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Church and Main is a podcast at the intersection of faith and modern life. Join Pastor Dennis Sanders as he shares the stories of faith interacting with the ever-changing world of the 21st century.
Hello. On this episode of Church in Maine, we talk about not getting the full
story of Palestinian life in Gaza and the West Bank.
This is Church in Maine.
Music.
Hello, and welcome to Church and Main, the podcast at the intersection of faith
and modern life. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host.
Church and Main is a podcast that looks for God in the midst of of issues affecting
the church and the larger society.
You can learn more about the podcast, listen to past episodes,
and donate by checking us out at churchandmaine.org or churchandmaine.substack.com.
Consider subscribing to the podcast. You can do that on Substack or on your
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That helps others find this podcast.
Many of us might think that we know the whole story of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
If you listen to the news or follow things on social media, you'll hear stories
of lives lost in the ongoing war with Israel in the wake of the October 7th attacks.
Usually when we hear these stories, they are almost always in response to something
that Israel has done, either in the past or in the very near present.
I mean, the way that the Palestinians are depicted is almost always very one-dimensional.
There's not much talk about any other voices in Palestinian life.
The only voice that we hear is one of protest against Israel.
Now, I need to be clear. That is not to say that the talk of protest against
Israeli actions is not ever justified.
I think that there are times that it is.
It's just that it seems to be the only voice that we ever hear.
But unlike most groups, Palestinians are not of one opinion on anything.
Sometimes there is criticism of leadership, especially criticism of Hamas.
But these voices usually get silenced, both within places like Gaza and in the wider world.
Today, I talked to Episcopal priest and frequent guest on Church in Maine, Frederick Schmidt,
about the silence of Palestinian voices and how many in the West in some ways
are not allowing to really even speak out against things such as fundamentalist
Islam by not allowing these other their voices.
In December 2023, he wrote an essay for Pathios entitled Christian Leaders,
Hamas, and Fundamentalist Islam,
where he writes that comparative religion has in some ways missed some of the
dangers of an extremist version of Islam and its role on October 7th.
He writes, the discussion about the murderous behavior of Hamas has been reduced
to political categories or a conversation about religion that considers all
religious differences to be all about the same thing, and they are not.
The significance of radical fundamentalist Shiite convictions that drove the
attack on Israel on October 7th cannot be ignored or subliminated.
So, today, we're going to talk about having a fuller conversation about Palestinians,
life in Gaza, Hamas, and fundamentalist Islam in light of October 7th.
A little bit about Frederick Schmidt. He is currently the vice-rector of Good
Shepherd Episcopal Church outside of Nashville.
As I said before, he is an Episcopal priest. He's also a spiritual director,
a retreat facilitator, conference leader, writer, and academic.
Before his current position, Schmitt held the Reuben P.
Jobe Chair of Spiritual Formation at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary
in Evanston, Illinois, and directed the Jobe Institute for Spiritual Formation.
And today we will talk about the dangers of spiritual formation.
Of a spiritual formation so without further ado and without any further uh flubs
there like that one here is the reverend frederick schmidt.
Music.
Well frederick it is good to have you back this is this has kind of been a tour
of having i've I've had a few interviews where it's been several people that
I've had on several times.
So this is kind of the rerun tour, it seems like, for the podcast.
Well, I appreciate that. I don't mind being a rerun.
It's not a problem at all. I have no problems with that.
So the reason that I have you here is that I wanted to talk a little bit about the article you wrote.
And this was, it's been a while, but not too long ago, about a month ago.
So, um, and the title of it is Christian leaders, Hamas and fundamentalist Islam.
Um, and the reason I wanted to talk to you about it was, um, kind of an interest, um,
a few, maybe when the whole kind of Israel Hamas thing kind of started back
in the fall, I saw a link somewhere in a, uh, a sub stack that I read about, um.
I think it's called Whispered in Gaza. It's a project that is done where they
have been able to go in and interview people who live in Gaza and are able to
kind of present a viewpoint that we don't always hear about Gazans who live there.
Because I think we have this one voice,
which sadly usually tends to be the voice of Hamas, and don't really hear the
complexity and the kind of diversity of that.
So that was kind of, when I read your article, I thought a lot about that.
But I think maybe it would help for people who haven't read the article to kind
of give a synopsis of what it is you were trying to get at.
Happy to do that. And by the way, I did actually see some of the work done with Whispered in Gaza,
and a lot of what I've heard in that project resonates with what I was observing in the article.
