God Under the Rubble: Religion as Resistance in Gaza
Winner of the North Star Magazine Best Non-Fiction Writing Award (Spring 2024)
(Note: This essay was originally published in the Spring 2024 edition of North Star Magazine.)
They say the night is darkest before dawn.
The all-too-familiar buzz of my alarm jolts me awake. I let myself sit on the edge of my bed for a moment, my groggy mind teetering on the precipice of falling back asleep. Whispery strands of moonlight cast silhouettes against the walls of my dorm room. Outside my window, Rugar Street is silent, still, and soulless.
It is 4:30 a.m. on a Ramadan night. My friends and I sometimes joke that this feels like waking up in the Twilight Zone — a sliver of time and space when nothing feels quite real, as if stuck in a crack between worlds. The lingering pre-sun quietness renders the typically bustling college campus an eerie liminal space of sorts. Yet during Ramadan, this silence feels neither stifling nor spooky. It feels liberating. It feels like I’ve shrugged off the plastic artifices of a materialistic, man-made planet and stumbled upon the world as it once was, as it was meant to be. Gone are the contrived anxieties and worldly responsibilities that slip away into the blackness of the late night. They will inevitably come back up with the sun, but for a couple hours, in this peaceful calmness, I can hear God a little better.
I wolf down a box of fried chicken and rice — carbs make it easier to fast, as my father had taught me — and gulp down several bottles of water until I can almost feel it sloshing around inside me. This is, after all, my last food and drink for the next fourteen hours or so. Around 5:30 a.m., my phone buzzes again to signal Fajr, the first of the five daily prayers. I perform the obligatory full-body cleansing — wudu — under a warm shower, running my fingers through my scalp and between my toes, as if literally rinsing out the impurities of my soul. By the time I make it back to my room and unravel my prayer mat onto my floor, the blackness of night has started to give way to the blue and orange hues of dawn.
Allah, I offer you two rakats of Fajr. Hands to my temple. Arms crossed. Bow. Kneel. Forehead to the ground.
The prayer ends with facing to your right and then to your left, and saying Assalamu Alaikum wa rahmatullah: “Peace and the mercy of God be upon you.” It is meant to be said to the people praying on either side of you, as they would in a mosque. The oneness and unity of the global Muslim community, irrespective of creed and color, is a crucial principle of Islam. You pray shoulder-to-shoulder with humans you have never met but have a duty to love and protect all the same. This soaring feeling of togetherness was what Malcolm X described in his letter from Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, in his famed autobiography: “ [During my pilgrimage] I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept on the same rug — while praying to the same God — with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. . . We were all truly the same.” So powerful and life-changing was this experience that it directly led to him disavowing his ties to antisemitic, racially divisive organizations and embracing a more holistic respect for all of humanity for the rest of his life. The global Muslim community, the ummah, is one family, with a responsibility to uphold the dignity of humanity as a whole.
Despite praying in the dark solitude of my dorm room, thousands of miles from my homeland of Bangladesh, this oneness is something I feel on a profound level. Maybe it is precisely because I am so far from home and yearn for the warm familiarity of family. Maybe it is because the Internet Age has allowed me to connect with Muslims observing Ramadan alongside me in places as far away as Brazil, Rwanda, Norway, and Japan — cultivating a sense of unity that was simply not possible a generation ago. Maybe it is because I only wholly embraced religion in college, and I am now eager to explore and embrace a part of my identity I had stifled for years.
Maybe a combination of all of these factors has forced me to grapple with a deeply unnerving reality. I am praying in the comfort of my dorm room, literally bloated from the food and water I had just consumed, fully expecting to return to the warmth of my bed soon. I will fast comfortably throughout the day, eventually breaking it at sunset with a large meal I will share with my friends. I will call and wish my family on Eid, a day of celebration. I am living in joy. I am living in luxury. I am living in safety. I am living.
