The Catastrophe
D.L interviews Kelley Nikondeha, author of First Advent in Palestine about Christian zionism, and how Palestinians view the year 1948. Kelley is the author of The First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexities of Hope. You can follow her on Instagram here.
Here is a great 4-page sheet outlining what happened in 1948. While John Wayne encouraged Bodie Theone to call it “The Jewish Alamo” Palestinians had another word for that year-- , or “the catastrophe.”
The key has become a symbol of Palestians forced from their homes in 1948 who continue to hope to go home and yet have no rights or protections under which they can do so.
Here are interviews with four Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank.
A Keffiyeh is a Palestinian scarf that is full of cultural significance.
Here is both the video and the transcript of Isaac Munther’s sermon “Christ in the rubble”
For further reading D.L. recommends Palestine Speaks and Kelley’s book The First Advent in Palestine (make sure you read all her footnotes!)
Kelley recommends The Lemon Tree and This is Not a Border. She also recommends following and watching content from PAL fest, the Palestinian Art and literature festival. For Christians, she recommends reading Naim Ateek’s book Justice and Only Justice, and Faith in the Face of Empire by Mitri Raheb.
Sliman Mansour created the image Kelley used for the cover art for her book. You can follow him on Instagram, where he updates almost daily on the situation.
You can Join our patreon comamunity to support this podcast and gain access to two extra episodes each month, our facebook community, as well as the backlog of patreon-only episodes covering evangelical media, spiritual abuse, and more.
You can follow The Bad Place Podcast on Twitter and Instagram. You can follow Krispin on Instagram here and Danielle on Instagram here.
TRANSCRIPT
D.L.: Okay, I say this almost every interview, but today I mean it like times a thousand. I'm so excited for today because I get to talk to one of my best friends in the whole world, who is Kelly Nikindeha, an author, an activist, a theologian, and a really, really good friend to me for many, many years. So Kelly, welcome to the Prophetic Imagination Station
Kelley: Thank you.
D.L.: We're here to talk about some bizarre things, aren't we?
Kelley: Yes, as always. I think that's part of what brings you and I together all of these many years is that we are willing to talk about intense things.
D.L.: Yes, we like to talk about intense things. We talk on Voxer almost every day and you are an awesome conversation partner to have. And I thought, okay, I want more people to learn from you! So why don't you just take a moment to explain to listeners a little bit about who you are and your most recent book?
Kelley: Sure. This shouldn't be such a difficult question, but I feel like we're always reconsidering who are we and how do we show up in the world, right? I live between Arizona and Burundi (Burundi is located in East Africa). So I kind of live between two different continents and that's a function of my family -- my husband and my children are all born and raised in Burundi.
And that has really allowed me to kind of break out of some of the American exceptionalism and American ways of thinking that I grew up with and took for granted. I am a liberation theologian, definitely a feminist.
I see myself as kind of an independent scholar. So I do this work that is shaped by Scripture, because I grew up in the Christian tradition, but I'm not doing it for the sake of the church so much as for the sake of a more humane society, a better society that works for all of us. So to whatever degree there is wisdom there, I want to share it. I'm a community development practitioner, so my husband and I do work in Burundi to make lives better for the people there.
I'm kind of the, you know, the theologian, the book smarts person, and he's the practitioner, the street smarts guy. But together we take seriously the work of making society work better for people.
D.L.: And then tell us a little bit about your book that came out a little over a year ago that is very, I don't know, what's a good way of saying it? It's very relevant beyond just the advent season,
Kelley: it's sadly relevant, right? So I wrote a book called the First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Eesistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope. And the initial idea was to write a book about Advent, which is the four weeks that lead up to the celebration of the birth of Jesus in the Christian tradition--especially in high church settings like Catholics and Episcopalism.
But I've always loved Advent. And when I decided that I wanted to maybe write something in that direction. Well, you know, advent takes place in Palestine in ancient 1st century Palestine. And so this book became an opportunity to not just write about these Advent stories that we get from Luke and Matthew, two very different stories, by the way, but it became an opportunity to also talk about Palestine in the first century and make connections to that very place and these people today. And I was very intentional about doing that because in my upbringing, Palestinians were invisible.
I wanted to make sure that for anybody who picked up this book to better understand the story of Jesus's arrival into this world, they would recognize that he arrived into a world populated by Palestinians and that they would have eyes to see something that, you know, maybe sooner than what I saw in my own story.
So the book talks about the land, the people, the places, and the politics, both then and now. And I think that sadly it's, it's a very prescient conversation.
D.L.: Yes, you are someone who has traveled to Palestine, you've made friendships with many people in Palestine, you love the food, you love the culture, and in your book, even from the cover artwork to the people you write about it centers on Palestinians. And I think like you said that those communities have been really erased, especially in the white evangelical and more Pentecostal movements and so I just thought it was such an important book when it came out and it's, it's become even more important.
I think we'll talk a little bit more later on in this conversation about sort of the present day realities, especially for people who still call themselves Christian and if they want to make connections to living Palestinians today. So all that to say, you have immersed yourself in many elements of Palestinian culture, and you're deeply connected to the scriptures, as you said, and you still continue to be so connected to those. So I was like, I don't know how I can ask you to engage with these Christian Zionist romance books, but I'm going to, even though it's got to be so painful for you!
I want to ask you, I mean, I already know the answer to this, but did you grow up reading Christian romance books? Did you read the Zionist Chronicle books by Brock and Bodhi Theone? Let's start there.
