One thousand and fifty-three days after October 7, 2023, with Israel’s erasure of Gaza in full swing, with over 70,000 Palestinian fatalities,1 and with state-supported terrorism in the West Bank on display, Israel is losing the war for public opinion.2

People who never thought twice about Palestinians have been moved to outrage by eyewitness testimony, fearless reporting and images—of squalid tent cities and demolished hospitals, of emaciated babies and targeted children.

But even as IDF war crimes are shifting global opinion, Israel’s Christian partisans in the West are pledging allegiance to the Star of David. Consider the fourteen Christian leaders who met with Benjamin Netanyahu in February, 2025 to profess unwavering zeal for him and for Israel. Consider also the Christian scholars and pundits who, even now, are defending Israeli talking points.3

From these public figures the Christian church is hearing no call to repent, no condemnation, much less repudiation, of Israel’s industrial violence—its targeting of children, medics and journalists; its indiscriminate bombing and collective punishment; its mass human displacement; its obliteration of all that sustains life in Gaza.

What we hear instead from pro-Israel Christians is now predictable: war is complicated; Israel is defending itself; the casualties are Hamas’s fault; Israel could have killed every Gazan but hasn’t, so it’s not genocide; Israel isn’t perfect, but Hamas uses human shields; the bullet in the forehead of that 18-month-old was an accident.

Question: do you know a pro-Israel Christian thought leader who has publicly changed her or his mind on Israel? Do you know any Zionist Christian leaders who have repented openly of uncritical support for Israel, and repudiated the mass incarceration, documented torture and erasure of Palestinians? If such a person exists, what caused the reversal?

What gets in the way of change?

Research shows that every one of us struggles to switch sides on weighty matters, especially when that change of mind could challenge our identity, loyalties and alliances. Here’s a list of obstacles to mind-changing, each one of them formidable.

1. We are polarized and suspicious. (The bane of binary thinking)

I stand for freedom and light; you advocate tyranny and darkness. I’m a soldier; you are a terrorist. Social media echo chambers stoke fears and brand our critics as obdurate, malign, nefarious. So stark are the polarities now that many Americans doubt “whether dialogue with other Americans . . . is even worth their time” (Higdon & Huff, 6; Klein, ch.1). Binary thinking is especially strong among religious people who imagine a universe locked in cosmic conflict. When ideas and arguments are weapons in the grand Battle between Good and Evil, changing one’s mind—switching sides—is tantamount to apostasy.

2. We are loyal to our tribe. (The danger of excessive conformity)

We are all tribal. We cherish ingroup solidarity, sometimes indulge in outgroup dehumanization, and may even resort to violent confrontation. Members of my tribe wear halos; others wear horns. When we form opinions and make decisions, “we are prone to imitate, befriend or seek the advice of a particular type of person—a person just like us,” whether they share family ties, religion or ethnicity. To deviate from my tribe on non-trivial matters is disloyalty, even betrayal (Hertz, ch.10; Cavanaugh, 181-182, 217; Lubrano 26-27).

3. We cherry pick data to bolster the views we hold. (The power of confirmation bias)

Confirmation bias is “the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them” (Kolbert; cf. Lubrano, 23). Rather than acknowledge ambiguity and allow for nuance, we look for reasons to maintain our beliefs. We are, in fact, “incredibly good at picking apart other people’s reasons. We are just terrible at picking apart our own in the same way” (McRaney; cf. Kolbert). Strangely enough, “we actually get a dopamine rush when we find confirming data, similar to the one we get if we eat chocolate, have sex, or fall in love” (Hertz, ch.2).

4. We preserve coherence through rationalization. (The discomfort of cognitive dissonance)

We feel discomfort “when our actions contradict our beliefs . . . or when two of our beliefs contradict one another” (Lubrano, 23-24). We are “biased and lazy,” says McRaney. “It is costly to re-evaluate everything all the time.” So “when we argue with ourselves, we usually win. We draw self-serving conclusions based on our unique experiences and motivations, and then we employ reasoning to create justifications and rationalizations for our own thoughts, feelings, behaviors, plans, and goals” (McRaney, chs.7 & 8). When Winnie-the-Pooh fails to reach the beehive hanging from the oak tree, he decides that the buzzing swarm must be the “the wrong sort of bees” who would thus make “the wrong sort of honey.” To compensate for not tasting the honey, our beloved bear rationalizes.

5. We think we are more informed than we are. (The illusion of explanatory depth)

We all know the awkwardness of making a bold claim and then scrambling to provide evidence to buttress our point. “People believe that they know way more than they actually do,” says Kolbert. When it comes to complex causal patterns and “wicked” problems, we often don’t realize how woefully under-informed we are. When we are overconfident, even burdened by intellectual hubris, we are closed off to information that challenges our understanding.

6. We wrongly assume that the best ideas will ultimately prevail. (The myth of the marketplace)

Many of us imagine that if all are free to speak openly in the public square, the best ideas will prevail. But “marketplace” metaphors don’t work well with political wedge issues and inherited cultural convictions. We are persuaded less by better ideas than by media influencers and personalities (both secular and religious). The internet is driven more by ad revenue than by any hunger for honest conversation. Moreover, as Sarah Lubrano points out, the mediasphere “has fractured into many tiny media landscapes,” with each one “selling such specialized wares that people in one marketplace have no idea what is being sold in the others.” All of which is to say that the internet is “nothing like a ‘level playing field’ where the best ideas are likely to win out” (Lubrano, 28, 31).

Your turn

What about you? Have you changed your mind on something momentous, something morally consequential? Who or what prompted you to rethink and redirect? Did any of my six obstacles stand in your way? How did your tribe react? Perhaps some of you will share your change-of-mind stories in the comments.

My sojourn on the planet began in Montreal among the Plymouth Brethren. We didn’t go to church. We were the church. No ornate sanctuary for us, just a modest “chapel.” No lectionary, just the Bible. No pastor, just a handful of elders. On Sundays, women covered their heads and kept quiet while men requested hymns (sung a cappella), read scripture and delivered homilies before we shared the Lord’s Supper—each of us tearing a piece from a single loaf and sipping port from a single chalice. We were a serious and separated bunch, as Garrison Keillor described the Sanctified Brethren of imaginary Lake Wobegon: “a lot of very quiet people worrying about each other’s souls.”1

The movement owes its origins to Irishman John Nelson Darby who, in the mid-19th century, defended low-church ecclesiology and popularized the curious idea of a pre-tribulation rapture in which God evacuates true Christians heavenward before pouring out judgment upon the earth. Darby championed Dispensationalism, which took America by storm when, in 1909, lawyer-turned-pastor C. I. Scofield transcribed Darby’s teachings into the footnotes of his Scofield Reference Bible. In due course, Dispensationalists would move from the hermeneutical bleachers onto the political playing field where they lobbied and labored for Jewish hegemony over the Holy Land and its peoples, in part because they knew the End was near.2

In high school the Jesus Movement found me underlining verses in my Bible, patching my jeans like Randy Stonehill, and playing Fender Rhodes and harmonica in a Christian folk band.

The post-Woodstock seventies were for me a time to gather weekly with friends—to play guitar, sing, pray and pledge our loyalty to Jesus. We were living on history’s edge, after all, what with Larry Norman’s sound track (“I wish we’d all been ready,” 1969), Hal Lindsey’s bestseller (The Late, Great Planet Earth, 1970), and apocalyptic shock flicks (A Thief in the Night, 1973)—all following hard on those six days of war in 1967 that that “miraculously” brought Jerusalem’s Temple Mount under Jewish control.

Fulfillment, not negation

It wasn’t until college that I read my way out of rapture theology and abandoned the apocalyptic dualism of my youth. No longer was I “only visiting this planet,” nor was worldwide destruction something to welcome. No longer did every earthly conflict embody a cosmic battle between heavenly Light and infernal Darkness.

As for Dispensationalism’s central tenet, that ethnic “Israel” and the Christian “church” were to remain forever distinct, however, I was agnostic. By the mid-eighties, enamored with lexical semantics, I was writing an M.A. thesis on terms for the people of God in the New Testament and discovering Paul’s habit of describing his mostly-Gentile churches with language long reserved for ethnic Israelites.3

• Romans 9:24-25: including us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the gentiles? As he also says in Hosea, “Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’ and her who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved.’” “And in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ there they shall be called children of the living God.”

• Galatians 3:7, 9, 29: those who believe are the descendants of Abraham; those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed; if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

• Galatians 4:28, 31: you, my friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac; We are children . . . of the free woman

• Ephesians 2:12: you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel

• Philippians 3:3: For it is we who are the circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh.

To what extent did Christ-believing Gentiles share in the covenants and blessings promised ancient Israel? Did the New Testament preserve an ongoing distinction between Gentile and Judaean Christ believers? Was the national, territorial restoration foreseen by Israel’s prophets fulfilled in the church, or should we expect Jewish political resurgence?

My Israel/Church quandary persisted into the nineties when I found my way to Duke University to study with Richard Hays, who wrote of Paul’s gospel as “the fulfillment, not the negation, of God’s word to Israel,” and Paul’s Scriptures as “a prefiguration of the church as the people of God.”4

To suggest that Jesus’ movement annulled or replaced Israel would have been incoherent to Paul. On the contrary, Paul would have seen the church as a promise fulfilled, and Christ-believing gentiles as co-equal children of Abraham and co-heirs of the blessings promised the commonwealth of Israel (Gal 3:29; Eph 2:11–3:6; 1 Pet 2:9–10).

With believing Gentiles now fully belonging to Abraham’s family, with God now most present in Jesus, and with a global mission underway, New Testament authors had little to say about redrawn physical borders, and much to say about erased barriers between peoples. Nowhere is this more explicit than in Ephesians 2.

Four waypoints on a journey

Not until the early 2000s, after joining the faculty of Westmont College, did I realize that my reading of Paul’s letters had political implications.

The teaching post came with a travel budget so I boarded a plane bound for Tel Aviv, hoping for stories and pictures from the Holy Land to spice up my lectures. But what seized my attention as the Second Intifada wound down was not just the vistas of Arbel, the crystalline Dead Sea, and the gates of Old Jerusalem. What held my gaze were the visible tensions between peoples and the trappings of a military occupation, among them sprawling checkpoints growing up around Jerusalem and the serpentine Wall that began to appear in 2002.

1. Switching Teams

Initially I assumed Israel’s harsh tactics were self-defense or understandable retaliation against Arab bus-bombers and Muslim militants. By 2006, however, the evidence before me suggested otherwise. Long pre-dawn queues of laborers at checkpoints; incremental dispossession of Palestinians from their land; inequitable distribution of resources; daily humiliations and unreasonable constraints—none of it was necessary or humane.

When I visited Hebron families trapped and barred from “sterilized” (i.e., Arab-free) streets; when I watched soldiers assault and gas unarmed villagers for refusing to relinquish confiscated farmland; when I helped rebuild houses (mixing mortar, moving bricks, pulling nails) flattened by Daewoo bulldozers for the lack of building permits (nigh impossible to acquire), Israeli talking points rang hollow.

Critics might say I had traded one false moral binary for another, replaced the Palestinian-Arab villain with the Israeli-Jewish one, switched teams but didn’t change the game. They wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

2. Moving between worlds

With time, as I moved easily between opposite worlds—settlement and refugee camp; Tel Aviv and Nablus; West Jerusalem and East, I learned to toggle also between conflicting mythologies: Jewish Zionist and Palestinian liberationist. Whether from Holocaust or Nakba, national trauma was real. The Land had room for two peoples, each with ancient ties, existential fears, legitimate grievances, and profound ignorance of the Other.

On Monday I would hang out with liberal Zionists and settler hippies who wanted peaceful coexistence in the hill country of their ancestors. On Tuesday I would march beside Palestinians who needed the world to see their plight and enforce international law. After a visit with the Nassar family on their settler-threatened hilltop, I would cross highway 60 to plead their case to an Orthodox settler in Efrat.

Zealous to hear “both sides,” I sought out Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Palestinian Authority, UNRWA, B’tselem, Al-Haq, Jordanian negotiators, and Christian organizations like the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem and Holy Land Trust. I attended lectures and book launches. I heard testimonies from Breaking the Silence, wept with storytellers from Parents Circle, and marveled at the resolve of Combatants for Peace whose members knew up close the futility of violence.

No one was off limits. I sat with gun-toting settlers and dispossessed refugees, zealous peace activists and contrarian ideologues, aging Arab Bedouins and young Haredi Jews. I taught English to students in Nablus, hiked the West Bank with Muslims, stayed in moshavim, kibbutzim and eco-farms in the Galilee, and twice visited the besieged Gaza. I observed Ecumenical Accompaniers shielding children in Hebron; I witnessed brave Rabbis for Human Rights in Bil’in. In Anata I took inspiration from Jeff Halper, in Bethlehem from Sami Awad, in Jerusalem from Salim Munayer, to name a few sages from a long list that includes both editors of this book.

With leaders like these, went my unassailable logic, the peace camp would surely succeed. Even with setbacks like September 11 and the Second Intifada, they would eventually transform the conflict from below, until two viable states emerged or until Israel became an egalitarian state for all its citizens. And American Christians would finally join the march toward peace.

Naïve, as it turns out.

3. Watching clouds threaten

Naïveté succumbed to dread. Checking the pulse of the Two State solution, I confirmed its demise and watched Israel maneuver to ensure that no viable Palestinian state would ever emerge. Settlers weren’t leaving. Palestinian land was shrinking. Legalized, entrenched inequality meant wildly disproportionate retaliation against Palestinian violence, detention without charge, systematic prisoner abuse, accelerated demolition of houses and villages, impunity for settler terrorists, state-funded parades in Old Jerusalem, and Knesset laws that inscribed discrimination based upon ethnicity. The Jewish state’s hegemony—political, cultural, demographic, military—looked to be fortified for the long term.

Meanwhile, many younger Palestinians were abandoning their parents’ dream of national self-determination and questing instead for human rights. Likewise, the new generation of Palestinian Christians was feeling forsaken by western Evangelicals—whose Zionist ideology had proven intractable, and whose pilgrims walked where Jesus walked but never learned how.

4. Raging in the falling dark

In the months since October 7, 2023, shadows have darkened my soul. Israel’s forces have abandoned restraint and turned Gaza into wasteland. In pursuit of territory, permanent security and payback, the IDF has exterminated and maimed tens of thousands, displaced and terrorized millions, seized most of the tiny Strip (60%, soon 70%), besieged the rest, and inflicted on Gazans trauma more grievous than what their grandparents suffered eight decades ago.

My darkness is not just outrage over Israeli brutality and American complicity, nor is it merely fears of Palestinian erasure. It is also the bleak realization that a live-streamed extinction has had almost no impact on my pale-faced, Euro-American, Evangelical tribe. After three years of state terror, Zionist Christians are sticking to their script: Israel acts in self-defense, the IDF is honorable and Hamas demonic, Itamar Ben Gvir is an outlier, Palestinians are incapable of peaceful co-existence, Israel’s critics are antisemitic, and the near-global consensus that the Gaza assault is genocidal is without merit.

My people may lament the death of Gaza’s children and gesture obliquely at Israel’s “imperfections.” But never do they repudiate systemic injustice or condemn Israel for bombing and sniping non-combatants. After more than 5,000 attacks in the West Bank by Jewish Israeli civilians since early 2023,5 Evangelical support for the settler movement remains strong.

I once thought arguments and evidence would change minds. I once imagined Christian Zionists and Evangelical partisans repenting of uncritical support for the state of Israel. I once expected that the cries of bereaved parents and forlorn orphans would awaken in them zeal for justice. I once assumed their tolerance of Israel’s transgressions had limits.

I harbor such fantasies no longer. Indeed, after Evangelicalism’s profane complicity in Gaza’s desolation, I feel estranged from my tribe. Like an Elijah despondent over the Israelites, I hold out little hope for my people. Unlike Elijah, it is not clear I’ll be able to return to their world.

Fourteen Evangelical leaders on Team Netanyahu

It was early in February 2025 when the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump during his second term as president arrived in Washington. That visitor was Benjamin Netanyahu. On the night before his visit to the West Wing, Israel’s longest-serving head of state met with fourteen influential Americans in the historic Blair House nearby.

The American group included not a single Jew. Nor were moguls and military industrialists in the room. Every one of the fourteen attendees was an evangelical Christian, among them Franklin Graham, John Hagee, Robert Jeffress, Ralph Reed, Paula White, Mike Evans, Mario Bramnick, and Tony Perkins—all of them invited by fellow evangelical Mike Huckabee, the next US ambassador to Israel.

Having witnessed Israel extinguish thousands of innocent lives—women and men, young and old—and purposely destroy homes, schools, hospitals, churches, mosques, power stations, and anything else that might sustain life, these evangelical leaders gathered to profess their unwavering zeal for Israel.

Having watched American leaders defend mass killing—and having watched American industries supply, American taxes fund, American technologies streamline, and American weapons accomplish it—these public figures chose not to confront the American-Israeli war machine. They hastened instead to celebrate the choreographer of Gaza’s decimation.

Having witnessed Gaza become the world’s deadliest place to be a child, they requested no reprieve for the sake of the little ones. Presented no petition. Delivered no ultimatum. They simply pledged more evangelical support and promised soon to resume Holy Land bus tours.1

Voices crying in the Judean wilderness

Five days before this assembly of evangelicals would reassert their support for Netanyahu and their love for the Jewish people, Peter Beinart’s latest book hit the shelves: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.2 I’m guessing none of our fourteen Evangelicals brought a copy in their carry-on en route to DC.