And yet I call myself part of the ummah, the worldwide family of Muslims, when the same month of Ramadan has ushered in new phases of untold, unfathomable horror for so many. Gaza has been described rightfully as a living hell. It is currently an apocalyptic, nightmarish landscape. The silence that I said made me feel closer to Allah is a luxury that Gazans cannot afford — their nights are humming with the sounds of airstrikes, sirens, and screams. Their darkness is not limited to the late hours of the night like mine — the military blockade on their land has cut off power and plunged hospitals into blackness, forcing them to salvage electricity by deciding which dying patient needs it most. ICUs have gone dark, killing infants in their incubators. Gazans will not be breaking their fast at sunset like I do — seventy percent of the population is experiencing a severe famine. Malnutrition, starvation, and thirst have already claimed lives beyond count. Aid workers cannot bring in enough food because their trucks are being bombed. Innumerable Palestinian children will not be celebrating with their families on Eid — the rate at which they are being orphaned is beyond any modern comparison. Doctors in the region have a new term known as WCNSF (“Wounded Child, No Surviving Family”) due to how prevalent this is. According to the UN, more Gazan children have been slaughtered since October 2023 than have died in the last four entire years of global conflict. Combined.
In the past six months, the attacks on Gaza have produced pictures and videos no one should ever have to see. Human beings with limbs and faces blown off. The mutilated corpse of a young girl dangling from a window. Young children trying to wake up their dead parents. One that has particularly haunted me is a video of a family of girls wailing helplessly from a rooftop as their father burns alive on the ground below. I could not bring myself to turn the audio on; I knew their screams would ring in my ears forever.
Seeing these every day has a strange effect. It leaves a numbness that lingers in your bones. You realize suddenly that the world works differently than how you thought it did. The “international community” has not protected these people, and nor has the UN or its dozens of conventions; and there is no reason to believe they will protect you. After all, what stopped you from having been born in Gaza instead of wherever you were? Sheer, blind, unfeeling luck. It is nauseating and infuriating to watch what is happening, yet averting your gaze brings excruciating guilt. You can’t look and you can’t look away. I call myself a Muslim and part of the ummah, and yet I am not living the same Ramadan as them. I am not even living the same basic reality as them. When I have never experienced anything even similar to the mass killings in Gaza, trying to “put myself in their shoes” becomes futile. Empathy becomes impossible. It gives way to disbelief.
Given the barren hellscape that occupied Gaza has become, it is easy to expect a feeling of defeat, nihilism, and numbness from the Palestinian people. Faith in an all-powerful, all-loving God does not come easily when your community has been bombed to dust and literal shreds of corpses are strewn around you. And who can blame the nonbelievers? What would I say to a teenager carrying his brother’s remains in a plastic bag to reaffirm that God loves him and is watching over him? During what must feel like the actual end of the world, there are no sermons to preach to a community that has had their very humanity ripped from their souls.
Yet — there are. There are sermons. We know this, because the people of Gaza still pray. Some of the most remarkable images I have seen coming out of this war are those of Palestinians lined up in prayer, just like I am every night, but beside the remnants of their destroyed homes. They pray beside unexploded missiles. They pray beside death and destruction. They scribble prayers and declarations of faith into walls as they await the next airstrike. Muslim and Christian Palestinians alike congregate in houses of worship that may be bombed at any second (which is illegal under international law, but so is just about everything else that has been done to Gaza). Mosques and churches, with their walls crumbling and roofs blown open, still host rows upon rows of worshippers as they reflect on what is being done to their home. Though their religious identities are attacked, demonized, and used against them, they persist in their belief.
Even in what may be their final moments, the people of Gaza have not turned away from their faith. On the contrary, it has become all the more important — it has become a symbol of life, of resistance, of hope. They still believe. They still survive. They still fight.
Religion has become an inextricable part of this hellish conflict. It has been weaponized, used wrongly to spread hate and propaganda and justify bloodshed. It has been targeted, with houses of worship desecrated and reduced to rubble, sometimes with worshipers still inside. It has been erased, with the existence of Palestinian Christians and non-Muslims frequently (and deliberately) ignored to paint all of Gaza as a monolithic, homogenous nest of Islamist fanatics. But it has also served as a beacon of hope. Muslim countries across the world have led the charge in advocating for their ummah in Palestine. Christians, Jews, and non-Muslims of all backgrounds have invoked their religion to support Gazans and rally their communities, speaking to the true oneness of all humans regardless of faith. Palestinians in Gaza have continued praying, worshiping, and celebrating, expressing their faith as a form of unshakeable resistance against the violence that surrounds them.
As the Palestinian soul continues to endure in the face of massacre, famine, and brutalization, it has become a moral responsibility — and truly the least one can do — to explore and appreciate the spiritual fortitude we are witnessing in Gaza.
