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solidarity
Saving the Savior Tree: A Holiday Stand for Palestine
In so many ways, olive trees are a Christmas tree for Palestinians: symbols of hope and renewal.
Dec 25, 2024
So, there it stands in your living room—the crown jewel of December. Your Christmas tree, dressed to the nines in ornaments that range from genuinely lovely to “why do we still have this macaroni abomination from 1997?” Beneath it, gifts for loved ones and a few hastily wrapped “emergency backups” for people you forgot about until yesterday. It’s not just a tree; it’s the spirit of the season—a symbol of hope, renewal, and festivity.
But halfway across the world, another tree tells a far grittier, far less sparkly story. The olive tree. For Palestinians, this tree doesn’t glitter—it sustains. Its fruit isn’t decorative—it’s dinner. And while it doesn’t cradle stockings or fairy lights, it carries something heavier: the survival of families who’ve relied on its branches for generations.
A Season of Loss (and Rage)
Picture this: You arrive at your family’s olive grove in the West Bank, expecting to gather the fruit of months of labor. Instead, you find the trees—some hundreds of years old—hacked to the ground. These weren’t just trees; they were ancestors, livelihoods, the living heart of your family history. Each stump is an act of violence, as if someone took a chainsaw to your roots.
This holiday season, why not let your generosity extend beyond your living room? Support organizations like Treedom for Palestine, Development in Gardening, or Grassroots International.
This isn’t vandalism––it’s strategy. Uprooting olive trees is a brutal tool in the ongoing effort to displace Palestinian families from the land they’ve farmed for centuries. This year alone, settlers have destroyed more than 4,000 trees. Armed settlers patrol the land, while IDF soldiers turn a blind eye—or worse, assist. Two farmers were killed during the olive harvest including a 50-year-old woman shot by an Israeli soldier whilst tending her trees.
If you’re outraged, good. You should be. But rage alone isn’t enough to counter despair.
There’s also hope.
Planting as Protest
In 2018, Motaz Bsharat knelt in his field and planted 250 olive trees. But he wasn’t just planting—he was envisioning a future. His grove—fenced, irrigated, and fortified—became the first Freedom Farm. Today, there are 70 Freedom Farms across the West Bank, each a living testament to resilience.
This year, Motaz harvested his first full crop: 500 kilograms of olive oil, valued at $10,000. Next year, that yield will double. But this isn’t just an economic success. It’s proof—proof that even in a land scarred by violence, life persists.
The Freedom Farms are thriving, but the destruction hasn’t stopped. Since the occupation began, 2.5 million olive trees have been destroyed. Each tree uprooted is a scar on the land and its people. And yet, the farmers remain. They plant. They rebuild. They endure.
The Humble Hero
Olive trees are miracles of nature. They thrive in arid soil, resist drought, and live for centuries, bearing fruit for generations. They sequester carbon and sip water sparingly. In so many ways, they’re a Christmas tree for Palestinians: symbols of hope and renewal.
In response to the settler violence this year, Treedom for Palestine launched its 4,000 Strong Campaign to replace every olive tree destroyed this year by settlers. These new groves are more than replacements—they’re fortified Freedom Farms, designed to withstand violence and flourish under the harshest conditions.
Planting a tree in Palestine is not just reforestation. It’s reclamation. Each sapling declares: We are still here.
Deck the Halls, Plant The Fields
As you sit by your Christmas tree, marveling at its glow and wondering whether you really needed a third slice of pie (you did), spare a thought for the olive tree. For Palestinian families, it’s more than a decoration—it’s their lifeline, their anchor, their inheritance.
This holiday season, why not let your generosity extend beyond your living room? Support organizations like Treedom for Palestine, Development in Gardening, or Grassroots International. Every tree planted isn’t just a tree—it’s a promise. A promise that families will stay rooted, that livelihoods will be rebuilt, and that peace might actually take root one day.