A professor, editor, political commentator, and notable public figure, Peter Beinart is also an observant Jew who worships in a Modern Orthodox New York synagogue. His slim volume, already a New York Times bestseller, recounts tragedies from October 7, introduces us to some of the hostages, and describes the collective trauma experienced by Jews in Israel and across the world. It also provides trenchant critique of, and historical context for, what Israel has been up to in Gaza: “the flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name.”3

In what one reviewer calls “a spiritual manifesto for the future of Judaism,”4 Beinart writes to summon his fellow Jews to a moral reckoning, calling them audaciously to embrace “equality rather than supremacy.”5 He seeks to persuade his extended family to “tell a new story,” an unvarnished recitation in which:

We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense. It exempts Jews from external judgment. It offers infinite license to fallible human beings.6

Nor is Beinart’s the only voice crying out in the Judean wilderness. The Iranian-Israeli human rights activist Orly Noy, after beholding the intense response in Israel to the release of Jewish hostages, sounded a warning before her compatriots:

The war will not end with a ceasefire, the return of all the hostages, or even a full military withdrawal from Gaza. The war will end only when Israeli society realizes that it is not only immoral but also impossible to secure our existence through the oppression and subjugation of another people—and that the people we imprison, bomb, starve, and rob of their freedom and land are entitled to the exact same rights as we are, down to the last note.7

Jesus’s inflammatory critique of the powerful

This book does not presume to tell Jews how to rewrite their story after Gaza. That burden belongs on the shoulders of Peter Beinart, Orly Noy, and other brave Jewish sages who sense first-hand the existential fear embedded in Jewish identity,8 and who are witnesses not only to their people’s trauma but also to Israel’s doomed quest for permanent security. It takes courage for a Jew to testify that the Jewish state has succumbed to rage, that its military has fused enemy combatant with civilian, that the foot soldiers conducting its slaughter are darkening their own souls.9 It takes audacity in this moment for Jews publicly to model empathy toward Palestinians and to pursue justice for all, not just survival for some.10

This book summons a different community—our own—to its own moral reckoning. We are responding to Gaza’s destruction as would-be followers of Jesus. We write from different cultural contexts, lived experiences, and professional disciplines, but we are united in our desire to see Christians in the West tell a new story. That story must begin with pledges of political allegiance not to the State of Israel but to God’s just and peaceable kingdom; it must be willing to echo Jesus’s “inflammatory critique of those in power,” and it must be marked by a collective lament for Christian complicity in a massacre.11

Western Christians shed tears for Jewish hostages and celebrate their release. But rarely do our hearts break for Palestinians. We have muffled, not amplified, calls for ceasefire. Some of us have made the crisis in Gaza a plot point in our End Times bestsellers or an applause line in our Sunday sermons.12 We have provided biblical justification, political support, and financial backing for discrimination, displacement and, now, genocide.

We have ignored the cries of some 40,000 children left without one or both parents.13 We have abandoned hapless hostages subjected to unlawful detention and abuse in Israeli prisons.14 We have demonized non-Jews the way our ancestors demonized Jews.

Mistaking good intentions for good theology, we have conflated Zionism with Judaism and treated the State of Israel as trustworthy and righteous by definition, and thus virtually incapable of criminal behavior. Not only have we credulously amplified false claims of burned and beheaded babies.15 We have uncritically repeated memes about human shields and self-defense and Israel’s “unprecedented” efforts to avoid civilian casualties.16

We have narrated low-tech mass killing as barbaric terrorism while writing off high-tech mass killing as mere collateral damage. We have distinguished two kinds of victims, worthy and unworthy: “those we are allowed to pity” and “those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored.”17

Why do clergy whisper when they should scream?

In his 2002 book A Moral Reckoning, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen summoned the Roman Catholic church and its clergy to confront their complicity in the Holocaust. “What must a religion of love and goodness do,” he asks, “to confront its history of hatred and harm, and to perform restitution?” To followers of Jesus, Goldhagen poses several stark questions:

Would Jesus, a man who spoke truth to power, have said that his Church should have shouted protest, have spoken moral truth to evil, instead of being virtually silent, as the Jews were being hounded, tortured, and exterminated? Would Jesus himself, in the face of such evil, have publicly condemned the evildoers?18

Goldhagen could imagine three possible replies. Christians could remain silent; they could say that Jesus would not have called for protest; or . . . they could say

that Jesus would have told his Church that it must not be a silent witness, complicit in the evil of the slaughtering of his people or, for that matter, of any people, that Jesus himself, this forthright man of goodness, would, of course, have publicly, repeatedly decried the evil in explicit, unambiguous, powerful, and ringing language.19

Allow me to rephrase Goldhagen’s question for us today:

Would Jesus say “that his Church should have shouted protest, have spoken moral truth to evil, instead of being virtually silent,” as Gazans were bombed, arrested, “tortured, and exterminated? Would Jesus himself, in the face of such evil, have publicly condemned the evildoers?”20

Why, in other words, do our theologians and clergy “whisper when they should scream”?21

How Many? How Long?

In the final chapter of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, Beinart too pictures himself posing questions to his people:

How many Palestinians would Israel have to kill in Gaza before you urged the United States to stop sending it weapons? How many Palestinian prisoners would Israel have to torture and sexually abuse with impunity before you acknowledged the right of international courts to put Israeli leaders on trial? How long must West Bank Palestinians live under military law before you stop calling Israel a democracy? How many human rights groups have to accuse it of apartheid before you question the principle that Jews alone must rule?22

Beinart thinks he knows how his Jewish kinfolk would reply.

They’d likely include references to Hamas, human shields, Iran, and antisemitism, coupled with expressions of regret that the cruel realities of the Middle East require Israel to protect itself in such painful ways. But the essential answer would be clear: There is no limit. No matter how many Palestinians die, they do not tip the scales, because the value of a Palestinian is finite and the value of a Jewish state is infinite.23

Some respondents, it is safe to say, would go beyond hand-wringing, Jewish solidarity, and Realpolitik to openly advocate collective punishment, mass killing and wholesale displacement of Palestinians. New York-based Israeli journalist Liel Leibovitz sees Israel “fighting millions of little Hamans, murderous marauders who will grow emboldened the more we offer them mercy.”24 His problem is not simply with Hamas militants but with all of “Israel’s neighbors to the south,” who are collectively possessed by “the singular idea that gives them life and meaning: Kill the Jews, all of them, gleefully.”25

Leibovitz’s cartoonish depiction of the Palestinian collective would be funny if it were not toxic and deadly. Rabbi Eliyahu Mali of the Shirat Moshe Yeshiva in Jaffa, in an address to IDF soldiers on March 7, 2024, invoked Scripture to justify killing all Gazans, including women, children, and the elderly.26 Randy Fine, the right-wing Zionist U.S. Senator from Florida, didn’t require an essay or a homily to slate all Gazans for annihilation. A breezy three-word tweet would do, which he posted to X on February 20, 2025: “Palestinian” = Hamas. #BombsAway.27

Scanning the clouds for Jesus’ return

What about our tribe? How might predominantly pro-Israel North American Christians reply to Beinart’s questions: How many? How long? With American evangelicals consistently proving themselves more reliably pro-Israel than American Jews,28 it is not hard to predict some of the responses. They might begin by opening their Bibles, turning to Ezekiel, say, or Revelation to explain that the apocalypse is dawning. Or they’d look up that verse in Romans where God ordains governments to bear the sword against evil actors.

Some of our theologians would invoke Just War theory or speak of Judeo-Christian solidarity. Others would identify Palestinians with the biblical Philistines, or with the Canaanites whom Joshua displaced at God’s command. Some would read Genesis as reason to bless and support the State of Israel no matter what.29 More than a few would simply hold their tongues and scan the clouds for signs of Jesus’s return.

All members of the tribe, I suspect, would lament the deaths of Palestinian women and children (though probably not men). I can hear us supplementing our prayers for Israel’s protection with something generic about suffering Gazans.30 But most would hasten to clarify that blame for the body count rests entirely on Hamas,31 who, it is maintained, uses civilians as human shields32 and hospitals as staging areas. Israel, by contrast, would be celebrated as a “rare example of democracy in a region dominated by authoritarian regimes,”33 whose army is doing “all it can” to avoid civilian casualties.34

Like Beinart’s imagined Jewish community, my imagined Christian one would draw no red lines. Our beloved Israel must do what it needs to do. Gaza may have become uninhabitable, but we could never admit that Israel has gone too far. The logic, albeit unacknowledged, seems to be that “any violence committed by Palestinians justifies all violence by Israel, and no violence committed by Israel justifies any by Palestinians.”35 To think otherwise would be for Christians to succumb once again to the sin of antisemitism.

The Wrong Sort of Christians

The contributors to Being Christian After the Desolation of Gaza refuse to defend the indefensible. Egregious criminal behavior on one side does not justify mass killing, brutality, and displacement on the other. Neither Islamist militancy nor surging global antisemitism nor the fog of war can excuse the scale of collective punishment we have witnessed over more than 500 days. Gaza’s wreckage is more than the detritus of exploded homes and bombed hospitals. The smoldering pyramids of concrete are more than monumental tombs for trapped and crushed civilians. The fetid refuse, the mass graves, the toxic rubble are something else: forensic evidence of the collective moral failure and silent complicity of millions of American Christians.

In one of Winnie-the-Pooh’s early adventures, the beloved bear, clutching a balloon, floats upward toward a beehive on a tree branch where, he reasons, there must be honey. Alas, the bees begin to buzz suspiciously, one landing on Pooh’s nose, prompting him to announce soberly to Christopher Robin that the threatening swarm must be “the wrong sort of bees.” Which means, he calculates, they would make “the wrong sort of honey.”

Many of Israel’s evangelical defenders, including the fourteen who pledged loyalty to Netanyahu in February 2025, are likely to conclude that the contributors to this book are “the wrong sort of Christians.” Why haven’t we given equal billing to Jewish fear and generational trauma? Why are there only passing references to the Israeli civilians massacred and captured by Hamas? Why so little on the despotism of Israel’s neighbors, and so much about Israel’s rage and revenge?

As we see it, evangelicals don’t need encouragement to recoil from the horrors of October 7 and condemn the perpetrators. Our tribe is eager to stand with bereaved Jewish and Israeli friends, and to repudiate Hamas for attacking civilians. Where evangelicals do need help is in cherishing the full humanity of Palestinians alongside that of their Jewish neighbors; in acknowledging what should now be obvious: that Israel aims to empty Gaza (and large parts of the West Bank) of Palestinians; in decrying the injustice of dispossession; and in recognizing our own complicity in Gaza’s incineration.

A motley crew clinging to hope

The contributors to this book are an improbable collective. One is a Jewish Israeli advocate for reconciliation. Four are Palestinian academics, one of whom grew up in Gaza and is the new Academic Dean at Bethlehem Bible College. One of us serves with distinction an Anglican church in East Jerusalem. One is a renowned Latin American theologian.

We hail from a variety of Christian communities: Anglican, Christian Church, Christian Reformed, Evangelical Covenant, Greek Orthodox, Mennonite, Messianic, Pentecostal, Presbyterian and non-denominational. We are activists, advocates, organizers, professors, priests, pastors, theologians, and graduate students. We have taught courses, written books, articles, and blog posts, preached sermons, composed poems, produced films, hosted interviews, offered seminars, and organized conferences, all while praying for justice and peace to prevail in the Land. We have led study programs across the region for undergraduates, seminarians and adults, and we’ve watched how the same Bible can inspire peacemakers and stir up warmongers.

We have waited hours at checkpoints, graffitied the Wall, witnessed brutality, choked on tear gas, shielded children, tended the wounded, enjoyed Arab and Jewish hospitality, camped with Bedouin, marched for justice, battled despair, and clung to hope.

We have raised candles in the churches of Bethlehem, danced in the alleys of Jerusalem, prayed at the Western Wall, watched the sun set on the Sea of Galilee, and ascended Masada at dawn. We have spent sabbaths with Jewish friends, shared Iftar with Muslim friends, and broken bread with followers of Jesus Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic. We have pursued Jesus to Capernaum, sipped water from Jacob’s Well, harvested olives in the West Bank hills, and savored apricots in the Makrour valley.

Declare us “the wrong sort of Christians” if you must. But don’t say we haven’t spent years listening, learning, laboring, yearning, and praying for a durable, just peace between Palestinians and their Jewish neighbors whose Messiah we follow. Our impressions have formed slowly over many years in the land, through lingering encounters, hard conversations, and troubling experiences. Disagree with us if you must, but first hear us out.

Toxic fictions and formidable obstacles

Jews and Palestinians both have ancient and authentic ties to the Land we call Holy. A lasting resolution must recognize these twin realities. The state of Israel, born of European Zionist aspirations for self-determination and need for refuge, welcomed and empowered Jews from around the world. It also displaced and evicted Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of whom were driven out or forced to flee when the state was founded. Those who remained saw their lives and lands come under Israeli occupation and control.

Palestinian reactions to this catastrophe have run the gamut: from resignation and collaboration, to political advocacy and international diplomacy, to peaceful demonstration and boycott, to civil unrest, exasperation and emigration, to religious zealotry, violence and terrorism. None of these tactics has met with much success. Some have brought disaster.

The “conflict” between Jews and Palestinians is not one thing. It is a battle for land and water and holy sites. It is a war of demographics and religions and dueling nationalisms. Complicating the matter are false binaries, weaponized ideologies, tribal rivalries, delusional power games, assassinations, corruption, American duplicity, international collusion, and climate change. Nor should we discount the influence of “violent fundamentalism and messianic prejudices, fantasies and symbols, and deep-rooted anxieties.”36

To this dire list of formidable obstacles we must add one more: western Christian complicity. Israel’s Christian partisans in North America and Europe perpetuate injustice and further entrench the conflict when they imagine that love for the Jewish people means defending the apocalypse Israel has unleashed on Palestinians; when they equate “blessing” Abraham with abetting Israel’s military; when they let Israel respond to a perceived demographic threat with mass expulsion; when they broadcast palpable falsehoods about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians;37 when they embrace the toxic fiction that sympathy for Palestinians promotes “deranged and murderous Jew-hatred”38 or, to flip it around, when they behave as if standing with the Jews means supporting their efforts to banish others.

I hold out little hope that the fourteen Evangelicals who sat down with Benjamin Netanyahu in February, 2025 will read this book, “come to Jesus,” and rethink what it means to be Christian after the desolation of Gaza. But Jesus rose from the dead, so you never know. For the rest of us who are asking how things got so bad and wondering where to go from here, perhaps these essays will cast a few shards of light on a darkened path.

BEING CHRISTIAN AFTER THE DESOLATION OF GAZA — CONTENTS

Introduction — The Wrong Sort of Christians — Bruce N. Fisk

PART I—War on the Land: Witnessing Israel’s Desolation of Gaza

• Chapter One—Gaza Undone — Bruce N. Fisk

• Chapter Two—Israel’s Christian Armada Sets Sail — Bruce N. Fisk

• Chapter Three—Bombing in the Name of the Gospel — Gary M. Burge

• Chapter Four—Prisoner Abuse and Evangelical Indifference — David M. Crump

• Chapter Five—Hamas and Violence: Ideology, Militarism, and the Quest for Liberation — Daniel Bannoura

• Chapter Six—Palestinian Citizens of Israel in the Shadow of the War on Gaza — Lamma Mansour

• Chapter Seven—The Political Perils of Biblical Archaeology in the Holy Land — Donald D. Binder

PART II—The Bible and the Land: Listening for God’s Voice in the Tempest

• Chapter Eight—How Can We Sing the Lord’s Song? — Lisa Loden

• Chapter Nine—Theologizing and De-theologizing Genocide — Yousef Kamal AlKhouri

• Chapter Ten—Doing Justice: The Unequivocal Calling of God’s People — Ruth Padilla DeBorst

• Chapter Eleven—Missiology After Gaza: Christian Zionism, God’s Character, and the Gospel — Anton Deik

• Chapter Twelve—October 7 and Armageddon: Misreading Revelation, Justifying Genocide — Rob Dalrymple

PART III—The Peoples of the Land: Taking Our Stand with the Vulnerable

• Chapter Thirteen—Living the Future We Hope For: Christians, Jews, and Muslims at the Gaza Border — Mercy Aiken

• Chapter Fourteen—Passing By on the Other Side: Christianity Today Since October 7 — Benjamin Norquist

• Chapter Fifteen—A Tale of Two Trips — Suzanne Watts Henderson

• Chapter Sixteen—Worshiping Jerusalem: Christian Colonizers and Colonized Christians — David M. Crump

• Chapter Seventeen—A Great Awakening: Mennonite Action and Palestinian Liberation — Amy Yoder McGloughlin

• Chapter Eighteen—Being Christian After the Desolation of Gaza — J. Ross Wagner

Appendix—A Gaza Timeline — Bruce N. Fisk

On that day, says the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon
and darken the earth in broad daylight.
I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation;
I will bring sackcloth on all loins and baldness on every head;
I will make it like the mourning for an only son and the end of it like a bitter day.
(Amos 8:9-10)

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.
At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:33-34)

I would not blame victims of a genocide for decrying Divine Absence. I marvel at those who entrust themselves to God while enduring “flattened cities, dismembered children and open sewage streaming through tent encampments.” At those who pray to a merciful God (Ar-Raḥīm) while “rebuilding makeshift shelters, sifting through a collapsed home and waiting for hours for food, only to be turned away to starve.”1 At those unarmed West Bank Palestinians who keep faith during murderous assaults by state-armed Jewish terrorists.2

Compared to these believers, my own faith hangs by a thread. As I watch hell fire rain upon civilians in West Asia—from Gaza, Tel Aviv and Beirut to Tehran, Doha and Abu Dhabi—and as Zionist militias banish more and more Palestinian families into homelessness, rage surges within. I continue “scanning the skies for a beacon from you,” but no sign appears.3 “What happens to our claims about divine presence,” asks Palestinian theologian Shadia Qubti, “when bombs target hospitals, when children die seeking water, when sacred spaces lie in rubble?”4

Sacred Celestial River

South of the equator, the Milky Way tracks directly overhead. Stargazers in the northern hemisphere are jealous.5 No surprise that this galactic wonder fired the Incan imagination across a vast empire that spanned some 2,500 miles tip to toe. For comparison, think Roman Empire from Great Britain to Iran.

For the Incas, the Milky Way was a sacred celestial river—willka mayu in Quechua. When that sky-river’s orientation dipped into the cosmic ocean upon which the earth floated, it drew waters into the sky that would return as rain to renew the earth. Recycling water in this way, the Milky Way was “the principal organizing unit in the Andean astronomical-cosmological system.”6

Creatures in the Night Sky

When observing our galaxy’s center, the Incas saw countless points of light, as do we. But they also saw fields of darkness where no stars shone, something we may be less likely to notice. Astronomers explain these shadows as clouds of interstellar gas and dust that block our view of the stars behind them. The Incas had a different explanation: what they saw were dark constellations—powerful spirit beings that imaged creatures here below. Animals and birds on earth had supernatural heavenly counterparts.

One of the shadows was a serpent that would herald the rainy season, corresponding to earth-bound snakes who emerge from their dens when the rains arrive. Another was a celestial toad who would rise above the horizon at the very time of year that earthly toads end their hibernation and begin to mate. The most conspicuous dark constellation in the southern sky is the llama, cherished Andean creature, beast of burden, source of meat and wool and fertilizer. The heavenly llama rises progressively higher in the wee hours during the earthly llama’s birthing season, from late November to April.