*
Islam has always been an intractable element of the Palestinian movement for self-determination. Ever since the mid-20th century, some of the loudest voices for this campaign have belonged to Muslim leaders, writers, and thinkers. Even in the Western world, activism for Palestine has been largely pushed forward by Muslim icons such as Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, who enmeshed the Palestinian cause with their Islamic values as well as the Black civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s. This intersectionality, which was based on shared goals of social democracy and anti-colonialism, is what brought other Black leaders such as Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin into the movement for Palestine. The Institute of Arab American Affairs, started in 1944, also helped bring this cause to the forefront of the national consciousness through the efforts of Muslim diplomats and representatives.
Palestine is a historically and culturally Islamic land, having been shaped by its people’s Muslim identity for centuries. Gaza’s population is 99% Muslim, and religion has played a pivotal role in the region’s politics, governance, and ways of life. The Palestinian liberation and nationalist movements have long invoked Islamic principles, rallying its people around a central religious identity that has long been attacked, misrepresented, and outright suppressed by occupying forces. Unfortunately, fanatic and extremist groups like Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades (which led the tragic and violent October 7th attacks), have co-opted Islamic messaging and aesthetics to justify acts of barbarism. It should be remembered that the actions taken by such radical groups do not represent Islam and fundamentally contradict the religion’s core principles. In addition, and contrary to what many defenders of genocide have argued, the people of Gaza do not overwhelmingly support Hamas. The group was unpopular when it took power through a violent war in 2007, and according to polls taken as recently as last year, they remain unpopular, having remained in power largely due to the lack of any alternative political parties in the region.
The Islamic faith of Palestine and much of its supporters has long invited blistering attacks seeped in bigotry and racism. The investigative magazine The Intercept has labeled this trend as “anti-Palestinianism”, noting that such rhetoric often demonizes and attacks Muslims to undermine the Palestinian cause. Anti-Islam and anti-Arab sentiment has festered in the wake of this ongoing war, seen viscerally in hateful speech, dehumanization of Muslims, and violent crimes. At Netanya College in Israel, hundreds of attackers attempted to break into Palestinian students’ dormitories while yelling “Death to Arabs.” In the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recorded a 172% increase in anti-Muslim bias this year, corresponding to a surge in similar Islamophobic hate crimes recorded by the FBI since October 2023. Across the world, mosques and Muslim-owned businesses have been vandalized in record numbers, with perpetrators seemingly blaming the current Middle Eastern crisis on Islam. Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Muslim child in Chicago, was stabbed 26 times and murdered by a landlord who screamed “You Muslims must die” at him and his mother. In November 2023, the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University published a report called “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse,” which noted that “the portrayal of Muslims as loyal to terrorists and presumptively antisemitic is a well-worn image” used to demonize the religion and its adherents.
Islam has long been used as to represent savagery and barbarism in the conversation on Palestine. A 2012 ad campaign by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) headlined the phrase “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel, Defeat Jihad.” Jihad is an Islamic term for the spiritual battle against sin, although it has been treated as a synonym for terrorism by those who know nothing about Islam. In such propaganda, the Islamic religion has become a shorthand for evil incarnate. Anti-Palestinian dehumanization frequently includes the deriding of the Islamic faith. Videos posted by the IDF themselves show soldiers mockingly wearing Islamic clothing, stolen from the homes of Gazans they have displaced. A particular video showed an IDF soldier defecating in a ransacked house in Gaza with an Islamic prayer mat deliberately placed on the bathroom floor, considered highly insulting within any religion. A deeply disturbing trend has emerged on TikTok in which anti-Palestinian account post videos derogatorily mimicking suffering and starving Gazans. Often, they are dressed as stereotypical Muslims and donning Islamic cultural clothing.
There is little doubt that Islam has long been a flashpoint for racist, hateful attacks aimed at dehumanizing Palestinians. This has only worsened with the waging of the current war; this virulent anti-Muslim violence has already cost innocent lives outside Gaza as well. However, despite the constant mocking and targeting of their Islamic faith, the Palestinian spirit has shown no signs of giving in. Ever since the beginning of the military campaign in Gaza, ever since the first bombs began dropping, the people of Palestine have only turned closer to their religion as a source of communal hope, comfort, and resistance. They have persisted in their faith despite it all. It is beyond remarkable how resilient Gazans have been in their beliefs even as they suffer the deadly, genocidal consequences for it.
Consider, for example, the prayers of Gaza. The first Friday prayer, known as jummah, of Ramadan was held right beside the remnants of a mosque destroyed by the invading military. As described by Reuters News Agency, “scores of worshippers knelt in rows . . . by the wreckage of the al-Farouk mosque in Rafah, laying out their prayer mats in the shadow of a white minaret marking all that remains of the otherwise flattened building.” The name “al-Farouk” had been painted onto a nearby structure, since the mosque itself had been decimated.
