Photo: 2025 cup decorated with keffiyeh pattern and QR code to actions list;
2024 Water Ceremony with Empty Cups for Gaza, Theodore Parker Church, Roxbury, MA

In summer of 2024, our national co-organizer India Wood initiated the Empty Cups for Gaza ritual of witness. This was intended for implementation during Ingathering and Water worship and ceremonies for Unitarian Universalist congregations that take place in August and September. The ritual was honored to be included in the UUA's Worship Web. At least 50 congregations participated, and many shared photos with us. View the Instagram reel for inspiration.

Originally named Water Communion, and now more commonly known as Water Ceremony, this worship service celebrates the interconnectedness of people and the planet. Often people bring a bit of water from their favorite waterway or from home, and the ceremony consists of people commingling the water in a communal vase or pitcher near the altar. 

Because the Palestinians in Gaza have been systematically deprived of food and water, the Empty Cups for Gaza ritual bears witness to the deprivation. To participate in this national observance, bring an empty cup or glass decorated with paper bearing the words Empty Cup for Gaza, or simply for Gaza, and place it beside the communal water vessel. Provide a sign-up sheet to collect names and contact information of congregants who would like to gather to take action in community; you or your congregation can plan a Zoom meeting for this in the coming days and weeks. Contact us for more ideas at [email protected]. 

We are providing an updated printable for you to tape or glue to your empty cup. It includes a QR code to our Actions list so that people can scan, visit, and choose an action to take to stop the starvation and the bombing. Find the printables at this link.

Take a photo of your congregation's empty cups and share with us at [email protected] to be included in this year's Instagram reel. Post your photos on social media and use the tags #EmptyCupsforGaza, #uujme, #UUIngathering, #UUWaterCeremony, and #UnitarianUniversalist. You can include these words in your social media post:

UUs across the country are taking this prayerful action in sympathy with the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza who are denied potable water by Israel, a war crime that is enabled by the United States. These people are dying of starvation, thirst, preventable disease, and weapons of war.

The intention is to augment and expand the traditional water ceremony, not to replace the existing ritual. This is not to alienate us from our traditions but to start or continue a conversation about an additional ritual element.

This silent yet powerful symbolic ritual will be only the beginning of continued conversations within each congregation as the violence in Gaza continues with no sign of a ceasefire. UUJME provides materials to help you figure out what format of conversations or actions your congregation should take next based on the needs of your unique community. 

If you would like to learn more about how to get started with Empty Cups for Gaza, please check out the recorded information session video at Empty Cup for Gaza Ingathering Ritual Q&A on Vimeo. Please discuss the idea with your local minister, other staff, and congregational leadership and bring your curiosity about how this ritual can be included. Invite them to view this ritual suggestion as bringing another seat to the table for an attitude of abundant space for ritual.

Read last year's blog post about the ritual.

Other actions you can take:

Connect with our organizer to find out more about how to gather local UUs to take action: [email protected]

Check back on our Calendar and the Side with Love Action center for our next national gathering of UUs on Zoom.

The final stages of malnutrition and death.

That’s where Gazans are now. Suffering needlessly at the hands of the Israeli military and government, supported by the US as always, dying a horrible and prohibited - as starvation is not an allowable tool of war, even - death.

Dying, too, is our belief in our governments. Long gone is the belief that those in power can or even want to do the right thing. More governments, including our own, driven by racism, power-grabbing, money, anti-muslim hate, and sheer greed. 

For months, years, many have pled, bargained, protested, and barricaded, trying to get the government to change its actions. All for naught.

For this wasn’t pre-ordained, these horrors, but perhaps pre-destined. This was always the plan, those in power never saw Gazans, Palestinians, as fully human. And it is easy to kill what is not seen as human.

G-d knows, we’ve learned that lesson well. 

We vilify and we kill. More than 56,000 (far more, as this count is more than a week old), disappeared here in the US, in plain sight. Cruelly, violently, and without accountability, because those taken (so far) are almost entirely brown-skinned. Who the white men in power find, still, to be less than fully human.

We’re just beginning here in the US. One does not allocate those billions of dollars to ICE without intending to detain and kill large numbers in this country. None of us are safe. They will eventually come for us all who do not meet the white, Christian nationalist criteria of “worthiness.”

I have often quoted my colleague, Rev. Julian Jamaica Soto, that “all of us need all of us to survive.” This remains so. 

There is no excuse, no valid one, for failing to speak out, to scream, about this horror happening in Gaza, in the US, and elsewhere right now. This isn’t anti-zionism, it isn’t antisemitism, this isn’t about Hamas, or immigration, or crimes, or anything else; this is about the right for people to exist, wherever they are, without being persecuted and killed for their very existence.