There’s wisdom here, it seems to me. When I behold the core of our galaxy on a moonless night, I see dark patches of emptiness. Pondering that same canopy, the Incas saw fullness—not a lifeless void or an unfortunate obstruction, but an animated presence. They recognized life in the absence of light.

The Notes You Don’t Play

Good musicians and artists know the importance of negative space. For jazz giant Miles Davis, it was not the notes you played; it was the notes you didn’t play. In the distilled simplicity of Broken Coastline by Caitlin Canty and Peter Adams, the sonic spaces between the notes emulate the empty, open road of which Caitlin sings. Good writers leave room as well. They’ve learned that a single word is often better than a phrase, that adverbs are evil, that clutter is the enemy.7 Heeding the wisdom of George Orwell, when they can delete, they do.8

Interpret the Page, Not Just the Ink

So too, good readers attend to the empty space between the lines. The Hebrew Bible is particularly cavernous. In the sacred stories about Abraham, Joseph and David, words of explanation, motivation and description are conspicuously absent. Even God is under-described, from the very first line of Genesis: “In the beginning God created” or “When God began to create.”

“God comes on stage with a complete absence of preliminaries. Who is God? What is God? Where does he hail from? How does he differ from other deities?”9

“The sparely sketched foreground of biblical narrative,” says Robert Alter, “somehow implies a large background dense with possibilities of interpretation.”10 Attentive readers become “partners in creating the story” by closing narrative gaps, solving puzzles and resolving ambiguities.11 We must interpret the page, not just the ink.

So musicians know that good performance requires unplayed notes, writers, that the best literature is gapped, and readers, that we discover meaning between the lines. So too, the Incas remind us that darkness is not emptiness, and that some eyes see what others cannot.

The Darkness of God

But what do we do when God goes missing, when the light of Transcendence fades to black?

Divine darkness overshadowed more than a few biblical characters. The psalmist asked how long will you hide your face from me? (13:1) Job proclaimed, I cry to you, and you do not answer me (30:20). Isaiah’s lament is best recited in old English: Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself (45:15, KJV).

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence . . . for you have hidden your face from us (64:1, 7).

Even Jesus knew the anguish of abandonment. During that darkest of nights in Gethsemane, the grief-stricken Galilean appealed to God for rescue (Mk 14:32-40).

But none came. Hours later on Golgotha he cried, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me (Mk 15:34)? The power and mercy of God felt to him infinitely distant, a feeling Gazans surely share today.12

Theologians and mystics have long pondered the darkness of God, this sense of God’s absence in the face of gratuitous suffering and injustice—when holiness dissipates, when luminescence is overtaken by shadow.13 Indebted to Isaiah, they call it deus absconditus—God hidden. Indebted to Walter Smith, we sing of light inaccessible hid from our eyes.14

Famously afflicted by a pall of divine darkness, Saint Teresa of Calcutta cried:

Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? . . . I call, I cling, I want—and there is no One to answer—no One on Whom I can cling—no, No One.—Alone. The darkness is so dark . . . The loneliness of the heart that wants love is unbearable. . . . My God—how painful is this unknown pain.15

Similar cries must surely be rising from Gaza’s bereaved parents, forlorn orphans, emaciated families, tortured medics, and survivors of the St. Porphyrius Church bombing.16 Were I retrieving my child’s crushed body from sacred rubble, I would surely shake my fist at heaven’s indifference.

Accompanying the justified rage and despair, however, we are hearing stories about Gaza’s Christians finding Jesus among them, “crucified in the wounded, buried under rubble and yet present in every act of mercy, every candle in the darkness, every hand extended to the suffering.”17

How else could the faith of Gaza’s besieged not be consumed by the fires of war? How else could trust persist when “every trace of [God] seems to have vanished”?18 God appears in darkness, in the kindness Palestinians show one another. Divine light shines, if not from above, from round about, in the selfless deeds of God’s people.

Here again is Shadia Qubti:

Divine presence manifests not despite but within human suffering—in water shared amid scarcity, in dignity maintained amid dehumanization, in community preserved amid displacement. We are called to locate ourselves honestly in this reality, to face both the horror of genocide and the persistence of human dignity, to hold both the cry of divine absence and the glimpses of presence in Palestinian resistance.”19

Five centuries years ago, the Incas knew little about gravity and nothing about interstellar gas clouds. When their sages beheld the willka mayu, they saw a literal river swimming with Andean creatures. And yet they teach us that when heaven goes dark, life persists in the shadows.

Half a world and half a millennium away, Palestinians too are teaching us—that when God seems absent, the searing pain of our separation unites us with others likewise forsaken. On Good Friday, this might be reason at least to embrace, if not to love, the darkness.20

In our day, Israel’s Prime Minister has used Deuteronomy to resurrect the long-dead Amalekites and render the Palestinian nation a perpetual enemy.1 America’s Ambassador has invoked Genesis 15 to imply that the Nile and Euphrates are modern Israel’s God-given boundaries. U. S. military commanders have deployed the book of Revelation when informing troops that God’s plan had Jesus anoint Donald Trump to launch Armageddon.2 Nor are they alone: many American Christians grew up believing that the Bible foretells the cast, location and timeline of the Apocalypse.

In hands such as these, the Bible becomes a weapon of mass destruction. We weaponize the Bible when we exploit biblical passages in the service of ideology so as to excuse injustice and imperil the vulnerable.

In medical ethics, the first rule aspiring doctors learn is: do no harm. In Latin it is primum non nocere. I would argue that the first rule in Bible reading should likewise be do-no-harm. Here’s my thinking.

First, the Bible tells a story of reversal. Persevere in hope.

Woven through the dark tapestry of Scripture—stories of family dysfunction, power struggles, national emergencies, forced exile—is the bright thread of reversal. Abraham and Sarah were painfully childless . . . until they weren’t. Joseph, sold into slavery, becomes an Egyptian ruler (Gen 37-50). Hebrew slaves are emancipated. Job, deprived of everything, is wholly restored. (Job 42) Desperate widows see their sons raised back to life (1K 17:17-24; Lk 7:11-17). Israel’s forced exile ends with return. Isaiah says joy will replace shame (61:7). Mary sees God exalting the lowly and dethroning the powerful. Reversal.

He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” (Lk 1:51-53)

Jesus-the-prophet speaks of mourners comforted and empty stomachs filled. Those who laugh will one day weep. The meek will inherit the earth. (Mt 5; Lk 6). Jesus-the-storyteller imagines a last-minute laborer paid a full day’s wage (Mt 20:1-16), and a wayward son improbably restored to his father (Lk 15:11-32). Jesus himself is defeated on the cross but then vindicated in resurrection. (Lk 23:46; 24:5-7) In the Bible’s finale, the Lie deceives the masses (Rv 12:9; 13:13-14; 18:23) until Truth prevails (Rv 1:16; 19:13-16, 20; 20:3, 8, 10). Reversal.

It is this trajectory—from catastrophe to restoration—that fires the Christian imagination and sustains our hope. It is this promise of reversal that makes the story the Bible tells good news for the defenseless and forsaken.

Second, sometimes the Bible is the problem. Reader beware.

We call the Bible holy. La Santa Biblia. Al-Kitab al-Muqaddas. But when we sit down to read it, some parts don’t seem holy at all. On the contrary, they are troubling, terrifying, especially when they present God directing violence against non-combatant women, children and men. In the quarter century since 9-11, many scholars have been preoccupied with divinely mandated violence of the sort we find Deuteronomy 7:1-2:

“When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you . . . and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.”3

Echoing Michael Prior, the late liberation theologian, we ask: how can one cherish a story in which, before Israel could enjoy a land flowing with milk and honey, that land first had to flow “with the blood of its indigenous population”? With Old Testament scholar Daniel Hawk, we wonder how “readers in an age saturated with ethnic violence [can] find meaning in a story that seems to endorse brutality against others?”4

Responding to such questions are books with fretful titles like Is God a Moral Monster? and Bloody, Brutal and Barbaric? and Show Them No Mercy. One way to acquit God of charges of war crimes is known as “Divine Command theory.” Favored by the likes of Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin and debated in rabbinic and post-Talmudic Judaism,5 the idea is that whatever God does is just and above reproach—by definition—and therefore should not be questioned.

I am not persuaded. Au contraire, I want to read the Bible with my conscience on high alert, posing honest questions of the text and of God. Not because my moral compass always points North, but because I have a compass. Not because my vision is perfect, but because my eyes are open.

In my defense, is this not precisely what we see within Scripture? Many Bible characters argue with God. Abraham implores God to spare innocents in Sodom (Gen 18:23–25). Jacob wrestles with God all night long (Gen 32:28). Moses dissuades God from decimating the Israelites (Ex 32:12). Job says in God’s presence he would be full of arguments (Job 23:3-4). The Psalms ask how long will God hide (13:1-2; 88:14) and forget our affliction (44:9, 24)? Rachel refuses to be comforted (Jer 31:15). Jeremiah asks in Lamentations why God has forsaken the Israelites (5:20). Jesus on the cross hurls skyward the complaint of the psalmist before expiring from flogging, dehydration, asphyxiation, and exhaustion: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34; Ps 22).

If Jacob can wrestle with God, we can wrestle with the Bible. If Jesus can question heaven, we can question Scripture, though we do well to remember that it resists domestication. The Bible will remain wild. Dangerous. Reader beware.

Third, the Bible isn’t a book. It’s a choir. All voices matter.

The Bible is a rich and variegated trove of stories, prayers, poems, oracles, visions and even personal mail. It’s a chorus of sages, prophets, priests, apostles and anonymous scribes echoing across centuries.

Many of us shy away from the Bible’s multivocality. We hush the dissident voices. We turn the poet’s veiled verse and the seer’s cryptic vision into artless, uniform prose. We edit passionate correspondence into symmetrical bullet points. We get anxious when Scripture’s authors jostle in moments of dissonance—until we finally grasp that the Bible is, gloriously, neither monotone nor monolithic, neither code nor creed. It is a spirited conversation. A choir.

Think of the four Gospels, each Evangelist zealous to tell the same Jesus story, but in his own way.6 In Matthew, the Christmas story includes exotic foreigners; in Luke, common shepherds, from Beit Sahour. Mark’s Jesus feels abandoned on the cross. In John, the cross is Jesus’ glory. According to Matthew, Jerusalem may retain prominence in the coming Kingdom (8:11; 19:28; 23:39). John, by contrast, assigns that centrality to a person, not a city (4:21; 2:19-22).

To celebrate the Bible as a vibrant chorus is to appreciate every voice—tenor or soprano, booming or tranquil, jazz or blues. We sense Miriam’s joy (Ex 15:21) and Rahab’s fear (Josh 2:11). We hear Joshua’s call for courage and the Gibeonites’ plea for mercy (Jo 1:6-9; 9:24-25).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught us to read from below, to read “from the perspective of the outcast, . . . the powerless, the oppressed.”7 So we give attention to off-stage voices and minority reports wherever they are found: the Psalms, Lamentations, Jonah, Habakkuk. When some voices call for exclusion, we hearken to others—like Micah who denounces land theft (2:1-2), or Isaiah and Jeremiah who embrace the homeless (Is 58:6-7; Jer 7:5-6; 22:3). When some verses describe blessing in terms of real estate, borders and progeny, we notice others that focus not on a place and a tribe, but on a person and his followers.

And as we read from below, we should also read from outside, for the Biblical authors rarely had insider access to power. Many of them wrote as exiles or minorities, as outsider critics of the status quo. They looked for restoration, not revenge. If we don’t see them as vulnerable outsiders, we risk hearing their yearning for justice as a gleeful desire for blood.

Fourth, our readings are fallible and never final. Let go of certitude.

This is one of our best reasons to adopt a do-no-harm reading strategy: my readings might be wrong. Some of them certainly are. With the passing of time, with linguistic distance and missing cultural contexts, not to mention our faulty assumptions and political bias, the chances of us having 20-20 theological vision shrink to zero. We delude ourselves, Peter Enns writes, when we think “we can transcend our tiny place in the human drama and see from on high, as God sees.”8

Besides, the very nature of Scripture tells against closure. By far the most common biblical genres are narrative and poetry. Neither one permits once-for-all, final determinations. This doesn’t mean all readings have equal merit. Some are absurd or perverse. Rather, it means that we must keep coming back to the text, listening quietly, pondering the gaps, posing questions, and allowing these texts to speak anew to each generation.9

All of this to say that we have every reason to read slowly, with much prayer, much silence and buckets of epistemic humility. And when we draw conclusions and form convictions, as we should, we must always distinguish our interpretation of the text from the text itself.

Contrast this approach with the untethered hubris of some Bible interpreters—not just fringe figures like David Koresh of the Branch Davidians, but also mainstream pastors and televangelists who preach as if their patchwork exegesis relays nothing but pure Bible Truth, as if their warmongering sermons and Armageddon paperbacks are merely unveiling the Divine plan in simple language we all can understand.

We crave certitude and “moral clarity,” not loose ends and complexity. If God is Absolute Truth, our truth claims need not be contingent, right? So reason the Fundamentalists. “As insecurity threatens on so many fronts,” Daniel Taylor wrote, “the man who offers a guarantee with faith will attract a large and devoted following. He will appear, not without reason, as a man of conviction, a prophet, a defender of the faith against forces of evil.” Likewise, Brian Zahnd says “certitude is popular because it’s easy. No wrestling with doubt, no dark night of the soul, no costly agonizing over the matter, no testing yourself with hard questions.”10

In the 2024 film Conclave, Cardinal Lawrence says: “If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith.” “Let us pray,” the Cardinal says, “that God will grant us a Pope who doubts.”

Dare we pray that God will grant us preachers and teachers who doubt? Who hold convictions without certitude? Whose pulpit musings offer us not a tidy system but a mysterious story? The ancient prophets peered into mist. Each oracle was abstract art, not a video clip from the future. The task of preachers today is not to crack a code or decipher encrypted text. It is to invite us into a drama.

Alas, those who quote the Bible today to defend tribalism, imperial violence and displacement are invariably marked by certitude—incautious, unwarranted certitude. They “know” the Last Days have arrived, that things will only get worse, and that God is on their side. Their unbridled certitude is getting a lot of people killed.

Finally, Bible reading belongs in community. Don’t get comfortable.

Reading the Bible is not a private enterprise. This is where Roman Catholic tradition and rabbinic sages have much to teach Protestants like me. Solo readers start cults. Cult leaders weaponize the Bible to dominate their sheep. Saint Paul warned of those who would “distort. . . the truth in order to entice the disciples to follow them” (Ac 20:30). Saint Peter worried about “ignorant and unstable” false prophets who would proclaim “bombastic nonsense” (2P 2:1, 18; 3:16). The threats Paul and Peter saw then we are seeing now.

Early in the book of Acts (2:42) we read that the earliest Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” They did that in community. “Day by day,” Luke writes, “they spent much time together in the temple” (Ac 2:46)

That fledgling community had work to do. We would scarcely be exaggerating to say that their first task after Jesus’ departure was to re-read the Bible in light of the life, death and vindication of their Messiah. This is what got Paul, Luke, Matthew and John out of bed. Convinced that God had moved among them, and reading Scripture “through the lens of a gospel–inspired imagination,” they began discovering the many ways the ancient story had foreshadowed Jesus and the new community of his followers.11 Munther Isaac has helped us see the Christmas child in the rubble of Gaza. The earliest Christians help us see that same Child wrapped in the swaddling clothes of the Old Testament.12

Reading in community doesn’t mean cozy home Bible studies with people who look and think like me. It means listening, even when unsettling, to readers outside my circle: near and far, alive and long dead, expert and lay, pale-faced and dark, women and men, youthful and aged. It means standing within the Christian tradition and gleaning insights from the mothers and fathers of the Faith, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant. If I’m doing it right, my cadre of readers will include people at the centers of power and people on the margins, because Jesus ignored neither.

Some churches shun robust deliberation over Scripture in the name of preserving unity and order—what Melissa Florer-Bixler calls “the cool and collected roadmap of civility.”13 Other communities seem to be reading while intoxicated—by mammon, celebrity, personal growth or, these days, militant Christian nationalism. Toxic communities produce perilous readings.

Healthy reading communities, by contrast, welcome thoughtful debate, blessed by leaders who listen to congregations and stand to be corrected. These communities are careful to include the disenfranchised, those under siege or imprisoned—precisely those most vulnerable to the dangers of careless interpretation. Only by reading together can we perform the story the Bible tells, for the Bible is less a legal code or owner’s manual and more an orchestra score or a theater script.14 Interpretation is not complete until enacted and embodied—in communities whose lives and whose readings do-no-harm.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Wasteland

One fifth of the book, chapters 46 to 56, detail Twain’s escapades in Palestine, fragments of which have proven irresistible to partisans of Israel—politicians, journalists, apologists, lawyers—who often cite the American wit to confirm that Jewish migrants at the end of the 19^th century found the Holy Land desolate and unclaimed, “barren, sparsely populated and undeveloped.” Turns out that the early Zionists were doing a service, by benignly filling a demographic and territorial void.

