This Advent, Chasing Justice partners with Red Candle Palestine to stand in solidarity with our Palestinian siblings, honor the people of the land where Jesus was born, and pray for peace and liberation in Palestine and beyond— for our liberation is bound up together.
In this first week of Advent, usually characterized by hope, Palestinian Christian Muna Nassar shares how she is wrestling with hope in the face of genocide and the hope that comes from “samud,” the Arabic word for steadfastness that her people have cultivated for centuries.
“For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what one already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
—Romans 8:24-25 (NRSVue)
In a world that is significantly different, changed, and drastically shattered, this Advent season comes as a time to reflect where humanity stands, where morality lies, and where one can find hope. This is usually the time that the world turns its attention toward the little town of Bethlehem for a story of hope and renewal. However, this Advent season arrives at a very different junction.
The past two years have been years of videos and soundbites of Palestinians in Gaza being mercilessly murdered in numerous unfathomable ways, while the whole world watches.
To witness how our people have been mercilessly murdered, obliterated, and wiped off the face of the earth with the most brutal weaponry, supported by a Western racist ideology of the Other, has inflicted a new level of fear that we Palestinians have never lived through before. Nothing can come close to imagining the enormity of suffering that Gazans have experienced all of their battered and brutalized lives, but for two years, a new level of ferocity has been unlocked.
Here, I find myself wrestling with the questions this has forced me to ask. Questions like: What is it about our suffering as Palestinians that no one is able to stop? How is it that our extermination is so normalized? And where can we ever find hope?
How can we describe this state of hopelessness when we see that there are no red lines that Israel will not cross? How can we feel that we have any control over anything when hospitals are bombed? When churches and mosques are bombed? When schools where people are sheltering are bombed? When people praying are being bombed?
How can we go back to a time when we could not have imagined patients would be shot while inside a hospital ward?
As they always have, our lives as Palestinians have been defined by apartheid and occupation. And Christmas arrives as yet another reminder to us and to the world of the story of hope—a story of continuation, a story of constant adaptation, and in constant construction. We, as Palestinian Christians, are not able to see hope, and have not been for a while now, but hope is a defining characteristic of our Christian faith, expressed both individually and collectively as a community.
The Christmas story is a reminder for humanity all over the world to reorient its compass and ask: What can we do to build hope, to reconstruct it collectively?
Sumud forms our collective Palestinian response to the everyday systematic oppressions that we go through.
It forms our stand and our journey toward what we cannot see.
It forms our inability to sit with hopelessness—it is a way of saying that hope will always have the final word.
Muna Nassar, a Palestinian Christian woman from Bethlehem, advocates for justice for the Palestinian people and has worked as a project coordinator for Kairos Palestine. In 2021, she obtained an MPhil in intercultural theology and interreligious studies from Trinity College Dublin. In December 2022, Muna joined the World Communion of Reformed Churches based in Hannover, Germany, as Executive Secretary for Mission and Advocacy. As a writer, she aims to articulate and represent the diversity of Palestine and Palestinians, highlighting their voice and agency.
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