CWs Speak Out for Ceasefire, Peace

On the anniversary of Dorothy Day’s birth, on November 8, Martha Hennessey shared a message that captured the joy and pain many were feeling. “Today is the 126th birthday of our beloved granny Dorothy Day,” she said, standing in the kitchen of Maryhouse, the site of Day’s death. “And we mourn and we yearn for the bodies and the rubble of Gaza. What will it look like 20 years from now?”

Hennessey expressed fear that Gaza—once a great port city that has been turned into a crowded internment camp for 2 million people on a once-gorgeous, now-blockaded and polluted Meditteranean coastline—would become annexed, turned into profitable real estate, and the pain of its inhabitants buried and forgotten. “Our whole world is built on the skeletons of children,” she said. 

“We pray that voices will be raised much louder than they are now in protest,” she added.

Catholic Workers have certainly been raising their voices—loudly—for peace. Since 1977, November 29 has been an international day of solidarity with the people of Palestine. And since 1980, it has also been the day that Dorothy Day died.

In 1967, when Martin Corbin was managing editor of The Catholic Worker, the first large essay dedicated to the conflict was printed in the paper. It was written by a foreign correspondent, and reprinted from a Colorado newspaper, following the June 1967 Six-Day War that began Israel’s long occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Throughout the 1980s, the newspaper ran more articles about the increasingly entrenched apartheid state of occupation.

Dorothy Day died seven years before the first Palestinian intifada began in 1987. But several Catholic Workers, including Jim Forrest, who co-founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship, and Rosemary Lynch, the co-founder of the Nevada Desert Experience, studied in Palestine during the 1980s. The 1980s ushered the Christians of Palestine into a new awareness of their historical context and the liberation God desired for their people. The first intifada was largely practiced according to the techniques of nonviolent resistance—labor strikes, sit-ins, marches, and protests. 

This fall, from St. Louis to London, Catholic Workers have walked with Jewish groups and pacifist organizers to protest the United States’ blocking of U.N. resolutions for a ceasefire, to protest Boeing’s supply of weapons to Israel, and to stand in solidarity with Jewish and Palestinian groups advocating for peace and justice. 

“Right now, I’ve been so wanting to know how to bilocate,” said Mary Anne Grady Flores, of the Ithaca Catholic Worker Community. “My spirit wants to be in Palestine and in Gaza right now.” 

Grady Flores has never been to Gaza, but, in the early aughts, she spent time with peace activists in the village of Bi’lin, the site of the Palestinian documentary Five Broken Cameras, which depicts the violence of settler activity in the West Bank and documents the loss a community suffers. And in Hebron, Grady Flores recalls attending Mass at Sabeel, the influential ecumenical liberation theology center in East Jerusalem founded during the first intifada. There, at Thursday Mass, she would often see Mordecai Vanounou, the storied peace activist who exposed Israel’s nuclear program and was rewarded with eighteen years in jail.

In October, following the Hamas attack, Grady Flores worked with a group of Catholic Workers and Jewish peace activists in Ithaca to organize a group called Ceasefire Now-Central New York. They traveled to Syracuse’s federal office building and held a vigil of prayer and mourning, reciting the kaddish and blowing the shofar. Grady Flores, who raised her children among Jewish neighbors and grew up in the Bronx among Holocaust survivors, finds great beauty and spiritual solace in the rhythms of Jewish prayer and traditions of life. The group roughly a dozen stayed for two hours, praying before the police disbanded them. On November 20, Grady Flores also joined a group of 250 in Ithaca in marching for peace. 

Grady Flores noted the importance of language in describing the conflict. “I will not call it a war. It’s an attack, it’s a genocidal attack,” she said. 

The consensus in international law is that Gaza, like the West Bank, has been occupied by Israel since 1967. Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that Israel ceased occupying Gaza in 2005. But the facts on the ground, such as Israel’s control of Gaza’s water and electricity, its border, and its frequent military incursions into Gaza (31 in 2023 before October 7) and the international legal community differ from Israel’s assessment. It is impossible for an occupying army to wage a war—in the legal sense—on the people it occupies. And it is illegal for the army to attack the people it occupies and owes protection to under international law.

“When I went over there, I barely knew who Palestinians were,” recalled Steven Saint Thomas, who spent a year in the Middle East in 1980 after graduating from journalism school. In trying to discern what personalism demanded of him in this situation, Saint Thomas decided to write about his own visit to Gaza, his stay on a kibbutz, and the stories of the persons he met in the region. Saint Thomas writes under his honorific, Abu Francis, which is a custom in Palestinian culture that gives the father the name of his first-born son. 

After spending time at the L.A. Catholic Worker and the San Diego Catholic Worker in the ’80s and ’90s, Saint Thomas studied permaculture in Colorado and his wife recently relocated to Northern California in 2017 to start an urban farm, which is more than 7,000 miles from the Gaza Strip, but he sees as a first step toward creating a sustainable and peaceful world. Even so, Saint Thomas is disturbed and saddened by the increasingly violent rhetoric, support of violence, and deepening polarization on the issue of Palestine and others. “It’s a sad time for dialogue,” he said.

Mike Bremer, who lived at St. Francis House in Chicago for several years with his wife, said that when he attended a protest at the Israeli Consulate building in Chicago, the protestors were mostly Jewish and mostly young people. “They thanked me for being there, which was a first for me,” he said, chuckling. 

Bremer had been to Israel and Palestine once, in 1992, on a peace march from Haifa to Jerusalem. He and his fellow marchers spent most of the time they were meant to be marching in jail. And they left Israel with letters banning them from re-entry. 

Bremer said the story he remembers most vividly from the interrupted march was when he was with their driver, Ibrahim, as he was pulled over by an Israeli police officer. At first, Ibrahim thought that he was being stopped because of his West Bank license plates, but when he got out of the car, the police officer gave him a large hug. And Bremer watched as they spoke in a mixture of Arabic and Hebrew to each other. 

“Who was that?” Bremer recalls asking Ibrahim. Ibrahim explained that after studying in the University of Florida and chairing a student organization in support of Palestine, he returned to Palestine and was immediately arrested by the Israeli authorities. He spent seven years in prison. That police officer was a guard in the prison with whom Ibrahim developed a relationship, entrusting him with notes for his family outside prison, and sharing conversation.

For Bremer, that story illustrates the power of dialogue to bring human hearts together when political structures pit them against each other. He recalls Ibrahim saying: “The lesson I learned in prison was to keep talking to our enemies. We can’t give up talking to our enemies.”