Solidarity Pilgrimage with Sabeel
by Rev. Dr. Joyce Penfield
Please join me in November on a
Solidarity Pilgrimage in Palestine
(led by Sabeel)
November 9, 2024 Blog #1
On my way today. First stop: Amman
Thank you for joining me on my Solidarity Pilgrimage with Sabeel.
This is not an ordinary Pilgrimage, although we will see some of the "holy sites" in the region. I think of it more as a "people's pilgrimage". We will be putting the principles of Palestinian Liberation Theology into practice by visiting, accompanying and listening deeply to Palestinian communities who are suffering from the escalating violence and injustice.
In frequent issues of this blog, I will try to bring those voices and stories to you--along with my own!
What to pack?
Well. for this journey, I think I need to pack some special things, like, open-mindedness, curiosity, compassion, passion for justice, good team spirit, dependence on God's guidance, and as much cultural, political and religious humility as I can find.
I am hoping that my suitcase can expand and that I can expand in these and other things I am packing in the next 3 weeks. I definitely value prayers and support from those reading this and others I may never know as we all pray for dignity for all human beings and a pathway to increase what the seeds of justice yield---peace.
Readers: This Solidarity Pilgrimage is a demanding one. Now we are a group of 49 from Canada, Britain, USA and we eat, travel, live, debrief together from 7am until 10 pm in common spaces. I do not have time or energy to keep you up to date on all of what we encounter WHEN we experience them and so some blogs will not be in chronological order---except for this blog.
Trip to Gaza
Today, November 18 was another emotional day. We traveled from Jerusalem firstt to an israeli town to meet with Israeli Rabbis for Human Rights who lived in towns near the border that had suffered attack on Oct 7, 2023. More on this later.
Next we went by bus as close to Gaza as we could. This place was a small memorial to Israelis who lost their lives and/or were taken as hostages. School groups from Tel Aviv arrived while we were there and a group of Israeli youth soon arrived. Our Sabeel group of 49 gathered for a vigil of singing and prayer which I found inspiring. Then we had indidual time for prayer. After we had our Vigil for Peace, we spent time individually in prayer. This was a time of silence among us. It felt outragous and obscene to be peering at an ongoing mass killing and starvation of Palestinians while we stood watching.
Usually a Memorial is a place to honor the deceased and that was what this site was created to do for Israelis, like the 2 high school girls who had just arrived--one of Ethiopian descent. They were on a field trip from Tel Aviv 2 hours away. But for those of us on the Sabeel Pilgrimage, this experience was surreal, not yet normalized like it has become in the United States where live-streaming of mass killing and destruction is often just "the news" of the week.
Far off in the distance, we could see puffs of smoke where death and destruction was in process at the hands of Israelis with 70 per cent of the weapons and training financed by U.S dollars and backed by policies blocking ceasefire attempts. How does anyone have words to speak at this moment? Tears, silence, rage, moral disgust, deep deep sorrow--for the situation, myself, my country, Palestinians, and Israelis. It was a surreal moment because we were witnessing from afar a "living cemetery". These are words used by Palestinians detained in military prisons to describe their experience. But they fit here too. What we were witnessing is not hidden behind prison walls but is live-streamed in independent press and in the USA in small bits on mainstream t.v. So easy to turn viewers in to "observers" just as we were.
Being an observer was what made the greatest dissonance for me--a moral dissonance that I could be watching this level of injustice and suffering, knowing that in the present and future it was going on without cease and I stood "observing", "watching" as if I was not part of it, when the policies and capital that propelled this suffering I am de facto a part of financially, politically, and morally. The only comfort was my agency, my faith, my moral conscience that drives me to join others and find my part in stopping the mass killing, the injustice, the suffering, the daily indignity that later, I would see many examples of in the West Bank. All I had at this moment was my trust that the Holy Spirit who had compelled me to join this Pilgrimage would show me and people of faith who have conscience, the way towards living out my baptismal vows of: loving my brother and sister in every part of the world, working for justice and peace among all people, and respecting the dignity of every human being. These are tall orders locally and globally, but especially when I find myself observing a genocide of bombs, starvation, and destruction of housing and infrastructure that is human-created, funded, and sustained.