Case in point, Benjamin Netanyahu in his 2022 memoir, Bibi: My Story:

“Mark Twain echoes many contemporary travelers when he says, ‘A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action… the desolate and unlovely land is hopeless, dreary and heartbroken’. . . . In the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish immigration brings the fallow land back to life.”2

The claim is that “the whole territory was an unproductive waste” whose “only inhabitants were a few scattered tribes of feeble barbarians.”3 Netanyahu explains why this matters:

“the land was indeed largely empty and could afford room to the millions of Jews who were living in intolerable and increasingly dangerous conditions in the ghettos of Europe and who were yearning to return to the land and bring it back to life.”4

Not only did “millions of Jews” require a safe haven. As a people, their ties to the Middle East were ancient, national and personal. The ragtag assortment of Arab inhabitants, by contrast, lacked a collective national identity, and the Land had suffered neglect on their watch. Writing in 2000, between terms in office, Netanyahu put it this way:

“When intelligent and humanitarian men such as Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George considered this wasteland of Palestine, they understood that its minuscule Arab presence, making use of virtually none of the available land for the people’s own meager needs, could hardly be considered a serious counter to the claim of millions of Jews the world over to a state of their own—especially when the vast reaches of Arabdom (which extends over five hundred times the area of today’s Israel and the administered territories combined) would be considered a homeland for the Arabs.”5

The contrast between disposable Middle Eastern Arabs and deserving European Jews strikes me as textbook Orientalism. “Orientals were rarely seen or looked at,” Edward Said explains. “They were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined or—as the colonial powers openly coveted their territory—taken over.” The Palestinian population Netanyahu denigrates has become, in Orientalist narration, “stagnant over the centuries, neglected, and especially unable to cope with the impulses of Western modernisation.”6

Mark Twain, poster boy

Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister was not the first to invoke the inimitable Mark Twain to buttress the Zionist cause. In 1991, at the Madrid Peace Conference, Yitzhak Shamir leaned on Twain to help him contrast Jewish passion for the Land with the disinterest of “others” for whom the Land was not “attractive.”7 So too, Mortimer Zuckerman, chief editor of U.S. News & World Report, described in 2003 what Jews arriving in the 19^th century encountered: “a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated, and wildly neglected land of sandy deserts and malarial marshes.” His evidence? Mark Twain, who described the land as:

“‘desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent, mournful expanse. . . . We never saw a human being on the whole route. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country’.”8

That same year Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz in The Case for Israel declared late 19^th century Palestine “vastly underpopulated.” The first witness he summons is, wait for it, Mark Twain:

“Stirring scenes . . . occur in the valley [Jezreel] no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent—not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. . . . ; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias. . . . We reached Tabor safely. . . . We never saw a human being on the whole route. Nazareth is forlorn. . . . Jericho the accursed lies in a moldering ruin today. . . ; Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation. . . . Bethsaida and Chorzin have vanished from the earth, and the “desert places” round about them. . . sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.9

With the renowned American on the stand, lawyer Dershowitz informs the jury that under late Ottoman rule, and prior to bursts of Jewish immigration, the Promised Land was barren and suffering from neglect. In other words, the historic Jewish homeland was in sore need of settlement and development.

No one disputes that 19^th century Palestine had room to grow. On the eve of Zionist migration, in 1881, the population was 457,000 (400,000 Muslims, 13,000-20,000 Jews, 42,000 Christians).10 Today that same territory is home to nearly 16 million, and I have hiked its trails—in the Galilee, the West Bank, the Negev—in peaceful solitude. But this fact alone hardly establishes Mark Twain’s travelogue as an objective report on the state of the Holy Land and its peoples in 1867. The Innocents Abroad is a fascinating cultural artifact, but as a window on Palestine it is cracked and cloudy. Reader beware.

Twain against the romantics

From page one Mark Twain is determined to dispel every fantasy—all the “poetry and nonsense”—that marked Holy Land travel-writing in his day. It’s like he wanted to repay Sunday School teachers who taught children “from infancy to revere, almost to worship, the holy places,” and to debunk popular chroniclers who, full of “pleasant falsities,” “partialities” and “prejudices,” had arrived “with their verdicts already prepared.”11 Thanks to them, pilgrims would return home from Palestine with stories “not as it appeared to them, but as it appeared to Thompson and Robinson and Grimes—with the tints varied to suit each pilgrim’s creed.”12 Precisely these folk were the naïve “innocents” to which the book’s title refers. (495, 496, 511, 320)

Real Palestine, he insists, is pocket-sized, homely and unexceptional, not the grand dreamland of pious imagination and boyhood impressions. Recalling the grapes borne by Joshua’s spies in Numbers 13, he complains that “in the children’s picture-books” we see them as:

“one monstrous bunch swung to a pole between them, a respectable load for a pack-train. The Sunday-school books exaggerated it a little. The grapes are most excellent to this day, but the bunches are not as large as those in the pictures. I was surprised and hurt when I saw them, because those colossal bunches of grapes were one of my most cherished juvenile traditions.” (441)

Never mind embellished grapes. The entire region had been exaggerated. “The State of Missouri could be split into three Palestines, and there would then be enough material left for part of another—possibly a whole one.” “I have got every thing in Palestine on too large a scale.” (479, 486)

In addition to downsizing the Holy Land, Twain was eager to desanctify it. The Sea of Galilee upon which Jesus walked was shrouded in “dismal and repellant” solitude. Twain may have enjoyed a “blessed” swim in the “roasting climate,” but he judged every poetic depiction of “the bland scenery” to be worthy of the flames. With tongue in cheek, he proposes that the herd of swine who plunged into that Sea (in Mark 5) “doubtless thought it was better to swallow a devil or two and get drowned into the bargain than have to live longer in such a place.” (507, 495, 508)

Mary Magdalene’s home town was likewise “thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy,” and within it her dwelling was “a bramble-infested inclosure.” Same goes for Jesus’ home base, Capernaum: “a shapeless ruin,” now “desolate and unpeopled,” surrounded by “the bald hills and the howling deserts.” (505, 502)

If pious pilgrims had sensationalized the ancient land, so too its people, he complains. The kings who attacked Joshua in the Galilee (Joshua 11) according to Sunday School fantasy, were like the monarchs of England and France, “arrayed in splendid robes . . . with . . . crowns upon their heads.” Twain knows better. “Petty chiefs,” they would have been, “ill-clad and ill-conditioned savages much like our Indians, . . . whose ‘kingdoms’ were large when they were five miles square and contained two thousand souls.” (486)

As Twain and fellow pilgrims drew close to Jerusalem, the Land showed no improvement:

“The further we went the hotter the sun got, and the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became. . . . There was hardly a tree or a shrub any where. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country. No landscape exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the approaches to Jerusalem. The only difference between the roads and the surrounding country, perhaps, is that there are rather more rocks in the roads than in the surrounding country.”

On arrival, the Holy City itself also failed to impress:

“At last, away in the middle of the day, ancient bite of wall and crumbling arches began to line the way—we toiled up one more hill, and every pilgrim and every sinner swung his hat on high! Jerusalem! Perched on its eternal hills, white and domed and solid, massed together and hooped with high gray walls, the venerable city gleamed in the sun. So small! Why, it was no larger than an American village of four thousand inhabitants, and no larger than an ordinary Syrian city of thirty thousand. Jerusalem numbers only fourteen thousand people.” (555-56)

At almost every turn, then, Mark Twain banishes the fantasies of “innocent” pilgrims, and downsizes, deflates and desanctifies their “sacred geography.”13 As the consummate contrarian, he seems to enjoy erasing the romantic Land that ought to be, sketching instead the gritty world as it is—barren fields, crumbling ruins, squalid hamlets—all while painting himself as free from “partialities and prejudices.”(v, 511) One moment he is celebrating the nobility of the ancient world, the next he is amplifying the deficiencies of the modern.14 When painting today’s Holy Land, his only colors are shades of grey.

A curse upon the Land?

More than once Twain hints that divine judgment might explain the gap between idyllic Bible scenes and gritty modern Palestine. Scholars might label this punitive supersessionism, the idea that “because the Jews obstinately reject[ed] God’s action in Christ, God in turn angrily rejects and punishes the Jews” and sets out to create a new people as their replacement.15

Case in point, the epilogue to his Holy Land sojourn. “Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.” Site after holy site he describes in tones of lament: Nazareth, Jericho, Bethlehem and Bethany, Jerusalem, the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum, Magdala, Bethsaida and Chorazin. In brief, Palestine is “desolate and unlovely.” Then he appends to this dreary litany a pair of rhetorical questions: “And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?” (607-08)16

Speaking of divine curses, Twain had earlier devoted 74 lines to the Wandering Jew, the legendary figure who was banished to the diaspora because he withheld respite from Jesus on his way to the cross. (576-78)17 Not that our latent agnostic would take such traditions seriously; most likely the raconteur was simply retelling the provocative tale to spice up his account of walking Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa.

What is certain is that some of Twain’s devout contemporaries absolutely did view the Holy Land through the lens of divine judgment. Swiss theologian Felix Bovet, whom Netanyahu cites in A Durable Peace, published an account of his Holy Land pilgrimage in 1858, nine years before Twain’s voyage. According to Netanyahu, Bovet testified to the absence of Palestinian cultural and historical ties to the Land. Here’s Bovet in his own words:

“The Arabs themselves, who are its inhabitants, can only be considered as encamped in this country; they have pitched their tents in its pastures, or contrived for themselves a place of shelter in the ruins of its towns; they have founded nothing in them; strangers to the soil, they never became wedded to it; the wind of the desert which brought them there may one day carry them away again, without their leaving behind them the slightest trace of their passage through it.”18

Insofar as Netanyahu drew this excerpt from a secondary source (in Hebrew), he was perhaps not aware that Bovet’s lyrical sketch was embedded in a larger theological argument. Bovet’s next words (which conclude his chapter on “Samaria and Galilee”) amount to a claim that Arabs, like Christians and Turks before them, could not be other than transient in the Land:

“God, who has given Palestine to so many nations, has not permitted any one to establish itself or to take root in it; He is keeping it, no doubt, in reserve for His people Israel, for those rebellious children, who will one day have become the ‘men of a meek and humble spirit’, of whom Jesus said that ‘they shall inherit the earth’.”

When Jews finally turn to Jesus, in other words, God will replant them in the Land of Promise which until then can only be occupied temporarily by transients from among the nations. So Bovet’s impression that Arabs were “strangers to the soil” was formed less by experience than by theology.

Yet another voice in Netanyahu’s Desolation Chorus, amplified in both A Durable Peace and in Bibi: My Story, belongs to Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, the Anglican priest and historian who visited the Holy Land in 1852-53 and again in 1862.19 In the following excerpt from Sinai and Palestine, Netanyahu quotes only the words italicized:

“Above all other countries in the world, it is a Land of Ruins. It is not that the particular ruins are on a scale equal to those of Greece or Italy, still less to those of Egypt. But there is no country in which they are so numerous, none in which they bear so large a proportion to the villages and towns still in existence. In Judaea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that whilst for miles and miles there is no appearance of present life or habitation, except the occasional goatherd on the hill side, or gathering of women at the wells, there is yet hardly a hill-top of the many within sight which is not covered by the vestiges of some fortress or city of former ages.”20

What Netanyahu does not disclose to his readers is that Stanley portrays the land as it must appear now that “the Jewish dispensation” has ended. The land’s barrenness was proof for the priest that it had lost all religious significance. Jerusalem’s “desolation and degradation,” which incline pilgrims to declare the city “accursed,” remind us, above all, that “He is not here: He is risen.” Like the Holy Sepulchre, the city of Jerusalem is empty, no longer home to the risen Christ. As with Bovet, Father Stanley’s view of the land’s “emptiness” is shaped by theology, in this case his supersessionism.21

Claims that the Land was cursed were apparently common enough to provoke a reaction from James Finn, the British Consul appointed to Ottoman Palestine in 1845. Finn describes the Land’s population as “exceedingly diminished” in contrast to Roman times, and recalls “passing by desolated villages . . . which stand as memorials of miraculous events.” But then he says that “the land is one of remarkable fertility wherever cultivated,” so that “it is not necessary. . . that believers in the Bible. . . should rush into the extreme of pronouncing the Holy Land to be cursed in its present capabilities.”22

When White supremacy sets sail

Africa and Turkey. When Mark Twain loaded his trunk onto the Quaker City, it bulged with assumptions about inferior cultures and subject races. Darker-colored Africans and Asians replaced the indigenous savages he had left behind in America. Like North American Indians, Palestinian Arabs embodied the inferior and contemptible Other.23 We sense “unrivaled” disdain for Muslims not just in the Middle East but also in Africa and Turkey.24 White supremacy knows no borders.

Early in the voyage we learn that the people of Tangier are “as savage as the wild beasts they were constantly obliged to war with.” Moorish women “carry their children at their backs, in a sack, like other savages the world over.” “[T]he Moors, like other savages, learn by what they see, not what they hear or read.” (80, 85, 86)

After sojourning in civilized Europe, they arrive at Constantinople, “the very heart and home of cripples and human monsters,” where everyone “lies and cheats” and where he faces an “infidel horde”:

“People were thicker than bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils could conceive of. There was no freak in dress too crazy to be indulged in; no absurdity too absurd to be tolerated; no frenzy in ragged diabolism too fantastic to be attempted.” (370, 358-59)

Filling the streets are “beggars, who beg forever, yet never collect any thing; and wonderful cripples, distorted out of all semblance of humanity, almost.” The dome of Saint Sophia is disfigured with “monstrous” inscriptions. Men “mutter” prayers as they go through the “gymnastics” of “bowing and straightening up, bowing again.” Whirling Dervishes are “barbarous.” The city’s Great Bazaar is a “monstrous hive.” The Turkish bath is “a malignant swindle.” The “natural instincts [of Mohammedans] do not permit them to be moral.” (366, 380, 368)

Smyrna, home to one of the seven churches of Revelation, fares little better:

It is just like any other Oriental city. That is to say, its Moslem houses are heavy and dark, and as comfortless as so many tombs; its streets are crooked, rude]y and roughly paved, and as narrow as an ordinary staircase. . . . [A]ll manner of sounds assail the ear, and over them all rings out the muezzin’s cry from some tall minaret, calling the faithful vagabonds to prayer.

More dreadful than the sights, for Twain, were the “combination of Mohammedan stenches. . . Such is Oriental luxury,” he says sardonically. “Such is Oriental splendor!” (407)

The Levant. With chapter 41, the Quaker City steamer finally reaches “the grand feature of the expedition” (646, cf. 431, 555). Disembarking in Beirut, Twain joins the hardiest passengers to make “the long trip” on horseback to the ruins of Baalbek, Damascus, the Sea of Tiberias, then southward for three or four weeks through “the full length of Palestine.” The overland caravan includes eight pilgrims, nineteen servants and twenty-six pack mules, whose antics he recounts with masterful storytelling punctuated by history lessons, Bible stories, humor and sarcasm.

At first, Twain targets the Ottomans overlords, not the Syrian people they oppress who “would be a happy and contented race.” By the time he reaches Damascus, however, he resumes his racist tirades against the “degraded Turks and Arabs.” “The Damascenes are the ugliest, wickedest looking villains we have seen,” he informs us, and in the surrounding countryside, “a Syrian village is the sorriest sight in the world.” (444, 463, 468)

Palestine. Overlooking the ruins of ancient Banias, on the north edge of Palestine, are “the miserable huts of a little crew of filthy Arabs.” Scrutinizing his entourage was “the usual assemblage of squalid humanity” hoping for breakfast crumbs. Their visible ailments are “bred of indolence, dirt, and iniquity.” (471-473) In appearance they remind him “much of Indians.”

“They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly Indian, and which makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe. These people about us had other peculiarities, which I have noticed in the noble red man, too: they were infested with vermin, and the dirt had caked on them till it amounted to bark.” (473, italics added)

Echoing the biblical Joseph story, he ventures that Bedouin shepherds “would sell their younger brothers if they had the chance.” The coarse shirts Arabs wore were like “the only summer garment of little negro boys on Southern plantations.” (481, 488)

With condescension and sarcasm on display, he obsesses over camel dung in Magdala and the “stupid population” that appears “in ragged, soiled and scanty raiment,” all of them “abject beggars by nature, instinct and education.” Alas, “how the vermin-tortured vagabonds did swarm!” (504)

In Tiberias, the “Jews, Arabs, and negroes” of “this stupid village” are all “uncomely,” though here he singles out Orthodox Jews for special ridicule:

“They say that the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking body-snatchers, with the indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear, are the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in the Scriptures. Verily, they look it. Judging merely by their general style, and without other evidence, one might easily suspect that self-righteousness was their specialty.” (505-06)

None of Nazareth’s girls is pretty, an observation confirming that “Arab men are often fine looking, but Arab women are not.” Endor‘s specialty is “dirt, degradation and savagery.” Bedouins cavorting on horseback are “tatterdemalion vagrants.” (532, 541, 547)

As Twain and company wend south from the Galilee, local guards joined the convoy, necessary, they were told, because “the country is infested with fierce Bedouins, whose sole happiness it is, in this life, to cut and stab and mangle and murder unoffending Christians.” (515) I can’t not think of Injun Joe, Tom Sawyer’s arch-villain.

Descending into the Jordan Valley, Twain’s racial animus lacks all subtlety: “What a shame it is that armed white Christians must travel under guard of vermin like this as a protection against the prowling vagabonds of the desert.” (591)

Marveling at Jerusalem’s many “races and colors and tongues,” he can’t resist singling out Muslims: “Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.” Pondering their traditions about the afterlife, he says most Muslims “ought to stay with the damned.” (559, 579)

As it turns out, the same globe-trotter who would famously declare at the end of the book that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness” would advertise his own prejudices on almost every page. (650)25

Mere remnants of a passing society

While conflating American Indians with Middle Eastern Arabs, Twain was not immune to an affliction, then common to European and American travelers, some have dubbed “Biblical Orientalism.” As Lorenzo Kamel explains, because they read Palestinian realities through a biblical lens, they ascribed little intrinsic value to the contemporary local Arab population.

“In the more than one thousand books and travel diaries that were written about the ‘Holy Land’ by European authors between the 1830s and the beginning of the twentieth century, the local populations—including the Arab majority and the Jewish minority—were often, and not by chance, portrayed as a simple appendix to the ancient Biblical scenarios. More precisely, both places and peoples were depicted as ‘shadows’ of a far off past, ‘fossils’ suspended in time.”26

Nineteenth century pilgrims, missionaries and scholars came ashore, after all, to recover the biblical past, to walk where Jesus—along with Abraham, Moses, Joshua and David—walked, and to tie Palestine’s topography to Bible stories, the sad result of which was a “major lacuna in the historiography of Palestine during the Ottoman period,” namely, “the absence of a live portrait of the Palestinian people, especially the historically ‘silent’ majority of peasants, workers, artisans, women, merchants, and Bedouin.” Alas, “‘natives’—black, brown, and yellow—were portrayed either as resistors to the forces of progress, or romanticized as the pristine remnants of a passing traditional society.”27

So, if Twain single-handedly demolished Western idealizations of the Land, he nevertheless reinforced Western, Orientalist caricatures of its peoples. They were neither interesting nor capable of civilization. Rather, they were bemusing artefacts, benighted stage props, two-dimensional objects, assorted shades of non-White inferiority.

