On Feb. 16, the Adalah Justice Project hosted a webinar on Zoom between 6 p.m. and 7:15 p.m. with the grassroots organization, Christians For A Free Palestine (CFP). During the session, three panelists came together to discuss contemporary struggles in the fight for Palestinian liberation, including the acceptance of ideological Zionism among people of color. 

The webinar invited Rev. Crystal Silva McCormick, Rev. Naomi Washington Leapheart and activist Jonathan Brenneman to share their insights.  

The three are prominent leaders of CFP, a faith-advocacy network that works to mobilize Christians across the US to act in solidarity with Palestinians and “resist empire in all its forms.” In drawing support from an interfaith collaboration, CFP also seeks to dismantle antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia and racism. 

Izzy Mustafa of the Adalah Peace Project delivered a few opening remarks that set the stage for later discourse among the panelists. He returned attention to the ongoing violence against Palestinians, under the guise of the US-brokered ceasefire that went into effect in October 2025.

Although broadcast coverage has declined in recent months, the attempts to erase Palestinians’ presence are as rampant as ever, amid annexations of Palestinian-owned land in the occupied West Bank and armed settler attacks on villages. Behind these state-sponsored aggressions, as Mustafa noted, is a more elusive ideology. 

Leapheart explained it as a select interpretation of scripture that implicates a duty to sponsor “the nation-state of Israel.” 

However, this vision itself has Anti-Semitic roots. Zionism, as a political ideology, emerged during a time when the idea of the nation-state was solidified, motivating the rise of fascism and Nazism in its wake. European nationalists, such as former British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, encouraged the resettlement of the Jewish population in Palestine to achieve the vision of a Christian Europe.  

As Leapheart adds, the reach goes beyond a certain ideological framework. In her words, it is the primary political tool behind U.S. backing of Israel and undermines regional stability in the Middle East— entertaining a vision of displacing Arab populations as part of a wider resettlement campaign. 

After beginning his first term in 2016, the administration under President Donald Trump initiated a series of actions that paved a path for Israeli expansionism. One of the most symbolic of these came in 2018, when Trump moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing it as Israel’s capital despite contested claims to land in the region. 

Brenneman explained that Palestinians of the Christian faith, who have “been stewarding this tradition since it began,” are marginalized by Zionism. Before the 1948 Nakba disaster that displaced 750,000 Palestinians, Christians accounted for 12.5% of the total population. However, due to forced removals without the right of return, only 1.2% remain in historic pre-1948 Palestine. 

Brenneman also spoke about the newest edition of the Kairos document, a renewal of the 2009 edition’s commitments to “fundamental faith, theological and moral principles,” ethical resistance and the preservation of Christian identity.

The new document, issued in November 2025 at the 16th Annual Kairos Palestine Conference, was signed by Christian leaders from around the world. They convened in Bethlehem to address the ongoing harms against Palestinians, urging government leaders in the Global South, Europe and America to cut national ties with Zionism. 

Each panelist also shared how they, as individuals from diverse denominational and ethnic backgrounds, found belonging in the Palestinian struggle. 

McCormick, a Mexican-American raised in El Paso, Texas, remarked that her earliest memories of traveling across the border to visit family were overshadowed by the separation wall. 

“ I think in my childhood, I didn’t understand what the walls or checkpoints were. They were kind of ubiquitous—normal.”

Years later, she found herself facing a similar barrier: the apartheid wall between the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Although in different environments, it dawned on McCormick that the walls reinforced similar ideologies of exclusion. As she remarks, “they had the same roots” in an oppressive system. 

As part of her seminary, Leapheart led a group of students to Palestine. During her travels, she empathized with the testimonies of Palestinian Christians and non-Christians alike, who had long been displaced by the rewriting of political borders and communal histories.

These prompted her to take a second, more critical look at the strains of the ideology encountered in childhood. As an African American woman, she recognized the similar techniques of systemic oppression used against Palestinians. 

“Palestine, for me, was roughly transformational,” Leapheart said about her epiphany around a unified struggle.

Leapheart and Silva spoke on how the proselytizing of Zionism can embed itself within communities of color, despite right-wing rhetoric posing harm to them. According to Silva, it is manipulative tactics that prime acceptance.

These probes into wounds that have not healed—the scars of colonial pasts and historic discrimination. Where the Global South and marginalized communities in the U.S. are concerned, she believes it is ultimately proximity to power that drives association with a powerful movement. 

Both Leapheart and Silva conceded that even noble sentiments — principle and a duty to serve a cause higher than oneself— can be warped by nationalistic ideologies.

However, these same reasons can be the means by which a person learns to ally themselves with the Palestinian cause, and of all peoples who have been oppressed.

An article by the United Methodist Church evokes this call for a pluralistic front against injustices globally, reflecting the shared values of law, peace and love for one’s neighbor across religious traditions.

 “As Christians and people of faith,” Director of Peace With Justice Colleen Moore said, “we must reject antisemitism, Islamophobia, and any policies and ideologies that put people in the Middle East — including the Jewish people — more at risk.”

As a closing thought, Leapheart encouraged viewers to bridge the gaps of their distinct upbringings and identities with the cosmopolitan cause of CFP.

It is through reckoning with these that we begin to hold ourselves accountable and realize that struggles for the affirmation of human rights, wherever they may be, are one and the same.