has reduced Palestinians to eternal victim, reducing the right and duty to fight oppression, apartheid, and the theft of land to a vague abstraction.
What are the origins of this dominant Western narrative of Palestine that continues to trap Palestine between the poles of “human rights” and “terrorism” sterilizing the colonialist reality of the conflict? There has been the deeply ingrained habit and conditioning to respond in terms of the prefabricated scripts of “human rights”, the last moral vestige of liberal modernity. This ingrained habit has in effect systematically denied Palestinians the right to understand their own resistance, not just to ‘feel it’ or to ‘survive it’, but to ‘think it’.
However, for many people (including myself), something has shifted. After two years of constant massacre there is a new and furious clarity, where this systematic refusal to allow Palestinians the capacity to theorize their resistance is no longer about Palestine. More dangerously it is about the world. What is deeply feared is not Palestinian liberation on its own, but that resistance might become thinkable again, might circulate, might take root in other zones of abandonment. There are the danger and fear that the Palestinian is no longer the mute emblem of suffering, but has become the 'figure' through which the question of emancipation reenters people’s political imagination.’
Hugh Williams
[1] It needs to be stated that no betrayal of ‘Jesus’ is intended for, as I understand and believe, Jesus was a rebel also at odds with the political and religious rulers of his day. I would emphasize that the phrase is ‘changing my religion’ not ‘losing it’.