Editor's note:   The toll of martyrs and the suffering of the Palestinian people rolls of media reporters all too reasonably, abstractly, but what those numbers hide is the personal toll and the trauma that God's suffering family lives with. 

Samia Odeh helps us appreciate some of that personal, human dimension to the horror and genocide being carried out in Palestine.   Samia lives in Cornwall, Ontario where she is the musician at Wall St. United Church and a faithful activist for truth, justice, and caring for the oppressed - not an easy but necessary vocation.

Will the election of this week bringing to power an Israeli government committed to human rights and humanitarian values, or will the  genocidal death march of the Netanyahu regime continue?  Pray and act for the divine Spirit to work in all human beings dwelling in Palestine to generate truth, justice, peace, & transformation for grace in living.   Harry Oussoren

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A Palestinian Christian's Witness

By:  Samia Odeh

I often find myself having to explain to people that I am a Palestinian Christian. My family has tested our DNA, which connects our ancestry to the ancient Canaanites and Hebrew tribes. Our roots in this land go back thousands of years.

My family comes from 25 generations of Palestinian Christian priests in Jerusalem. We have a book documenting every name in that family line, dating back to 1113 AD. That is over 1,000 years of documented history as Christian priests alone. Our ancestry goes back much further.

The Nakba - The Catastrophe

In 1948, when my father was just a boy, his family home was blown up by Zionist militia. The same militia massacred people in a village just 9 kilometres away. My father and his family fled, along with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, as hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed. They were never allowed to return to their homes. Neither am I.

Before 1948, my grandmother would light the Sabbath candles with her Palestinian Jewish neighbours. Their Palestinian Muslim neighbours were part of their lives too. They lived together in peace, sharing their traditions, their homes, and their humanity.

Jewish communities have endured centuries of persecution, particularly in Europe, culminating in the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust. That history of suffering deserves recognition and remembrance. But the persecution of one people should never be used to justify the displacement and suffering of another.

My father’s home on Bethlehem Road in West Jerusalem is now a bus stop in Israel. His loss was never acknowledged. He lived with that injustice for the rest of his life, until he passed away last year.

Since 2023

And today, over 22,000 Palestinian children have been killed in the last three years.

For decades, my family has tried to help Palestinian children. We helped establish an organization providing prosthetic limbs to children who lost their arms and legs in various Israeli bombings of Gaza. Israeli military operations in Gaza were even described using the chilling phrase “mowing the lawn.”

My family also helped establish a pediatric cancer clinic in Gaza because Palestinian children were not always permitted to leave for lifesaving treatment, or were delayed until it was too late. Sometimes their parents were not permitted to accompany them.

That pediatric cancer clinic was bombed in November 2023.

These are not abstract political arguments to me. These are human beings. These are children. This is my family, my history, and my people.

We need to know the truth if we are ever going to find a real and just peace.

I stand with my Jewish friends who also stand up for Palestinian human rights. I know that Judaism and Zionism are not the same, and that many faithful Jewish people have courageously stood against these injustices.

But one of the deepest sorrows I carry is speaking with people who call themselves Christians and believe that what is happening to Palestinians is God’s will:

That the genocide, decades of apartheid, displacement, and illegal occupation of the land where Christianity was born, and the suffering of the descendants of its earliest Christian communities, could somehow be justified in the name of God!

How can anyone who follows the teachings of Jesus believe that the destruction of an entire people, their children, their homes, their holy places, and their history is God’s will?

Jesus weeps.

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Image credit: Naked Pastor:
"Original cartoon drawing for Palestine, No One Is Going To Stop This." 

For those who don’t know, the watermelon emoji symbolizes them for the colours of the Palestinian flag. 

Two Books follow below.  They report the complex quest to contribute to just peace in Palestine by tearing down walls between opponents, while recognizing and acknowledging the experiences of suffering, injustice, loss, and death which both Palestinians and Jewish people have to navigate in seeking a new way of co-existence.:

The Future is Peace, a Shared Journey Across the Holy Land by Aziz Abu Sarah, a Palestinian, and Maoz Inon, an Israeli.   New York, Crown Publishing Group, 2026.

The Wall Between by Canadian Arab Raja Khouri and American Jew living in Canada Jeffrey Wilkinson,  Toronto, Interlink Publishing Group Inc.  2023