Palestine & Homelessness: Why We Are Quiet
Zionism was the religion of my upbringing. To be sure, my parents seldom espoused any Zionist talking points at the dinner table, but we all revered our church’s founding pastor, whose entire orientation to the Christian mission centered on Israel. It was commonplace at our evangelical/charismatic/nondenominational congregation to sing songs in Hebrew and pay homage to Jewish rituals. Along with the proscription of abortion, the sacredness of the modern Israeli state was where we welcomed politics into our house of worship and ignored any entertainment of church-state separation. Indeed, two of our pastors would come to be cherished advisors of George W. Bush and, by extension, US militarism in the Middle East.
A couple of years into my interrogation of those tenets, I posted something mildly critical of Netanyahu on Facebook (thank god I’ve deleted that account since). Family members and close friends attacked. To critique Israel was to question god’s plan for humanity. An uncle came the closest to defending me by saying “the Israeli state is not the same thing as God’s Israel, but there is a lot of overlap.” This imitation of solidarity for Israel, in retrospect, feels especially sinister because we Christians still believed Jews would vanish into hell once Jerusalem had welcomed the second arrival of Christ. The cruelest weaponization of solidarity.
My first mentor in undergrad was a Palestinian scholar, the chair of the Political Science department, where I worked ten hours per week, and the director of the international studies concentration that was mine. As such, I took every course he taught, and regardless of the subject matter (I remember one class was supposed to be about public opinion polling), we focused on Palestine. I came to learn that no articulation of international law and human rights could overlook the colonization of Palestine. No study of peace and reconciliation could ignore Israeli settlements. No study of religions could leave Christian Zionism’s influence on US policy unexamined. Palestine touches everything because our own liberation cannot exist alongside their suffering. More than any individual outside my family, Dr. M changed my life. And since October 7, 2023, I have thought about him every day.
As it was characterized on a podcast I listened to recently, when you grasp at the roots of injustice, you don’t find very many roots at all. You find white supremacy. You find colonization and imperialism. You find racialized capitalism. Surely even deeper roots exist, and I often lose myself in pondering the evolutionary origins of human domination and exploitation, but the sentiment remains: the US struggle for liberation of the oppressed shares the same lineage as the resistance to apartheid in Palestine. Even the specific movement to which I belong, the work of ending homelessness in the United States, belongs with the Palestinian struggle.
In the US, homelessness proliferates due to an economic system that hoards wealth for the overwhelmingly white ruling class and relies on the exploitation of poor and working-class people, which is upheld by a racial caste system. These economics emerged from the colonial project, including the kidnapping of African people as laborers and the theft of Indigenous land, smoothed over by a narrative of innocent pilgrims fleeing religious persecution in search of sanctuary. The ethos of colonialism endures on display in the housing market, which only ever prioritizes white security by commodifying housing as a pathway to wealth accumulation, rather than a human need. Nuanced differences pervade, of course, but the similarities to the settler colonial project of Israel outnumber them. Stolen Indigenous land, an ethnic caste system, militaristic expansion, housing settlements, and more. An end to homelessness in the United States necessitates collective liberation from oppressive forces, and we will not be free until Palestine is free.
Indeed, the confluence of our movements came in sharp relief in the Supreme Court this year. In Grants Pass v. Johnson, the case that codified the criminalization of homelessness, Justice Gorsuch noted that “Under the city’s laws, it makes no difference whether the charged defendant is homeless, a backpacker on vacation passing through town, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building” (emphasis added). As Tracy Rosenthal reminded us, “unhoused people and protesters, the court suggested, are similarly outsiders in the eyes of the law. The criminalization of one supports and justifies that of the other.”
I do not write this article to trace the overlap between the progressive movement for housing justice in the United States and the global solidarity movement for Palestinian liberation. Rather, I spew mournful reflections on why those of us who do perceive these connections feel so disinclined to point them out. Writing on the evening of October 7, my inbox has witnessed just one newsletter commemorating the anniversary of the Hamas attacks and the subsequent genocide from a housing organization (shout out to Right to the City), which echoes through a year of silence from the homelessness sector.