Kelley: I was not a Christian romance reader, but I remember seeing the Zion Chronicles on my mom's bookshelf, like right next to her Jerusalem Bible and you know, her Thesaurus and all the things she used when she read and studied the Bible. And there were a handful of the books this series. So I was familiar with them, but I was never interested in them in part because I wasn't interested in the Holy land growing up.
So even though I came up in evangelicalism, where they talked a lot about the Holy land and going to visit the Holy land and walking where Jesus walked, but somehow that was never interesting to me then. And so books, romance or otherwise that were set in that milieu were not of interest to me.
D.L.: I'm curious. So you grew up with Christian parents, and it's just interesting if we want to zoom out on that little picture you painted, right, of your mother who had a Jerusalem Bible and a thesaurus and studied the Bible and was into the Holy Land and read these Christian historical romance novels, like, that was a pretty common thing, right? Evangelical women who got into studying the Holy Land?
Now, from your perspective, what was that all about? What was that movement, which was sort of centered, I believe, in the 80s and 90s and maybe some of the 70s, too. But what was going on there? If you feel you have any insight.
Kelley: Well, I mean, I should say that part of what was on that bookshelf was also how Lindsay's Late Great Planet Earth and, you know, books that talked about end times and that was also part of what was on that shelf. And I think that is what is still at least theologically a part of the extended conversation about what we would call Christian Zionism. I don't fully know what was happening back then. I just think that there was this movement just to support Israel that was just kind of woven into the fabric of my evangelical upbringing.
My parents went to a Christian, what, how would they describe it? A non denominational spirit filled church. And part of that was we would have a Messianic Jew come every year to share and they would sell prayer shawls and would blow the shofur and all of these symbols of Jewish practice having Seder meals—it would all kind of be woven into our being close to Jesus and Jesus's world the whole Holy Land And yet it was always as if Jewish people were the only people that populated that land or that story.
D.L.: Mmm Hmm
Kelley: Right? So I grew up into that space where there were Jewish people. Then there were the Jewish people who came to accept Jesus, right? The Messianic Jews, they were our favorite. And then there was us, but we were all together. And you would never think that there was another people group involved in that story or with any connection to that land, but that doesn't necessarily answer your question, I guess.
D.L.: No, I think it does, because even like the phrase, the Holy Land, right, I think about that phrase being uttered over and over and over and over again, and just sort of the way language works and how it sort of desensitizes us to it, right? So. American Christians in particular have these narratives about the chosen people, right?
And of course, evangelicals believe they are the new chosen people, but they also think God, right, has this relationship with Jewish people where they're still the chosen in some ways. And then also they would need to become messianic Jews if they actually want to escape eternal conscious torment and possibly even the big apocalypse battle at the end.
So, who is left out of the chosen people narrative? It's the people that don't belong in the Holy Land, according to Christians, which would be basically all Arab people who aren't Jews or Christians. And I would even say Palestinian Christians are totally left out of this conversation in general,
Kelley: Right? So, if you are a Christian, in theory, you have kin who are Palestinian and they are actually the ones who have been safeguarding your holy sites. All these generations, and yet you act like they don't exist.
D.L.: Oh, we'll kind of untangle that in a little bit. Do you remember when you first realized the historic presence of Palestinian Christians in Palestine?
Kelley: when I was in college we had the first Intifada, which was mostly non-violent uprising of Palestinians in the West Bank. It hit the news and what I remember as a college student was seeing on the news every night that there was this roiling uprising of some sort in the Middle East in the Holy Land.
And I guess I was just curious, because I really thought only Jewish people lived there. And they of course Arabs around them, but I had no sense of it. So at one point I picked up the book that was the bestseller at the time, which was from Beirut to Jerusalem written by Thomas Friedman. It's a huge book and I thought, I'm going to read this and I'm going to understand what is happening in the Middle East and what all of this chaos that I see on the news and the terrorists and all the Jewish people, what that is all is about. And I read this book. I mean, it's a secular book. It's not written by or for a Christian audience. But it was the first time I had heard anybody talk about other people in this land.
D.L.: hmm. Mm
Kelley: It was the first time I heard that there were Palestinian people, it was the first of all of it. Palestine, Palestinians, some of them are Christian, many of them are Muslim, but they all share historic ties to the same land. I had no idea and it felt like my Damascus moment, right? Where those scales fall from your eyes.
And I thought all the time that my church had hosted Messianic Jews and talked about Jewish people and talked about this land, they never once mentioned these people. I remember feeling so lied to by my own community. And there was something that hit particularly hard when I realized, right, the Christian Palestinians-- these are even people that share my faith tradition. And I never knew about them! I just felt that was so deeply wrong.
I remember thinking, I will never forget that they live there. I will not perpetuate that invisibility and that erasure and so that was so prominant back in the late 80s, early 90s. And so then I just read books out of the region, and it was all different, whether it was history or theology or politics by Muslims, Jewish people or Arabs. I just read voraciously over the next 30 some years, to school myself in understanding that world in all its complexities and all the various peoples who have history there. And of course, I ended up making friends andtraveling there.
And so that of course deepened my connection to this place, but it started with reading a book off the best time seller list to see what my own church community never taught me.
D.L.: Yeah, and I think one thing that's interesting is people who listen to this podcast, right, if they come from American Christianity or evangelicalism, they oftentimes will message me and be like, I was not raised with Zionism. I didn't get any of this stuff. And I just want to say like, You probably did. This erasure of Palestinians is baked into not just American Christianity, but into American foreign policy and politics,
Kelley: It's the water we swam in.