The sheer power of this image cannot be overstated. If this were a work of fiction — which, believe me, every Gazan there wishes it was — the symbolism would be criticized as too heavy-handed. These people, whose homes had been eviscerated and families torn apart and entire cultural identities trampled upon, remain steadfast in prayer next to the remnants of their communities. Their houses of worship, bombed to dust, still provide the shade and comfort in which they practice their faith. The airstrikes had, after all, missed their true target. They had flattened homes and schools, but the Palestinian spirit lived on.
“The whole land is the land of God, so we can pray anywhere,” said Abu Jehad, a lawyer who had been forced to flee his home due to the occupation. “The occupation can’t deprive us of that.”
Even outside Gaza, the Muslims of the region congregated for prayer in an active display of resistance and protest. In Jerusalem, about 100,000 Muslims arrived at the Al-Aqsa mosque for prayer. On a usual year, only about half this number would have showed up at this mosque, which is the third holiest site in Islam. But this was no usual year. In an act of defiance against violent threats and military occupation, worshippers gathered to show their spirit and togetherness, according to Mamoun Abasi, a Palestine Red Crescent Society spokesman. Police forces of the occupying government attacked the worshippers with tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets, injuring more than 600, but the prayers continued.
Apart from prayer itself, the people of Gaza have refused to cast aside the cultural customs of Ramadan. In Islam, one is excused from fasting if they suffer from health complications or malnutrition. This is the case for almost a million people in Gaza, in the looming shadow of a UN-recognized famine. Dozens have already died from starvation in recent weeks. However, in an astounding display of faith, many Gazans are embarking on excruciating fasts regardless, out of pure religious commitment and discipline. 45-year-old Sabah Sbeta told NBC News she is “grateful for what she has this Ramadan and plans to fast”, rooting her devotion in the Islamic concept of tawakkul, a steadfast belief in and reliance on God.
“Thank God, lord of all the worlds, for everything. Oh, God, there is no objection to your ruling,” she recited a prayer.
Others recognize the sheer depravity of the situation they have been forced into, yet they celebrate what they have and remain trustful in Allah. As Gazan refugee Hussein Owda said, “We are doing our best just to survive. We don’t have the luxury of anything else. God is sufficient for me, and He is the best disposer of affairs.”
Iftar, which is the breaking of the fast at sunset, is meant to be a joyous occasion and shared with family, friends, and loved ones. Some of my fondest childhood memories include gathering around a table with my family during Ramadan, watching the sun creep below the horizon and waiting with bated breath to hear the first words of the evening prayer outside. Our throats are parched and stomachs rumbling, but the spiritual discipline honed by fasting provides a different sense of fulfillment. As soon as the prayer signals the beginning of iftar, our hands dart across the vibrantly decorated table for the glasses of cold lemonade and bowls of warm stew.
Gazans during this military onslaught can only reminisce about enjoying such calm, loving iftars with their families before the killings began. The blockades on food aid have resulted in mass famine, making it impossible to even “break” a fast properly. Whatever food is still available in local markets have skyrocketed in price due to catastrophic inflation, placing them out of reach out of the destitute and displaced masses. Many Gazans, as documented by various news agencies and humanitarian organizations, have resorted to eating literal grass and animal feed. The families that have been lucky enough to scrounge together scraps of food — usually far less than what they need — have iftars among the remains of flattened buildings and bombed neighborhoods.
Yet the spirit of iftar, astoundingly, has endured in many forms. A remarkable series of images by photographer Ali Jadallah shows families smiling around a makeshift table of small plates of food, breaking their fast amid the rubble of their former homes. Yes, they are surrounded by the evidence of the hellish havoc that has been wreaked on them for the past six months. Yes, many of their iftar tables are missing loved ones who had been killed in the onslaught, and their absence surely casts an excruciating shadow upon the meal. But these images show the determination of the Gazan people to observe one of the core traditions of the Islamic faith while doing their best to salvage whatever meaning, hope, and joy they are able to find in a landscape that reeks of desolation and death. I cannot help but be struck by how vastly different their iftar circumstances are from mine, how deprived they are of the most basic human resources, and yet their Ramadan experience attests to the rawest and most unfiltered truths of Islam: the endless value of faith, perseverance, and spiritual fortitude.