We fear reprisal. Foundations have cut funding to nonprofits that spoke out against the genocide, including philanthropists who otherwise fund admirable housing-justice work. I myself started an email this morning whose purpose was to remind members of an upcoming meeting, but I could not in good conscience overlook today’s date. I drafted a sentiment that recognized the year of genocide and how our collective work for housing justice is intertwined with Palestinians’ fight for survival. I offered words of compassion for everyone else who is mourning. But then I retreated, postponing the email until the anniversary had passed. Even though my job would remain secure all the same, which signals my privilege, I cowered. Support for whatever Israel does is bipartisan, and I feared backlash from those in my own camp. I feared accusations of antisemitism. Surely those with less power in their workplaces and/or whose organizations skew more conservative are even less likely to express their solidarity with Palestine publicly.
The risk of mission creep also keeps us quiet. When we are already losing the domestic narrative that housing should not be predicated on sobriety or anything else, it seems outside our scope and distracting to add warfare abroad to our messaging. With this notion comes whataboutism: if we name Palestine, what about Sudan, Haiti, the Congo? Where does it stop? Where indeed. This notwithstanding the legitimate suspicion that any public statement seems superficial unto itself.
But the sturdiest barrier to voicing our solidarity with Palestinians, I surmise, is that to do so is to criticize the Biden-Harris administration that bankrolls and arms the ongoing genocide and daily expansion of war. More specifically, it is to admonish the heir apparent, who seems our last hope against a second Trump presidency. Because my brain cannot truly process the trauma of 42,000 murdered Palestinians (which most agree is an undercount anyway), the despair of this “lesser-evilism” weighs on me just as much. Our two-party corporate-run political system has produced two candidates who would both expand US involvement in the genocidal project of Israel.
I do not argue their policies are equally dangerous, and I have heretofore heeded the counsel of my “block and build” comrades who caution against anything that would threaten Harris’ election for fear of Project 2025. I feel compassion for my colleagues in swing states who will hold their noses to vote for a prosecutor with blood on her hands to stave off facism and, of course, to facilitate our first legitimate chance of a woman in the White House. That I get to vote for Jill Stein or Clauda de la Cruz without consequence, because Trump owns Tennessee either way, is a privilege I don’t take for granted. Damn this system that only offers us violence.
When I describe myself as a pacifist, I’m saying something similar to when I call myself an abolitionist. Yes, I really do mean all warfare and militarism is wrong just as I really would dismantle police departments. And here I hold in my heart my Jewish and Christian friends who insist we mourned too little for the 1,140 Israelis killed by Hamas’ attacks one year ago. I’m thinking of my dear friend whose necklace suspended a Star of David when I dined at her home this summer, a small gesture of disagreement with her anti-Zionist company whom she loves all the same. My capacity for solidarity is wide.
But just as an abolitionist politic asks us to examine the conditions that lead to behaviors our society attempts (but fails) to ameliorate through incarceration and policing, as a pacifist, I take a broader view of violence than just bombs and guns. Settler colonialism is violence. Land theft is violence. Apartheid is violence. Displacement is violence. Claiming religious authority to assert domination of Indigenous people is violence. As I write, I just returned from a protest in Nashville at which I only muttered one of the chants: “Resistance is justified when a people is occupied.” Sure, but I’m less interested in justifying violent resistance to violence than uprooting the violent conditions and dismantling the oppressive systems that render it possible.
I have not yet read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest, which purports to weave together the oppression of Palestinians to Jim Crow in the States, but his summation in interviews sits with me now: “Either apartheid is right or it’s wrong. It’s really really simple.” He does not mean that the historical backdrop to Israeli occupation is straightforward. I mean, I just read a whole book on Palestine and truly ingested maybe 10% of it. But on moral terms, as Coates asserts, the picture is clearer. We are living in a time of genocide. We are living in a time of genocide.
Free Palestine.