D.L.: yeah,
Kelley: You never heard the word Christian Zionism, but we swam in it.
D.L.: We didn't say dispensationalism. What we said was, The Holy Land, you know, God's chosen people, we need to support Israel. I guess one of the most famous phrases, and again, you maybe didn't hear this phrase, but this might be true. It kind of describes how I viewed Palestine, and it sounds like you too, but the saying is “a land without a people for a people without a land, right?”
A land without a people. That's what Palestine has been made into in this mythology, right?
Kelley: Like it just sat empty after the Jews had migrated all those years and it was just waiting for them to come home. I mean, that was one of the fundamental myths, right of Zionism. But we know we grew up in it. If you grew up in one of those churches, that was the world you swam in. You don't, you didn't have the language for it. I mean, I used to always just call it the Holy land. I think once I started reading more deeply now, more often, like in this conversation, I use that language because it's part of understanding the world we grew up in but now I just say Israel/Palestine. It's just my little way of even in my language making sure it's Israel/Palestine We have to name it so that people hear it
D.L.: Yeah. I kind of want to get into a little bit of that history, I want to sort of talk about this book, but not really talk about this book. I sent you a few passages of the first in the series of the Zion Chronicles. So the Gates of Zion is the first one.
I sent you a little bit of how it was sort of setting up the creation of the state of Israel. And it's confusing, it's not terribly well written, but I thought maybe I'll just read you some Goodreads reviews of people who love this book and have loved it for years, and their sort of synopsis of the history of it, and you and I can kind of chat through that.
Does that sound okay?
Kelley: Yeah better than rereading it because that was some pretty subpar writing.
D.L.: Exactly! So there's a person named Bobbi with an I at the end who talks about this book and says, this book is about Israel’s statehood in 1948. And how on November 29th, 1947, the UN General Assembly in its 120 eighth plenary session by a two thirds vote, 33 to 13 (with Britain and nine others abstaining) passed resolution 181 partitioning Palestine into two states: one Jewish and one Arab. All the Arab countries angrily rejected partition almost immediately. There was Arab violence against the Jews in Palestine. So that's how Bobbie sums up what happened based off of her reading this novel.
So I'm just curious, as someone who's studied the history of this, how does that strike you?
Kelley: Well, I mean she got the year, right? Yay Bobbi, no, I mean I think when you had me read those pages it seemed like really Palestinians were missing, right? There was just an odd mention of some Arabs and of course, the connotations in every sentence where they were mentioned was really negative or ominous. Of course, at least in the part I read, there was no character. There was nobody, right. There was nobody representing that part of the story. It was just these beleaguered Jewish people who were just longing for a home.
D.L.: Uh huh.
Kelley: And they were going to get a lot of pushback because even in the story, they did say, we know that if they grant us this partition, if the UN makes this move, we're going to have pushback from those people. So I mean, they did at least let you know that they knew something ominous was going to happen. They just never let you know, well, there's this whole other people group who have never left this land, who have been harvesting all of trees and, you know, living their lives here and have developed homes here. And, oh, by the way, Jewish families started moving in, in the late eighteen hundreds and lived side by side with these people.
You were allowed to move into this land and they initially lived side by side in communities, Jewish and Arab communities. And then these people were given the notice that they were going to lose more than 50 percent of their land and, had no voice, no agency. What about that whole part of the story? Like, yeah, you make it sound like “how dare these Arabs on the eve of this partition, you know, be roiled and ready to fight us?”
Well. You were taking over half of their land. That would make a lot of people really angry. I mean, if Mexico said that they were going to partition California, I think Californians would be, would be upset.
D.L.: hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Kelley: You know I just think by not naming the full context, you make it seem like how terrible those Arabs were when the Jewish people just wanted a place to live (and this land was, you know, pretty vacant anyways). The Arabs seem like villains from the beginning. Rather than people with a shared story and something more complicated.
D.L.: Yeah, I mean everything you said is so correct, and just even having that sort of thought exercise of like, what if Mexico tried to partition California, right? If we add on this thing that makes Zionism so insidious, right, is like, this is not just us wanting land. This is God's plan for the land.
This is God's plan to use God's chosen people. And American foreign policy was like, yeah, we can use this. You know, we can both view ourselves as the chosen ones and the ones deserving of this land and to You know, control these resources, control this area. And so I think that is just the added element where if you add enough of that God language, which American Christians have been doing for many, many years now, it muddies the waters even further so people aren't able to sort of read it critically.
And I think that's exactly what Bodhi and Brock Theone were trying to do with these books, I mean they always tout themselves as extremely accurate historical writers, and I mean, Brock has a master's in history, you know, and they use that as a cover for obviously having extremely biased and slanted books. So a lot of readers are like, yeah, it's a very Christian book and almost all the Jewish people end up being Christians, too, and the history is so accurate or whatever.
But I'm going to read you another thing. This is just so like evangelical women, right? This person says. I own all of these books, although I've only read three. I learned a lot about post World War II situation in the Middle East while being so enraptured by the story that I probably neglected my kids for a few days.
The characters lives have almost soap opera levels of drama, and even though the characters are kind of one dimensional The stories are fun and factually educational.
And so I think that's what kind of scares me. It's like, this person is like this is how I learned about post World War II history in the Middle East, just through these books.