When I wrote the article, I didn't attempt to kind of treat the whole question
of what's going on in Gaza and in Israel from the vantage point of a historian.
And I wasn't trying to kind of give an exhaustive sort of picture of the political
dynamics that are involved.
Knowing what's going on either among Palestinians or among Israelis politically
in any kind of exhaustive fashion is a specialization all its own.
But I reflected back on the time that I served as dean of St.
George's College on the east side of Jerusalem and also served as a canon of
the Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem.
And the east side of Jerusalem is the dominantly Arab side of Jerusalem.
And what I wanted
to note was that my experience
during what was a comparatively brief
period of time in meeting people
and conversations that I
had with people was the fact that Palestinians reflected back to me with some
regularity that they felt that they were really disadvantaged by the kind of
leadership that they had.
And one of the experiences that stood out in my own mind from that period was
I spent some time in Amman,
Jordan, And I was given a tour by an Anglican priest who was also a Jordanian who showed me the city.
And then we stopped finally opposite a fairly large home with a wall and a wrought
iron gate and a large marble-esque plaza in front of it and a fountain.
And I asked him, I said, well, what is this?
And he said, well, this is the home of the ambassador of the Palestinian Authority to Jordan.
And he said, this is the way representatives of the Palestinian Authority live
while Gazans live with open sewers at the same time.
And that was kind of a distillation of the frustration that Palestinians have
had with their leadership.
And I made the point that we don't appreciate the frustration that is kind of
embedded in those sorts of conversations.
They don't figure prominently in American conversations about the tensions between
Israelis and Palestinians.
And I also noted that one of the sort of glaring problems from the theological
and the ecclesiastical side of the difficulty is that church leaders don't seem to recognize it.
Not even church leaders in the Holy Land seem to acknowledge that it's a problem.
And I suggested in the article that perhaps part of the problem is that,
especially in the American setting.
Our approach to these issues either tends to be entirely secular and political.
Or if it's religious, we ignore the complexities that are introduced into the
tensions there by fundamentalist Muslim factions like Hamas.
I mean, essentially, I would argue that Hamas is a genocidal death cult,
but it's a genocidal death cult predicated on certain Muslim extremist convictions
about what life in Islam is all about and what the mission of Islam is all about.
And I think because we've been shaped by a comparative religions dialogue,
and because we've been shaped by the ecumenism movement,
we hesitate to critique that version of Muslim life.
Because we're afraid that it will either seem judgmental or it will seem Islamophobic.
And I think because we've surrendered to all of that, we overlook the fact that
just as there are fundamentalist expressions of Christianity that are problematic,
there are also fundamentalist expressions of Islam that are problematic.
And so the article was about trying to say that in this context,
religious leaders and Christian religious leaders in particular,
at least in terms of my own orientation to this,
need to be fairly forthright in noting that that factor has contributed to the
turmoil in the Holy Land. and in Gaza.
How would you define how it has kind of contributed to the problems that are
happening in the Middle East?
Do you think it has enabled some of the problems?
Well, I think broadly speaking, it has enabled the situation because what you
see on the streets in the United States, for example,
are demonstrators who parrot Hamas slogans.
And I think there's no doubt that Hamas has
actually been using those
kinds of demonstrations and that kind of public pressure to try to leverage
American political opinion in a way that will leverage Israeli Israeli opinion and behavior.
I think that it has...
Contributed to confusion about what's going on because our failure to kind of
name those dynamics have left people with the impression that maybe this is
entirely a political dispute without religious underpinnings.
So I think it's left people with an incomplete picture of what's involved.
And I think it's also
drawn the capacity of Christian leaders into question in terms of them really
being critically thinking voices in the dispute.
In other words, Christian leaders themselves seem to lurch from a kind of pro-Israeli
point of view that's completely uncritical of what Israelis do.
And they simply pendulum swing to the other extreme, and they become entirely
pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.
The other thing, too, is that it also obscures the fact that Hamas is not necessarily
representative of all Palestinians.
And I think that that's a real problem as well, because there's certainly room to argue,
I believe, that Palestinians are living with adverse circumstances.
And the Whispers in Gaza program illustrates just how...
Problematic Hamas's leadership is right now,
how problematic Arafat was when he was in charge of the PLO,
how problematic the Palestinian Authority has been since then with Abbas.
And all of that's left unexamined because we simply kind of parrot what we're
hearing comparing at the extremes.
Do you think that there's also a fear of, and I don't necessarily agree with
it, but a fear of what they might say is racism,
that it's primarily white, um, Western people and they don't want to criticize,
um, persons of color in this case.