Artist at play, with a colonized mind

Keep in mind that the irascible wordsmith had come of age while his American countrymen were fashioning a national myth of Westward expansion—the “myth of the emptied land”—according to which “the whole territory was an unproductive waste” whose “only inhabitants were a few scattered tribes of feeble barbarians.”28 Motley crews of beggars, peddlers, transients and savages, in whatever hemisphere or century, can hardly lay credible claim to the land beneath their dusty feet. This myth was neither unique to America’s formation nor easily dispelled. “History has shown,” observes Norman Finkelstein, “that this generic conquest myth possesses remarkable resiliency,” whether embraced by the English, the Dutch, the Nazis or the Zionists.29

All things considered, it is best to regard Twain’s dolorous sketches of the Holy Land—including its Arabs, Muslims, Bedouins and Mizrahi Jews—as a gallery of whimsical impressions and “seat-of-the-pants reportage,” colored as much by the observer as by the observed.30 One might applaud Twain for his “desanctification of sacred geography” and quietly cheer as he debunks pilgrim fictions. But what one cannot do is treat The Innocents Abroad as a clear historical window or an impartial account of the “desolate” land of 19^th century Palestine and its “hopeless, shirtless” inhabitants. (475)31

Mark Twain is a savvy storyteller, “a shifty narrator who constantly inflates his own illusions in order to puncture them, . . . alternately playing the knowing insider or the deluded newcomer.” His performance, clothed in exaggeration, sarcasm and hilarity, showcases “the radical incongruities and discrepancies at the root of all American experience.” Neither historian nor demographer, Twain is an artist at play, and we should read him as such. (165-66)

Nineteenth century Palestine, like America, was sparsely populated, but certainly no wasteland.32 Twain’s imagination was captive to colonial mythologies about indigenous savages, territorial entitlement and White superiority. For him, the Middle East, like his Western frontier, was empty by definition; its people, degenerate and destined to vanish. The Arab world Mark Twain encountered abroad matched the Indian world he left behind. Locals in Palestine were accustomed to “eccentric . . . explorers traveling the country with a Bible stuffed in their saddlebags,” but the fair-skinned foreigners were all too often oblivious to the presence and humanity of the simple villagers of olive complexion along their path.33

Injun Joe lurks in the shadows. “All the old graves were sunken in,” we’re told, about the neglected burial ground. “Worm-eaten boards staggered over the graves, leaning for support and finding none.” For a while in the gloom, the only noise is “a faint wind moan[ing] through the trees.” Then, “a muffled sound of voices floated up from the far end of the graveyard,” voices Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn recognize from behind the elms. They belong to Dr. Robinson, Muff Potter, and Injun Joe. “That murderin’ half-breed!” whispers Huck.1

The three grave robbers exhume a corpse and bind it to a wheelbarrow, at which point Injun Joe threatens Dr. Robinson, demanding greater compensation. A fight breaks out. Injun Joe drives a knife into the doctor’s chest. Minutes later, he pins the blame on his whisky-addled partner, Potter.

Nobody likes Injun Joe, “the region’s sole remaining indigenous inhabitant.”2 Huck and Tom are pretty sure the devil owns his soul. Townsfolk think he deserves tar and feathers. The kind old Welshman, hearing of Injun Joe’s plan to mutilate the Widow Douglas, describes Injuns as innately evil:

“When you talked about notching ears and slitting noses I judged that that was your own embellishment, because white men don’t take that sort of revenge. But an Injun! That’s a different matter altogether.”

Even the narrator calls the novel’s vengeful and deceptive antagonist a lowly, hapless half-breed.

I was about eight years old when I first entered Mark Twain’s world to join Tom Sawyer on his adventures. Injun Joe did not grab my attention at the time; I was obsessed with Tom, the mischievous lad from Missouri who would swap “lickrish” and fishhooks for Bible-memory-verse tokens until he had enough to compel the Sunday-school superintendent to award him a “very plainly bound” Bible.

Truth be told, I was Tom’s age when I too was drawing admiration at church for feats of Bible memory which earned me a week at summer camp. Unlike Tom, however, I didn’t cheat. Nor did I ever attain to his level of craftiness, on display when the quick-witted orphan conned local boys into whitewashing his aunt’s fence and paying him for the experience.

Mark Twain and Forced Expulsion

That was then, when I, the over-achieving school boy, longed to unearth treasure like Tom and Huck, or raft the Mississippi like Huck and Jim. Now when I reread the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, my eyes spy something else: Mark Twain’s deep disdain for the indigenous American, the savage Other. Indians, for Mark Twain, were “low and degraded, hardly human creatures,” writes Carter Revard. Twain laced his writings “with contemptuous bigotry and corrosive hatred of Indians.” The bombastic Leslie Fiedler likewise finds Mark Twain to be:

“an absolute Indian hater, consumed by the desire to destroy not merely real Indians, but any image of Indian life which stands between White America and a total commitment to genocide.”3

“Even at his most cosmopolitan,” writes Gregg Camfield, Twain “never renounced the idea that Native Americans were barbarians.”4 His prejudice may have waxed and waned over the years, as Kerry Driscoll has shown, but it never fully disappeared: “he never succeeded in fully exorcising this racial animus.”5

Perhaps we should not be surprised. It was only five years before the birth of Samuel Langhorne Clemens—the Missouri-born “father of American literature” whom we know by his pen name—that President Andrew Jackson was signing into law the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The bill formalized and accelerated the ethnic cleansing and genocide of America’s indigenous inhabitants. Between 1830 and 1850 as Mark Twain came of age, some sixty thousand Indians would walk the Trail of Tears, a west-facing forced march toward what would become Oklahoma and Kansas. Alas, the timeless storyteller was a man of his time.

L. Daniel Hawk and Manifest Destiny

The mass expulsion of indigenous peoples enjoyed the consensus, strongest in the South and shared by Mark Twain, that “Indians were an inferior race, genetically predisposed to lawlessness, indolence, wastefulness, and violence,” that they were “an impediment to human progress and the fulfillment of Anglo-Saxon destiny,” and that they “had to be removed from the land.” So writes Daniel Hawk in his brilliant new book, Undoing Manifest Destiny: Settler America, Christian Colonists, and the Pursuit of Justice.

In addition to chronicling the political marginalization, cultural erasure, and ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, Daniel recounts the stories told and the doctrines taught that made it okay. Genocide is unavoidable, after all, when “a superior people [overcomes] an inferior one. Destiny dictated, and history confirmed, that Anglo-Saxon civilization would thrive and expand, while Indigenous peoples would dwindle and die.”6

Today, as Andrew Jackson’s latest successor wages a campaign to marginalize, dehumanize, criminalize and remove the Unwanteds—be they asylum-seekers, Venezuelans, Muslims, Somalis, Haitians, Mexicans, other migrants of color, immigrants with Temporary Protected Status, or Gaza-sympathizing international students—Daniel Hawk reminds us that parallel acts of dehumanization and expulsion were committed two centuries ago. We’ve been here before.

In the days of Mark Twain, in order to preserve civilization and seize territory, white settlers needed to kill or expel savage indigenous peoples. In our day, in order to keep America white and guard Anglo-Christian culture against being replaced, lawmakers need to deliver an extra seventy five billion dollars to ICE so its masked agents can clean up our cities. The ideology back then was called Manifest Destiny, “the conviction that, whether by Providence or the inexorable tide of human development, the Anglo-Saxon race was destined to overspread the continent and to establish a higher and purer form of European civilization for the benefit of all humanity.”7 Nowadays we call it ethnic nationalism and white supremacy.

As a Christian scholar who yearns for “a society that seeks the well-being of all members,” Daniel Hawk has the unenviable task of naming the complicity of his (and my) people in America’s settler-colonial project.

“Christian theologians constructed the ideological infrastructure that rendered colonization and dispossession as a divinely ordained mandate. Christian religious leaders cast the theft of Indigenous land as expansions of Christendom and as victories of Christian light over pagan darkness. Christian potentates claimed Indigenous lands in the name of God. Christian settlers committed atrocities against Indigenous people who occupied land they wanted. Christian leaders endorsed military operations to exterminate and remove resistant peoples. Christian missionary and educational programs demonized Indigenous cultures and attempted to erase Indigenous identities in warped attempts to civilize and Christianize Indigenous people. Christian settlers of European origin and descent, in short, participated with colonial powers in the construction, implementation, and perpetuation of colonial structures, and benefited by them. The whole operation was and is configured, in the American settler mind, by a conflation of Christianity and Euro-American civilization so thorough as to be inseparable.”8

The bad news is that American Christianity today is increasingly complicit in a parallel campaign of Anglo-supremacist Christian nationalism.9 The good news is that the 19th century has much to teach us in the 21st.

Coming Next

Mark Twain’s Indian Arabs and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Palestinian Wasteland —Reading Mark Twain in Troubling Times — Part Two

Sparked by the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, American evangelicals have been busy debriefing, lamenting, and publicly condemning the scourge of Christian Nationalism. Largely absent from this discussion, however, has been public consideration of any affinity between Christian Nationalists and their more familiar, if less populous, “cousins”—Christian Zionists. As it turns out, the similarities are neither superficial nor coincidental and, as Donald Trump’s circle of Christian lieutenants and advisors have made clear, the two ideologies are eminently compatible. Of numerous points of overlap, here are four.

1. Both Christian Nationalists and Christian Zionists espouse an ideology of exceptionalism.

Christian Nationalists contend that America has always been, and must remain, distinctively Christian. Christian Zionists likewise contend that the Holy Land has always been, and must remain, distinctively Jewish. For both groups, when it comes to narrating history, selecting sacred symbols, elevating cherished values, or determining public policy, the perspectives of American Christians and Israeli Jews must be privileged.

2. The two movements share an apocalyptic outlook.

For Christian Zionists, the restoration of the Jewish people to their historic homeland is a prerequisite for the second coming of Christ. As for Christian Nationalists, those of postmillennial (or Dominionist) persuasion think that with the arrival of God’s kingdom we should be subjecting all aspects of American civic life to Christ’s dominion. Premillennial Christian Nationalists, meanwhile, are less sanguine about the present age. Expecting to see steady moral decline until Jesus returns, their job is to stem the tide, align America with God’s agenda, and proclaim the gospel before time runs out.

3. Christian Nationalism and Christian Zionism look to be defensive maneuvers.

Shifting demographics in the U.S. are making America’s “greatness” (imagined as Christian, patriarchal, hetero-normative, conservative, and white) ever more elusive, a problem Christian Nationalists are desperately seeking to rectify. Likewise, for Christian Zionists in an increasingly secular world, the modern rebirth of Israel, heralded as the miraculous fulfillment of biblical prophecy, works as an apologetic rebuff to skeptics and decisive proof that the God of the Bible, their God, is on the move in our day.

4. Partisans of both movements are certain that God is on their side.

Just as Christian Zionists insist that ancient Israel’s covenants and privileges continue in force for today’s nation-state of Israel, Christian Nationalists see divine favor resting upon modern America. The dark corollary, for those who deem Christian Americans or Jewish Israelis exceptional, is that other groups, say, Muslim Americans or Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, are outsiders whose claims and traditions merit little moral consideration. Exceptionalists of both varieties inhabit binary, exclusionary worlds: Christians in America have God on their side. So do Jews in Israel.

Neither Christian Nationalism nor Christian Zionism is monolithic, of course, nor are they static, and the overlap of constituencies is far from total. But the parallels are real, the movements’ histories are intertwined,1 and the two are mutually reinforcing as when, for example, a Nationalist believes that America’s success requires support for “God’s people.”2

If these parallels are not simply imagined, are they instructive?

Might they equip us to show more clearly why exceptionalism, exclusivism and apocalyptic militancy create a toxic narrative in which history is forever a battlefield and “the other” is forever the enemy? Might a critique of Christian Nationalism’s myth of America’s chosenness shed light upon Christian Zionism’s idealization of the modern Jewish ethno-state? And vice versa?

What seems clear is that neither movement provides a foundation for reconciliation or peace-building between peoples. In today’s polarized American society, divided by class and color and culture, Christian Nationalism works to maintain white supremacy. Christian Zionist ideology likewise perpetuates an ethnic divide between Jews and Palestinians and defends a social and legal hierarchy, one that obstructs the quest for an enduring, just peace between equals. The binary thinking these two movements share—in which everyone is either Insider or Intruder, Family or Foreigner, with God or against God—is not just lazy, divisive and deceptive. It is dangerous.

Admission was free, so my plan was to loop back to the museum office to make a donation. That was before I reached the final exhibit, a shrine to Vladimir Jabotinsky and Betar. Jabotinsky was the father of Revisionist Zionism; Betar (or Beitar) was the youth movement he founded in Riga in 1923, more than a century ago.

For Jabotinsky, Benjamin Netanyahu’s ideological mentor, it was delusional for Zionist Jews to expect Arabs to submit voluntarily. The only prospect for a Jewish future in Palestine was irresistible force: “strong power in Palestine that is not amenable to any Arab pressure.” Hence, the name and theme of his most important essay, The Iron Wall, the reading of which explains a lot about Israel’s prime minister.

The charismatic Jabotinsky came often to Riga where he inspired young Zionists and founded Betar, a right wing nationalist youth movement that would be marked by militarism, hostility to socialism, and devotion to his authoritarian leadership.1 Among Betar’s alumni are a pair of former Israeli Prime Ministers: Menachem Begin2 and Yitzhak Shamir.

Betar reboot banned from New York

As I read each inscription in the Betar exhibit, my mind traversed eight time zones from central Europe back to North America, where Betar’s USA branch had rebooted itself after October 7, 2023 and launched an aggressive pro-Israel offensive led by the likes of two New Yorkers, Ronn Torossian and Ross Glick.

Torossian’s tactics and rhetoric were problematic enough to get him arrested in May 2024 and banned from the World Zionist Congress, and to have the ADL designate Betar as an extremist group, the only Jewish group on their list.3

Glick likewise drew attention when he announced on social media his plan to hand out pagers to members of Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Pittsburgh. This ostensible bomb threat—mimicking Israel’s pager attacks in Lebanon—is what caused Meta to ban him and Betar from its platforms.

Betar today sees Palestinians as the enemy, whom they target with counter-protests, street confrontations, Palestinian flag-burnings, mosque demonstrations and racist WhatsApp chats. They have forwarded names of Palestine sympathizers to authorities like the DHS, to encourage their deportation. Case in point: Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University grad student and Palestine advocate whom Betar USA has called “a jihadi who terrorized America,” and who was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on March 8, 2025. Just this week, the Department of Homeland Security pledged to rearrest and deport him to Algeria.

On the bright side, an investigation into Betar USA that began in March 2025 finally concluded last week with New York’s Attorney General, Letitia James, condemning the group’s “alarming and illegal pattern of bias-motivated harassment and violence designed to terrorize communities and shut down lawful protest.”4 According to the Attorney General’s statement,

“group members trespassed at private homes to steal and destroy Palestinian flags, threatened to report protesters to immigration enforcement officials, forced beepers onto people in a reference to Israel’s 2024 operation that killed a dozen and injured thousands more in Lebanon with exploding beepers and harassed and threatened Jewish college professors they viewed as disloyal to Israel and Judaism.”5

Among their activities, Dropsite News reports, they run “a constellation of WhatsApp group chats to plan counter protests against pro-Palestine demonstrations and commit potential hate crimes against Muslims in New York City,” and have been aiding “the Trump administration’s deportation program targeting student protesters.” Under pressure, the group has agreed to dissolve its New York operations, file compliance reports and, if it violates the settlement, pay a $50,000 fine.

Meanwhile, back in Latvia

I circled back to the Museum office pondering the irony of a shrine to the militant, racist legacy of Jabotinsky nestled within a Holocaust memorial. I offered the attendant high praise for Exhibits One through Ten, but stated that because of Exhibit Eleven I wouldn’t be making a donation. Why, I asked, would a museum explain so clearly the evils of Nazi dehumanization and their brutal treatment of Jews, and then celebrate a branch of Zionism known today for dehumanizing Palestinians and calling for their death?

I struggled with the language barrier until Misha joined the conversation. When he heard my complaint he shared confidently that he had just come from fighting in Gaza. “There are no innocents in Gaza,” he assured me. “None.”

This was the same obscenity we heard immediately after October 7. Five days after Hamas’ slaughter, Israeli president Isaac Herzog was saying that “an entire nation” was “responsible.” The Israeli government posted videos with this same claim, and Israeli lawmakers made similarly genocidal comments. Depressingly, a June, 2025 poll in Israel found that “an overwhelming majority” of Jewish Israelis believe there are “no innocents in Gaza,” precisely what I would hear a month later from a soldier who had only just completed his tour in Gaza. For Misha, every Palestinian he encountered there was guilty. Every death was deserved.

Spoken like a Nazi

“Why would you say that?” I exploded. To hear those words on that spot was deeply troubling. The museum in which we were standing showed Nazis treating every Jew as a threat. Not one innocent was precisely the sort of propaganda they had used to justify displacement, starvation and mass killing of Jews.

“You speak like a Nazi,” I said, waving my hand toward the damning exhibits nearby.

Unmoved by my agitation, Misha recalled the horrors of October 7 (which I denounced with him) and assured me that he didn’t hate Arabs. The problem was, rather, that every Palestinian child wanted to kill Jews. They all want to die as martyrs in the fight.

I reminded him that these children had lived their entire lives in a ghetto, and that the only Jews they knew were the Israeli soldiers maintaining the blockade. At which point he claimed he’d seen babies incinerated in ovens, which was when I had to call bullshit. “No you didn’t,” I said. “You’re repeating government propaganda.”

The massacre that October day was heinous. Hamas mercilessly murdered children with their parents. But the babies-in-ovens meme was quickly debunked (as was the beheaded-babies). Two babies died that day, a 10-month-old and a newborn, which is two too many. Was Misha’s claim to have witnessed events that never occurred his way of sanitizing crimes that he and his company committed? Or was it just an instance of group-think?

“We’re watching you,” I said. “The world is watching.”

I doubt that anything positive came from my public indignation. I’m sure Betar still features prominently in Riga’s Holocaust museum. Misha may have tallied my hostile reaction as evidence of global antisemitism. He could not know that my sojourn in Hungary, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia focused more than anything on Hitler’s and Stalin’s despotism, and on the marginalization, deprivation and brutal killing of central Europe’s Jews.

To his credit, the museum attendant remained stoical throughout my rant. Exhibit Eleven was important, he urged. The Holocaust in Europe and the quest for a Jewish state in Palestine are inextricably tied.

Fair enough, but the story the museum tells leaves out crucial details, paints Betar paramilitaries as heartwarming patriots, and elevates a group that has become synonymous with racist hatred, all within meters of a full-scale model of the rail cars that deported Latvia’s Jews to their death.

In the aftermath of October 7, many American evangelicals are displaying unwavering support for the state of Israel. Pro-Israel zeal finds expression in statements of outrage over Hamas’ slaughter and abduction of Jewish civilians and in declarations of solidarity affirming Israel’s right and duty to eliminate Hamas.

I see three troubling patterns in pro-Israel statements posted by influential Evangelicals. Let’s call them maneuvers. All three are dangerous. Let me explain.

The first maneuver is binary reductionism.

