by Mark Lewis Taylor,
Remarks Prepared for Panel Presentation,
Sponsored by Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP)
Nassau Presbyterian Church, Princeton, NJ, May 3, 2026
(photo at right, IDF bulldozer walled-in & decaying. Art in Dheisheh Refugee camp, Palestine. By Mark Taylor, Nov. 2007.)
I first came into the U.S. struggle for Palestine in perhaps a peculiar way. I was a professor supervising our Princeton theology students in Guatemala in 1987. There, on a hot dusty day in the capital city, a new police jeep barked out orders over a jarring loudspeaker. I was startled: “What’s that?” My Guatemalan companion said, “Oh that’s part of the latest inflow of military, police and surveillance personnel from Israel to Guatemala’s military junta. As I looked more into it this over the years, I became aware that Israel and the U.S. were partners in the genocide against the Maya peoples of Guatemala, with Israel offering military and police aid, weapons, and personnel training, drawing from decades of its occupation and dispossession of Palestine. In fact, Guatemalan officials refer to the outcome of genocide in Guatemala with Israel’s help, as “Palestinization.” I’ve written and documented this in an article published in several venues, entitled “Israel and Genocide: Not Only in Gaza.”
The key point here is that my support for Palestine began with a critique of Israel as intimately related to U.S. imperial domination in Latin America, particularly Guatemala. For me, solidarity with Palestine was integrally bound up with solidarity with the Maya indigenous, and other peoples throughout the world. Israeli partnership with the U.S. in supporting genocide intersected the struggles against corporate subjugation of the global South, the racism of the U.S. toward global South peoples, the emerging struggle against global warming, and more.
This Guatemala connection offers just one glimpse of the “multidimensional” matrix that advocacy for Palestine involves. I want to underscore today that Palestine advocacy is not just a one-issue advocacy campaign. It cuts in many directions, running into a tangle of other modes of political repression. As such, advocacy for Palestine is a gift for peoples struggling for a comprehensive peace and justice.
Standing for Palestine means standing amid at least five antagonisms, and then mobilizing challenges to five powerful forces and systems.
1. For Palestinians –as Challenge to Israel and Its Military Backers
First, consider how our advocacy for Palestine vs. Israel’s settler colonialism quickly opens out into a broader political field. It is clear, I think, that in spite of the vulnerabilities of some in Israel, and the suffering by Israelis of war crimes in Israel of Oct 7, 2023, against some 800 of its citizens and foreign residents, as well as over 200 police and military personnel that Hamas attacked, it is Israel’s now genocidal retaliation that calls forth the primacy of our solidarity with Palestine. The solidarity must critique and resist the legacies of Israel’s one-hundred years of settler colonialism in Palestine, and nearly sixty years of illegal and belligerent occupation.
But because Israel is backed by billions of U.S. dollars—not just the $ 3.8 billion it receives every year since the G. W. Bush admin, but also the billions more that both Biden and Trump provided Israel for genocide in Gaza, now against Lebanon, Syria and Iran—we need to go through and beyond any binary of Palestine against Israel. This is well known. We are also led to take on the U.S. and other European militaries and ideologies that back the genocide and “Greater Israel’s” illegal and brutal expansionism. So, right here, our advocacy though centered on Palestine, by necessity is also a creative struggle with the U.S. military machine that provides the greatest amount of its military aid to Israel.
- For Palestine –as Challenge to the U.S. Zionism and Christian Zionism
Second, our criticism of U.S.-backed Israel will also put us into opposition to those who uncritically support U.S.-backed Israel, usually out of commitments to a Zionism and Christian Zionism.
