Editor’s (admin’s) note. Copy of a handout I put together for Sundays@6, the adult faith formation book study group Debi and I co-facilitate at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. I composed it in WordPress so I could easily create hypertext links as I drafted it.
In October 2023, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America renamed its longstanding program of “accompaniment, advocacy and awareness-raising” with Lutherans in Palestine and Israel at the behest of ELCA’s partners in the region. Formerly known as “Peace, Not Walls,” it now has an Arabic name — Sumud, which is hard to translate but means steadfastness and/or resilience.
Since we are discussing a series of videos titled Sumud: The Way of Jesus in our Sundays@6 adult faith formation group, we thought it might be useful to explore the concept in more detail. ELCA explains it at https://www.elca.org/sumud like this:
Sumud is an Arabic word meaning “steadfastness.” The term is widely used by Palestinian theologians and others to signify Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people. That resistance takes the form of nonviolent advocacy for political change as well as “resistance through existence,” embodied in education, social work, the arts and one’s relationships with the land and community.
One more word needs definition. In this context, “accompaniment” refers to a program of the World Council of Churches known as the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel. An “international, ecumenical programme that recruits and despatches observers […] to several Palestinian towns and villages to monitor the interaction between the Palestinian inhabitants and the Israeli military.”
In addition to sending observers to “to offer protection through nonviolent presence” in the occupied territories and reporting violations of international law, EIPPA “support[s] Israeli and Palestinian peace activists.” It was founded by Bishop Munib Younan of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, among others.
The following summary barely scratches the surface. Especially illuminating is an article by Alexandra Rijke, now of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and Toine Van Teeffele of the Arab Educational Institute in Bethlehem based on focus groups conducted at Bethlehem’s Sumud Story House, within sight of the Israeli separation wall.
Sumud and a spirituality of prayer
In 2015, Bishop Younan, then president of the Lutheran World Federation, discussed the philosophy of sumud at a theological colloquium in Bethlehem, stressing the “need of a spirituality that helps us remain steadfast, that gives us the courage to act not with hatred and revenge, but in the pursuit of peace based on justice.” A WCC news release said:
Bishop Younan said “sumud” is the word used in Arabic to describe the steadfastness of the olive tree, firmly rooted in the soil.
“In order to stand firm with sumud, we need a spirituality of prayer. Our resistance to the forces of empire must be sustained with this spirituality of prayer”, he emphasized.
Violence was spiraling out of control at the time, following Israeli incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in nearby Jerusalem, with 66 Palestinians “killed […] by Israeli forces or settlers” and nine Israelis by Palestinians. Younan stressed peace and justice for all:
He warned against transforming “the God who is our refuge and strength into a hard castle wall”. When we turn God into a fortress, it is difficult to avoid the temptations of a fortress mentality, he said.
“In this context—surrounded by walls and checkpoints and every other expression of imperial self-protection—we must be careful when imagining God as a fortress, as a wall or barrier separating us from threat. In a fortress mentality, we pursue safety for ourselves and our community alone. In a fortress mentality, we seek security at all costs, even trampling over others in our way. In a fortress mentality, we do not hesitate to build walls to keep others out: walls of concrete and steel, walls of ideology and hatred, walls even within our hearts”, said Younan.
Perhaps the most complete definition of all appears in Wikipedia. Since my keyboard doesn’t have Arabic letters (and I don’t know Arabic anyway), I’ll copy and paste it here:
The term isn’t widely known in English, but you may encounter other forms, such as samadin, as you read further.
‘Faith in God, our people, our land’
While sumud has cultural and literary antecedents dating back to 10th-century Islam, it has become identified with the struggle of Palestinian people to remain on their land since the 1967 war. Yasser Arafat, described it as an alternative to armed resistance. “If you only fight — that is a tragedy,” he once said (quoted in Wikipedia). “If you fight and emigrate — that is a tragedy. The basis is that you hold on and fight.” Or, as a doctor told Amiri Haas of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (also quoted in Wikipedia) of her return to Gaza:
Generation after generation, the Nakba (catastrophe of 1948) continues. Wherever we go, the Jews persecute us. But they won’t eliminate us, that’s impossible. They must understand that. We aren’t (American) Indians. We’ll stay and we will multiply. Nor will we forget… We don’t believe in parties, in Hamas or Fatah. They can go to hell. But we have faith in God, in our people, in our land, in our homeland. [Links, parentheses and ellipsis in the original.]
