Praying and fighting for justice means embracing the cross, the impotent power of God that frees humanity from systems that kill life. It also happened in South Africa.
Many attribute responsibility for the war unleashed by Israel in Gaza to the assault carried out by Hamas militants on 7 October 2023. A conflict that had already claimed 30,000 Palestinian victims at the end of February after the massacre of Israeli civilians.
According to this belief, Hamas has purposely brought upon itself and the Palestinian population the ire of Netanyahu and his government. Many others, however, maintain that this contrast has such a deep-rooted and devastating history that it has also put our faith in crisis.
But even in this dark moment, as Christians we are called to a resilience that can come from our faith, praying for peace and a solution to the conflict as quickly as possible, and doing our part in the fight for greater justice. While it is right to recognize South Africa’s traditional solidarity with Palestine, at the same time we are challenged to demonstrate the same spirit of Christian solidarity to those everywhere in the world who suffer from conflict.
It is, however, no coincidence that the South African government and a large part of its people have demonstrated closeness to the Palestinian people and filed a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice for crimes of genocide, ethnic cleansing and degradation of the land and people in Gaza.
Although separate and geographically distant, these two populations (South African and Palestinian) have a substantially shared history.
In 1948 the Nakba (the “catastrophe”) occurred, when over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their original lands, supplanted by the foundation of the national state of Israel. In the same year, in South Africa, after three centuries of colonialism, the National Party took power and established the apartheid system. Many governments, including South Africa’s historic partners, had turned a blind eye to these blatant violations of people’s rights and the violence.
Worse still, theologies have been formed to justify what happened and the suffering undergone by millions of people, to the point of claiming, in the case of Israel, that God did nothing other than restore the Promised Land to his people.
Similarly, in South Africa, apartheid was “theologized” as divine law ordained by God and embellished with Scriptures urging slaves to remain subject to their earthly masters. Although apartheid has been abolished in South Africa, what is happening in Gaza seems all too familiar to many South Africans: it takes them back to times gone by.
In times like these, faith in the eternal liberator God must remain firm. Pope Francis’ repeated invitation to Christians is to continue to pray and fight for justice: he speaks of the “courage of prayer”. As Christians, we are therefore called to pray and offer solidarity to the populations of Gaza, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and every other condition of conflict and denial of basic human rights.
African spirituality is one of hope. Despite the atrocities, Africans embodied resilience through their struggles and, in their faith, upheld the axiom: “Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” (Fabian Ashwin Oliver/South Africa) – (Photo: CC BY-SA 3.0/Wafa)