Zionism is, yes, a political movement of late 19th and early 20th centuries. But it is rooted in European nationalism and in a long history of Christian belief in the need to restore Jews back to Palestine, a history that is at least as old as the 15th century. (I gave my “Farewell Lecture” as a retiring professor at Princeton Theological on “Christian Zionism,” because I see it as a powerful ideological and theological orientation that often becomes an ideology for uncritical support of U.S. Wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing going on in the West Bank (which I saw last summer of 2025 in my travel there, as well as first in 2007). Perhaps the biggest mis-step of Christian Zionism, is its identification of “Israel” in the bible with the Israeli state created in 1948. Our challenge, in this dimension, is to purge our Christian faith of this Zionism, and so free ourselves for a new relationship of U.S. Christians with Jewish advocates for Palestine here, and with Arab-Americans (whether of Muslim, Christian or other faith traditions). Thus, we would be rebuilding Christians’ relation to the “Holy Land” in a whole new way. You perhaps know of the some 20-30,000 who now work in or with the activist organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, which has made such a powerful contribution in the pro-Palestinian movement in the U.S. today. They are some of the most effective critics of Zionism and Christian Zionism, extending a long tradition of American Jewish criticism of Zionism. We need to join with them more than ever.
- For Palestinians –as Challenge to the Repression of Democracy in the U.S.
Third, when joining with the likes of Jewish Voice for Peace and others, we of course will experience abridgment of our rights to free speech, and often also of rights to assembly. Advocates have experienced this from the beginning and do to this day. We may be targeted by current and later U.S. authorities. This may seem unsettling, but the value of this is that advocacy for Palestine puts us on the front lines of today’s struggle to preserve and create democratic protections and processes in the U.S. We thereby come alongside others today engaged in the struggle of and for our Latinx neighbors, for immigrants from many other countries, especially from the global South, as well as for Palestinians and Jewish and other advocates for Palestine whose democratic rights will be infringed. This advocacy positions us alongside those fighting for democratic ideals for a multi-racial democracy. This is one reason why I occasionally say —counter-intuitively to many—that “To be pro-Palestinian is to be pro-American.” That is, to be pro-Palestinian is to work on advancing, concretely and with ever-new political efforts, democratic practices, especially for the most vulnerable in our midst today.
4. For Palestinians –as Challenge to Racial and Gender Injustice
Fourth, the struggle for Palestine against the joint power of the U.S. and Israel will also be an encounter with the hierarchical “social systems” that exploit differences set by notions of “race” and those of “gender and sex.” This is far more than “identity politics.” Race and gender/sex notions anchor not just individual identities, but also socially discriminatory and repressive processes. These processes are woven into political systems and meet us in our advocacy for Palestinians.
As to racism, Israel’s drive to represent European civilization in Palestine, usually with the strongest entitlements and privileges given to its European- descended Ashkenazi citizens, expresses and reinforces U.S. and European white supremacy, over not only Palestinians in Israel, but also over other Jews and Arabs in Israel, say from Iraq, Somalia, Algeria and elsewhere, who are routinely racialized as subhuman/unhuman “barbarians” or “savages” (see Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race, or Race and the Question of Palestine).
As to sexism, in Israeli settler colonial society, Israeli ideals of the settler “New Man” and “New Jew” often entailed masculinist assumptions about gender that are not emancipatory. Israel’s “New Man” often mainly recycled the image of the “Tough Jew” who in a frontier land, became warrior to fight the racialized savages, spreading notions of “masculinity” that pivoted around war-making heroics, often enshrining virulent masculinist assumptions (Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel, 72–9).
- For Palestinians –as Challenge to Imperio-Coloniality’s Global Economy
Fifth, and most comprehensively perhaps, advocacy for Palestine will take us into confrontation with the political structure of the current global economy that favors the global North nations that still reap advantages from centuries of their imperialism and colonialism. Palestinian workers have long been made subservient to what the U.S. has termed its “capitalist peace,” the terms of which are set by the dominant powers of world capitalism (think the IMF and WB, and the cooperative alliances of many of Western corporate entities). As a notable example, Palestinian workers were organized in the 1990s by Israel into “industrial zones,” where their wages and working conditions were to service wealthier countries’ corporations whose factories were in those zones. More recently, from Trump’s 2020 “Abraham Accords” to Jared Kushner’s 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” plan, continuing through to Trump’s 2025 “GREAT Trust” for Gaza and to his 2026 “Board of Peace” plans for a new “riviera” in Gaza), Palestinians are expected to trade away their self-determination as a people—indeed their very lives—to build up a militarily supported, capitalist network in the Middle East that the U.S. and many of Europe’s powers want for countering the geopolitical interests of Russia and especially China (Tariq Dana). But as we are seeing now, U.S.-backed Israel’s genocide in Gaza and genocidal warfare in Iran dramatize how building this capitalist economy—with Israel serving as an aggressively expanding military garrison for the U.S. in the region—is only a recipe for continuing war and repression. Creative resistance for Palestine challenges this this still-colonizing imperial economy. And Israel’s settler colonialism of Palestine is essential to this persisting imperial economy (Hanieh, Halper, Lowenstein). Taking on this capitalist project puts our advocacy for Palestinians in solidarity with all the earth’s vulnerable poor, especially across the global South, who must—in Africa (think Sudan and the Congo), Asia (think Myanmar), Latin America (think Guatemala and Argentina) and Oceania (think Israel’s role in U.S. RIMPAC naval exercises in the Pacific)—places where millions of people are in struggle for life against this exploitative political economy.
