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Rural Faith Communities Advocate for Justice in Palestine [1]
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Date: 2025-05-19
Land and water rights – topics that matter to rural Americans – are issues at the core of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. In three rural faith communities across the country– a Lutheran church in Vermont, a Catholic Worker Farm in Wisconsin, and a Universalist Unitarian Fellowship in Washington – rural folks are finding solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli occupation through their understandings of religion, land, and community.
The following vignettes explore how three rural faith communities advocate for the Palestinian people.
Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church – Montpelier, Vermont
On any given Sunday, about twenty people – most of them in their 70s and 80s – gather in a tiny church called Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran in Montpelier, Vermont.
Montpelier is the smallest state capital in America, with 7,991 people. Many of the church’s congregants live in surrounding rural areas.
Pastor Rick Neu called Shepherd of the Hills “a small group that cares for one another.” Thirteen years ago, Neu came to Shepherd of the Hills to serve as interim pastor for three months. The congregation comes together to celebrate life, grieve, and talk about their faith and the world around them. One topic of discussion at Shepherd of the Hills is far away from the hills of Vermont where they worship – all the way across the world, in the hills of Palestine.
Neu has been passionate about justice in Palestine and Israel for decades, in part due to his longtime friend Mousa Ishaq, who grew up in Palestine. Mousa came to Shepherd of the Hills several years ago to speak to the congregation about the history of Israeli occupation.
Mousa has lived in Vermont with his wife Kris Peterson-Ishaq for 47 years, but the couple was born in different hemispheres. Mousa was born in a small Palestinian village in the West Bank called Aboud. Kris was born in Decorah, Iowa.
Mousa Ishaq’s hometown of Aboud is north of Jerusalem in the West Bank. (Photo by Ibrahim Zarour)
“[Aboud and Decorah] are two of the most beautiful towns in the world,” Mousa said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. Both landscapes boast of “hills, springs, and limestone.”
When Mousa spoke at Shepherd of the Hills, he started by showing the congregation photos: a photo of Aboud in springtime, a photo of poppies sprouting up in the hills, and a photo of an ancient olive tree. He captioned one slide: “the hills of Aboud–one reason I love Vermont.”
He wove in his family history with captions, explaining that one photo showed “hundreds of miles of stone terraces, built by my ancestors to protect the land from erosion on every mountain for hundreds of years.”
Mousa also shared images of the church his ancestors would likely have attended in Aboud, which has been in continuous service since 332 AD. Mousa comes from generations of Palestinian Christians living in the Christian “Holy Land,” so when people misguidedly ask him when he converted to Christianity, he jokingly responds, “we were converted by the big guy.”
After the photos, Mousa displayed four side-by-side maps capturing moments from 1947 to the present, illustrating the loss of Palestinian land to Israel over time.
After 1967, when Israel displaced more than 350,000 Palestinians from their homes, Mousa couldn’t return to Aboud.
“Now, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are under enormous pressure to leave,” he said.
In Aboud, Israeli settlers have steadily encroached on the groves, cutting down approximately 3,000 trees in recent years.
The reaction from the congregation was profound. One congregant approached Mousa afterward, saying that he had always kept up with the news but seen nothing about this. Mousa remembers the congregant saying, “Why has all of this been hidden from me?”
One congregant wanted to see the situation in Palestine with his own eyes. Ron Gustafson has been going to Shepherd of the Hills for 30 years now, making the 20-mile commute from his house in Cabot, Vermont – “where they make the cheese,” as he described it in an interview.
Gustafson travelled to Palestine and Israel with a group from the New England Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) in 2017.
The group visited a refugee camp near Bethlehem, where some Palestinian families had been living since 1948, when Israel forcefully displaced 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. When the first Palestinians were displaced to the camp, many lived in tents. Over time, they built homes on the ground where their ancestors’ tents stood. Gustafson’s group was invited into one of those homes to learn how to make maqluba, the national dish of Palestine.
“That chicken and carrot and rice thing, in the big pot and they turn it up,” Ron explained.