The Islamic faith of so many of the people of Gaza has become more than just a religious identity. Despite the physical violence and global culture of hate that has enveloped the Islamic Palestinian narrative — or perhaps because of it — simply being Muslim and exercising the pillars of the faith has become a show of survival, persistence, and resistance. The families of Gaza have refused to allow the hellish onslaught they have been subjected to, to diminish their faith or undermine generations of cultural practice. The endurance of their religion has sent a clear message to themselves, their attackers, and the world: Gaza lives on.
*
“There are no Christians in Gaza. There are no churches in Gaza.”
Or so said Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, as she attempted to deny the Israeli government’s murder of two unarmed Christian women in Gaza on the grounds of a Catholic church, which constitutes a war crime. Of course, she is blatantly wrong, and she likely knows it. Christianity has existed and flourished in Gaza since the beginning of the religion itself, over two millennia ago. The Deputy Mayor is simply parroting a common propagandist lie conjured to ignore the Christian communities of Palestine and paint the entire region as a fanatic Islamist hellhole of intolerance and authoritarianism. This is a widely used farce employed within anti-Palestine rhetoric.
The history of Christianity in Gaza can be traced back to literally the times of Jesus. As described in the Bible, Philip the Apostle traveled down the road from Jerusalem to Gaza to spread the word of Jesus’s crucifixion. The Church of Saint Porphyrius, the oldest church in Gaza, has housed Christian worshipers since the 5th century, AD. Today, the over 1,000 Christians living in the region “speak of feeling an ethnic connection to Gaza, as Palestinians, and a spiritual one, as Christians”, according to The New Yorker. “Relations between Christians and Muslims in Gaza are peaceful. . . the parish emphasizes the participation of parishioners in interfaith outreach for elderly people and the poor; Christian schools, including a primary school run by Sister Nabila, educate thousands of Muslim children.”
Yet the Christian community has often been deliberately erased from the narrative when Westerners discuss Gaza. The anti-Palestine lobby would like to paint a picture of the region as an authoritarian, illiberal breeding ground of Islamist terrorism that stamps out religious tolerance. Thus, it is convenient to simply not mention Gaza’s thriving Christian community that has lovingly co-existed and cooperated with the region’s Muslims for generations upon generations. That same Christian community has been bombed, attacked, and massacred by Israeli attacking forces during the onslaught on Gaza since October 2023. Other Christian institutions in the region include the Catholic Holy Family Church and the Gaza Baptist Church. The first of those churches recently released a video of parish children praying with the audible sounds of bombs and airstrikes in the background.
The Church of Saint Porphyrius, which is also the third oldest church in the entire world, has been home to refugees of all religions during the military bombing of Gaza. It served the same purpose in 2014 during a similar Israeli attack. On October 19th, 2023, this church was bombed by the IDF, killing 18 people, including several children. The Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem issued the following statement in response: “Targeting churches and their institutions, along with the shelters they provide to protect innocent citizens, especially children and women who have lost their homes due to Israeli air strikes on residential areas over the past 13 days, constitutes a war crime that cannot be ignored.” The Reverend Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Lutheran minister in Bethlehem, directly spoke out against the wholesale slaughtering of Christians and Muslims alike in Gaza: “To our European friends, I never, ever want to hear you lecture us on human rights or international law again. We are not white, I guess — it does not apply to us according to your own logic.” (The IDF faced zero accountability, but that should go without saying.)
The attacks on Gaza have so severely endangered the already small Christian population that the political magazine The Nation published the headline, “Will This Be the Last Christmas for Gaza’s Christian Communities?” The essay reads, “Gaza has some of the world’s oldest Christian communities, yet Palestinian Christians say Israeli strikes put them ‘under threat of extinction.’”
Just like Muslim Palestinians, Christians in Gaza have faced the nightmarish horrors of the genocidal campaign in the region, with the added abuse of being deliberately erased from the narrative by their attackers. And just like the Muslim community, the Christians of Palestine are leaving a legacy of fearless resilience as they continue to congregate, pray, and practice their faith while the bombs drop around them. In a similar way as Ramadan, Christian religious observances have also taken on a special meaning and political significance during these times.
Christmas 2023 in Gaza exemplified this. Palestinian Christian Ola Musleh wrote in USA Today that “Christian leaders here canceled the celebrations in solidarity with Gaza. We can’t celebrate until our friends and colleagues in Gaza, both Muslim and Christian, are safe and can celebrate Christmas with us.”