This Christmas Day, while the world pauses to celebrate, Treedom for Palestine will do what it does best: plant. Instead of carols and candlelight, three new Freedom Farms—750 olive trees—will take root in the West Bank. These aren’t just trees; they’re acts of quiet defiance and faith in prosperity and peace, each one declaring: We are still here. Until peace takes root, we’re holding a space for it.
Because like the Christmas tree, the olive tree is a savior tree—but one that doesn’t just light up for a season. It lights the way for generations. By planting this holy tree in the Holy Land at a time like this, it’s not just the tree we’re saving.
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To Fight Trump’s Mass Deportations, We Need Local Efforts to Defend Immigrants
The best way to resist enforcement activities, we learned under the first Trump administration, is for citizens and noncitizens to claim one another as fellow community members, and then work together.
Dec 22, 2024
Throughout his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump promised mass deportations of the more than 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. Those of us on the ground who work with immigrants are apprehensive about what that will look like and how we can respond.
During the first Trump administration, I was part of local organizations working on issues of migrant detention and deportation defense in Washington state and writing my dissertation on interior immigration enforcement. I was also active with migrant justice efforts during the Obama presidency.
Some of what happened during these periods involved large-scale raids that made national news. Such operations are expensive to plan and orchestrate, are highly disruptive to the communities where they occur, and provoke opposition. This can happen again. However, much more immigration enforcement took place quietly, through the intensive targeting of specific locations such as workplaces, highway stretches, bus stations, and apartment complexes where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents believed there may be undocumented people.
Most sanctuary ordinances remain in place, but locals need to organize to make sure these ordinances have popular support and are upheld.
At any point, ICE could round up those immigrants under remote surveillance, through GPS devices and mobile phone apps, who now number 181,000 people. ICE agents also capture people as they are being transferred from police custody, jail, or prison. Traffic stops, domestic disputes, and altercations with neighbors lead to deportation. This kind of enforcement is the most efficient for ICE; it has made up more than 90% of ICE arrests under President Joe Biden and will likely happen even more aggressively under Trump.
The Trump campaign drummed up support through scapegoating “migrant crime.” This is a pretext for mass deportations. There is no evidence of a crime wave related to immigration, but tying together the criminal justice system and immigration system becomes a way to ensnare people in the deportation dragnet.
The best way to resist these kinds of enforcement activities, we learned under the first Trump administration, is for citizens and noncitizens to claim one another as fellow community members, and then work together. Much of this work happens at the local level.
For example, Pacific County Immigrant Support was formed in 2018 in a rural county in Washington state that has voted for Trump for the past three election cycles. Citizen and noncitizen community members tracked ICE arrests and organized community protection.
Group members accompanied immigrants to ICE appointments and court dates, raised funds for immigration attorneys and bonds, and provided know-your-rights training to immigrants and employers of immigrants. They also sat down with the local sheriff to ensure that he wasn’t collaborating with ICE.
What is needed now is a blossoming of local-level efforts to defend immigrants. In Washington state this includes the Washington Immigration Solidarity Network hotline for reporting deportation events and connecting people who are facing enforcement with resources. The Fair Fight Bond Fund provides bonds to immigrants in detention while going through their proceedings in Washington, as does the National Detention Bond Fund at the national level.
Washington’s Shut Down the NWDC (Northwest Detention Center) campaign in Tacoma, and other campaigns nationwide coordinated through the Detention Watch Network, have exposed deadly and inhumane conditions in migrant detention centers, gathered support for people to survive detention, and strategized to shut down the detention infrastructure.
There is evidence that shutting down detention centers is an effective strategy for restraining immigration enforcement. There is also evidence that ICE enforcement was not able to function as smoothly in jurisdictions regulated by sanctuary ordinances. Most sanctuary ordinances remain in place, but locals need to organize to make sure these ordinances have popular support and are upheld.
The first Trump administration was vengeful towards those who thwarted its restrictionist agenda. Trump revoked some federal funding to sanctuary cities. As I have documented in my scholarship, ICE agents also targeted activists, community organizers, journalists, and artists who spoke out against them.