And so they don't, um, that's also some of that behind it.
And as I said, I have a problem with that, and I can talk more about it,
but I'm just wondering if that's… Well, I think you're right,
and I'd be interested in hearing more about what you think about that.
But I think it is, and I think there's a whole set of categories that have also
reinforced that. The categories of oppressor, oppressed.
The categories of colonizer and colonized have been kind of wed to the racial issues.
And the whole mix has been offered as a supposedly more potent argument for a pro-Hamas argument.
Position. The problem with it, of course, is that Israeli society is actually
much more diverse racially than that, more diverse religiously than that.
I mean, a lot of Americans are surprised alone that there are Palestinians who are Israeli citizens.
With full rights, participation in a democratic society.
They seem to be surprised to find that Israelis differ pretty widely racially
and in terms of their ethnic origins and all of the rest of it.
They're shocked when you point out that you can hardly call them colonizers
because they don't have a colonizing power to go back to.
They're not Belgians who can go back from Belgian colonies in Africa or French
colonists who can go back to France,
they have nowhere to go, and no one's screaming for Europeans to take them back if they vacate Israel.
It's such a gross oversimplification of what's going on.
Yeah, I mean, I think the reason I think that I have a problem with this is
because I think that That view in and of itself can be racist,
because it's very limiting in how it views the Palestinian people,
and Islam.
They don't understand the complexities of either group, and kind of flatten
it to just one way of seeing things.
And I don't think that that's fair. I mean, I think that there are a lot of
different people different opinions of Palestinian views.
People who are this it may be critical of Israel, but they're not in favor of
what happened on October 7 There are those who?
You know don't support hamas and have paid for it and in many ways and so i
don't think that it's helping and i think it's kind of a very simplistic view
that it it's that kind of a,
well it reminds me of some of the views that sometimes people have had of african-americans
or things of the you know or native americans or something that you know where
they simple happy people or
something and not humans that are complex and that we should be respected,
not because we're the simple or happy people,
but because we are made in the image of God.
And that means that all of that means that we're really complex people too.
That's right. I think that's exactly it.
Yes, there's been a trend to reintroduce into our vocabulary,
I think, a form of racism that I think is really problematic.
And to your point,
it's interesting how those forms of racial dialogue have been kind of transposed
or imposed from the American setting on to settings across the globe.
Erasing all the complexities in both places. I agree.
And I don't think that that helps on any side.
No. And interestingly enough, the Palestinians have been subjected to their
own kind of racist discrimination over the years by other Arab bodies as well.
Well, I mean, it's probably more complicated than simply racial issues.
There are probably issues of potential political unrest and potential presence
of radicalized elements and so forth.
But you take, for example, Egypt's role in all of this and their control over
the one exit from Gaza that might actually benefit refugees if they could be
processed and allowed to enter in Egypt,
even if it were only to move to the other side of the Gazan border for safety.
But here they are trapped by the Egyptian insistence that they're not going
to be allowed to enter into Egypt.
So this kind of leads me to think also about, and one of the reasons I really
wanted to talk to you is, when it comes to especially mainline denominations
and how they deal with this issue.
Right. And again, it also feels at times really flat.
I remember, I haven't read it all, and his name right now is escaping me,
but it was kind of the pastor from Bethlehem, from a Lutheran church.
Uh-huh and his saying
which i guess has been going around was very standard
from what i would expect or we would expect
people to have want to hear that you know the israelis are are the bad people
and we're the good people but again it felt like with churches we don't really
seek to to understand the full issue. It's like, we want a certain narrative.
And it's not just the people in the pews, it's the people in leadership as well.
And I guess my question is, why do we not want to seek something?
I mean, we accuse, especially evangelicals, especially on this issue of being
very simplistic when it comes to just supporting the Israelis.
But it seems like on the mainline side, we're doing the same thing, just the opposite.
And so why are we not willing to embrace kind of that, all of the stories that
are taking place and all of the complexity that's taking place? Yeah.
I think that's a hard one to answer, and it's embedded in what I perceive to
be a real cultural shift over the last couple of decades.
There seems to be this sort of move that's happened that instead of the argument
being as it might have been in the 60s,
70s, and 80s, That there is a greater complexity that is suppressed by certain
kinds of fundamentalist categories.
That what's now happened is that we've lapsed into this cultural pattern as a church that indulges,
that doesn't insist on honoring the complexity,
but indulges in an alternative ideology. theology.
And I'm not sure that the reasons for that shift on the one side and the other
are always quite the same.
I think that certainly the language people would use.
