Looking ahead to a special JFSR issue, this panel features feminist research, reflections, critiques, and activist interventions on religion, Palestine, and Israel, particularly in a time of genocide, nationalism, and authoritarianism.
This paper proposes an Orthodox feminist theological framework for addressing the destruction of land in Palestine-Israel through the category of desecration. Drawing on trauma theory and ecofeminist theology, it argues that ongoing devastation in the region cannot be adequately understood solely through juridical, political, or even ethical paradigms of injustice, but must also be named as a theological rupture in the sacramental vocation of creation. In Orthodox theology, land is not a neutral backdrop for human conflict nor merely an object of possession or symbolism; it is a liturgical and iconographic participant in divine-human communion. The systematic destruction of neighborhoods, agricultural land, water systems, cemeteries, and religious sites thus reveals itself not as collateral damage but a form of contemporary iconoclasm and theological violence.
This paper explores feminist theological intervention against transnational Korean Christian Zionism by interrogating the various factors that have shaped it, including the interplay of the Korean, Israeli, and American/U.S. exceptionalisms, which serves as a mechanism that sustains resolute support of Israel at the expense of Palestinians. At the center of Korean evangelical Protestant Christians’ unwavering support of the State of Israel lies Christian Zionism, defined as a racist, Islamophobic, and heteropatriarchal theo-political ideology that supports the State of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy of God’s promise. What is inextricably interconnected with transnational Korean Christian Zionism is gendered racism against Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians, as the feared and ungrievable Others. Furthermore, when transnational Korean Christian Zionism supports Israel’s genocidal and omnicidal war against Palestine, it is also perpetrating reproductive injustice and environmental injustice against Palestinians, injustices that cannot be separated from one another.
This paper highlights the intersection between Israeli forces’ sexual torture of Palestinian men and Qur’anic theological masculinity of the qawwamun, the Muslim male ‘protector’. While violence against Palestinian women is frequently reported in the Gaza Genocide, a hallmark of this genocide is an inversion of the womanist framework of sexual shame: rights agencies have cited that Palestinian men were overwhelmingly subjected to sexual abuse through “specific persecutory acts” by Israeli forces. This paper addresses the discussion of qawwamun beyond the existing feminist rubrics, to demonstrate how the concept theologically functions as a de-colonial stabilizer of Muslim selfhood against Israeli sexual excesses. While acknowledging the deep patriarchal inflection of qawwamun, the aim of the paper is to show how masculinity norms specific to Muslims are weaponized and destabilized by racist-imperial collusions to endanger Arab men and, relationally, cause further disempowering of Arab women.