ON THE evening of 17 October 2023, the Revd Dr Munther Isaac left his home in Bethlehem and made the short walk to his church. It was late and quiet, but his eyes were filled with tears and he shook with anger. He let himself into the building, headed for the bell-tower and began to ring. “I released my anger and anguish by pulling the rope to ring the bell as hard as I could for over 15 minutes,” he writes in his new book, Christ in the Rubble. “I was traumatised. I was in tears. I was angry at God.”
Earlier that day, a devastating explosion had ripped through the central courtyard of the Anglican-run Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza (News, 20 October 2023), the first such strike of the conflict. Hundreds of Palestinians who had been taking shelter during the early, deadly days of Israel’s ferocious bombardment were killed, and hundreds more were injured.
The precise cause of the explosion — Israel denies carrying out an air strike, while Hamas denies that one of its rockets misfired — remains contested to this day. But, that evening, Christians in the West Bank decided to ring their bells in solidarity and mourning with their beleaguered compatriots under siege just a few dozen miles south in Gaza.
Christ in the Rubble was also written in tears and in anger, Dr Isaac says. His book is an unsparing condemnation of his Christian brothers and sisters overseas. Unlike West Bank churches, the global Church has failed to stand in solidarity with the people of Gaza, he argues. It has stood by, wringing its hands and making tepid calls for peace, as Israel perpetrates genocide against the Palestinians.
He lambasts churches that have declined to criticise Israel’s war or identify it as a genocide. Some of this is driven by ignorance, he concedes, writing that part of his aim is to “tear down the walls that insulated Western communities of faith from the reality of the genocidal war that has been raging in Gaza for over a year”.
But some of it comes from denominations and ministries that should know the reality of what is going on in the Holy Land, Dr Isaac argues. In an interview with the Church Times, Dr Isaac said that Palestinians could not help but wonder how different things might have been if the international Church had spoken with one voice: “This is wrong.” “If faith leaders are not willing to speak up and present accountability, then who will? As long as Israel knows it is above the law, then nothing will change.”
THE Church of England’s conduct since 7 October is also criticised. The then Archbishop of Canterbury cancelled a meeting with Dr Isaac, before apologising and reversing his decision (News, 29 February 2024). Dr Isaac told the Church Times that he now considered Archbishop Welby a friend and ally, after several productive conversations, but said that he was a good man constricted by the institutional nature of his position: “There is Justin Welby the Christian, and then there is the Archbishop. I honestly saw him as a very, very genuine leader, and I don’t envy him at all.”
His condemnation was for what he calls the “diplomatic Church”, which “cares more about image and avoiding controversy, rather than being prophetic and creating sometimes unwanted tension”.
He remains deeply hurt by Christians who have have shied away from endorsing fully his accusations of genocide against Israel. “Calling for peace is a safe option. You don’t want to see people killed,” he said. “You come across as holier-than-thou. War is wrong, and so on. Let’s love one another, and so on. But you’re not willing to call out war criminals and call for accountability, because that would create controversy, and you don’t want that.”
Towards the end of his UK visit last year, Dr Isaac joined a Christian Aid-organised prayer vigil outside Parliament. He writes that the group felt like outsider prophets, challenging the empire. As he spoke to the group about the parable of the persistent widow and the importance of persevering in prayer, his phone beeped with a notification about yet another missile strike in Gaza.
Palestinian Christians, a small and shrinking community, have been deeply hurt at how Western churches with which they had strong connections appeared to be taking Israel’s side in the conflict. While he was familiar with the pro-Israel bent of many in the Evangelical world, Dr Isaac notices that even mainstream or progressive Christian leaders have swung behind the Netanyahu government and its 18 months of brutal retaliation in Gaza: “We were a bit sad, shocked, grieved by those we thought were our friends. Given the nature of the genocide — the horrific killings being broadcast live — you would expect that some positions would be lenient. You would expect some mercy, but we saw none of that.”
