Jacob Katumusiime
Beloved Christian,
The support of Israel’s assault on the sovereignty of other states has become another sacrament within our Christian tradition. A significant number of Ugandan Christians frame their support for Israel’s bombardment of Palestine as an act of worship. It is conceived as standing on the side of God. The Israel state is imagined as sacred and its violence against humankind as fulfilment of scripture. Neither the bodies of unarmed civilians trapped under the rubble nor the blood of countless more that engulfs the streets of Gaza, not even the breathless new born babies, and the bruised civilians still holding onto life are yet to evoke any productive engagement with the gospel Christ was to us. The callousness towards human life with which, for example, the Pentecostals engage the Israel/Palestine question is baffling. The Pentecostal pastors are now tradesmen of the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians. It surely cannot be the Israel state’s material donations to Uganda that have continued to rent support for the atrocities of Zionism.
In fact, most Ugandan Christians are united in their support for the Zionist state through an ultra-literalist reading of the Bible, where Jerusalem is invoked as the Christian’s final homeland. The paradox is that despite the Christian-Zionist’s modernist concept of Israel which constructs the Israelite as an ethno-religious identity fixed to a geography, the Ugandan Christian-Zionist again envisions self as an Israelite. Can the Zionist state ever imagine the ethnic Ugandans or the non-Jews as residents of Jerusalem? Yet still, how geographical is the concept of Israel that the Ugandan Christian-Zionists hold onto as their final destination? The Ugandan Christian-Zionist forgets about the early 1900s Uganda Scheme through which a proposal was being moved to relocate the Jewish population to a part of Uganda, that is now to be found in Kenya, as a homeland. Like many other subsequent proposals to relocate the Jewish population to parts of different countries, the Uganda Scheme was rooted in the modern nation-state logic of fashioning permanent political majorities and minorities in a given territory. However, both the Uganda Scheme and the Ugandan Christian’s imagination of self as an Israelite highlight the need to think beyond contemporary geographical Israel as an exclusive ethno-religious homeland for the Jews.
The Ugandan Christian’s imagination of Israel as an exclusive homeland for the Jews not only sustains the desecration of human life but also participates in the self-erasure from the anticipated Christians’ residence in Jerusalem. We need to remember that we are all children and candidates of migration. Beloved Christian, for how long shall you be blind to the extreme violence that your religious praxis animates? Whereas some Christians’ response has been resorting to silence, the silence of the Christian in the face of injustice is as much complicit as the various pro-Zionist solidarities. It is rather ironical that the individuals involved in the fight for Human Rights in Uganda, are the same individuals invested in the Zionist project which, like its Nazi antecedent, is a political ideology built on the oppression of those imagined as not part of the nation. Where did the tradition of equality in the sight of God go? Even democracy, the system of government that we all look to while still part of this terrestrial body politic, is popular for its promise of equality before the law. How come that when it comes to the Israel/Palestine question, we politicize the idea of the sovereignty of human identity?
Jacob Katumusiime, Ph.D. [@Mwine_Kyarimpa]
Email Address: [email protected]
The author is a Researcher at Makerere University
Img Src: Wikipedia
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