The Biden administration refused to place restraints on ICE’s capacity to repress activist immigrants. Also during the Biden administration, the revanchist mantle was passed to state governments, like Texas, which bused asylum seekers to sanctuary cities, prosecuted immigrants for trespassing, and punished border humanitarian organizations. We can expect more of this kind of thing.
That is why it is crucial that we build solidarity within our local communities and get ready to defend against the coming attacks.
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How to Survive Trump—America’s Nero
Lives and livelihoods will be saved, if at all, from below, rather than on high.
Nov 25, 2024
“If they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:31)
Before November 5, millions of us were already struggling with poverty, extreme storms, immigration nightmares, anti-trans bills, criminalized reproductive health, the demolition of homeless encampments, the silencing of freedom of speech on campuses… and, of course, the list only goes on and on. Since Donald Trump and JD Vance were elected, more of us find ourselves in a state of fear and trembling, given the reports of transgender people attacked in broad daylight, misogynist social media posts threatening “your body, my choice,” Black college students receiving notes about returning to enslavement, and the unhoused beaten and battered.
In the wake of the election results, there has also been a flurry of activity in anticipation of the extremist policies Donald Trump and crew are likely to put in place to more deeply harm the nation’s most vulnerable: mass Zoom meetings with MoveOn, the Working Families Party, Indivisible, and more; interfaith prayer services for healing and justice organized by various denominations and ecumenical groups; local actions pulled together by the Women’s March; community meetings with the hashtag #weareworthfightingfor; and calls to mobilize for inauguration day and beyond.
Although some were surprised by the election outcome, there were others who saw it coming and offered comfort and solidarity to their communities even before the results were in. On the eve of election night, a public elementary school in West Harlem, New York sent this message to its families:
We know emotions are running high. Today, and last week at school, many conversations in PreK through 5th grade were had and heard regarding how voting happens… worry from some students about whether they will be safe after tomorrow… We assured all children that our school, no matter what, will always be a safe place for them and their families… It is so hard feeling that this election and its outcomes could have such a huge impact on any person based on their status, race, gender identity, sexuality, religion, country of origin, and so many other identities which make our school so beautifully diverse…It is not easy being a parent/caregiver on a good day, let alone when it feels like times are so turbulent and uncertain and even, scary. We are here for you, parents, caregivers, and we are in this together. No matter what!
That message came from a Title 1 school, nearly 60% of whose students qualify for free school meals. If Trump keeps up with his promise to close the Department of Education, tens of thousands of public schools across the country, like the one in West Harlem, could lose critical funding and programs that sustain tens of millions of students and their families—that is, if public education isn’t completely privatized in some grim fashion.
Of course, not all communities approached Trump’s election with such trepidation. On November 6, the Bloomberg Billionaire Index reported that the 10 richest men in the world added $64 billion to their own wealth after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2024 election. Since then, the stock market has had some of its best days in recent history.
An Impoverished Democracy
After inciting an insurrection at the Capitol; being indicted in state and federal court; convicted of 34 felony counts; and using racist, sexist, and hateful rhetoric prolifically, Donald Trump has gone down in history as the only convicted felon to become an American president, receiving more than 74 million votes and securing 312 electoral college votes. Although an undisputed victory, the outcome relied heavily on a weakened democracy and a polarized economy, drawing on discontent and disarray to regain political power.
Indeed, although Donald Trump has the distinct “honor” of being the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years, he has done so after more than a decade of assaults on voting rights, unleashed in 2013 when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Over the next 10 years, nearly 100 laws were passed in 29 states that restrict voting access, from omnibus bills to polling location closures, limits on mail-in and absentee voting, harsh ID requirements (including eliminating student ID cards as a valid form of identification), and more. Since 2020, at least 30 states have enacted 78 restrictive laws, 63 of which were in effect in dozens of states during this election. And in 2024 alone, nine states enacted 18 restrictive voting laws, alongside purges of thousands of voters in the days leading up to November 5.