On, and I hate these terms, but on the right and the left are probably different, you know,
but we seem to have lapsed into a setting where we're left with a kind of zero sum game.
That means that if I can't acknowledge that there's some complexity that my
position doesn't take fully into account, then what I've done is I've lost the argument.
And I suppose it might be because of the fact that ultimately,
if there's a common denominator,
between both sides of the argument, it's because politics have become so important,
important even in the church.
And, and our mode of political, um, uh, discourse is, is the discourse of, of, uh, conflict,
uh, and, and a zero sum game, uh, where we kind of ape, ape the politics You know, you, you.
Everyone necessarily kind of advocates that there's a certain kind of solution
to a problem or that maybe some
piece of a problem is more urgent or more central than other parts of it.
And so we get out there with a position that corresponds to that issue or corresponds
to that problem as a solution.
And then when someone comes along and says, well,
okay, so that's part of it, but you're not taking into account this issue or
that issue or some other issue,
you're left with either granting that there's greater complexity and maybe you
need a more complex solution,
or you simply deny that.
So you take, for example, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians,
it's hard to take into account the complexity of Israeli politics.
Politics, that there are people who are and have been always in favor of some
sort of resolution to the problem.
And actually the percentages have been quite high for some sort of solution to the problem.
And then there have been people who have been from time to time more hard-line.
The public discourse doesn't acknowledge that. And the public discourse doesn't
acknowledge that there's a difference between Palestinians and Hamas.
That there are certain Palestinian
needs and certain deprivations that the Palestinians are struggling with that
are not one in the same with what Hamas has as its cult.
So we just don't get a complete picture of things.
And one would have hoped, I guess, that Christians, if we're really interested in peace,
one would hope that Christians would actually start by trying to nurture mutual
appreciation between groups.
Because I know at least from the work that I've done in dispute resolution if you,
anathematize another person's views, if you attribute the worst possible motives
to them if you don't attempt to understand why they are where they are,
then there's no possibility of dispute resolution.
Effective dispute resolution and peacemaking
always begins with people on both sides of a conflict being heard and granting
that what they have to say might be said with good motives involved.
Of course, then one wonders, though, is peace really the goal?
Well, I think that that's a serious question right now.
You know, you look at the current situation in the Middle East,
and you suggest that one of the things that's happened repeatedly as the peace
process has made progress in the Middle East.
On multiple occasions in that history,
there have been plans forwarded that would have been a compromise and would
have involved a listening process of one sort or another.
Oslo offered a possibility in that regard. Uh, Ehud Barak, uh,
offered a Palestinian state in Gaza and 97% of the West Bank.
Uh, Ehud Olmert, uh, who was also a prime minister,
uh, offered to withdraw from the entire West Bank and partition Jerusalem on a demographic basis.
And those aren't the only occasions. And every time they got to the point of
actually formalizing an arrangement,
Palestinian leadership said, oh, wait, but we want right of return. And,
So this isn't going to be adequate because we really want to go back to what
we believe existed when the British Empire was still in control of the entire area.
And of course- And that's impossible. That's impossible because that means then
that the Israelis have to have somewhere to go.
And as I said earlier, they're not colonizers in that sense.
They're refugees themselves.
And in a sense, you know, it was the West.
It was European countries. It was the British Empire.
It was the United States that threw Jewish refugees and Palestinians and Arabs together.
Together, and in part because they were so slow to confront the Holocaust.
And so you wonder, well,
are you really interested in peace if you're going to predicate a solution to
the problem that's that difficult and that old,
by simply saying, I want what I want,
I don't think you are interested in peace.
And of course, the formal position of Hamas is the elimination of Israel entirely.
So how can Christians foster a different talk so that it isn't what it has been in the past,
which sometimes doesn't distinguish between Palestinians and kind of fundamentalism
and can really deal with kind of a more complex situation?
Because it feels like, you know, I would hope that the goal would be to get
people to think about this issue instead of being given a story or being told what to think,
which sometimes seems to be what we're being asked to do, but to really be able
to have a much more rich and complex discussion.
Right, right. Well, I think if Christians are going to provide any kind of guidance
in a situation like this,
and Christians probably have more of an opportunity to inform dialogue than
they do to necessarily inform the political process,
but perhaps dialogue will indirectly affect the political process.
What we have to do, I think,
is we have to set aside ideological lenses and look at the history for what it is,
which leaves no one entirely in the right and no one entirely in the wrong.