And I do not think that is the only person who this happened to. Now, these books sold over 10 million copies. And both you and I know that books like this were passed down in church libraries, from mothers to daughters. They were taught in a lot of like middle school, and high school in Christian schools and homeschooling as history textbooks. And so these books really have a wider reach..
So here's how another person named Lisa summarizes these books. And she read this in 2016. So pretty recent. She says: this is an amazing series about the creation of the state of Israel.I was truly blown away by the way the Jews who had essentially been left by the British to be massacred by the Arab countries surrounding them were able to pull together and win the day. And she said, I read this for the first time when I was living in Jerusalem, which made it even more amazing.
So tell me your thoughts on that.
Kelley: well, I mean, it's always hard to know how to respond, like in terms of the history because how far back do you go? But I think one of the things that people don't often realize is that the British had kind of entered into a partnership with. Jewish Zionists before 48 and, you know, the Christian movement in Britain partnered with Jewish Zionists and said, yeah, we will support you in having this Jewish state. Cause you know, Britain was in charge of Palestine at the time during the world wars. And we had the British mandate. So they said, Hey, when all of this is done, we see that this land should be yours. And we're, we're going to support you now. They also said the same thing to the Arab people. If you support us in the war and help us with some of these battles in North Africa, we will ensure that you get this land. So Britain was talking out of both side of their mouth.
D.L.: Mm hmm.
Kelley: But there was a promise made called the Balfour Declaration, and they put it in writing: we are going to support a Jewish state.
D.L.: Mm.
Kelley: And from that point on Britain actually started supporting in other ways, like arming the [Jewish] people that moved there and allowing them to be trained because everybody knew that if 48 went there--if this partition happened in the UN, everybody knew that it was going to result in an armed fight. Even the Zionists way back, you know, said the only way we will be able to have a Jewish state there is if we are armed. Because they knew the numbers, there were more, Palestinians living there than there would be Jewish people immigrating. They knew the numbers. They knew the demographics. And even in the earliest days, they knew one of the earliest Zionists, I think his name was Jabotinsky said, we will only be able to have a sustained Jewish state there if we also have military dominance. They knew from the inception the necessity of having military dominance. So they were trained. They were ready in a sense. They already had militias that were armed and trained and ready for that day in 1948.
You know, you don't hear a lot about that, but they knew they were taking away land from this other people group. Of course, they were going to be upset.
D.L.: Yeah. And I think this is all probably news to some people listening to this. Now, the interesting thing about Brock and Bodhi Taney is that these books are actually very anti British and very pro American, right? So Americans were the ones who ended up supporting the Jewish people and supporting the Jewish state.
And the British was like, in these books, basically everybody hates the British.
D.L.: So that's fascinating.
Kelley: Well, and this stuff is complex because while the Brits certainly helped set up and the policy structures that would allow 1948 and the state of Israel to be created. On the ground, you know, the Brits and the Sephardic Jews and the Ashkenazi Jews and the Palestinian people and the Bedouin people---like, there was a lot going on on the ground where nobody liked the British. Nobody likes the overlords. Right? But structurally the Brits in the United Kingdom knew that this was going to serve some long-term interests and Americans quickly figured out the same and really Israel became a pond.
The [Zionist] theology made it easy to sell it to the masses of British and American people, but really, they wanted to have a foothold in the region and they didn't have good relationships with Britain and America didn't have great relationships with those Arab countries.
So this was like a toehold into that world that will support this, what we would call a Western state, will support Israel. And in a sense, they can kind of do our dirty work. They’re really our foothold in this geopolitical game. And there's all this great theology to kind of get all the Christians to support it.
Kelley: This is the most crass understanding, but it, that doesn't mean that it's not worth us investigating and applying a little critical thought to it.
D.L.: Exactly. I mean, I think it's clear based off of how Biden is treating this, current situation. It's like, we're not going to do anything to mess up basically having our military, you know, in the Middle East, and I'm just seeing that there is a lot of overlap between the Israeli military and the U. S.military and the mutual support there, and so that seems like to be a very accurate way to describe it to me. Now, you know, John Wayne told Bodie Theone to write books that basically centered around 1948 and to describe it as “the Jewish Alamo”. And so that's sort of like what she felt was God's divine blessing on her to write and focus her work on talking about the Jewish Alamo, which is 1948.
Now as somebody who is in relationship with Palestinians from a wide variety of backgrounds, how do Palestinians view 1948? How would they categorize that year?
Kelley: Well, 1948 is what they would call the Nakba. And in Arabic, Nakba means the catastrophe.
D.L.: Mm
Kelley: It was. When they were violently pushed out of their homes, out of their villages, out of their land, and made to be refugees, made to be oppressed peoples in their own territories. I'm not really a good numbers person, but I think over 750, 000 people were displaced. And thousand were killed. I have a girlfriend who's a Palestinian and I remember spending time with her and her husband. Initially, we all met here in Arizona and he told me how his grandfather lived in one of the villages that was where they were pushed out.
And he said, my grandfather was told it's going to get really rocky. You know, you're going to to need to move out, but only temporarily. So because he had purchased a piece of land that was going to be the family homestead. So the grandfather at this time, a young man, you know, is being told you just need to move out for a little while. There's going to be some fighting over the land, but then you're going to get to come back home. So he goes not too far and lives in, you know, like a little tent community that other Palestinian men, had set up because they thought they were going to get to go back.
