By Shadia Qubti
January 26, 2025
A note on the Title: The original title was submitted before the ceasefire. In a reality where circumstances are shifting daily, almost hourly, it is challenging to capture. Both the title and content attempt to speak to this moment while acknowledging how quickly things can change. To engage with this context is to write with pencil rather than pen, to type rather than print.
As someone who grew up in Israel as an unrecognized Palestinian minority, I always held some frustration at my parents’ generation, perceiving their silence during the Nakba, or any massacre that followed, as passive acceptance. Now, witnessing this genocide in Gaza as an adult, I carry remorse for having misjudged them because it finally dawned on me. I finally understood that their silence is their resistance. I have seen how fear is utilized across various mediums, how it seeps into our bones and shapes our choices.
The weaponization of fear operates through multiple layers: the denial of employment opportunities with “security checks” that never clear, the threats in university dormitories, the forced choice between being a “good Arab” who stays silent or facing consequences. Each generation learns its own vocabulary of survival. For my parents’ generation, it was the silence after the Nakba, the careful navigation of daily life under military rule until 1966, where you “keep your head down and provide your daily bread.” For my generation, it’s the policing of our social media posts, the surveillance of our words in academic spaces, the constant pressure to prove we’re not a “security threat.”
This machinery of fear knows no borders. Here in Canada, as well as other places, Palestinian voices face similar pressures to remain silent. Recently, the Public libraries staff are banned from wearing Palestinian symbols, universities suspend student groups advocating for Palestinian rights, peaceful protests are banned or violently dispersed, and employees lose jobs for expressing solidarity or even sympathy with Gaza. The message remains the same across geographies: your security depends on your silence. What changes is merely the bureaucratic language used to justify it – from “military necessity” in Palestine to “maintaining neutrality” and “workplace policy” here. The conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israeli state policy creates yet another barrier to speaking truth – where even raising questions about justice becomes fraught with accusations of hate.
After fifteen months of relentless advocacy, of bearing witness, of trying to make our voices heard above the machinery of silence, the ceasefire arrives and finds us exhausted. I had imagined this moment would bring release, would allow space for celebration. Instead, I find myself caught in a familiar tension: How can a ceasefire be celebrated when the imbalance of power remains so palpable?
In seeking to understand this tension, I find wisdom in unexpected places. Recently, I spoke with Mark Charles, co-author of “Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.” I shared with him my struggle as a Palestinian Christian, constantly having to define my theology in opposition to Christian Zionism – explaining what I’m not rather than what I am. As someone now residing in and benefiting from another settler colonial project, I look to Indigenous peoples who have a longer history of navigating settler colonial systems and their intertwined religious, legal, and political justifications for dispossession while maintaining their identities.
Mark’s response illuminated something crucial about our struggle. “Power,” he explained, “is the ability to act; authority is the right of jurisdiction.” The Israeli government, like the United States, has power but no authority – they can enforce their will through military might and legal systems, but this power is fundamentally morally bankrupt. “As a Native man,” he continued, “I have authority but no power.” His words reframed my understanding: while Palestinians may lack institutional power, we possess a profound authority rooted in our connection to land and inherited wisdom. The challenge becomes how to wield this authority in dialogue with those who operate purely through power dynamics but lack legitimate right to the lands they control. His words reframed my question: How do we use our authority to engage in dialogue where we have no power? Or how do we engage with those who are bankrupt of authority yet wield enormous power?
Part of me wants to remain here, in this space of hopelessness, to sit with the raw truth of our grim reality. Yet my Christian faith disrupts despair’s comfort – this familiar space where we brace for the next wave of violence. It demands I hope even while knowing the cycle may begin again. It pushes me out into the uncomfortable work of hope, demands that I wrestle with what seems impossible. And so, in this weariness, in this tension between relief and continued anguish, I return to ancient words that have carried generations before me through similar moments of exhaustion and uncertainty.
The psalmist paints an image of ideal hope – a perfect meeting of love and faithfulness, a kiss between righteousness (Justice) and peace. These words emerged from a community wrestling with return and restoration. Having survived exile, they faced the exhaustion of rebuilding their lives while still under empire’s shadow. When they sang of faithfulness springing from the earth and righteousness (Justice) looking down from heaven, they were not describing their present reality but voicing their deepest longings. In their context, as in Gaza today, the land itself bore witness to devastation. Yet they dared to imagine restoration even before it materialized.
Meanwhile, James offers us wisdom for the tangible present: “pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere” (James 3:17). Writing to a dispersed and persecuted community, he understood the bitter wisdom that can emerge from suffering – the temptation to let exhaustion harden into envy, to let fear calcify into ambition. His call for wisdom that is “peace-loving” spoke to a people who, like Palestinians today, had every reason to abandon peace. Yet he insisted on a wisdom that could hold both purity of witness and gentleness of spirit.
Between these two visions – the ideal and the tangible – lies the work of decolonizing hope.
To decolonize hope means to strip it of false positivity, to allow it to hold both light and shadow. My evangelical upbringing, rooted in empire Christianity’s narrative of victory and power, pushed me toward a blanket of positivity that left little room for lament. This theology of triumph stands far from Jesus’s solidarity with the poor and oppressed seeking liberation. But James reminds us that true wisdom begins with purity – the honesty to name things as they are. Hope becomes more authoritative when it can hold our disillusionment, when it makes space for both celebration and grief.
