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Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center

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Summary

A Jerusalem organisation adapting Latin American liberation theology to the Palestinian situation, instrumental in the politicized Christianity through which Munir and, a generation later, Hanna were mobilised in Lybarger’s account (Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile, PDF p.138, p.143-144).

Details

  • Sabeel essentially advocates Palestinian national independence and democratic governance in terms of the biblical mandate for justice, empowering adherents to contest both the Islamist construal of the Palestinian cause as an essentially Islamic matter and Zionist uses of the Bible to justify maximalist Jewish claims to the land (PDF p.138 / printed p.117).
  • The priest at the Jerusalem church where Munir’s family were members was a founder of Sabeel; he urged Munir to apply for a scholarship to a Chicago Protestant college whose Middle East Studies Center creator was also a supporter of the Palestinian liberation theology movement (PDF p.138 / printed p.117).
  • Hanna was taken by his uncle to Sabeel in Jerusalem in 2010, volunteered at its annual conference that year, visited al-Khalil (Hebron) and heard survivors of the Baruch Goldstein massacre at the Ibrahimi Mosque during Ramadan 1994, and visited Nazareth (PDF p.143 / printed p.122).
  • Sabeel’s book The Way of the Cross surveys how the occupation relates to the stopping places of the Stations of the Cross, each station representing a different part of the occupation (PDF p.143-144 / printed p.122-123).
  • Lybarger writes that Sabeel’s fusion of Jesus’s suffering with Palestinians’ tribulations, derived from Christ’s “option for the poor and the oppressed”, elided the historical Jesus’s Jewishness: “Sabeel’s Jesus was a Palestinian: his suffering was Palestinian suffering” (PDF p.144 / printed p.123).
  • Don Wagner was serving in a national leadership capacity for Friends of Sabeel North America, the network supporting Sabeel, when he spoke at AMP’s 2014 Nakba commemoration (PDF p.127-128 / printed p.106-107).
  • The text states at PDF p.143 that Sabeel is “the same organization that Munir, a generation earlier, had helped to establish”, while at PDF p.138 Munir’s priest is described as a founder and Munir as drawn into its framework; both statements are held as printed on the source page under Open questions.

Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile · Naim Ateek · Don Wagner · Palestinian liberation theology

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