North Texas Presbyterian Church Hosts Annual Nakba Remembrance Event
Pastor Craig Hunter and his congregation have visited Palestine, Israel multiple times, hopes to educate public on Nakba and current violence
Trinity Presbyterian Church, in Denton, TX, is hosting its annual Nakba Remembrance Day event this Saturday, May 18, and invites everyone to enjoy a free Palestinian dinner and film screening.
Pastor Craig Hunter and his congregation have visited Palestine and Israel multiple times to meet with Palestinian Christian churches, Palestinian civil society leaders and Israeli human rights groups.
Tell us about Saturday’s event.
This year, we're gonna start with the food. And we're gonna have some Palestinian food. This year the movie is “Tantura”, it's a movie about what happened in 1948 in the Palestinian village of Tantura during the Nakba. The movie doesn't just deal with what happened in 1948, it also deals with some of the politics of the memory around the Nakba within Israel today.
We talk about the Nakba, it happened decades ago, but there's still violence going on. What's significant about that connection to this historical event? And today's situation?
We're witnessing an ongoing, Nakba. There's the event that happened from 1947 to 1949, but that event is part of a larger history and that history is still unfolding today.
Unfortunately, and I think a lot of the stuff that I see and read and hear and watch about Israel and Palestine, comes from some level of ignorance about what happened in the Nakba, and before. I don't think you can have a significant understanding of the larger Middle East if you don't have some understanding of what was involved in the Nakba.
Multiple college campuses have held large protests, what are your thoughts on the protests happening here in Texas and across the country?
I'm casting a little bit of a broad brush with my perceptions, but for the most part, I'm encouraged. I think we're seeing among the younger generation, a kind of, moral uprising.
I've been dismayed by a lot of what I've read and seen about how the university administrations have responded to them and the police departments.
A lot of the protests have been mischaracterized. And I also think the protests are a story and they should be covered in the news and they are to some degree. As many protesters themselves have said … we shouldn't be so focused on the protests, but the reason for the protests which is what's going on in Gaza and the West Bank.
Tell us about your most recent trip to the West Bank and also, how it relates to the work that you and your church have been doing.
We're one congregation that's part of the national denomination of the church which nationally has 1.1 point 3 billion members. We've introduced a number of different resolutions over a decade now relating to Israel. The most significant one that passed, we introduced in 2020, outlines the reasons that Israel practices the crime of apartheid as defined in international law.
That was a significant win, which is to say that now the official position of the Presbyterian denomination in the US is that Israel practices apartheid.
There were about 35 of us Americans, 30 of us were Presbyterian, and probably the majority of us were pastors. We went over there and met with a variety of different groups and individuals. We met with them in Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
Several things were said that were heavy and stuck with me, but our main purpose was to say, “You're not alone,” because they felt abandoned by the West.
As your church has been hosting these events for the past several years, has there been any local support from churches in your area?
We did an event at another Presbyterian church in Plano last month. We've approached at least a dozen other churches, offering to provide a program that they help to design and to do it for free. And that may include a film that we paid the streaming rights for, a meal that we paid for or a speaker either international or local.
I'm a Christian pastor, so I think the church has a significant role to play in this because this is a justice issue. I certainly think there are segments of the church that are fulfilling that role, but not nearly as many as I think should be. Much of the American church, and not just in our church, the Western Church, especially the American church has been on the wrong side too.
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