This ceasefire moment demands such complex hope. As families wade through rubble searching for traces of their loved ones, others cluster at the corridor of northern Gaza, waiting for permission to return to their homes. Some find miracles – a child recognized among the displaced, a parent located in a hospital, siblings reunited after months of separation. Last week brought its own moments of joy: Israelis returning to their families’ embrace, Palestinians freed to reunite with loved ones even though their communities were not allowed to conduct any public celebration. Yet others confirm what their hearts already knew, finding evidence of losses too painful to name. A mother identifies her son’s jacket in the ruins of what was their home. A family finally learns the fate of their missing grandmother. Small wins float in a sea of wreckage.
My emotions lag behind these rapidly shifting realities. How do we celebrate the reunion of one family while standing with another as they confirm their worst fears? Children’s questions from Gaza capture this liminal space between celebration and grief: “When I die, will they put me in a grave with my mom and dad?” asks one child, while another wonders, “Do children who have their legs amputated grow new legs?” Some questions reach toward future possibilities – “When will we have our home back?” “When will we go back to school?” – while others reveal the precarity of the present: “When it rains, will we drown in the tent?” One child’s simple query, “How many years have we been at war?” echoes across generations of Palestinian suffering.
Even this bittersweet moment of ceasefire carries its own shadow. As bombs stop falling on Gaza, violence intensifies in the West Bank, where heightened settler attacks and army incursions have recently claimed more than ten Palestinian lives in Jenin. The machinery of displacement simply shifts its focus. How do we celebrate relative quiet in Gaza while our siblings in the West Bank face escalating brutality? This, too, is part of empire’s strategy – to fragment our attention, our solidarity, our grief.
When James speaks of wisdom shown through “good lives” and “deeds done in humility” (3:13), I think of our maternal ancestors who knew how to hold such opposite truths together. They didn’t theorize about how to balance joy and grief – they were too busy embodying it through daily acts of tending: washing the bodies of the dead while feeding the living, planting seeds in soil soaked with tears, keeping count of both the lost and the found. They told their stories in silence, through fingers threading embroidery patterns passed down through generations, through recipes whispered from mother to daughter in steaming kitchens. Their wisdom grew from the ground up, like the faithfulness that the psalmist sees springing from the earth, rooted in the reality of both devastation and survival.
The psalm speaks of righteousness (Justice) looking down from heaven, but James reminds us that wisdom is “first of all pure; then peace-loving.” Perhaps this is what decolonizing hope means – understanding that before righteousness (Justice) can kiss peace, we must first face the truth of our reality. Hope begins when illusion ends. Our maternal ancestors understood this – that tending continues even in devastation, that resistance isn’t always loud but sometimes exists in the quiet insistence on life.
Today, as I navigate this uncertain and fragile ceasefire, I’m learning to practice joy as an act of faith and resistance. I choose to see what remains standing: 30% of Gaza’s structures still rise from the earth – each building a testament to resilience, each remaining hospital a monument to healthcare workers who refused to abandon their posts. Among the rubble, I find signs of life refusing to be erased: families returning to tend what’s left of their homes, medical staff continuing to heal in makeshift clinics, children finding spaces to play between the broken walls.
I find joy in unexpected moments: in videos of reunited families embracing their released loved ones, tears mixing with laughter; in social media posts of Gaza’s children finally sleeping through a night without the thunder of bombs or whir of drones; in the surge of dancing in streets that have known too much sorrow. I see it in your unwavering commitment to speak truth despite the cost – in every letter written to representatives, every protest attended, every difficult conversation with colleagues and friends. Your steadfast advocacy, even when it felt like no one was listening, has helped shift the narrative. Each small victory – a resolution passed, a newspaper finally using the word “genocide,” a church pledging to become an Apartheid-Free congregation – represents countless hours of faithful witness. These are not small wins; they are the seeds of transformation.
I see it in the global awakening of conscience, in every voice that refuses to be silenced, in every solidarity movement that grows stronger. Your persistent truth-telling, your refusal to look away, your commitment to justice even when it seemed impossible – this too is cause for celebration.
The tension between Psalms 85’s vision of perfect harmony and James’s earthly wisdom lives in these moments. Each reunion, each peaceful night’s sleep, each act of solidarity becomes a small kiss between righteousness (Justice) and peace. My maternal ancestors would understand – they knew that joy itself is a form of resistance, that celebrating life is how we refuse to let empire define our existence. “Always be joyful.” (1 Thessalonians 5: 16)
Echoing the recent “Palestinian Christian Initiative – Kairos Palestine Statement on Gaza Ceasefire Agreement,” this ceasefire brings both “a moment of relief and joy” and a reminder that it is “but one step toward true peace and justice.” Their call for “steadfastness and resilient spirit during these challenging and bloody times” echoes James’s wisdom about perseverance. Most powerfully, they affirm that “Our future and their future are one. Either the cycle of violence that destroys both of us or peace that will benefit both.” To practice joy in uncertainty is to live into this truth. When I celebrate each family reunion, each night of uninterrupted sleep, each moment of solidarity, I am practicing that shared future into being.
This is what it means to decolonize hope – to root it in the wisdom of those who came before me, who knew how to tend to life even in the shadow of empire. It means learning to celebrate without denying my fear, to grieve without losing sight of possibility, to tend to what is while keeping alive the vision of what could be. Just as I now understand my parents’ silence as perseverance (Sumud), I recognize that joy itself can be resistance – not despite fear, but alongside it. The same machinery that once made my parents silent now tries to silence our small victories, our solidarity, our hope. But like my maternal ancestors who found ways to tend to life under empire and uncertainty, I choose to practice joy out of necessity. Because in the space between what empire destroys and what remains standing, something new is already growing.
Also see: The Gaza Call, Open Letter from Palestinian Christians to Western Church Leaders and Theologians (October 20, 2023), Response to: A Call for Repentance: An Open Letter from Palestinian Christians to Western Church Leaders and Theologians (April 2024), and Liminal Times, Critical Ties