What’s happening in Gaza will haunt me, will haunt us, for the rest of our lives. What’s happening here, in our own country, will ultimately do the same.

SPEAK OUT. Fight back. Risk your own safety. For even if you don’t care about Gaza — and I hope with all my heart you do – one day this will be us. And wouldn’t you want someone fighting for your very existence?

AN APPEAL TO UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS: 

Update Your Land Acknowledgement to Recognize the Forced Removal of Palestinians

The Action of Immediate Witness (AIW) “Solidarity with Palestinians” approved at the 2024 UUA General Assembly, stated, “The targeted and widespread destruction of medical, cultural, agricultural, educational, and religious sites [in Gaza] constitutes ethnic cleansing.” At the sametime, Israeli settlers have conducted violent attacks on Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank, and some U.S. synagogues have hosted the selling of illegally confiscated Palestinian land in the occupied territories. Since Janu–ary 2025, even during the temporary ceasefire in Gaza, settler attacks on Palestinian villages in the West Bank and home demolitions in East Jerusalem have sky-rocketed.
The AIW called on UUs to “witness, educate, organize, and advocate,” and so we are proposing one step: to extend our Land Acknowledgements of theft of indigenous land to recognize our own U.S. government’s enabling the forced removal of Palestinians from Palestine. Our Palestinian ally, Friends of Sabeel–North America (FOSNA), encourages us to join their ”stand against forced displacement and false doctrines.”

Revising land acknowledgements to acknowledge present reality will enliven the call of the 2020 GA AIW, “Address 400 Years of White Supremacist Colonialism,” to move beyond “simple preliminary actions” toward “the deeper, long-term process of relationship building and cultural healing from the deep harms of colonial genocide.” 

PHOTO: Forced removal in Jenin (Wahaj Bani Moufleh/Electronic Intifada, 11 March 2025)                                                   

Suggested Addendum to Land Acknowledgements

Short version:

We also bear witness that the United States is still–at this moment–providing the weapons, funding, and diplomatic cover for Israel's forced removal of the Indigenous People of Palestine.

Long version, for a reading or ritual:

We also bear witness that the United States is still–at this moment–providing the weapons, funding, and diplomatic cover for Israel's forced removal of the Indigenous People of Palestine. Like the Trail of Tears, oppression of the residents of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem is the culmination of a colonial settler-replacement project. We will work as individuals, in our congregation, and as a Unitarian Universalist religious movement to end the unjust policies and practices of our nation that abet the forced removal of any People, uphold any apartheid regime, or deny human rights to any human being.

PHOTO: Forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza (Jaber Jehad Badwan/commons. wikimedia.org, 29 January 2025)

Please contact us at [email protected] with your questions, suggestions, struggles, and outcomes when you engage with fellow congregants to bring this proposal to life.  – Karen Steele & Steven Sellers (Muskrat) Lapham, Members of the Board, UUs for Justice in the Middle East. 

Supporters of this Appeal

Rev. Dr. Clyde Grubbs and Rev. Dr. Michelle Walsh, Ministers-at-Large, Tuckerman Creative Ministries for Justice & Healing * Melissa Nuwaysir, Palestinian American; Co-Coordinator, Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East (UUJME)–Northern Virginia * Mac Goekler, UU Peace Ministries Network * Dana Fisher Ashrawi, President, UUJME * Curtis Bell, Member of the Board, UUJME * Dr. Samira Farwaneh, Member, UU Congregation of Tucson * Rev. DL Helfer, LCSW, Member of the Board, UUJME * David Delk, Trustee, UUs for a Just Economic Community

Link to the flyer version of this blog post.

NOTES

https://www.uujme.org/unitarian_universalists_call_for_an_end_to_the_war_on_gaza_u_s_complicity_in_that_war
https://www.fosna.org/advocacy-direct-action-database/christian-leaders-and-activists-stand-against-forced-displacement https://www.uua.org/action/statements/address-400-years-white-supremacist-colonialism
https://www.uua.org/justice/blog/beyond-land-acknowledgment       

Over the last 18 months – the world has watched in horror at the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Millions of people around the world protested, mock-died in the streets, wrote and sang and protested for Palestinians, with Palestinians. Our efforts driven in part by the belief that our actions would create change. If we could make the leaders understand the harm they were causing, the unbearable brutality of their decisions to unendingly supply Israel with weapons with which to slaughter Palestinians, we thought protest would at the very least slow the cruelty.

We were wrong.

Senators and representatives, Presidents and Administrations, they weren’t confused or questioning about their actions. Instead, they held – hold – an unwavering commitment to Netanyahu’s genocide. This wasn’t a situation in which decisions were made about collateral damage or moral injury, about noncombatants or slaughtering of innocent peoples.