When you see people with these skeleton keys they're symbols. Because they left with their keys believing we're only going to be gone for a short time. And then we're going to get to come back to our home. Of course, that never happened. You know, they eventually got marched out by what would then be Israeli soldiers eventually into that tent community they had, and they got pushed out, but there's so many variations of this story.
And some are much more violent where people were pushed out of their homes and Jewish families got to move into these furnished homes. And what a lot of them were told, especially those that were coming in boats from Europe by this point, right? In the aftermath of the Holocaust, a lot of them who were not there in the days of the British mandate, but who came after World War II, they were told, yeah, these people just left their homes.
You can just go in and take any home you want. Now, I mean, a thinking person would say this doesn't make sense, but they had been traumatized by what they had suffered in Europe. And they're just like, great, a home, a safe place. But that was the nakba, that was Palestinian people being pushed out and they've been pushed out ever since.
And so you might hear some people now talking about what's happening in Gaza as a second nakba or a continuation of the nakba meaning the ethnic cleansing that they experienced in 48. So that would be how the Palestinians view that day.
D.L.: I think it's so helpful for you to point this out, even, you know, you're wearing this necklace with a skeleton key on it that you got in Palestine, and that is a symbol of, we had homes, we had lives.
Kelley: And we have hope of returning. I mean, it's not only a sign of what we lost and a sign of our ongoing resistance, but for them, it's a sign of hope that one day that they know they're not really going to get to put the key into those doors. But it is also this hope that someday, because there are UN resolutions that have come later that have said they have the right to return.
Of course, Israel ignores those the West ignores those, but there is this deep hope that someday we'll get to return. Right?
D.L.: So all of this happened in 1948 and obviously we're seeing the exact same tactics, except more extreme happening right now in 2023 and 2024 and the same tactics, right, are being used, except much more violent and concentrated, Unfortunately, right, the technology to kill, to starve, to all that is, is more pronounced.
So there's so many people in Gaza in particular, right, who have been killed, who have been hurt, and who have been displaced. Do you think they will get to come back to their homes? I do not think so. I mean, it sounds like in this Nakba in particular, right? It's targeting the mosques, the churches, the universities, the schools, and every single hospital in Gaza.
Kelley: And the archives. I mean, this is the thing that I think people don't realize but in the early days they bombed the site that housed all of their archives, the registry of families, the history, like you want to erase a people. They're going for their cultural sites, their historical records and the infrastructure.
I mean, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's a duck. They are using what happened on 10/7, as a bit of cover to do what they've been wanting to do for a long time, which is to now, right? Extend that ethnic cleansing and that campaign in Gaza. I don't see a way where those people ever get to return.
And really, neither do they and that's part of the deep grief that you see when you hear or when you see these videos is they know. We may never get to go home because so many, like my friend Tahani, they never got to go home. Right? So there's this, we know the story. We're not going to get to go home.
D.L.: We know the story because this has literally happened to us, to our grandparents. Now it's happening again. And I think, you know, people like myself, other Americans were like, Oh, it's just, it's really complicated. And we have a really hard time understanding like, well, what is Palestine? Where is it?
I guess the, the broad understanding, right. Would be that Gaza and the West Bank are sort of the two portions, right.
Kelley: And East Jerusalem, if you're going to, you would say East Jerusalem, right?
D.L.: Okay. And, you know, where Palestinians live and they have so few rights as compared to. Israelis, right? It's, it's, you know, even President Jimmy Carter called it an apartheid state. And it's been an apartheid state for a very, very, very long time. Now, Gaza is in the news. Young people, and the vast majority of countries, are recognizing this is an apartheid state. It's not actually keeping anyone safe. And it's not keeping Jewish people safe. This campaign for this second Nakba, right, is really sort of forcing the issue now.
I think people are hearing about Gaza in the news, but you have connections to the West Bank, which is not really being reported on as much, although it still is also an apartheid state.
And with everything going on in Gaza, it seems that people, both the Israeli army, plus, you know, Israeli settlers are sort of capitalizing on this moment. And they're also doing some of these age-old tactics of trying to intimidate and displace people in the West Bank. Do you, do you feel comfortable talking a little bit about that?
And your friend who's living there right now.
Kelley: Sure. So I met this friend when we were both here in Arizona. Our kids went to the same school. And so we survived several years together, mothering our children together. And then she decided to go, her and her family decided to go back to their traditional home, because they wanted their children to be formed in their homeland. And to know the greater part of their family and the rhythm of life and be able to go to the mosque with their uncles and cousins and have that part of their identity shaped back home.
D.L.: Now, were they able to do that because she was an American citizen at this point?
Kelley: So she, yes, so she's a dual citizen because her family immigrated here when she was a teenager,
D.L.: because if someone doesn't have dual citizenship, right, they're not allowed to return to Palestine. Is that right? You become a refugee. So that's the other thing that Palestinians are facing right now. If they get displaced from Gaza, if they get displaced from the West Bank, they have no hope of being allowed back in, of coming back.
They have no rights. They have no rights of return, even though you know, if you're of Jewish ancestry or descent and never lived in that region, you have a right of return. Right? And so that's just another one of the disparities.
Kelley: Well there are Palestinians who can go in and out, not through Tel Aviv, not through the Tel Aviv border They have to use the Jordan border. So if you do have your papers in Palestine, I mean, it's complicated. But there are Palestinians who are not dual citizens who can come in and out of Jordan, but even that, like I said, it's complicated, she and her family were able to return. And they live in a village about an hour plus outside of Ramallah. I mean, to me, it seemed like it was off the grid because it's dirt roads, no street signs. So I was kind of hoping, oh, they're far enough off the grid, maybe they'll be spared some of the things happening in the West Bank right now.
