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From the Inside, Looking Outside: Alternative Story Telling Initiatives among Palestinian Christians
Abstract
The first Intifada was a watershed for Palestinian Christians in their participation in the Palestinian national movement. Palestinian Christians were instrumental in organizing tax boycotts and non-violent resistance. They marked the beginning of organized Palestinian Christian activism, notwithstanding prior Christian support for the secular movement. Over the following twenty-five years, Christian organizations began communicating the plight of the Palestinian community at home and abroad. They provided a counterpoint to the Islamic movement that had arisen among the majority Muslim population, a form of deprivatization described by Jose Casanova. However, it also demonstrated that more independent forms of religious organization have become more assertive during the period of state consolidation, as seen by Toft, Philpott, and Shah in their recent work God’s Century. The inverse relationship between the decline in relative numbers of Christians and their growing significance as a voice for the Palestinian national movement shows how telling an alternative narrative has been a type of survival strategy for Christians. The first stage in this process was the push for indigenization of the clergy within both the Protestant and historic Christian churches. From 1990 to the early 2000s, almost all of these churches had replaced largely foreign hierarchies with indigenous leaders. Prominent Christian clergy, including Anglican Canon Naim Ateek and Melchite Archbishop Elias Chacour, arose to lead solidarity movements that would link the churches with the national movement. Others, such as Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah and the patriarchs of the other historic churches, began to embrace ecumenical initiatives that culminated with the Kairos Palestine declaration of 2009. As the indigenization of the clergy proceeded, their efforts at contextualization have equally fostered lay activism in support of the national movement. Today’s Palestinian Christians have taken up the reins of non-violent resistance, pursued alternative trade, and lead annual events that communicate the plight of Palestinians under occupation to the global community. Taking advantage of their position on the inside, as Israeli citizens or as residents living under occupation, these Christians have mobilized the national message to Christian communities that might otherwise remain hostile to the Palestinian narrative. In this paper, I will explore evidence from first-person accounts told by Palestinian Christian authors and the work of several years of interview research among Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank to demonstrate how organized groups of Palestinian Christians are casting their own narrative of the national movement to domestic and global audiences.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Minorities