Gustafson’s group learns how to make maqluba, the national dish of Palestine. (Photo from Ron Gustafson)
While chopping vegetables and soaking rice, they learned about the history of the camp from the people who lived it.
Before the trip, Gustafson said, “in my limited knowledge because of the press in the United States, when I heard Palestinian, I also heard in my mind terrorist.” Coming away from the trip, he had a very different impression.
“I think Palestinian, I think of peace-loving people,” he said. “They’re just like a neighborhood [in Vermont]. Just really nice.”
Pastor Rick Neu made three trips between 1993 and 2000, abutting the first and second intifadas which were marked by violent Israeli repression of mass Palestinian resistance.
Neu led some of the trips himself, guiding groups of Christian New Englanders to the religious sites they had read about in the Bible and meeting Palestinian Christians.
“We visit the stones, but there are living stones, as the Christians there talk about themselves, the living stones of Christianity,” said Kris, Mousa’s wife, who has also made several trips to the Holy Land.
“From a devotional point of view, wherever we went, there was a liturgy,” Neu said.
Wherever they went, there was also a lesson about the reality of living under occupation in Palestine. On one trip, Israel shut off water in the area where the group was staying in the West Bank. It sparked conversation. Neu said he watched people realize before his own eyes that in Palestine, “nobody has control over their own water.”
“I took tour groups to show them the reality of what was going on,” Neu said. “Because in this country, we don’t get the reality. We get the whitewashed version.”
Along his travels, Neu made three trips to Gaza, a 25-mile long Palestinian strip of land on the Mediterranean sea that has been described by observers as an “open-air prison” due to intense Israeli restriction of resources and travel in and out of its perimeters.
Now, amidst Israel’s 19-month siege on Gaza killing over 60,000 Palestinians, the situation in Gaza is even more dire than when Neu saw it all those years ago.
“I don’t recognize anything when I see Gaza in the news,” he said. “I haven’t heard from anybody. It’s devastating.”
Mousa, Kris, Gustafson, and Neu continue to bring Palestine to their communities in Vermont.
Gustafson has spread the word about what he learned in Palestine to local Vermonters, giving presentations at Shepherd of the Hills and a local senior center. He fundraised for a school his group visited in Ramallah in the West Bank, which he felt particularly moved by as a former teacher of 25 years. Shepherd of the Hills raised over a thousand dollars for the school.
Neu, meanwhile, found it important to maintain relationships with the Palestinians he met on his trips.
Mousa travelled to congregations across Vermont, giving presentations much like the one he gave to Shepherd of the Hills. Mousa and Kris’s home congregation in South Burlington staged a production of “One Family in Gaza,” a play written by Vermonter Crystal Zevon in collaboration with a family living through genocide in Gaza. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Vermonters attended and raised money to send to the Gazan family.
“We are responsible for what’s happening there,” he said. “It’s our weapons, our airplanes, our money, our protection.”
The United States gave Israel over $17.9 billion in military financing in 2024.
“[Advocacy] is what we’re supposed to do,” said Neu. “You love your neighbor, you care for the sick, you give hope to the hopeless. That’s what Jesus would do.”
In Gustafson’s words, “it’s a matter of justice.”
Saint Isidore Catholic Worker Farm – Cuba City, Wisconsin
The Saint Isidore Catholic Worker Farm is a faith community in Cuba City, a small town of 2,100 tucked in the southwestern corner of Wisconsin.
The 25-acre farm is home to a couple and two families, a few cows and chickens, and the occasional visitor.
“We occasionally have different folks coming through and staying with us to experience what it’s like to live in community, or maybe people who are in between situations and just need a place to land for a while,” said co-founder Brenna Cussen Anglada.
The Saint Isidore Catholic Worker Farm is a rural faith community in Cuba City, Wisconsin. (Photo by Brenna Cussen Anglada)
Living communally on the farm, the group grows much of their own food using sustainable agricultural practices.
“We’re just slowly trying to restore the land and learn more about the land,” Cussen Anglada said.
They also seek to learn more about the history of the place. Decolonization, education, and nonviolent activism are core principles at Saint Isidore. So too is spiritual life, which the group practices through daily prayer and community gatherings.