To the contrary, our elected leaders were fully aware of their decisions, unwilling to reconsider no matter the outcry. The slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the destruction of their lives and their homes, their land and their history, it wasn’t a miscalculation. It was a plan. One with a specifically desired outcome.

In these days of horrors increasing in the United States – legal citizens removed in plain sight, in situations so torturous that rumors of suicide have already leaked out – it is impossible, then, to ignore the parallel. Who will this administration kill en masse, now that we are once again aware that imperialist and increasingly authoritarian leaders will continue to wantonly kill those who they deem expendable.

This is only the beginning. One day, millions of people will look back at the genocide in Gaza and realize this is when leaders around the world, and everyone who remained silent, everyone who supported these murders, one day they will see their complicity. And they will see what their complicity led to – ever more genocides of ever more people deemed expendable. They’re coming for immigrants. They’re coming for trans people. They’re coming, if more indirectly, for women, for disabled people, for those deemed less desirable, those who they believe the world would be better off without. And still, they come for Palestinians and Palestine.

In a mere number of weeks since the new Administration took power, we see the vestiges of civil society increasingly stripped away. People stunned into silence. Afraid to protest publicly. Fearful of fighting back. Far too many are simply obeying in advance, falling into line for fear of
what might happen to them if they don’t self-censor.

But what happens if we do? Where are the millions who protested for Palestine when we need you here too, protecting immigrants, trans people, and all those deemed unworthy? All those who will in short and horrifying order, suffer the same fate as Palestinians. Where are your hearts and bodies on the line? Does our solidarity with Palestinians and each other end now, as our own safety decreases?

For those who can’t speak for themselves, for those truly in harm’s way, we need you, every single one of you, now fighting a much wider fight, one we must survive together.

=========

Check out the following links:

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Find or start a chapter: Chapters page.

Learn about UUJME.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

Contact:

uujme @ uujme dot org

Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East marks 500+ communities pledging to be “Apartheid-Free”

March 21, 2025

Today, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East (UUJME) joins with communities all over the world to mark an important milestone: over 500 congregations and organizations have taken a pledge declaring themselves “apartheid-free.” Pledge signers commit to cut ties with Israel’s apartheid regime against Palestinians and to oppose all forms of racism, bigotry, discrimination, and oppression. These 500+ groups represent hundreds of thousands of constituents and include congregations, faith communities, solidarity organizations, non-profits, student organizations, veterans’ groups, businesses, and even municipalities.

A map and full list of apartheid-free communities can be found here.

The UUJME board stated this about the reason we signed the pledge, “Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East is a proud original signatory of the Apartheid-Free Communities pledge. We took the pledge because it invites commitment to collective study and action within a growing movement of communities in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle for liberation. As Unitarian Universalists, we center love in human relations and believe in accountable transformation of injustice by building a united symphony of many voices for witness, education, organizing, and advocacy. Taking this pledge and organizing other groups to do so is one of the most meaningful commitments that a congregation or other group can make. UUJME worked in a coalition at the Unitarian Universalist Association 2024 General Assembly to overwhelmingly pass a resolution in solidarity with Palestinians which called for UU congregations to join Apartheid Free Communities. We are proud to support the adoption of the pledge in three UU congregations so far.”

The three Unitarian Universalist congregations that have signed the pledge include All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church of Shreveport, Louisiana; Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists; and the Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco. Several other UU congregations are in discussion about the pledge.

For decades, the Palestinian people have faced Israeli occupation and systematic human rights abuses. Apartheid is defined under international law as a legally enforced system of separation and oppression based on race, creed, or ethnicity. Palestinian human rights groups have described Israel’s policies as apartheid for decades. Over the past few years, much of the international human rights community – including B’tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International – have also joined the call for an end to Israeli apartheid.  

The Apartheid-Free campaign originated in 2022 when an interdenominational coalition of faith groups in North America, convened by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), came together to organize the pledge.

We are proud to be among the original 13 national faith groups that organized and signed the pledge to be apartheid-free.

“The fact that more than 500 congregations, organizations, and businesses have come together to end Israeli apartheid fills me with hope,” said Noor Nabulsi, Apartheid-Free Communications Specialist for AFSC. “These groups represent hundreds of thousands of people from many different places, faiths, and walks of life. What we share is a belief that collectively we are growing the anti-apartheid movement and making it a 21st century issue.” 

Each community that signs the pledge commits to resisting apartheid and all forms of racism and discrimination, but this looks different in every community. It can include community education, political advocacy, divestment, protest, organizing ballot measures, or creative projects. 

UUJME supports local UU congregations in their journey to become apartheid-free.

Learn more at:  https://apartheid-free.org/ 

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Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East works within the Unitarian Universalist faith community to educate and mobilize individuals, congregations, and denominational leaders to recognize and counter inequality and injustice in Palestine-Israel and to support our allies in the global justice and anti-oppression movements.