Remarks at the October 7 Vigil: A Year of Grief and a Call to Hope

Remarks from our Executive Director Rev. J. Mark Davidson at the Duke SJP Vigil on October 7, 2024

Good evening.

I am honored to be with you, and thank you to the Students for Justice in Palestine for organizing this important event, and for the invitation to bring remarks on this solemn occasion.

It has been a devastating year. A year of unfathomable violence and destruction. A year of genocide in Gaza. A year of incinerated tent cities of desperate displaced families. A year of shredded children. Whole families wiped off the face of the earth. Hospitals, mosques, schools, bombed into ruins. A year of frustration as American foreign policy continues its blind descent into madness. As we gather to hold this vigil tonight, we must remember that this did not start on October 7th, 2023. This has been the bloodiest, most deadly and destructive year in a deadly and destructive history that goes back over 100 years. The savagery, the carnage will continue if we keep feeding the Israeli war machine. If we continue the futility of war. If we continue ignoring the peacemakers. If we continue our failure to address the roots of the violence.

• We need an immediate and permanent ceasefire. But a ceasefire has always been the bare minimum.

• We need an arms embargo.

• We need to end US military aid to Israel.

• We need to end the occupation. The apartheid regime in Israel needs to be dismantled.

• We must reject the hawks and the war-profiteers, and listen instead to the peacemakers, Israeli and Palestinian, who are forging a viable path to a just and lasting peace, security and dignity for all the 15 million people, Palestinians and Israelis, living between the river and the sea.

One thing that’s become crystal clear to me over the past year is that we need the capacity to sustain ourselves in this struggle. We need to stay strongly connected to our sources of hope. I don’t mean hope as wishful thinking. I mean hope as the unstoppable engine of our activism. In my Christian tradition, there is a verse that says, “Always be ready to give an account of the hope that is within you.” In this eviscerating year of genocide and shredded children, it has been challenging to find the hope that is within me. It has brought me to my bedrock. To the deepest sources of my hope. For me, it is trusting that the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. That each one of us is a glorious ray of that Light that shines in the darkness, and that means not hiding our light, but setting it high so that everyone can see it. Jewish tradition says the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and those who trust it shall renew their strength and mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. In Islam, one of the many beautiful names for Allah is “the Light,” and The Light is always near and provides for humanity with sources beyond our imagining. The Light wraps everything in mercy and compassion. All the great religious traditions echo this same wisdom. And those who are not religious still see this power at work. They see light on their path, they see the righteous being undergirded and upheld, despite all the setbacks on the road to justice and liberation.

Still, I know from experience that when I find hope hard to find in myself, I often find it in community, in the hope that is among us and between us, the hope that shows up when we come together. When we struggle to be hopeful, we are not alone. This is one of the greatest gifts of community. We lift each other up when we stumble, we inspire each other when our energy wanes, we strengthen each other when we lose heart. I feel that today being with you here, and I have felt it throughout this past year at rallies, actions, films, lectures, webinars, panels, and vigils.

In addition to the hope that is within each of us and the hope we find in community, there is a third kind of hope – the hope that is beyond us. I mean the forces in this world that are beyond our control, the larger forces that move history, forces we rarely see in the heat of the moment, but which are real and powerful. Dr. King talked about “the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice.” I believe we are seeing the bending of the arc.

History shows us that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Powerful nation-states and empires inevitably overreach. Drunk on power, full of hubris, they abandon moral foundations and act without restraint. They go too far and accelerate their own undoing. We are seeing signs of this in Israel. Their credit rating has been downgraded. Foreign investment is drying up. Their young are dying on the battlefield. The fanatics are running the government. Many Israelis are packing up and leaving the country. Boycotts and divestment have cost Israel valuable contracts. Israel, by its own recklessness, has done things it may not be able to come back from: Its horrific violence, turning Gaza into a wasteland, killing and maiming over 200,000 innocent civilians, 20,000 of them children, blocking humanitarian aid, starving the population of Gaza, terrorizing and stealing land in the West Bank, blinding and maiming thousands of Lebanese by indiscriminately exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, bombing Beirut, turning Lebanon, a beautiful country I lived in as a boy, into another Gaza.

All of these atrocities have shocked and sickened the global community and destroyed whatever good will Israel had. When their Prime Minister addresses the United Nations, governments walk out or meet his lies with stony silence. A majority of Americans are disillusioned with Israel. Recent polls show 61% of Americans favor ending US military aid to Israel. Ilan Pappe, the esteemed exiled Israeli historian, has said we are witnessing the demise of the Zionist project. This process will not unfold quickly, and its late stages will be very violent, but the process of the dismantling of the Zionist regime has begun. To me, and to many of us, this is a sign of hope. Because we know there will never be a just and lasting peace in Palestine-Israel until the Zionist ethnostate is dismantled. We pray that it be done peacefully, but it must be done.

Toward that end, let us cultivate three kinds of hope: the hope that is within each of us, the hope that we find in community, and the hope that is beyond us. Let us trust these sources of hope spreading Light in and through us, bending the arc of the universe toward justice and liberation, toward a true and lasting peace.