Musleh lives in Bethlehem, the historical birthplace of Jesus, and the cancellation of Christmas in literally the site of the birth of Christ should underscore the urgency with which Christians in the region are resisting the genocide of their neighbors in Gaza. As described by The New York Times, a Lutheran church in Bethlehem made a special Christmas arrangement in protest of the war: “The baby Jesus — wrapped in a keffiyeh, the black-and-white checkered scarf that has become a badge of Palestinian identity — is lying not in a makeshift cradle of hay and wood. Instead, he lies among the rubble of broken bricks, stones and tiles that represent so much of Gaza’s destruction.”
“God is under the rubble in Gaza, this is where we find God right now,” said Reverend Munther Isaac, the outspoken pastor of the church.
Christian observances in the region have taken a subtly different approach to protesting the genocide than Muslim celebrations like Ramadan. The Islamic communities, which make up the vast majority of Gazans, have showcased their resilience by continuing to observe Ramadan and doing what they can to practice their culture despite the ceaseless bombing of their home. Christian communities, which make up a smaller portion of Gaza but are much more prominent in neighboring regions like Jerusalem and Bethlehem, have instead opted to cancel their celebrations in a show of solidarity with Palestinians. In both cases, however, the cultural importance of religious faith has been underscored to make a broader point about the ongoing genocide and protest the attacks of the foreign occupiers. Both communities have expressed outrage and resistance through expressions of faith and religious customs. In a region of the world that is so deeply entrenched in Abrahamic tradition — and is the birthplace of it — such expression is vital and has a profound and lasting impact.
As the prominent Christian Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist Jonathan Kuttab penned in his moving essay in Truthout: “Perhaps that is the message of both Easter and Ramadan. It’s one not just of peace — but also justice. It’s the true prayer of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and all of Palestine/Israel. It’s the hope that springs eternal — that after a dark, cold winter of suffering and distress, there will one day be a spring of life, resurrection and peace for all of God’s children in this land we call Holy.”
*
I am writing this essay on the 6th of April, 2024. It is the last week of Ramadan. Eid is scheduled to be on the 10th, although the exact day will depend on the sighting of the moon (Ramadan is determined by the lunar calendar).
Over the last month, I have observed the most sacred month of Islamic year. I have fasted and prayed alongside billions of Muslims worldwide. I have woken up at ungodly hours to eat and offer prayers, and I have broken my fast with my closest friends. Ramadan is a month of self-reflection and self-awareness, with the goal of improving yourself as a human being.
I prayed right before I began writing this final section of this essay, around late dawn. While I knelt on my rug in submission to Allah, I couldn’t help but think of the images of Gazans doing the same thing as me, except next to the apocalyptic remains of their mosque. They bow in prayer amid the bombed rubble of their homes, schools, libraries, and offices. They are surrounded by evidence of the targeted destruction of their community. They do not know when they will be next.
As I prayed, I also thought about the minority of Christians in Gaza who had been intentionally removed from the conversation surrounding this genocide in order to further portray Palestine as some Islamist hellhole. The frustration they must feel — belonging to one of the oldest Christian communities on the entire planet and still being ignored, sidelined, and bombed. They are watching the third oldest church in the world, housing refugees of all religions, become an illegally targeted death zone.
I observe religion as a choice and out of personal belief. I do so in a place of comfort and safety. These Muslims and Christians of Gaza are doing so in a war zone. They are praying while surrounded by the sound of gunfire and bombs dropping. For them, religion has become about survival — the survival of their culture, their history, their people. It has become about withstanding a genocidal military campaign. It has become about showing the world they are still alive and will continue living.
I wrote this essay out of a sense of moral responsibility as well as admiration. I have immeasurable respect and pride for these Muslim and Christian communities who have a spirit that has persevered even under conditions akin to hell. In a region where all humanity seems to have been lost and forgotten, we instead see the greatest and strongest humanity can be.
Further Reading
● https://www.cage.ngo/articles/the-role-of-islamophobia-in-the-genocide-in-gaza
● https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240105-israel-palestine-and-rising-islamophobia/
● https://theintercept.com/2024/03/18/muslim-islamophobia-palestinians/
● https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ramadan-gaza-palestinians-israel-war-famine-rcna142785
● https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-dilemma-of-gazas-christians
● https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/1/under-israeli-attack-who-are-the-christians-of-gaza
● https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/23/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-bethlehem-christmas.html
● https://thenation.com/article/world/gaza-christmas-christian-communities/