That’s fancy talk for me making you pick a side. The side you pick reveals whether your moral compass is defective or points True North. No recognition of complexity (legal, historical, political, theological). No patience with contrary voices. One actor bears all moral culpability.

Russell Moore, editor and chief at Christianity Today, declares the need for “moral clarity about this war.” Likewise for Ivan Mesa, editorial director of The Gospel Coalition, and Bernard Howard, the moral fog has lifted. Richard Land, President Emeritus of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and executive editor of The Christian Post, doubles down on Samuel Huntington’s provocative thesis: “We’ve heard people talking about the clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity. This is not a clash of civilizations. This is a clash between civilization and barbarism.” San Antonio pastor John Hagee, as we’ve come to expect, is likewise Manichean: “Choose Israel or Hamas. There is no middle ground in this conflict. You’re either for the Jewish people or you’re not.”

“Moral clarity” was strong with George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11 when he announced “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” In Bushspeak, you were on the side of freedom or you were governed by fear. In the same spirit, William Bennett titled his 2002 hymn to patriotism Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. Bennett reminisced about a time when “the doubts and questions . . . seemed to fade into insignificance. Good was distinguished from evil, truth from falsehood. We were firm, dedicated, unified. It was, in short, a moment of moral clarity.”

Apparently, thanks to Hamas, those days of reductionistic, binary moral clarity have returned. Thus, when Franklin Graham meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister framed his nation’s predicament as “the battle of civilization against barbarism.” Graham’s reply upped the ante: “It’s good versus evil.”

My first visits to the Holy Land, two decades ago, were blessed by such binary clarity. Today, I know too much. I’ve seen too much. Yes, Hamas is committing war crimes. But they do not commit them in a vacuum. Nor is Hamas the only guilty party. We do not diminish Hamas’ moral culpability when we talk about context.

Uncritical pro-Israel binary reductionism over recent decades has provided international cover, financial backing and biblical justification for legalized discrimination, settlement expansion, extra-judicial killings, and the systematic subjugation of Palestinians in daily life. Christian Zionists’ moral opposition to partitioning the Promised Land has excused expropriation of land, demolition of homes and schools, and other forms of legal discrimination.

For many Evangelicals, including John Hagee (but not Russell Moore), binary reductionism pairs nicely with apocalypticism. It turns out that the real battle isn’t between Israel and Hamas. It’s between Light and Darkness. Jews miraculously defeated Arabs in 1948 and captured Jerusalem in 1967 because: Last Days. The Palestinians will never establish a state of their own in the Promised Land because: End Times.

When we reduce a protracted, complex and asymmetric conflict to a tidy moral binary, those who disagree with us become allies of the enemy. In Christians United for Israel’s statement, John Hagee warns us that “anyone who would seek to undermine Israel’s response to this horrific attack is making common cause with terrorists.” Read that again. Hagee is pledging support for whatever Israel does in Gaza, a textbook case of the absolutist worldview and its dangers that Glenn Greenwald warns about:

“Those who have become convinced that they are waging an epic and all-consuming existential war against Evil cannot, by the very premises of their belief system, accept any limitations—moral, pragmatic, or otherwise—on the methods adopted to triumph in this battle. . . . Efforts to impose limits on waging war against Evil will themselves be seen as impediments to Good, if not as an attempt to aid and abet Evil. . . Hence, there are no valid reasons for declaring off-limits any weapons that can be deployed in service of the war against Evil.”

For those blessed with binary certitude and moral clarity, there are two types of victims: worthy (“those we are allowed to pity”) and unworthy (“those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored”), as Chris Hedges, following Noam Chomsky, observes. One side’s intentional, low-tech, mass killing is barbaric terrorism; the other side’s intentional, high-tech, mass killing is collateral damage. Reports from Israel about beheaded babies are repeated notwithstanding serious challenges of verification. Reports from Gaza about the killing of thousands of children and the targeting of aid workers and journalists are unserious propaganda, perhaps the work of crisis actors. Certainly not evidence of war crimes. As Bob Dylan taught us: “you don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.”

Let’s call the second maneuver selective ambiguity.

This is where we obscure or evade hard truths by deploying euphemisms and convoluted diction.

Ronald Reagan, describing the Iran-Contra scandal, famously told Congress in 1987 that “mistakes were made.” When we want to tip-toe past wartime carnage, when we want to avoid ascribing agency, the passive voice serves us well, as it does for Russell Moore who says that Israel faced existential threats “after . . . the state of Israel was established.” Similarly opaque is the Southern Baptist reference to “the inception of the modern state of Israel.”

In the months before and after Israel “was established,” three-quarters of a million Palestinians fled or were forced out of their homes, and were subsequently blocked from returning. A lesser exodus of a quarter million followed when Israel defeated its neighbors in June, 1967. What animates resistance for most residents of Gaza today is this dispossession—of parents and grandparents—not just from Jaffa and Ramla but also from villages within easy walking distance from the Strip. Gazans want to go home.

Selective ambiguity obscures important details of historical context, context we desperately need in order to understand what is happening around us.

Ambiguity and underspecification are also in play when the World Evangelical Alliance says Hamas’ attack on Israel “has resulted in escalating violence and loss of innocent civilian lives in Israel and in Palestine.” Violence escalates. Lives are lost. No human agency in sight. The WEA rightly singles out Hamas for killing Israeli civilians, but mysteriously leaves unspecified the agents responsible for killing innocents in Palestine. Violence is simply a result, an unintended outcome that “will further spread” and needs “de-escalation.” Obscurity through ambiguity.

Another example: the National Association of Evangelicals worries about “actions by Israel that go beyond self-defense by taking revenge on those living in Gaza.” These actions “risk inflicting further suffering on innocent civilians while undermining the long-term security of the Israeli people.” Stripped of clutter, the NAE is claiming that “actions . . . beyond self-defense . . . risk inflicting suffering.” George Orwell would file such convoluted diction under cloudy vagueness. Clarity compels us to say that Israeli forces are killing Gazan civilians, and at a rate unprecedented in modern warfare. It’s a calculated rage playing out in real time.

Then there is Franklin Graham, whose affection for Israel, like his father’s, is evident. Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse is among the largest U.S. faith-based non-profits. A recent press release laments that “innocent families are suffering in Israel and Gaza as a result of the war, and many lives have been lost because they haven’t been able to reach medical care fast enough.”

Setting aside those ambiguous passives (have been lost, haven’t been able), context makes clear that the folks Graham thinks need urgent medical care are Israelis, which explains SP’s plan to replace the Magen David Adom ambulances that Hamas destroyed. Elsewhere Graham explains his inaction on the other side of the fence, using ambiguity and, yup, a passive verb: “humanitarian access to Gaza is not possible, and the border is sealed.” I’m pretty sure the border didn’t seal itself.

For still more selective ambiguity, consider Chosen People Ministries’ Affirmation of Israel: A Response to the War Between Israel and Hamas.

“We pray steps will be taken to eliminate the lethal presence of Hamas terrorists, the hostages be freed, Israel’s borders be secured and noncombatant Palestinians in Gaza and other parts of Israel be spared from the evils of these and other Islamic terrorists.”

The writers have impressively deployed four passive verbs (be taken, be freed, be secured, be spared), and the antiseptic “eliminate the lethal presence of” in place of, say, “kill” or “destroy.”

CPM’s prayer also seeks protection for Palestinians “in Gaza and other parts of Israel. . . from the evils of these and other Islamic terrorists.” Quite apart from implying that the West Bank lies within Israel, CPM suggests that the principal threat Palestinians face is “these and other Islamic terrorists.” Israeli forces in the first seven weeks since October 7 have killed 239 West Bank Palestinians. Perhaps we should pray about that too.

I call the third maneuver praise by faint damnation.

This is when we gesture at Israel’s imperfections but never follow up with substantive critique. When we nod at unspecified misdeeds so as to appear neutral and fair-minded, our “faint damnation” of Israel can actually function as praise.

Two recent examples. On the day of Hamas’ attacks, Russell Moore, who himself paid a price for criticizing Donald Trump, aligned with those prepared to criticize Israel:

Many of us are quite willing to call out Israel when we believe it is acting wrongly. We don’t believe the Israeli Knesset is somehow inerrant or infallible.”

One wonders what unnamed wrongdoings Moore has in mind, and whether some of them might provide relevant context for what is unfolding in and around Gaza.

Three days later, Ivan Mesa and Bernard Howard of The Gospel Coalition defined what they mean by being “pro-Israel”:

“We accept that the state of Israel hasn’t always acted blamelessly in its conduct toward the Palestinian people. To be pro-Israel in this situation, as we the authors are, isn’t to whitewash every action Israel’s government or military have taken, from its founding to today.”

What Mesa and Howard “accept” is an obvious truism—that “the state of Israel hasn’t always acted blamelessly.” Which actions of Israel should we not “whitewash”? Might some of this misbehavior merit specific mention during the present crisis?

Mesa and Howard do go on to acknowledge “the frustration, pain, and grief experienced by Palestinians” and affirm the impulse to weep with those who weep, which for them includes “Palestinians mourning their dead, both past and present.” But note again the passive voice and non-ascription of moral agency. Pain is “experienced,” not caused. They mourn Palestinian deaths but don’t name the killer.

Praise by faint damnation is popular among Christian Zionists. Malcolm Hedding of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem rejects “blind support of Israel.” Barry Horner in Future Israel does not recommend justifying “every military initiative of the State of Israel” (pp.102-03). Craig Blaising of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in a recent defense of Christian Zionism, likewise says Gentile nations are not obliged to “extend to Israel blind moral approval” (p. 102). But in each case the corollary—specific offenses that merit critique—is ever elusive.

Gerald McDermott of Beeson Divinity School seems poised to go further:

“We do not mean that the state of Israel is a perfect country. Or that it should not be criticized for its failures.” “We . . . disagree with dispensationalism at the popular level . . . that the present state of Israel is never to be criticized . . .” “It certainly does not mean that Israel is always right or that it has never been unjust in its dealings with other nations” (The New Christian Zionism, pp.12, 14, 328).

Darrell Bock of Dallas Theological Seminary, concluding the same volume, likewise claims not to give Israel a pass:

“To endorse Israel and a national place for the nation is not to give her carte blanche for everything she does. Christian Zionism is not a blind endorsement of Israel. It does not give the nation a pass on issues of justice or moral obligations” (p.309).

But again, McDermott and Bock are silent about concrete acts of injustice. Until Israel’s Evangelical partisans name specific laws, policies and practices to which they object, their vague declarations of Israel’s imperfection, their faint damnations, will continue to ring hollow.

To be sure, Palestinian sympathizers are likewise reluctant to criticize the Palestinian Authority and even Hamas for specific human rights abuses, torture, hostility toward internal criticism, infringements on journalistic freedom, militant ideology, fiscal corruption, monetary payments to families of fallen fighters, and intentional targeting of non-combatants. Let’s talk about it.

But let’s also talk about the impact on Palestinians families of the separation barrier and expanding Israeli settlements, Israel’s de facto annexation of the Jordan Valley, the 16-year blockade of Gaza; about the indiscriminate use of tear gas, imprisoning minors, snipers shooting journalists, settlers rampaging through villages with the tacit blessing of the IDF; about Netanyahu’s coalition of right-wingers bent on demolishing homes, raiding camps, and stoking violence on the Temple Mount. Inside Israel, such topics are hotly debated. From American Evangelicals we hear mostly silence.

So, three bleats. Binary reductionism blinds us to moral complexity. Selective ambiguity distorts history. Faint damnation is feigned neutrality. We may disagree sharply over how to respond to the present crisis, but let’s not weaponize language. Innocent people are dying. Partisans of Israel, conservative Evangelicals, Christian Zionists—you can do better. We all can.

Since Hamas’ criminal attack on October 7 and Russell Moore’s speedy response (the focus here), Christianity Today’s continued reporting on Gaza has mostly echoed pro-Israel talking points, blamed the humanitarian crisis on Hamas, and highlighted the plight of Gaza’s Christians, but offered no fundamental critique of Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza.1

Posted October 12, 2023

Between the headline and the byline of Russell Moore’s October 7, 2023 piece in Christianity Today we read:

“While we pray for peace, we need moral clarity about this war.”

It was this call for moral clarity—in a time of horror, rage and confusion—that caught my attention. It reminded me of William Bennett’s 2002 hymn to patriotism, Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism.

In the wake of 9/11, Bennett reminisced about how “the doubts and questions . . . seemed to fade into insignificance. Good was distinguished from evil, truth from falsehood. We were firm, dedicated, unified. It was, in short, a moment of moral clarity.”

It was this moral clarity about America’s righteousness that accompanied US troops into Iraq on a misguided quest for regime change. Cheered on by with-us-or-with-the-enemy rhetoric, our war on terror left many thousands dead, wounded and displaced, and sowed seeds of resentment and despotism across the region.

Many are calling Hamas’ October attack Israel’s 9/11. Indeed, per capita, the number of slain Israelis is already more than ten times the number of Americans killed on that dark day in September, 2001. Hamas has perpetrated unspeakable evil and horrific war crimes.

So, we’re told, one side is clearly right. The other is utterly wrong. This is not the time for moral confusion. We must stand with Israel. Full stop.

To claim moral clarity in such a moment, however, is far from helpful.

It means we take refuge in binary thinking, silence contrary voices, and erase the complexities—legal, historical, political, theological—that have beset the land and demographic wars in Israel/Palestine for over a century.

My first visits to the Holy Land, over two decades ago, were marked by moral clarity. Today, I know too much. I’ve seen too much. Hamas is committing war crimes, without question. But they are not committing them in a vacuum.

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Uncritical pro-Israel clarity over recent decades has provided international cover, financial backing, and biblical justification for legalized discrimination, settlement expansion, extra-judicial killings and systematic Palestinian subjugation. Christian Zionists’ unflinching opposition to partitioning the Promised Land has excused land expropriation, demolitions of homes and schools, and other forms of legal discrimination. This kind of clarity we do not need.

In the weeks ahead, history will repeat itself. Thousands of innocents have already become homeless. Palestinian families, trapped between Hamas butchery and Israeli bombs, will suffer and die. What we need to hear at such times are calls for indiscriminate compassion, challenges to work for justice, and invitations to humbly acknowledge our complicity. What we don’t need to hear are tales of light and darkness.

Allow me to contend for messy perplexity rather than binary certitude. Here’s my summary of, and response to, seven assertions embedded in Moore’s piece.

1. Israel’s response is just and proper self-defense.

“When acting justly, though, the state has not only the right but the responsibility to protect itself and the lives of its citizens.”

Israel’s partisans in this moment reflexively invoke the nation’s “right and duty” to defend itself. But the blockade on Gaza, 16 years and counting, effectively continues its control and occupation of the territory, a siege that is itself a provocation. An occupying force doesn’t get to use the self-defense defense when it acts violently against a population under its control, whose safety it is legally obligated to protect.

2. Many American Christians criticise Israel when it behaves wrongly.

“Many of us are quite willing to call out Israel when we believe it is acting wrongly. We don’t believe the Israeli Knesset is somehow inerrant or infallible.”

Zionist Christians routinely acknowledge the obvious, that Israel isn’t perfect. Rarely, however, are such admissions followed by specific grievances for which they want Israel held accountable.

Where are the frank discussions among Israel’s supporters about discriminatory laws, the separation barrier, expanding Jewish settlements, de facto annexation of the Jordan Valley, and the blockade of Gaza? Where are these willing Christian leaders when Israel’s forces gas refugees and imprison children, when snipers shoot journalists, or when settlers rampage through villages with the tacit blessing of the IDF? Israel’s current right wing government is accelerating home demolitions and refugee camp raids, and stoking conflict on the Temple Mount.

By conceding that Israel isn’t perfect, one can appear evenhanded without ever having to name specific discriminatory laws, policies and practices that contribute to Palestinian desperation.

To be sure, Palestine sympathizers can be equally reluctant to criticize Palestinian governing authorities. Whether it is human rights abuses and torture, hostility toward internal criticism and journalistic freedom, corruption, or monetary payments to families of fallen fighters—the Palestinian Authority has much to account for and merits robust, specific critique.

3. This war has just begun.

“Sometimes, especially in the early moments of any war, we may be uncertain”

These are not the “early moments” of a war. To suggest as much is to forget that the struggle for Palestinian emancipation and self-determination has been going on for 75 years and, as we noted earlier, the inhumane blockade of Gaza for 16.

4. Israel has greater justification to use force in the present because of past antisemitism, including the Holocaust.

“that impetus [to use force] is heightened by the unique circumstances that led to the formation of the Jewish state”

Antisemitism is real and surging. Notable statements from Hamas ideologues clearly qualify. But we must not conflate hostility toward Jews for being Jews with criticism of the state of Israel for forging a Jewish ethnocracy at the expense of other inhabitants in the Land. Zionism is not Judaism. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.

5. The establishment of the state of Israel was benign.

“After the state was established”

Describing the Iran-Contra scandal, Ronald Reagan famously told Congress in 1987 that “mistakes were made.” If we want to tip-toe past the messiness of history, the passive voice comes in handy. In 1947-49, when the state of Israel “was established,” three-quarters of a million Palestinans fled or were forced out of their homes, and subsequently blocked from returning. A lesser exodus of a quarter million followed in 1967. Why does this matter? Because Palestinians, including most residents of Gaza, will point to the dispossession of their parents and grandparents as the primary reason for present-day resistance.

6. Israel is a liberal democracy so we should support it.

“As Americans, we should stand with Israel under attack because it is a fellow liberal democracy—and a democracy in a region dominated by illiberal, authoritarian regimes.”

Some people, U.S. President Joe Biden among them, believe Israel can be both Jewish and democratic. Others, like historian Avi Shlaim and commentator Peter Beinart, find the combination contradictory. For its part, the state of Israel defines itself as “the nation state of the Jewish People,” administers separate legal systems for Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank, and enshrines laws that explicitly discriminate against non-Jews inside Israel. Israel is home, certainly, to various democratic institutions, but whether it qualifies as (or even wants to be) a “liberal democracy” is very much up for debate.

7. Israel responds to terrorism.

“But war has come, and we should recognize terrorism for what it is. We should also recognize the justice of a forceful response to that terrorism.”

When Hamas militants massacre hundreds of concert goers, that counts as terrorism. When they abduct civilians, use them as human shields, and threaten to execute them, again: terrorism. Likewise, when Israel bombs hospitals and schools, or blocks civilian access to food and water, that too is terrorism. By international law, both sides are committing war crimes. To defend collective punishment bordering on genocide as self-defense, by claiming Israel is only targeting militants, doesn’t work. Israel forces respond to terrorism, yes. They also terrorize.