In addition to such prolonged attacks on the right to vote, widespread poverty and economic precarity have become defining characteristics of our impoverished democracy: More than two of every five of us are poor or low-income, and three in five are living paycheck-to-paycheck without affordable healthcare, decent homes, or quality education.
If the poor and our democracy were suffering before Trump was reelected, what will happen now?
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 report Poverty in the United States: 2023, 41% of this country’s population has a household income either under the poverty threshold or just above it, precariously living one emergency away from financial ruin. That translates into approximately 137 million people who are struggling every day to make it through without falling even further behind. Those tens of millions of people include a disproportionate percentage of people of color, including 56.5% of Black people (23.4 million), 61.4% of Latino people (40.2 million), 55.8% of Indigenous people (1.4 million), and 38% of Asian people (8.5 million). They also include nearly one-third of white people, 60 million, and nearly half (49%) of all children in the United States. Such rates are slightly higher for women (42.6%) than for men (39.8%), including 44.6% for elderly women.
When tallied up, these numbers mirror pre-pandemic conditions in 2018 and 2019, during which poverty and low-income rates stood at about 40%, impacting 140 million people in every county, state, and region of the country.
In other words, in this sick reality of ours, poverty is clearly anything but a marginal experience—and yet, as in the last election, it’s repeatedly minimalized and dismissed in our nation’s politics. In the process, the daily lives of nearly one-third of the electorate are discounted, because among that vast impoverished population, there are approximately 80 million eligible voters described by political strategists as among the most significant blocs of voters to win over.
Case in point: In 2020 and 2021, there was a significant dip in the overall number of people who were poor or low-income. Covid-19 pandemic programs that offered financial help also expanded access to healthcare, food stamps, free school meals, and unemployment insurance, while monthly support from the Child Tax Credit lifted over 20 million people out of poverty and insecurity while increasing protection from evictions and foreclosures. Such programs made millions of people more economically secure than they had been in years.
Nonetheless, instead of extending and improving them and potentially gaining the trust of millions of poor and low-income voters, all of these anti-poverty policies were ended by early 2023. By 2024, not only had the gains against poverty been swiftly erased, but more than 25 million people had been kicked off Medicaid, including millions in battleground states like Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In that same time period, the Biden administration approved an $895 billion budget for war and another $95 billion in additional aid to Ukraine and Israel.
Rather than speaking to such economic crises or pledging to address such pervasive insecurity, over the course of the election season, the Democrats emphasized a rising GDP, a strong job market, and important infrastructure investments made in recent years—macro-economic issues that had little effect on the material well-being of the majority of Americans, especially those struggling with the rising cost of living. For instance, pre-election polling among Latino voters showed that three-quarters (78%) of them had experienced an increase in food and basic living expenses; two-thirds (68%) emphasized the high costs of rent and housing; and nearly three in five (57%) said that their wages weren’t high enough to meet their cost of living or they had to take second jobs to make ends meet.
When you consider the grim final results of election 2024, such realities—and the decision of the Democrats to functionally disregard poor and low-income voters—should be taken into account.
When the Wood Is Green/When the Wood Is Dry
With just over 74 million votes (to Harris’s 71 million), among a voting-eligible population of more than 230 million, Trump actually received only one-third of the possible votes in this election. Nearly 85 million eligible voters simply chose not to turn out. In reality, he won’t enter office with a popular mandate.
However, buoyed by a Republican-controlled Senate and House of Representatives, his second term brings with it a profound sense of dread, based on a heightened awareness of the policies that Trump 2.0 is likely to carry forward (laid bare in the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 900-page pre-election Project 2025 mandate). From mass deportations to assaults on social-welfare programs, housing programs, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ families, and public education, millions of people could be thrown into crisis, with alarmingly fewer ways to resist or express dissent, especially given Trump’s long-time willingness to use military force to quell protest. With the passage of the “non-profit killer bill” in the House of Representatives (before Trump even takes office), the infrastructure of resistance is also under threat. Add to all this: Trump has already started talking about overhauling the Medicaid and food-stamp programs that benefit at least 70 million poor and low-income people to offset the costs of extending tax cuts to billionaires and corporations.
