Originally published at crisis magazine
I didn’t set out to learn about anti-Semitism from Palestinians. But I did.
My organization the Vulnerable People Project has worked for years to serve vulnerable communities everywhere, from Afghanistan to Chinese-occupied East Turkestan to Nigeria to Gaza. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the first step to defending the vulnerable is to see them clearly.
A characteristic event that makes a group of people vulnerable occurs when the powerful elites of the world turn their backs on them and even make it socially costly to stand with them. It’s then that you find you can’t defend them at all unless you really love them, because love is the only thing that makes those social costs worth it to you—win or lose.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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But if you can’t defend someone you don’t love, you also can’t love what you don’t see—or a people you don’t know.
Until I listened to the voices of my Palestinian friends, I did not see or know the Semitic people.
I thought I did. I was an American Catholic, steeped in the language of Catholic social teaching and the American