American Christians often embrace tidy moral dichotomies—them & us, darkness & light, evil & good—and interpret current events through the lens of militant, apocalyptic dualism. With God on our side, of course. Ours is an age of toxic tribalism and self-righteous “clarity.” We need leaders who stand firmly against all human suffering and lead us in cries for justice, not vengeance.

Five hours on the road brought us to an impassable tangle of jungle, mountains and rivers. The Darién Gap as it’s called is the only break in the Pan-American highway—the 30,000 mile thread that weaves through fourteen countries from Alaska to Argentina. In Spanish it’s el Tapón, The Plug. For migrants and asylum seekers it’s the largest obstacle on the path from South America to their land of hope, the U.S.A.

More than half a million souls dared the 100-kilometer Gap in 2023. That’s 1,400 per day. They travel solo, as couples, as single parents with children. They form small groups along the way, many retracing the path of relatives who have sent money, and Instagram photos that romanticize immigrant life in the U.S. They encounter thieves and coyotes (human smugglers). They face abuse and sexual violation. They fear snake bites and injury, wolf attacks and drowning.

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Our drive ended in the dusty shambles of Lajas Blancas, a reception hamlet where migrants, emerging from the jungle on foot or in dugout canoes, find a few services and handouts. UN and Red Cross vehicles came and went. Trekkers clutched brand new sweatshirts bestowed by some NGO, oddly out of place in the tropical heat.

Sober Panamanian soldiers shooed us away from milling crowds and queued buses. Neither credentialed journalists nor uniformed aid workers, we were simply unwelcome voyeurs who were, nevertheless, free to wander “Main Street” where dozens of recent arrivals sought shade—waiting in traumatized silence or swapping stories with fellow survivors. To us they looked nervous, disoriented, depleted. We asked one group whether they would have made the journey had they known what it entailed. Without hesitation, each one said No. Never.

Most willing to talk was Daniel. Like 63% of last year’s trekkers, Daniel was Venezuelan. (The next largest cohorts came from Ecuador, 11%, and Haiti, 9%. Percentages vary by the year.) Venezuelans are abandoning the motherland for a host of reasons: the shrinking economy, rampant human rights abuse, crime, extortion, and reduced access to gainful employment, food and medicine. According to the UN, one in five Venezuelans needs humanitarian assistance.

Daniel was no rural campesino. From Venezuela’s middle classes, he worked for years in commerce before his country’s economic free fall forced him out, first to Peru and then Colombia where he struggled for ten years. Low migrant wages drove him onward; leaving a wife and daughter behind, he was now bound for Ohio where his brother lives. Daniel’s inner strength impressed us. Rather than pay for a canoe ride, he had walked an extra day through the jungle. Sadly, our attempts to track Daniel’s progress since that encounter have failed. Best case scenario: he had to change his phone’s SIM card. Daniel, we wish you well.

On top of the risks and physical demands, crossing the Gap is not cheap. Daniel recalled for us his expenses. It cost $90 to get from Ecuador to Turbo, his port of departure. He spent another $125 at the port of Turbo and for a boat ticket. On arrival in Acandi he was extorted out of $175, perhaps paid to the armed Gulf Clan who may have reaped something like $57 million in criminal gains over 10 months in 2023. The leg from Bajo Chiquito to Lanchita cost $25. Each night of “camping” in the Gap cost $10. Now, another $60 would buy Daniel a seat on a bus bound for Costa Rica, 17 hours away, where his quest would continue and new dangers would loom, most notably in Guatemala and Mexico. He estimated it would cost $400 to get himself from Costa Rica to Mexico.

It’s tempting to blame Daniel’s plight entirely on the government of Venezuela, and to downplay the impact of American foreign policy. But the United States, the would-be destination of these migrants, also bears responsibility. Beyond America’s policies on immigration, asylum and deportation which have tightened during COVID 19, under both Trump and Biden, the US has imposed brutal sanctions on Venezuela, sanctions said to target only the regime of Nicolás Maduro for its corruption, election interference and human rights abuses, but which are making life intolerable for normal people like Daniel.

So it is that the vulnerable masses now slouching toward America choose to brave the Gap in part because of decisions made in Washington, where whatever it takes to overthrow a defiant despot seems justified. Consider the numbers in this table.

Parallel accounts are easy to find. After Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait and violated the terms of a ceasefire, sanctions against his regime took their harshest toll on the Iraqi people: “persistent deprivation, severe hunger and malnutrition for a vast majority of the Iraqi population, particularly the most vulnerable groups—children under five, expectant/nursing women, widows, orphans, the sick, the elderly and disabled,” observed the UN in 1993. By 1997, UNICEF was reporting that “a third of Iraqi children were malnourished.”

• Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro // Iraq’s Saddam Hussein // Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh

Same goes for Gaza. After Ismail Haniyeh led Hamas to parliamentary victory in January, 2006, the Bush administration launched a covert operation to arm Hamas’ rival, Fatah, destabilize Palestine and provoke a civil war. U.S.-backed Fatah fighters made their move in June, 2007, but the plan backfired. Hamas won again, this time on the street, and violently seized control of the Gaza Strip. Undeterred, the U.S. (with the U.N., the E.U. and Russia) cut off funding to the P.A., which meant civil servants and security forces—a quarter of the Palestinian population—went unpaid.

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Far worse was the blockade, of land, sea and air, that Israel imposed on Gaza, which Egypt and the West have helped to enforce. According to a U.S. diplomatic cable dispatched in March, 2008 and leaked two years later by Wikileaks, Israel’s official plan was “to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.” Good luck finding a better example of collective punishment.

I visited Gaza in 2010 and 2012 on two of many trips to the region as a college professor planning study abroad programs. The harm that Israel’s blockade and global sanctions had inflicted on vulnerable populations was painfully obvious. Power was intermittent. Donkey carts replaced cars. I tagged along with Gaza City church members delivering supplies to a destitute family in a gritty refugee camp nearby. When I toured Al-Shifa hospital—the same Al-Shifa that Israel besieged in November, 2023 and obliterated in March, 2024—I asked about a medical machine standing shrink-wrapped in a corridor. I think it was an electrocardiogram but don’t quote me. Turns out the graph paper for the machine’s printouts was not on the list of items Israel was allowing into Gaza. Life-saving technology, donated from who-knows-where, was collecting dust.

In 2012 I headed south with a colleague along Gaza’s shoreline to Rafah, the town next to Egypt that Israeli forces are now bombing. Hamas personnel at a checkpoint welcomed us to Gaza. Nothing prevented our handler from driving us past the long row of dusty quonset huts, each one clearly marking the entrance to a smuggling tunnel, Gaza’s creative, if desperate, response to Israel’s blockade. The scale of the tunnel economy at the time was impressive; according to MERIP, by the time of Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), tunnels accounted for 90% of Gaza’s imports.

The teenagers we met in one hut were running a winch and cable to extract contraband from their tunnel. When they invited us to see for ourselves, we impulsively agreed. Their cable lowered us into the abyss, one at a time straddling the lap of a friendly kid. Dozens of meters below ground level, we scrambled and hunched our way along a shaft of packed sand, avoiding electrical wiring and dangling bulbs, until the tunnel abruptly ended. Three more boys welcomed us to their tiny lair beneath the Sinai desert. They smoked and smiled. We sipped tea. Gravel rattled through a pipe that poked through the low ceiling, filling a row of sledges they would soon be hauling into Gaza.

We couldn’t know which Egyptian or Palestinian businessmen this operation was enriching, nor whether the gravel was destined to fortify a UN school, a Hamas hideout, or a bombed-out apartment complex. (The UN calculated at one point that 3,000 tons of gravel were entering by tunnel daily.) What we did know is that Israel’s economic siege on Gaza had reduced these Palestinian kids to day laborers in a death trap. I suspect they would echo the cry of the Venezuelan woman who crossed the Darién Gap with her son in 2022: “this hell was my only option.”

Israel’s intermittent attacks and aerial bombardments across Gaza, on aid flotillas, on urban centers, on smuggling tunnels, have given way since October, 2023 to a sustained campaign of bombs and bullets during which, as usual, the Little Ones have shed the most blood. By December, over 80% of Gaza’s population had been forced to move to stay alive. January saw the displaced rise to 85%, or 1.9 million civilians.

Problem is, “there is no safe place in Gaza.” Like Latino families braving Darién, Gaza’s throngs fleeing war torn neighborhoods do not escape danger and death, as we saw on the last day of February when Israeli forces killed over 115 desperate aid-seekers. Trudging under duress from one “safe zone” to another, these displaced ones bear witness to the brutality that non-combatants endure, too many of which are women and children. The United Nations Human Rights Office is keeping a grim tally:

“As of 22 April, according to the authorities in Gaza, of the 34,151 Palestinians killed in Gaza, 14,685 have been children and 9,670 women. Another 77,084 have been injured, and over 7,000 others are assumed to be under the rubble.”

Like homeless Venezuelans, Gaza’s displaced have become victims of power games and violence which American money and might—and many of its citizens—are helping to sustain.

Further Reading: Venezuela
Crossing the Darién Gap: US-bound migrants marooned in Panama jungle Aljazeera America (5-2-15)
Latin America’s Migration Policies Look Set to Tighten Americas Quarterly (3-16-23)
Americas: Migrants Pushed to Cross Darién Gap, Abused HRW (11-9-23)
“This Hell Was My Only Option”: Abuses Against Migrants and Asylum Seekers Pushed to Cross the Darién Gap HRW (11-9-23)
Gaza, Venezuela, and Collective Punishment: A Conversation with Medea Benjamin Venezuelanalysis (11-24-23)
The Persistence of the Venezuelan Migrant and Refugee Crisis CSIS (11-27-23)
The Darién Gap migration crisis in six graphs, and one map The New Humanitarian (1-15-24)
Biden Considering Executive Order That Could Restrict Asylum at the Border NYT (2-21-24)
U.S. Reimposes Oil Sanctions on Venezuela as Hopes Dim for Free Election NYT (4-17-24)

Further Reading: Gaza
The Gaza Bombshell Vanity Fair (April, 2008)
WikiLeaks: Israel Aimed to Keep Gaza Economy on Brink of Collapse Haaretz (1-5-11)
Gaza’s Tunnel Complex MERIP (Winter, 2011)
As Israel’s Aerial Bombardments Intensify, ‘There Is No Safe Place in Gaza’, Humanitarian Affairs Chief Warns Security Council UN (1-12-24)
Flour soaked in blood: ‘Flour Massacre’ survivors tell their story Mondoweiss (3-4-24)
UN Human Rights Chief deplores harrowing killings of children and women in Rafah OHCHR (4-23-24)

Photo credits
Photos of the river, Lajas Blancas and Daniel taken by the author
Map: The Darién Gap migration crisis in six graphs, and one map
Sanctions table: Venezuelanalysis
Portrait of Nicolás Maduro: Nicolas Maduro | Biography | Britannica
Portrait of Saddam Hussein: Saddam Hussein Wallpapers | WallpaperSafari
Portrait of Ismail Haniyeh: Jewish News Syndicate
Palestinian reports: IDF hits Gaza home of Hamas leader in exile - JNS.org
Displaced in Gaza: Electronic Intifada
The Times podcast: Life and death in the Darién Gap
Frontline Documentary on Gaza that PBS pulled | Israel Palestine News

While the IDF purposely destroys homes, health centers, schools, universities, churches, mosques, roads, treatment plants, water supply lines, power generators, sewer systems, agriculture, apartment buildings, tents, and anything else that might sustain life,3 American Christians declare such operations necessary in the war on terror.

While Israel blocks essential aid and supplies that would prevent malnutrition, disease and death, they assure us that Palestinian criminal gangs are to blame. While foreign doctors report on blast injuries, embedded shrapnel, sniper shots to the head, severe burns, and spiking infant mortality, and while they perform amputations without anesthesia and surgery without scalpels, pro-Israel Evangelicals lament the inevitable messiness of war.

While Palestinians testify to torture and rape in Israeli prisons, or die in detention,4 Israel’s Christian partisans make no demands for independent investigations. While settlers demolish Bedouin communities, Zionist Christians celebrate the Jews’ return to Judea and Samaria.5

Writing in the Shadow of Gaza

Michael Rydelnik is a Messianic Jewish follower of Jesus and an emeritus professor of Jewish Studies, greatly appreciated by students at Moody Bible Institute. His new book, How Should Christians Think About Israel?, testifies to the inexhaustibility of Evangelicalism’s zeal for Zion in the post-October 7, 2023 world. The death of civilians “is a tragic consequence of warfare,” he writes.6 But Israel’s role in their demise is blameless.

While Rydelnik was writing his volume, J. Ross Wagner and I were editing Being Christian After the Desolation of Gaza.7 Like Rydelnik’s, ours aimed primarily at the Christian community. Both books worry that Christians are abandoning biblical teachings, applying a double-standard to the state of Israel, and endangering the lives of vulnerable populations. Both challenge widespread misinformation. Both claim that recent events compel us to rethink what it means to follow Jesus.

That’s pretty much it for similarities.

Michael Rydelnik promises God’s blessing to those who support modern Israel,8 burnishes Israel’s tarnished reputation, and defends her behavior in Gaza. We distinguish the Jewish people from the Jewish state, and condemn both Hamas’ war crimes and Israel’s wildly disproportionate response. Rydelnik detects antisemitism in the global call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions on Israel. We call out complicity among Christians who, by silence or solidarity, condone indiscriminate violence and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

Motivating Rydelnik to write his book is his conviction that many Christians today have been deluded by media propaganda, mounting bigotry and antisemitism, for which the best antidote is sound biblical theology. Thus, much of the book is a refresher on good old, pre-tribulational, premillennial Dispensationalism and its younger, politically active cousin, Christian Zionism, offered to reaffirm Israel’s importance in God’s plan and to muster Christian soldiers to march in defense of the Jewish state.

According to chapter one, Scripture calls us not only to bless Jews (a chosen people) but also Israel (a modern state). Chapter two does the heavy lifting: God’s ancient and immutable covenants, including the promise of Land, ensure Israel’s future; Scripture’s ethnic and territorial promises still apply, not to the Christian church, but to Jews; modern Israel fulfills biblical prophecy; future Israel, through suffering and restoration, will welcome the Kingdom rule of Messiah.

Chapter three defends the essential Dispensational distinction between national, ethnic Israel and the spiritual community we call the church. Chapter four offers four reasons why Christians should care “about Israel and the Jewish people,” and chapter five, three benefits awaiting those who do.

With an eye to the present, the professor assures us that believers need not “endorse every policy or action of the Israeli government.” Alas, from him we hear not a whisper of criticism. Only melodies of admiration and sympathy. Aligned with Israeli military statements and pro-Israel reporting, the author believes Israel has waged its war honorably and in accord with International Law.9

Mandatory Christian support for the Jewish state

Roughly half of chapter one is about antisemitism. Three of the book’s seven printed endorsements bemoan its rise. Rydelnik has reason to be alarmed. As I write, the horrific slaughter on a Sydney beach of fifteen Jews celebrating Hanukkah is front-page news worldwide. I grieve acts of violence against innocent Jewish people and join him in decrying centuries of Jew hatred.

Confusion arises, however, when Rydelnik targets what he calls the “newest form” of antisemitism: “hatred of the Jewish State of Israel” (23). It’s not that he equates Jews with Israel. But what he says of the one he applies to the other. It is not enough to be “pro-Jew.” One must also be “pro-Jewish-state.”

Rydelnik is hardly the first Christian Zionist to look for, and claim to find, antisemitism among critics of Israel. Nor is the “new orthodoxy—that antisemitism was the same as opposition to Israel” new—it emerged in the 1970s—or distinctly Christian.10 What struck me, however, was the high degree of continuity he sees between the Jewish collective (Hebrews, Israelites, Judeans, Jews) and the modern political construct. Alluding to Genesis 12:3 and Romans 11:29, he writes that “if the Abrahamic covenant still belongs to the Jewish people as an irrevocable gift, then surely the blessing-for-blessing principle still pertains to the Jewish state” (21).11

As global sympathy for Gazans surges, he declares it “crucial for followers of Jesus not only to support the Jewish people, but also the Jewish State of Israel. . . [W]e should be compelled to fulfill the demand of the Abrahamic covenant and take our stand with the Jewish State” (28). Lest doubts persist about the link he forges between Israel past and present:

“The ancient biblical promises made to the Jewish people are just as valid for modern Jewish people. God still has the same concern for the modern State of Israel as He did for the ancient nation of Israel. We would still urge Christians to act with care and concern for all Jewish people, those in our midst, around the world and in the State of Israel” (29).

This virtual conflation of an ancient people with a modern state undergirds Rydelnik’s relentless defense of modern Israel, which he mounts by adapting and expanding the three-fold “test” for antisemitism proposed by Ukrainian-born, former Soviet dissident and Israeli politician, Natan Sharansky.12

1. Demonization. To determine if the Jewish state is being demonized, Sharansky wrote in 2004, we should ask: “Are its actions being blown out of all sensible proportion?” To illustrate, he points to “comparisons between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz.” Demonization, for Rydelnik, is “presuming Israel’s actions are evil, without investigation” (27).

2. Double standards. This refers to differential treatment and discriminatory laws. Sharansky detects antisemitism when the UN singles out Israel for “human rights abuses” while ignoring “the behavior of serial abusers, like China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria,” or “when the only meeting ever held by signatories to the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war . . . is used to condemn Israel.” Rydelnik complains of double standards when Israel is held to a standard “not expected of any other country in the Middle East or even a Western democracy” (26). So too, those who condemn Israel for civilian collateral damage, when nations like the U.S. and Britain perform far worse, are antisemitic.

3. Delegitimization. Sharansky sees antisemitism when critics “deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state” and “question whether or not Israel has a right to exist.” After all, “if other peoples have a right to live securely in their homelands, then the Jewish people have a right to live securely in their homeland as well.” Rydelnik makes explicit what Sharansky may imply: Jews have the right to specific territory. It is antisemitic, he writes, not only to call into question the Jewish nation’s “right to existence” but also to deny “the right of self-determination to the Jewish people in their own homeland.”

4. Deceit. This one is not in Sharansky’s “3-D” list, and Rydelnik offers no definition of his own. Presumably he would not challenge Sun Tzu’s ancient maxim, that “all warfare is based on deception.”13 Every warring state or militia deploys disinformation, whether on the street, on social media, in the air or underground—to improve their odds of victory. In this regard, Israel and Israel’s enemies are no different, so I’m not sure how this fourth “test” helps Rydelnik advance his case.