All of this brings us to the Bible.
During the fall of the Roman Empire, poor and dispossessed communities banded together to build a movement where everyone would be accepted and all needs would be met.
Poverty was both severe and all too common in Jesus’ day. Ninety percent of the population in the Roman empire was believed to have been poor, with a class of expendable low-wage workers (to which some historians suggest Jesus belonged) so poor that many only lived remarkably brief lives in utter precarity. Shifts in farming and fishing had catapulted some people into great new wealth but left the vast majority struggling for basics like food and housing. Many of the impoverished subjects of the Roman Empire joined political and religious renewal movements, which took various forms and used various tactics to resist these and other injustices.
Some readers may be familiar with the decadence and violence of the Roman Emperor Nero. Popularly known as the anti-Christ, he came to power after Jesus walked the Earth, but as is clear from his nickname, had a grave impact on many of Jesus’ followers. Nero was, of course, the one who was accused of “fiddling while Rome is burning”—holding lavish banquets, using and abusing (even possibly raping) some of his poor subjects, persecuting Christians, and bringing about the decline and eventual fall of the Roman empire through his authoritarian rule and decadent overspending.
As detailed in Luke’s Gospel, during the last week of his life, Jesus turned to the people of Jerusalem and wept. He described the profound suffering they had been enduring and instructed them to brace themselves for the suffering still to come, saying, “For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” This line foreshadows Jesus’ death on the cross (an execution reserved for those who dared to challenge the Roman Empire and its emperors), the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, and the persecution of his poor followers who continued to practice mutual solidarity, even after that crucifixion.
Writing decades later, the author of Luke’s gospel may have been offering a warning about emperors like Nero that would foreshadow later times. Luke had the benefit of hindsight in the wake of Jesus’ life and death in which there was not exactly a lot of good news about the canceling of debts, the release of those enslaved to unjust structures, or the prosperity of the poor (of the sort Jesus had called for when he started his public ministry). Rather, those who dared to stand up to Rome were being persecuted, while so many others were being overworked and underpaid in a society that was faltering.
Two thousand years later, this sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it?
Looking at Donald Trump’s new appointments and his (and his cronies’) plans for “making America great again,” you really have to wonder: If the poor and our democracy were suffering before Trump was reelected, what will happen now? If, amid relative abundance, the poor were already being abandoned, what will indeed occur when those with the power to distribute that abundance, and protect our air, water, and land, openly disdain the “least of these,” who are most of us, and instead favor the wealthy and powerful?
Donald Trump may liken himself to Jesus in his media appearances and election rallies, but his words and actions actually resemble those of Nero and other Roman emperors. With claims that “I alone can fix your problems” and bread-and-circus rallies like the pre-election one he held at Madison Square Garden, perhaps a more accurate parallel with the incoming administration may, in fact, be Nero and his cronies who stood against Jesus and his mission to end poverty.
If so, then for those committed to the biblical call for a safe and abundant life for all, such times demand that we focus on building the strength and power of the people. During the fall of the Roman Empire, poor and dispossessed communities banded together to build a movement where everyone would be accepted and all needs would be met. Don’t you hear echoes of that in the words and actions of that school in West Harlem, so deeply concerned about its families, and the community actions proclaiming that “we are worth fighting for”?
Such communities of yesteryear knew a truth that is all the more important today: Lives and livelihoods will be saved, if at all, from below, rather than on high. As we approach a new year and the inauguration of Donald Trump (on Martin Luther King Day, no less), let us take to heart a favorite slogan of the authors: “When we lift from the bottom, everybody rises.” This is the only way forward.
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