And that particular
conversation about the
history of the situation and the current
state of the situation can then lead to an appreciation of the mutual concerns
or the individual concerns concerns of both Palestinians and Israel.
I think we also, if we're going to be good-faith actors in a conversation of that kind of thing,
we have to distinguish between terrorism.
And the people who might be misrepresented by terrorism and the interests of nation states.
I mean, I'm appalled to find so many Christians who are ready to sort of just
echo and repeat terrorist slogans of one sort or another.
And then, you know, once you've sort of sorted those things out,
then I think we can then begin to talk reasonably about what resolution might look like.
Remembering, of course, that at least for Americans, we stand outside that situation.
And we cannot claim to fully understand what either group faces or fears or
what it would mean to craft a resolution.
You know, I think that it's really difficult,
impossible in fact, to sit
in judgment on what
other people ought to do when we ourselves are not immersed in that situation
and we We don't face the consequences of either the problem or any potential resolution to it.
I mean, we can't appreciate what the Palestinians are facing,
being led by a succession of leaders who have never really been chosen in a
truly democratic environment.
Although they've tried to make it look democratic, we can't begin to completely
understand what it means to be displaced.
Over and over again. We can't know what it means to have a group like Hamas in charge of Gaza,
only to have them spend all of their time preparing the groundwork for launching
an attack against Israel.
On the other hand, we can't begin to understand what Israelis are facing,
to have been surrounded by nations that have openly declared their hostility to them.
We can't begin to understand now what they face with a kind of constellation
of terrorist organizations that are directly armed,
funded, and directed by Iran.
We can't know what it is to live in a country that's scarcely the size of New Jersey.
And that an F-16 can fly from its northernmost border to its southernmost border
in something around 17 minutes.
People who live with two friendly neighbors and two oceans have no idea what that's like.
And that's not even that doesn't even begin to drill down even deeper to the
personal losses and grief on both sides of the equation,
So I think there's a lot of humility that has to be exercised,
even as we try to facilitate a conversation.
Conversation i suppose you know dennis to be honest with you when it comes right
down to it if i was going to have a conversation about this with people i suppose
i would hope that they would go away realizing if nothing else that it's far
far more complicated than they recognize.
Yeah you know i think that is something that i've kind of long believed about
the middle east is is that it's,
I think there's a temptation to make the story into good guys and bad guys,
or white hats and black hats.
And I think the reality is there's a lot of gray, a lot of gray hats,
and that the story isn't so simple.
But I think that we want it to be simple, and it's not. That's right. I think that's right.
Well, thank you for this discussion.
We had another issue, but I think we're going to have to leave that for another day.
But I hope that this is a good discussion for others to kind of talk about this
issue, because it's a complex one.
But I'm hoping it can also lead to some discussions on other issues because
I think this is not the only issue where we kind of try to flatten everything
to kind of a very simple or ideological story and not something that's much more complex.
I think you're right. And I hope that begins to change, Dennis.
Me too. So if people want to catch up on some of what you've written, where can they find you?
I write it for Patheos on the Progressive Christian channel,
and they can find it by Googling Frederick Schmidt, Patheos,
and that'll take you to that work.
And there's some books that you can also find along the way,
none of them on this particular topic.
All right. Thanks for asking, Dennis. You're welcome.
Well, we will talk again soon, because there is another issue I want to talk
to you about. But until then, we'll see you later. Thanks.
Music.
Thanks again for listening to this conversation. I've included some links to
Reverend Schmidt's article in Pathios, and also links to what we described in
the conversation, Whispered in Gaza.
I think it's a truly fascinating series of videos and voices on life in the
Palestinian enclave of Gaza.
And so I think, again, it gives you a fuller picture of what's going on.
It doesn't negate some of the other stories, especially that Palestinians think,
especially in relation with Israel.
But it does, I think, give a fuller picture than what we normally will hear
from our news sources or in social media or in other places.
I also just wanted to let you know that I do another podcast called Lectionary Q. Q.
This is a podcast that focuses on a text from the Revised Common Lectionary
and adds in a reflection and some questions.
This is something I started back in the fall of 2022 but stopped basically just
due to busyness because of course I have another life of being a pastor.
But I've started up again late last fall, so you can find it and subscribe to
the podcast by going to LectionaryQ all one word, .substack.com.
So that is it for this episode of Church in Maine. Remember to rate and review
this episode on your favorite podcast app so that others can find it.
Consider donating so that we can continue to produce more episodes,
and you can find a link to donate in the show notes.
I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. Again, thank you so much for listening.
Take care, Godspeed, and I will see you very soon.
Music.