I’ll be quick to allow that antisemitism motivates some of those who impulsively condemn Israel’s behavior.14 But it works both ways; Israel’s assault on Gaza and brutality in the West Bank are fomenting antisemitism. Consider the young Palestinian who has known only military occupation, detention without charge, prisoner abuse, family displacement, and collective punishment. Might he not deduce that Jews en masse are evil, not because of antecedent antisemitism but because the only Jews in his life are soldiers, and because the injustices he endures are perpetrated by a state that calls itself “Jewish”?

The Zionism that Rydelnik defends asserts the right of Jewish people to “exercise self-determination and have an autonomous state in their ancient homeland of Israel,” the corollary of which is that those who would deny “the right of self-determination to the Jewish people in their own homeland” are antisemitic (17, 26).15

National self-determination has been “haunting the world since the French Revolution.”16 Even though championed by Woodrow Wilson (selectively, mostly for Europeans), applied by the League of Nations (inconsistently, condescendingly), and defined in the United Nations (as a path toward decolonization), the term lacks legal precision and its achievement takes on various shapes—protection, autonomy, federation, independence, resistance to assimilation, right of secession, separatism, balkanization, bi-nationalism—some of which stop well short of full state sovereignty.17 With the number of nations far surpassing the number of states in the world, debates will persist over which peoples count as eligible, what reasons for secession are compelling, and who gets to draw the new boundaries.

So we need clarification. What species of self-determination would Rydelnik have us support? Would it protect against the tyranny of the majority, or enshrine demographic superiority? Would it welcome non-Jews with ancestral ties, or promote racialized citizenship and legalized inequality? The Nation-State of the Jewish People, a Basic Law passed by the Israeli Knesset in 2018, granted national and collective rights inside Israel only to Jews. Meanwhile, Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have, by design, enlarged Israel’s de facto (and heretofore undeclared) borders, and made a prospective state of Palestine less and less feasible, viable, and even desirable. Would Rydelnik have us defend self-determination if, as is increasingly the case, it entailed Jewish hegemony and ethnic privilege from the river to the sea?

When antisemitism is distraction

When Rydelnik says it is antisemitic to deny Israel’s “right to exist,” he is in good company.18 The U.S. House of Representatives, in a Bill passed on November 28, 2023, affirmed “the State of Israel’s right to exist” and inscribed into law that “denying Israel’s right to exist is a form of antisemitism.” Israel is the safe haven Jews desperately need, goes the logic, so Israel-deniers deprive Jews of “a place to live free from persecution and discrimination.” A 2024 survey by the American Jewish Committee likewise found that 85% of American Jews surveyed regarded the statement “Israel has no right to exist” to be antisemitic.19

Such claims, though common and popular, are unknown in international law. People (Jews, Palestinians, the rest of us) have a right to exist. States do not. My birth country of Canada, confederated in 1867, has no right to exist. Nor does my adopted country of Peru, independent since 1821. Nor does recognition by other states conjure such a right. Israel, like other states recognized by the UN, exists not by legal right but by political act and historical fact.

Rather than affirm or challenge a state’s right to exist, we might be better off asking whether the states that do exist are treating justly those under their dominion, or privileging one population above others.20 It is true, sadly, that “most states are founded in some form of violence, exclusion, expulsion or injustice,” as Andrew March observes. From which it follows that all states are “ongoing projects of establishing legitimacy and approaching something like justice and consent-worthiness.”

Palestinian citizens of Israel lack legal equality.21 East Jerusalem’s much-neglected Palestinians can have residency permits revoked. Palestinians in the West Bank, unlike their Jewish neighbors, answer to military rule. Gaza has long been under siege. To call out ethnic and religious discrimination in the territories Israel controls is not obviously antisemitic. Indeed, it was precisely the inferior legal standing of Palestinians that prompted Israel’s own B’Tselem to charge the State in 2021 with practicing apartheid, and speak of “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”22

Among recent criticisms of Israel, none has been more inflammatory than the charge of genocide. On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled, by fifteen votes to two, that:

“the State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention.”23

The court directed Israel to prevent specific acts toward Palestinians as a group, including (a) killing, (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm, (c) deliberately inflicting conditions of life meant to cause physical destruction in whole or in part, and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births.24

This was not, nota bene, a legal determination that Israel was committing genocide. The court did, however, affirm that “at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible,” a finding Benjamin Netanyahu called “vile” and “outrageous.”25 Equally disdainful, Rydelnik warns that the charge of genocide has one basic motivation:

“Simply put, it is antisemitism, the hatred of the Jewish people. . . . Haters claim that the Jewish people, victims of history’s worst genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, are now guilty of genocide themselves.”

Awkward for both Netanyahu and Rydelnik is the fact that many of the sharpest genocide accusations have come from Jewish Holocaust and genocide scholars like Omer Bartov (Brown), Raz Segal (Stockton), and Amos Goldberg (Hebrew U.).26 Their sober, even reluctant, legal deliberations hardly qualify as unreflective, hateful antisemitic propaganda. By contrast, when Rydelnik likens the genocide charge to medieval slander about Jews “killing Christian children and using their blood to make Passover matzoh,” I detect a measure of desperation.27

Christians should be leading the charge against antisemitism and repudiating anti-Jewish harassment, threats, vandalism and violence. But the war on antisemitism that Rydelnik wages is less about protecting Jews from irrational hatred and more about shielding the militarized Jewish state from evidence-based criticism. British journalist Antony Lerman saw the problem decades ago:

“Rather than concede the Arabs have an ideological case, we treat their anti-Zionism as prejudice. Rather than admit that Israel’s mistakes fuel anti-Zionism, we prefer to brand critics as antisemites.”28

As Peter Beinart observes, this hollowed-out definition has lent Israel’s partisans a convenient distraction during the current assault on Gaza:

accusing Israel’s critics of antisemitism is the single best way to avert one’s eyes. It’s more effective than questioning death tolls, invoking human shields, or comparing Israel’s bombing to other wars, because those arguments require discussing Gaza. Accusations of antisemitism change the subject entirely. They turn a conversation about the war into a conversation about the motives of the people who oppose it.29

Disinformation is the Bullet

Contrary to what “terrorists reported to media outlets,” writes Rydelnick,“ a Palestinian terrorist group’s rocket, fired at Israel, fell short and landed on the hospital” (28). Under discussion here is the devastating explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital, Gaza City, on October 17, 2023, a lethal strike that triggered worldwide protests. A mere ten days after Hamas’ October 7 attack, and with Gaza’s healthcare system still largely intact, Israeli officials denied targeting the hospital and blamed it instead on a failed rocket launch by Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Rydelnik not only finds Israel’s version of events persuasive. He judges the contrary view—that Israel intentionally targeted the hospital—to be evidence of antisemitic deceit.

Unlike Rydelnik’s unqualified pronouncement, however, independent reports by Human Rights Watch and Forensic Architecture are noticeably more cautious. In their November 26, 2023 report, HRW concluded that the blast was unlikely to have been caused by a large air-dropped bomb of the type Israel has used extensively in Gaza, but called for all parties to cooperate in an independent investigation. Forensic Architecture in February 2024 declared the evidence “inconclusive.” Eight months later they directly challenged the Israeli/Western consensus, writing that the Israeli military:

“had incorrectly identif[ied] a video of a rocket being intercepted outside Gaza by their own missile defence system, far from the hospital, as a munition fired by Palestinian militants, which they claimed had disintegrated over the hospital, causing the blast.”

The group claimed, further, that Israel “has still not provided any conclusive evidence to support its claim that the deadly blast at al-Ahli Hospital was caused by a rocket fired by Hamas or PIJ.”

Plausibly relevant is that a few days before the deadly blast, the Israeli military had issued specific evacuation warnings to the al-Ahli Arab Hospital and much of Gaza’s north, mandating mass migration to the south. The danger to civilians was clear and present. Nor would this be the only Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital. Since that dark day, the world has witnessed a systematic assault on the Strip’s entire health care system, with the “double strike” on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis on August 25, 2025 as a particularly bleak exemplar. Double strikes are meant to“maximise casualties by firing on those who respond to the scene of a first attack,” reported the BBC at the time.30 Targeting the hospital’s emergency department, inpatient ward and surgical unit, the two strikes killed twenty; journalists and rescue workers attending to casualties from the first were killed in the second.

If truth is the first casualty in war, “disinformation is the bullet that kills it.”31 Rydelnik has implicit confidence in Israel’s version of the al-Ahli hospital strike. But given that third-party reports undermine claims on both sides, it is far from obvious that Palestinians were the principal disinformants.

Civilians casualties, civilian targets

Israel takes extraordinary measures to avoid civilian casualties, says Rydelnik, and it has a commendable civilian collateral damage ratio in its war against Hamas. Israel routinely warns Palestinians civilians, he assures us, via calls, texts, and leaflets, about “when and where Israeli troops will be operating.” It is “their desire to protect civilians,” moreover, that compels troops searching door to door for terrorists to endanger their own lives and become “easy targets for terrorist snipers.” Disputing Israel’s critics, Rydelnik contends that the civilian death ratio is far lower than what the U.S. and Great Britain achieved in their war with ISIS (26-27).

Rydelnik knows that a central battlefield question concerns the degree of risk soldiers must accept to minimize civilian harm. He may have submitted his manuscript to Moody Press before The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Israel’s Local Call released their joint report in May 2025, from which we learned that Israeli intelligence was crediting the IDF with killing 8,900 Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, at a time when the official Gaza death toll stood at 53,000. In other words, according to the IDF’s classified analysis, 83% of those they had killed were civilians. Out of every six Gazans, five were non-combatants. This report flatly contradicted statements by Benjamin Netanyahu and IDF spokespersons—and repeated by Rydelnik—who claimed the ratio was closer to one-to-one.

High rates of civilian casualties comport with Israel’s practice of targeting residential towers and public buildings, its use of Mark 80-series bombs (including the 2,000-pound Mark 84) in civilian areas,32 its practice of rapidly generating targets using artificial intelligence, and with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration early in the war that he has “released all the restraints.”

Not only has Israel failed to discriminate carefully between combatant and non-combatant. It has also restricted and blocked needed humanitarian aid, a practice in place long before October 7. In August 2025, more than one hundred aid groups publicly disputed Israel’s claim that “there is no limit on humanitarian aid entering Gaza.” On the contrary, they wrote, “most major international NGOs have been unable to deliver a single truck of lifesaving supplies since 2 March.” They contended, further, that “Israeli authorities have rejected requests from dozens of NGOs to bring in lifesaving goods, citing that these organizations are ‘not authorized to deliver aid’,” which has “left millions of dollars’ worth of food, medicine, water, and shelter items stranded in warehouses across Jordan and Egypt, while Palestinians are being starved.”

No civilian targeting in Gaza has drawn more attention than the IDF killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab. With their names now published by the Hind Rajab Foundation, twenty-four Israeli soldiers and commanders bear responsibility for the deliberate murder of Hind, her family, and Red Crescent medics who tried to rescue her. On June 28, 2024, Representative Rashida Tlaib delivered to the US Congress the report by Forensic Architecture and Earshot, though the damning evidence she presented went largely unreported by Western media.33 Meanwhile, Israel’s partisans circulated the IDF claim that “troops were not present near the vehicle or within firing range of the described vehicle in which the girl was found.” Such reporting, however vacuous, amplifies the myth that Israel is incapable of war crimes.

The Blameless IDF of John Spencer

Israel loyalists have been eager of late to cite John W. Spencer, retired US Army veteran (with two combat tours in Iraq) and teacher at West Point’s Modern War Institute. Spencer’s expertise is urban warfare, a background obviously relevant when it comes to assessing military strategy and tactics in high density war zones like Gaza. Speaking of which, he has embedded with the IDF four times, and (by my count) published some fifty-three pieces between Nov. 2023 and Nov. 2025 on the Israel/Gaza conflict, in addition to case studies and articles on other urban warzones.34

Although John Spencer does not appear by name in How Should Christians, Rydelnik does footnote two of Spencer’s articles in his blog post on genocide, and the overlap of their views is clear. According to Spencer, Israel’s conduct has been blameless. Six months into Israel’s assault, in March 2024, he was testifying that “all available evidence shows that Israel has followed the laws of war, legal obligations, best practices in civilian harm mitigation and still found a way to reduce civilian casualties to historically low levels.” Sixteen months later, “Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm,” it “has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime,” and it follows “the rules of distinction, proportionality and take[s] all possible care to avoid civilian harm.”

All things considered, the urban warfare expert finds that Israel has enacted “a responsible and historic mid-war humanitarian policy.” No critique of child detention, tortured prisoners, collective punishment, ceasefire violations or aid convoy restrictions. No concerns about 2,000 pound bombs dropped on densely populated camps. Rest assured, says Spencer, Israel, rather than seek revenge, has waged “a careful defensive campaign to ensure Israel’s survival.”

What Spencer possesses in credentials he lacks in impartiality. He admits that images coming out of Gaza are “repulsive,” but what should we expect? “That is what it looks like when you are forced to uproot a sadistic terror organization embedded in an urban area.” On Israel’s hands there is no blood: “the sole reason for civilian deaths in Gaza is Hamas.”35

When Netanyahu instructed his troops to “remember Amalek” and “fight,” Spencer found him to be harmlessly quoting “a phrase from Jewish history and tradition.”36 When Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told us Israel was fighting “human animals,” Spencer expressed sympathy—-“many would understand or even share that reaction,” and breezed past Gallant’s pledge to inflict “a complete siege” on non-combatants that would insure “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” Two years later, the siege remains “lawful, moral and necessary.”

On the vexed legal question of whether Israel has shown genocidal intent, Spencer treats each pertinent utterance in isolation, as if they have no cumulative effect. Thus, the toxic rhetoric of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is irrelevant, because Smotrich does not “command troops, issue orders or shape battlefield decisions.”37 Spencer surely knows that the International Court of Justice thinks otherwise. In May, 2024, the ICJ found relevant inflammatory statements not just by military officers, but by elected officials, among them Israel’s Ministers of Defence, Energy and Infrastructure, National Security, Finance, and the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset.

Spencer is no less partisan when he describes Israel’s efforts to mitigate civilian harm, which efforts he assures us are historically unprecedented and laudable. Spencer has in mind measures such as IDF warnings to evacuate, alert calls and texts, and “roof knocking,” the use of small munitions before a full attack.38

What he fails to ask, however, is whether such efforts are working. According to Larry Lewis, State Department advisor and expert in civilian harm mitigation, they aren’t. Twenty-four hours is not nearly adequate for evacuating one million-plus people out of northern Gaza. In addition to the mobility challenges of the sick, the elderly, children, etc., safe evacuation routes and true sanctuaries were conspicuously absent. That Israel calls and texts residents to evacuate a building does not magically make the street safer, when entire urban areas are under attack. Nor is it clear, given Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s communications grid, how many messages ever reach their target. And roof-knocking in a war zone can confuse civilians, especially residents of multi-floor buildings.

Lewis, also an expert, is critical of the IDF’s “high threshold for acceptable civilian loss” which allows them to conduct operations “knowing that scores or even hundreds of civilians will be harmed.” So too, the Washington Post in December 2023, reporting on rising civilian deaths in Gaza, quoted Biden administration officials saying “Israel’s bar is far higher than the United States’ would be.”39 One thinks of the tragic strike on the Jabalya refugee camp in October, 2023, reportedly targeting Hamas commander Ibrahim Biari. Israel killed 106, including 54 children. Similarly, the strike on a Rafah tent encampment in May, 2024 targeted two senior Hamas officials. Killed were 45 civilians, injured were 249. Examples could be multiplied.

To align with John Spencer and declare Israel’s war efforts blameless is to ignore evidence that his testimony suffers from bias, selective omission and distortion.

It doesn’t have to be this way

Israel’s Christian partisans have proven remarkably tenacious. Not even a relentless campaign of demolition, deprivation and death has dampened their zeal for the Jewish state. These folks have found no criticism of Israel compelling, no survivor’s story persuasive, no independent report damning. Israel’s “mistakes” are regrettable and rare, and they pale before the evils Hamas has wrought. Some Zionist Christians, ignoring the desolation across Gaza, simply look heavenward, expecting a white horse and rider soon to slay God’s (Muslim) enemies. Others lament centuries of Christian antisemitism, which they now seek to counter by “blessing” Israel, standing in solidarity with a people under threat, and parrying every arrow launched against God’s Chosen Ones.

If twenty-seven months of carnage have not opened Evangelical eyes, nothing I write here will. No inconvenient reporting,40 no testimonies from doctors, soldiers, or victims,41 no TikTok reel, no international consensus, no United Nations reports, no consensus declarations by American Christians, no Bethlehem lament will blunt this Evangelical Zionist’s sword, even as IDF troops move further into Gaza and force more and more Palestinians out.

Although the times may be a-changing—we now hear alarms about “the fraying rock-solid bond between evangelical Christians and Israel” and “the growing disaffection among younger religious conservatives”—but older Evangelicals have remained solidly in Israel’s camp.42

What explains this wartime zeal to justify Israel’s response to October 7 and to challenge the emerging global consensus? Our opinions and loyalties are, of course, shaped by the media we consume and the circles in which we move. But beyond information bubbles and group-think, other factors are in play.43 Factors like the gratitude Evangelicals feel for their Jewish Bible and Jewish Messiah. Or their contrition for centuries of antisemitism, and their resolve to impede its return. Or their fear of Islam, especially since 9/11, and the allure of war-on-terror, clash-of-civilizations, binary thinking.44 Many Evangelicals claim to see God directing global affairs, including the putatively miraculous birth of Israel in 1948. And Evangelicals of the Christian nationalist persuasion sympathize with their Jewish nationalist counterparts who, like them, are besieged underdogs in a cosmic, righteous battle.45

Last but not least, we must highlight the hermeneutics of Christian Zionism—on clear display in Rydelnik’s book—according to which God is using the modern Jewish state in these Last Days to draw Jews back to their Land and, soon, to their Messiah. To support Israel is thus to partner with God. If it turns out that Israeli forces sometimes abuse and expel Palestinians, might we not recall similar violence when Joshua conquered Canaan? As then, so now, ethnic cleansing is the unholy work required to realize God’s holy promise of Jewish restoration and territorial hegemony.

Rather than try to dissuade Christian Zionists of an entire theological system,46 my modest goals here are to point out its deadly, real-world impact and to persuade a few of Rydelnik’s readers that they can, and must, hold the state of Israel to account not in spite of but because of their love for the Jewish people and all God’s image-bearers, and their enduring resolve to follow Jesus.