Despite its origins in Palestinian resistance movements, and an intellectual movement centered in Jordan, sumud took on an emphasis during the First Intafada, or uprising, of the 1980s on developing schools, clinics and other institutions of civil society in the occupied territories. In a 2014 article in Jerusalem Quarterly, a publication of the Institute for Palestine Studies, Alexandra Rijke and Toine Van Teeffelen explain:
The sumud strategy focused on developing self-sufficiency structures and a decrease in dependency on the Israeli economy, especially in the strategically important countryside with Israeli settlements emerging everywhere and a Palestinian agriculture struggling to survive. This strategy reached its apex during the first intifada from 1987 on, which among other things encouraged a movement of small cooperatives that aimed (ultimately unsuccessfully) to establish a measure of economic self-sufficiency designed to protect people against the collective and economic punishment imposed by the Israeli army.
As Rijke and Van Teeffelen tell the story, the context of sumud has many twists and turns over the years. During the 1990s, the idea of self-sufficiency was sidelined while negotiations over the Oslo peace accords were going on. After the Oslo process blew up, the violence of the Second Intafada erupted and the Israeli separation wall was built, sumud took on a more interior focus. In 2014 Rijke and Van Teeffelen conducted focus groups at Bethlehem’s Sumud Story House, a project of Pax Christi, the international Catholic peace movement. Among their conclusions:
In a broader sense, according to the interviews we conducted, sumud has come to represent the struggle to preserve a certain “Palestinian” way of life, with its own rhythms and customs, its discourses and lifestyles, and also its joys. Keeping to this Palestinian way of life expresses the will to preserve human dignity, and challenges forms of oppression that trample dignity in overt and subtle ways. The added dimension of daily life has democratized the concept of sumud. The interviewees suggested that sumud is relevant to the daily life of all Palestinians who actively wish to maintain their identity and dignity through small acts of what is sometimes called “everyday heroism.” In other words, the concept is not only reserved for groups and communities that are tested in physical and extreme ways, and it also does not in all cases depend on whether or not the samid or samida lives inside or outside the Palestinian land. Whether or not someone is identified as samid or samida is in the end determined by actions and attitudes in daily life.
The democratic nature of this evolving understanding of sumud became clear during the interviews, as most interviewees conceptualized sumud more as an action than a state. This also comes across in the translation of the concept as “standing fast.” Given the tendency to keep sumud relevant to daily life, the concept can be given expression in a great many different types of individual behavior, depending on somebody’s particular circumstances of life. While pain and struggle are universally present in Palestinian experiences, sumud also allows for other experiences and expressions, including a deep-felt joy and appreciation of Palestinian culture, as well as a joyful, bittersweet, or even dark but transformative humor over and across the pain. Pain and sacrifice do not determine the lives of the samidin; the horizon of sumud‘s meaning is, rather, humanity. Sumud is not about sacrificing for the sake of sacrificing, but in the service of the human values freedom, justice and caring. [Footnotes omitted.]
Links and Citations
“Lutheran bishop advocates for ‘resistance of prayer’ amid Palestinian-Israeli violence,” World Council of Churches, Nov. 12, 2015 https://www.oikoumene.org/news/lutheran-bishop-advocates-for-resistance-of-prayer-amid-palestinian-israeli-violence.
Mohammad Marie, Ben Hannigan and Alec Jones, “Social ecology of resilience and Sumud of Palestinians,” Health [London], 22, no. 1 (2018); rpt. Sage Journals https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1363459316677624.
Alexandra Rijke and Toine Van Teeffelen, “To Exist Is To Resist: Sumud, Heroism, and the Everyday,” Jerusalem Quarterly, No. 59 (Summer 2014) https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/165375.
“The Sumud Story House in Bethlehem,” Arab Educational Institute — Pax Christi, Jan. 11, 2022 https://aeicenter.org/the-sumud-story-house-in-bethlehem/.
Photo: “Bethlehem wall graffiti: Stories on the ‘Wall Museum’ of the Sumud Story House in Bethlehem,” Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bethlehem_wall_graffiti_%22Chilenos_de_origen_palestino%22.jpeg
[Uplinked July 16, 2024]
Ordinary Time 