Matters of Conclusion
Yes, it is difficult for our movement groups for Palestine to be equally active simultaneously in each of these five dimensions. Certainly, this is true for individual activists. Nevertheless, it is the nature of this movement today, that both consciousness as well as actions, both touch and also are touched by these five dimensions. Again, this is a gift. We are called I think to take up these related challenges. This keeps our struggle open to more comprehensive, revolutionary thinking and work that must be ever creative and multidimensional.
I have been asked also to comment in closing, if ever so briefly, on “what to do.” Let me make just two suggestions.
(a) The first concerns a kind of spirituality, a deep practice that is found in many traditions of faith and conscience. I have written of this before as a need for artful re-membering of our dead, holding them close and fiercely keeping their names and stories alive. Remember that settler colonialism and imperial destruction count on their power to eliminate the lives of peoples whose lands are wanted by the powerful. They think they can raze the land, set aside and render its inhabitants “eliminated,” so that they can then raise their “temples” to capitalism, i.e. their new condominiums, beach resorts, corporate offices, hotel spas and restaurants. We must forever hold dear—in spite of our sadness, rage and even despair—these dead who have gone before us, who have been violently taken from us. In a way they are our strength, not only those now often spoken of like Hind Rajab and Refaat Alareer, but the many less well-known others whose stories and lives are ever important. In a way, we are learning the import and power of re-membering the dead from Palestinians themselves. Recall how they are now, with a resolute drama of resilience, are in the face of genocidal bombardment, gathering the shattered flesh, the dismembered portions, of their loved one’s bodies. They pull these from bombed craters of Gaza. This is movingly documented by Palestinian feminist and criminologist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.
(b) Second, let me beg your indulgence here if, as a non-member of your church, I dare to propose something specific about what this ecclesial institution might do. In the last two years of my professorship at PTS, I lobbied repeatedly for a public facing event, inclusive of some institutional statement from my theological institution, that would at least call for a ceasefire at that time (January 2024) and preferably also for an affirmation of Palestinian struggle and lives in the face of the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza. That did not materialize, and as an institution, with some small group and individual exceptions, we at PTS have been largely silent and complicit.
Might I suggest for your church, this institution, a better way? Why not hold a public facing event organized and sponsored by Nassau Church in the form of a press conference out on its front steps on the main street of Princeton, New Jersey, Nassau Street? It could be announced beforehand with a Press Release, with press packets given out or made available online to invited press reporters. The purpose would be to declare, to take a stand, a solidarity with Palestine.
The many regional activists for Palestine could be invited to gather on the street out front to support the press conference. The conference line-up itself would feature short speeches by pro-Palestinian activists from Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities—indeed, from more faith traditions if available. Then, other speakers might be added who can speak to one or more of the dimensions that are intrinsic to our multi-dimensional advocacy for Palestine.
The various outcomes of such an event may seem unsettling. Perhaps they induce apprehension. But I believe, if such an event were planned and carried out in way that is clearly rooted in Christian faith, while also being presented by inter-faith participants (Jewish, Muslim and more), and with the nuance provided by a multidimensional advocacy, there would be created a community movement for justice and peace that would be difficult for any of today’s authorities to counter. It would be a most-needed intervention. There is more to say on all this, I know, but there’s my suggestion for now.
BIBLIOGRAPHY for Five Dimensions of Palestinian Advocacy: select sources for reading more on the multidimensional approach.