A strain of the broader Catholic Worker Movement – a religious anarchist movement of anticapitalist communities across the U.S. – Catholic Worker Farms number about 30 nationwide. They are communities that “live a little more simply on the land,” Cusson Anglada explained.
“It’s a joyful way of living,” she said.
Cussen Anglada became interested in this way of living during her time in Palestine.
She spent time in Bil’in, a Palestinian village of 2,137 people (almost exactly the size of Cuba City) in the West Bank, supporting nonviolent resistance to the Israeli construction of a wall separating the village from over half of their land.
She also spent time in the South Hebron Hills in the West Bank. Classified as “Area C,” the area is under full military and civilian control of Israel. Palestinians living in “Area C” face daily threats to their existence.
“The Israeli military would come in and bulldoze people’s homes, to force them to leave,” Cussen Anglada said.
Palestinians living in the South Hebron Hills also faced violence from Israelis building illegal settlements on the land. Settlers would routinely beat Palestinians and poison their wells.
Still, many Palestinians stayed. When their homes were bulldozed, they put up tents or lived in caves. At the threat of settler violence, they went out to tend to their fields.
“I was really moved by Palestinians’ commitment to defending land that they loved,” Cussen Anglada said.
For Cussen Anglada, loving the land in rural America involved reckoning with its own fraught history.
“It’s as a result of my time in Palestine that I realized colonization, pushing Indigenous people off their land, it’s not just happening in Palestine,” she said. “It’s happening here, it’s been happening here for a lot longer.”
Indigenous justice is a major part of Saint Isidore’s advocacy work. Partnering with Indigenous-led Great Plains Action Society, they started the Honor Native Land Fund, raising money from non-native people to contribute to Indigenous-led projects to buy back land.
Cussen Anglada sees justice for Indigenous Americans and Palestinians as inextricably linked. She connected them both back to the Catholic Doctrine of Discovery, a collection of papal bulls from the early colonization period. In Cussen Anglada’s words, the Doctrine established “the right of European Christians to just take any land they found.” Just as the Doctrine mindset fueled the forced expulsion of Indigenous Americans, Cussen Anglada sees it as fueling the forced expulsion of Palestinians by way of the political ideology of Christian Zionism.
“I feel particularly responsible as someone who claims Christianity to be resisting,” she said.
Saint Isidore is resisting occupation in Palestine in many ways. For one, they refuse to give money to it.
“We have a commitment to earn wages that fall below the federal taxable income, so that we do not have to pay taxes that go toward the military,” Cussen Anglada said. “We are refusing to give money to that system,” she said.
They are raising money for a young poet in Gaza by hosting a screening of No Other Land, a documentary film about the destruction of the Masafer Yatta community in the West Bank.
Cussen Anglada went to Gaza herself in the wake of a 2008-2009 Israeli siege that killed over a thousand Palestinians. She was also part of a humanitarian group trying to deliver medical supplies to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which now stands in ruins after Israel raided and bombed it in early 2024.
Israel and Egypt denied her group entry into Gaza to deliver the medical supplies to the hospital. Now, Israel is denying all humanitarian aid entry into Gaza as people within its perimeters are starving to death.
When Cussen Anglada’s group was denied entry, they stayed at the border for two days, kneeling on the ground and praying the rosary.
Her identity as a Catholic is in many ways the foundation for her advocacy for Palestine.
“There are Catholic and Christian Palestinians who are suffering from this occupation and genocide. I feel great solidarity with them,” she said.
But more deeply, she feels that the Catholic faith itself calls her to resist occupation and genocide for Palestinians of all religions.
“Jesus is an example who himself was Palestinian, first of all, and who was an incredible nonviolent resister,” she explained. “He resisted the Roman Empire through living a life of integrity and community and spirituality. I feel I’m called to emulate that.”
Quimper Universalist Unitarian Fellowship – Port Townsend, Washington
Port Townsend, Washington is a mill town. It’s also a town of hippies, according to local Dena Shunra. Port Townsendites are people who have “rejected in some way the mainstream American urban life,” Shunra said.
