I was moved to read the recent opinion piece “Against all odds: A journey to Palestine” by Grace Cross that The Globe ran on Feb. 11, 2026. Cross wrote elegantly yet precisely about a recent experience traveling to Occupied Palestine with a delegation of Christians, organized by the Palestinian Christian organization, Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center.
The piece was firmly — and exclusively — rooted in the author’s own lived experience. Cross spoke clearly from their own identities and lived, material experiences: as a “Disabled person and wheelchair user,” as a Christian and as someone from the United States of America, the heart of the colonial project.
Cross talked about things they witnessed with their own eyes, ears and heart: she herself was needlessly held at an Israeli checkpoint; she spoke with Budour Hassan; a writer and researcher with Amnesty International and included direct quotes from that conversation; she witnessed tangible acts of grace and resilience in the generous spreads of food on tables and the charges from her tour guides and local partners to not forget the places she had been and the things she had seen.
Regardless of one’s perspectives on the history of the Palestinian struggle or the creation of the state of Israel and all the history that has followed, it is simply impossible to contest a story shared from someone’s lived experience.
But a letter to the editor published on Feb. 18, 2026, sought to do just that: Instead of engaging with any specific, concrete details Cross had shared with openness and vulnerability, the letter immediately skewed off in abstract directions untethered to anything that Cross had written about. Cross’ piece was a peek into their Christmastime trip to Palestine, meeting with the specific people and organizations they clearly named, through their embodied experience of being a Christian from the United States, and a person with disabilities in that specific place.
It borders on offensive to deride that specific, lived experience and claim that one’s own lived experience is somehow “incorrect” and should have been “fact-checked.”
But perhaps it is an illuminating pivot, a rhetorical technique that is also deployed against Palestinians who are telling their own stories, often live-streaming their own dispossession, only to have political leaders in Israel and the United States deny what we can observe on our own screens, asking for a “fact check” from the screaming mouths of those who are being ethnically cleansed. The Palestinian people have long been showing us with a humbling earnestness what they are seeing — what violence is being done to their own bodies, their animals, their children, their homes and their land. And the colonial voices say to them: “We deny the reality that you are feeling and living and breathing.”
Kudos to the author of “Against all odds: A journey to Palestine” for putting their faith into practice by opening her heart and eyes to the struggle of the Palestinian people. Despite an illogical and factually unsound attack that fails to make a coherent argument or reckon with the direct quotes, the direct witness and the lived experience Cross shares with great vulnerability, I hope Cross and others continue to trust what they see with their own eyes, hear with their own ears and touch with their own hands.
As the apostles Peter and John replied when authorities ordered them to be silent in the face of injustice, “We cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20). And nor should we.
Emma West Rasmus is a member of the Palestine Justice Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA), and a former participant on a Sabeel delegation to Palestine in February 2024.