But, I talk to my friend almost daily and initially she had told me after 10/7, that if they were to drive on the roads, they were getting shot at by the Israeli soldiers. Who monitor those roads, if they walked on the footpaths, let's say, to go to the little market or whatever, right? If they were to walk, they could get shot at by settlers because part of what happened right after 107 is that Israel, the soldiers allowed a lot more armaments and weapons to go into the settlements where Jewish families are living in like these gated subdivisions.
So the soldiers were allowing the settlers to get more access to arms. And also had changed some local provisions so that they had more leeway about how they could those arms and then they put all their energy towards Gaza, pretty much allowing the settlers. I mean, you want to say it is kind of like what we would say is the Wild West. To kind of run amok and do what they wanted in the West Bank with that tacit approval of the of the Israeli soldiers. So, there was all this increased harassment of Palestinians by Israeli settlers happening in the West bank as everything was happening in Gaza.
And so, as I said, there was the shooting of of anybody that was out of their house. And I remember she told me a couple of weeks in that she had started baking bread. Now, my good friend does not like to bake bread. This is one thing I know about her, but she started baking bread because she said it was too dangerous to send her husband or sons to the store to get any. And so she was baking bread every day as a safety measure. I mean, think about how we all did sourdough starters during COVID. But it wasn't about safety, was it? She was doing it as a way to keep her family from having to go outside in dangerous terrain.
So about a week after Christmas, she told me that she started noticing settlers from a nearby village settlement would come and surround walk, walk the perimeter of her property and pace in front of her house. So the front of her house, her kitchen has these big windows that look out into the the street and they would pace. And they did this around about 12 homes in their village every morning. And then after about a week, she said they would, they started to circle back in the afternoons. So now they were pacing around her house and others twice a day, right? So it felt intentional. It felt like there was this strategy and every day when I would wait to hear from her, I mean, I was so nervous on her behalf.
Like, what are they planning? And after it was maybe about a week and a half ago she started texting me furiously one, one night because they had actually done a night raid. Where the settlers had come in and attacked a series of homes, ransacked the homes, like, took books off shelves and things, you know, emptied out dressers and broke furniture and picked anything they could, you know, a phone, money, gold, anything they saw that they could pick and steal.
They took some cars. And they took four men, just took them, like, we don't know where they are, took them. So, you know, you get so like, are they going to come back and do that to more homes? My friend's home was spared, but are they going to come back? So now, uh, she said they have set up, the settlers have set up semi permanent checkpoints.
There's two roads that you can go in and out of from her village. They have set up checkpoints that are now manned 24/7. And I asked her, I said, are these guys armed? And she was like, Kelly. Of course, they're armed. They're heavily armed. She was like, of course, you idiot. Yes, they're armed. But, you know, it's like, I'm just doing my due diligence asking the question.
She's like, yes, they're armed. So now, if you want to go in or out of her village. You have to stop as these settlers take a picture of everybody in the car and their I. D. So part of what they're doing is it's intimidation, but it's also data collection because they're now building up a database right? Who's in each house. And particularly men and young men. And she's like, who do we call? What do we do? She goes, Biden's not going to do anything for us. That's the 1st thing she said, Biden's not going to do anything for us. Nobody's coming to help us. And what the settlers have been telling them is when we're done with Gaza, you're next.
So it's not a secret in the West Bank, what they are being told by the settlers themselves, the Jewish people themselves, is that when we are done with Gaza, you're next. And she lives under that terror every day of, you know, if we leave, if I leave my land that this is the inheritance for my kids. I planted those olive trees. This is the home that we're going to give our kids, if we leave, we leave everything. There's no coming back.
D.L.: Yeah, I mean, it's so overwhelming and I think it's really important for people to listen to this just to hear about one person's story on the ground. And, you've been to these places, right? And that's another thing. This is a historic family olive farm, right? They grow olives and they harvest olives and it's been in these families for generations, you know, this year in particular, because of all of this conflict and because of the armed settlers and the danger, they couldn't even harvest the olives like they could normally.
And so the intimidation tactics are so scary and also. They're trying to scare, and intimidate people into leaving, and then the settlers just take over the property. Isn't that correct? And that's what happened in 1948. It's happening now. And that is, and that is how the Israeli state is expanding is through these tactics.
Kelley: And some of, I mean, there's already about a dozen villages in the West Bank that have been emptied
D.L.: yeah,
Kelley: since 10/7, where they have the settlers around that those villages have forced them out. So it's already happened, you know, since 10/7, and it just, it's so interesting. Each settlement kind of has their own way of harassing the The Palestinian villages in their vicinity. Some are more aggressive. Some are taking their time. Some are waiting for, you know, the reinforcements that'll come after they are finished in Gaza. I can't imagine my friend, her living this way.
D.L.: Yeah, and I think what people don't understand is well, why don't people just leave? Now, listening to the history of it, you're like, oh, it makes sense why. A lot of people choose not to leave. People do choose to leave, of course, with all these intimidation and violent tactics and just the massacring going on in Gaza.
But some people choose to stay for extremely valid reasons. And I think even you just mentioning the settler communities that are heavily armed, and how strategic it has been to create these settler communities in Palestine, right? I'm not sure how they recruit people, but I also know that there has been some recruitment for Christian Zionists to go be a part of settler communities.