In Christ in the Rubble, Dr Isaac describes Christian Zionism as the “software of empire”. Israel occupied Palestine with its hardware of military might, but it was facilitated by the ideas emanating from mostly American Christian Zionists. For years, this was a frustration for Palestinian Christians as they conversed with their Western brothers and sisters — after what he understands as a genocide, it has become a barrier to dialogue, the rubbing of salt into open wounds.
“Our world, and especially my religion, does not need any more of this toxic ideology,” he writes. Once, he would have been happy to debate scripture with Christian Zionists and wrestle with competing interpretations. Now, as tens of thousands of his compatriots have been buried under rubble in Gaza, he is less interested in exegetical diversions.
He is also desperate to convince his Western colleagues that the conflict between Israel and Palestine is not an ancient religious war, unavoidably set in stone since Ishmael and Isaac. He rejects what he calls “biblical fatalism”, or the supremacy of one set of DNA over another.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is, rather, a classic example of very modern “settler-colonialism”, he argues, in which the Palestinian inhabitants of the Holy Land were jettisoned by the West as it tried to make amends for the Holocaust by offering traumatised European Jews a new homeland.
IT IS this painful historical context that must be grappled with by contemporary Christians, he writes. He does not try to play down Hamas’s atrocities on 7 October, describing it as “Israel’s 9/11”, but asks why Palestinians are expected to begin every conversation by condemning Hamas, “while the other side are never asked about the 76 years that led to that horrifying day”.
He writes repeatedly to attack the double standards and hypocrisy of the West, including many Churches, in castigating Hamas’s crimes but turning a blind eye to Israel’s: “As we thirst and hunger for justice, we must tell the whole story.”
Rather than try to take sides between Netanyahu and Hamas, he offers a different way: the way of non-violence. It is ironic and insulting that many of the Western Christians who constantly demand that he prove his opposition to Hamas do not live out themselves “the non-violent ethic of Jesus”, Dr Isaac writes.
It is straightforward for him to acknowledge that “horrible and evil crimes took place on October 7”, and he has very little time for Hamas, an authoritarian Islamist militia that continues to make the lives of Gaza’s handful of Christians difficult. But the only way to get rid of Hamas is to end the occupation, he says.
Non-violence is being challenged by some Palestinians in the face of overwhelming Israeli military force, he concedes, but he remains committed to rejecting the cycle of vengeance. “I don’t have a choice, to be honest. I follow Jesus, and I’m convinced this is the way of Jesus.”
Dr Isaac is candid about the struggle to keep the faith after more than 18 months of war and death. Just three days after the devastating explosion at Al-Ahli hospital, he led prayers at an ecumenical service for an end to the war and the protection of the innocent. Later that night, a missile slammed into the Orthodox church compound in Gaza, where hundreds of Christians were sheltering. Eighteen were killed, nine of them children.
“God did not listen, it seems,” he writes. “God did not protect those beloved people in the ways that we prayed.” Filled with hopelessness and anger, his next sermon was on the difficulty of the silence of God, adapting the Psalmist’s lament: “My God, my God, why did you forsake Gaza? Why do you hide your face from her?”
This experience led to the act that made Dr Isaac famous as the face of Palestinian Christian resistance. As Christmas approached, the Heads of Churches in the Holy Land agreed that there would be no festivities: no lights, trees, or merriment. Numbed by hurt, he reflected that the Christmas story was in many ways a deeply Palestinian one, filled with occupation, militarism, refugees, pain, and massacred children.
At his Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, they made a crib display at the altar of a baby doll wrapped in the iconic Palestinian keffiyeh scarf and buried under rocks and debris. They christened the scene Christ in the Rubble. His Christmas Day sermon went viral shortly afterwards: “If Jesus were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble in Gaza.” The church has decided to keep Christ in the Rubble on display until the war stops.
By Easter, the genocide had become normalised, and Israeli air strikes no longer grabbed international headlines, Dr Isaac writes. As Palestinian Christians gathered to celebrate Jesus’s death and resurrection, many had run out of answers in their sorrow. “We searched for God in this war. We cried out to him, and there is no answer, it seems, until we encountered the Son of God, hanging on a cross, crying out ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”
Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the genocide in Gaza by Munther Isaac is published by Eerdmans at £18.99; 978-0-8028-8554-8.