Of the 10,502 residents, some 300 are members of the Quimper Universalist Unitarian Fellowship (QUUF). Membership that large is “unheard of in a small town,” said Kathy Stevenson, lifelong Universalist Unitarian and member of the QUUF since 1987.
The mighty membership may be attributed to the QUUF’s alignment with the spirit of Port Townsend.
“It’s a very conscientious, liberal town,” Stevenson explained.
According to Shunra, about 20% of the population turned out for the April 5 anti-Trump “Hands Off” protests.
Activists in Port Townsend gather to honor the lives of murdered Palestinians. (Photo by Linda Gallaher)
“This is a very small town, but people care a lot here,” said Stevenson.
Many Port Townsendites find an outlet for community activism in the QUUF.
“It’s very much the justice work that draws people and keeps people,” said Shunra, who joined the QUUF last November for that reason. “I joined because I wanted to find a place where I could do something, actually solve a problem,” she said.
Through their justice work in the community, members of the QUUF have formed a particular orientation to the world in Port Townsend.
“There’s a sense of being away from the world, but also part of it and connected to it, which is pretty unique, I think, in a town as small as this,” said Shunra.
In recent years, the QUUF has become very connected to justice work in Palestine and Israel.
Shunra has been at the forefront of these efforts. Her connection to the issue runs deep. Before moving to Port Townsend in 2001, she lived in Israel from the age of four.
“About the time I was 12, I realized that it was not okay. And I have been learning more and more and being more and more involved in it ever since,” Shunra said.
On an individual level, Shunra participates in the Boycott, Sanction, and Divest (BDS) movement, a Palestinian-led movement wielding consumer power to resist the Israeli occupation. She also boycotts Israel in her professional life as a Hebrew-English translator, choosing not to work with members of the Israeli government.
“I have a strong moral sense that this is not right,” Shunra said. “Not in our name.”
Shunra has brought her strong moral sense to the QUUF. Since joining, she has organized with Stevenson to build a vibrant community of QUUF members dedicated to educating each other and advocating together for justice in Palestine and Israel.
The UU Church provided the infrastructure for the group to organize.
The QUUF recently hosted a production of “One Family in Gaza,” the same play that Mousa and Kris’s church put on in Vermont. Merchandise was sold at the play to fundraise, and a local Palestinian restaurant provided more hummus, baba ganoush, and pita than the audience of about forty could possibly stomach. But nothing went to waste.
“The youth group enjoyed the leftover Palestinian feast,” said Shunra.
As for the play itself, “it was very much understood as a cry from the heart,” Shunra said. “I know that for at least one member of the community, it really brought home to her how much these things were being done in her name as an American and as somebody with a Jewish background.”
Jewish voices have been centered in much of the QUUF’s work. The fellowship has held listening circles for Jewish members of the community. In the past year, it hosted two pro-Palestine Israeli activists as speakers at the fellowship.
“They came and shared with us on the ground, lived experience on the Israeli side that doesn’t want to have a genocide,” Shunra said.
And the QUUF’s justice work is not confined within its walls. QUUF members have partnered with members of the Port Townsend community for much of their work. They joined local group Jefferson County Palestine Solidarity (JCPS) to hold weekly vigils downtown and at the local farmers’ market. They also joined community efforts to pressure local officials to demand the federal government to declare an immediate ceasefire and restore humanitarian aid.
Stevenson cited the Unitarian Universalist (UU) religion itself as her source of motivation for her advocacy work.
“We have a strong history of justice work,” she said. “Those core values of Jesus – helping people, caring for people that are marginalized, and caring for our neighbor – have been strong all along.”
Although the UU faith has roots in Judeo-Christianity, its organizing principle is not any one creed or sect, but rather a shared sense of human interdependence.
“It’s a religion that calls us to be our best selves, and that includes being in community,” Stevenson said. “We all need each other.”
From Vermont to Washington, rural faith communities practice solidarity through prayer, relationship building, and political activism.
“The situation in Palestine is really the motivating force in my life,” Shunra said. “And I truly believe we will live to see peace.”
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