Kelley: Mike Huckabaa owns a home in one of the settlements,
D.L.: Huckabee?
Kelley: Yes he owns a home in one of the settlements there.
D.L.: Oh, so there's a lot more American Christian connection to these than I realized.
Kelley: Oh, there's a lot more Christian complicity in this. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things that Bibi Netanyahu has done during his long tenure as the leader in Israel is he's changed the reality on the ground in the West Bank. So, right, the West Bank used to be, you know, one large tract of land populated by all these Palestinians, but over across his tenure of decades, he has really empowered the with a lot of support from Christian Zionism has allowed all of these subdivisions--these gated communities or settlements--to arise. I mean, when you are there, if you look out and you see this beautiful gated community, they have pools, they have green lawns, you can see the trees like they're beautiful. And then if you just look a little to the left or a little to the right, you see villages where have big black storage tanks on top for their water, because Israel controls the taps. So you can get water delivered and you don't know if they're going to deliver more water to your community for three days or three weeks. So, you have these big tanks, but you don't know, does this water have to, this is the water for laundry and cooking and showers and irrigating your fields.
You don't know if that water is going to, how long does this water have to last? Meanwhile, your neighbors have pools and lawns, for God's sake. I mean, it is the way that even water has been weaponized. These communities have grown up so that now they say the West Bank, when you look at a map, it looks like a Swiss cheese.
There's all these settlements and the rationale for Bibi and his ilk is that there'll be somany settlements everywhere tha there's no way you're going to be able to make a two state solution. You can't make a state there because there's so many Jewish people that live there now. So he's changed the reality on the ground, making it impossible on purpose for there to be a two state solution. So when Biden and Kamala Harris, just this week, talk about, we want a two state solution, all of Israel, all of Israeli government laugh. Like, that's not our goal. We've worked hard to change the actual ground game, the landscape. So that's not going to be possible.
D.L.: well, also, it doesn't seem like America has done anything to validate a two state solution at all. And we know that Christian Zionists have lobbied extremely hard against a two state solution and that Christian Zionist lobbyist groups are some of the biggestin effect in the United States. So that is just lip service.
The U. S. government has no interests in a two state solution either. And so what does that mean? I think we have to look at it square in the face and say the end goal is a genocidal displacement of Palestinians. Now, I think what was interesting is like being in conversation with you during this last Advent season, both of us living in America, both of us coming from Christian backgrounds, now you were really paying attention to Palestinian Christians during this time and their message.
How would you sum up, like, their message to American and Western Christians in particular?
Kelley: Right. So the message coming from our Palestinian brothers and sisters, whether it was the churches in Jerusalem or churches in Bethlehem was you, we cannot celebrate Christmas as usual. We cannot. And so they decided no tree lighting ceremonies, no, um, parties, no, they were, none of the celebration.
And I mean, Bethlehem hasthe church of the nativity, they have banger square, they put up a big tree every year. I mean, I think it's as big as the one that we. Put in New York, you know, in Times Square, they put up a huge tree. It's a huge, you know, like marching bands come out from all those schools.
It's like a huge celebration for the entire community of Bethlehem, which is like half Christian, half Muslim, but it's a big deal. None of that. They didn't decorate star street. They didn't get a tree. They didn't have the ceremony. Like, no, we are taking all our energy for celebration and we are directing it all towards lament. And they invited the Western church to join them in solidarity. One church that I think has been such a prophetic or like a truth telling voice out of Bethlehem. It’s pastored by Isaac Munther. They restaged their nativity inside the name of their church to have baby Jesus wrapped in a kaffiya under the rubble.
So, if you look, you could see all the figures, you could see Mary and Joseph, you could see, but it was all through the rubble because they said right now, if Jesus were born, he would be born under the rubble in Gaza.
D.L.: Mm hmm.
Kelley: And so these were the messages that the Christian community in what we call the Holy Land, Israel, Palestine, had more telling us and inviting us into.
D.L.: From your perspective, how was that received by American Christians who love to sing about Bethlehem during the month of December?
Kelley: I can tell you that from what I saw in evangelical spaces, it just seemed like well, 1st of all, my guess is that most of our evangelical friends didn't hear the message, right? Because they’re in echo chambers where they were probably protected from hearing a lot of that, because I didn't see any change in any of those celebrations.
D.L.: Yeah.
Kelley: I spoke at a church, and I know some other friends with churches, you know, I think they really, it's like, yeah, we hear and we want to be in solidarity. But we're not gonna forego all the decking of our halls.
Kelley: and that was, I mean, I get it. I knew it would be a heavy lift to expect any Christian church to not lean hard into all of their Christmas traditions. And let's be honest for a lot of pastors that comes with, you know, it's a big fundraising season, right? But man, I was so sad that it just seemed like there were not, it fell on deaf ears here.
D.L.: Yeah, and I think if people are listening and they're interested in it, Isaac Munther is a wonderful person to look up some of the sermons he was giving during this time. I mean, they reminded me of MLK sermons, just like this is a person with extreme moral clarity who has no patience for the white Western Christian mythologizing of history.
Kelley: I think you and I are thinking of the same sermon. When he gave that sermon, my husband and I listened to it one morning, three times in a row. Listen to it again. We have to listen to it again. We listened to it three times and it felt like Martin Luther King when he spoke out against the war in Vietnam, it felt that like, I think we will be reading this sermon for years to come.
D.L.: Yeah. And it's, it's people want to Google it. It's called Christ in the rubble by Isaac Munther. You'll find it. It's so powerful. I'll put it in the show notes. We have to sort of wrap up this conversation, but I just want to say, Kelly, you have been such a model for me of of learning to listen to Palestinian voices.
I think besides your work and your books and your writing the book that most impacted me was a voice of the witness book.
Kelley: Yes.
D.L.: Um, Oh, Palestine Speaks. And so that's just a book of oral history. So you can really dip in and dip out.You can read one person's story and then another person's story. And they do have a wide variety of people they talk to.
Kelley: And they are from all over some of them are from Gaza. Some of the West Bank, some of them East Jerusalem. It's a really good representation.
D.L.: And it can kind of help you pinpoint some of these things. And also, you know, Voice of Witness does all these books of oral histories on people who've experienced human rights abuses, so I think that's a really helpful framing, right? Occupied territories, human rights abuses, so all that.
I would really highly recommend, especially if people are connected to Christianity and In whatever way, but especially if you still value the scriptures, I would really recommend they read your book, The First Advent in Palestine, and actually don't read it during December, like read it now, because I think just coming out of December What we are experiencing in Palestine and how the Western Church did not listen to Palestinians like, it's a really important time to just sort of marinate in the dismissal and erasure of Palestinians in general, but also Palestinian Christians.
So I would recommend everybody read your book, Kelly. Do you have any other resources you would just tell people if they want to learn more about Palestine?
Kelley: well, a classic book that, you know, for people who want more of that storied form, you know, maybe the anti-Zion chronicles would be a book, would be a book called The Lemon Tree
The Lemon tree looks at two families and it's based on a true story. Two families, one Arab, one Jewish family that migrates from Eastern Europe and how they are connected by one of those homes that was vacated.
One family is pushed out, the other family moves in. In every other chapter you're looking at each family's story. So you really are at least seeing: how are these two different families connected to the same land? How does that play out? There’s a beautiful story. I mean, the woman who ends up owning this home, I think ends up stepping into a, a jubilee type action.
But I think it is a good way to kind of say, okay, there are 2 people groups, 2 different narratives that populate this place. And at least that book tries to put them both in view. So, at least that is a good counter to the Zion Chronicles that pretty much erased Palestinians. There’s another book I really love called, This Is Not a Border and it's put out by the, you can get it on Amazon or wherever, but it's put out by the people of pal fest, Palestinian literature festival.
And it's all different sorts of poets, short story writers, novelists, and journalists who travel into Palestine to experience that life, and then they come out and these are some of the things they've written on the other side of having been in Palestine. So these are people who have the craft of writing well about that experience.
And I find that was another really helpful book for me to hear from the actual place from people who have the skills to really help us see and understand some things. I know recently Ta Nehisi Coates went, um, and if you hear some of the things that he spoke of, um, the week after 10/7, you can definitely see that when you have a writer like that in that place. Well, he certainly took the moment to speak to what he saw happening. And then for people who want to see this from their Christian tradition and the scriptures, I'd say justice and only justice by Naim Ateek, who's kind of the father of Palestinian liberation theology. Also Faith in the face of the empire by Mitri Rahab, who's another Christian pastor out of Bethlehem, if you want to connect that more to your faith story.
D.L.: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for, for mentioning those resources. You can look up Pal Fest online. You can follow Mitri Reheb, I don't know, is Naeem Mateek on social media as much?
Kelley: No, but I think you, his organization is this is Sabeel, S A B E E L,
D.L.: Okay.
Kelley: And they have a newsletter and so you could go like look up Sabeel online and follow, get their newsletter.
D.L.: Yeah. And the artist who, who made the beautiful cover that you use for your books, Sliman Mansoor is on Instagram.
Kelley: he's puts up something almost every day, doesn't he?
D.L.: gosh, He’s really an important person, I think, to follow right now. And so I've learned about these people from following you. So why don't you tell people where they can find you on social media be connected with your work.
Kelley: sure. I'm mainly on Instagram. Um, so you can find me there. Kelly Nikondeha. I’m a little bit on threads, but not, I mean, really Instagram is where I'm at.
D.L.: I'm so thankful we were able to have this conversation. One of the sad things about this conversation is I wanted to make sure we talked about your friend in the West Bank, just in case something happens to her and her family, that their story will not go untold and unspoken.
Kelley: She's given me permission to share it because she feels the same. I want people to know that we were here and what we were struggling with. So she gave me permission to share her story.
D.L.: I think it’s good for people listening to know that things are still really dire. And so we hold vigil with her and you're able to keep us updated. And I believe probably on your Instagram stories you will. But we just are holding her story and the stories of so many other people who are, their days and nights are filled with terror andthis awareness that nobody's coming to help them.
We kind of have to sit in that powerlessness, but also do what we can, which is we speak what is happening to her and we're not going to let it go by unnoticed. So thank you for showing up for this conversation, Kelly. I love that Palestine has been one of your loves for a long time and to see you just showing up to this moment, being able to be who you are is just beautiful.
Both of us were raised by Christian Zionist moms. Look at us now, Kelly. Look at us now! Terribly disappointing to them. And yet, you know, this is what our actual values are. So there we go. Thanks so much for this conversation. I always love talking to you. I encourage everyone to read your books and, uh, be on the lookout for new projects you're going to be involved in.
Kelley: Thanks.
