Encountering the Other Side

Zion, Palestine, and Perspective

Reverend Munther Isaac is on a mission to challenge your perspective. He is a Palestinian Christian who has become a leading voice against Israel’s war on Gaza. He made global headlines the first Christmas after October 7th, when his church in Bethlehem replaced their typical nativity scene with a pile of rubble, placing the Christ child in the midst of it. He has since become a religious leader on the world stage. He has hosted anti-apartheid activists from South Africa and met political leaders in Washington DC. His new book, Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza, came out earlier this year.

I have not read his most recent book, but I did hear him speak last summer on his US speaking tour. In speeches, writing, and interviews, Isaac is calling on Christians and social activists to join him in seeking justice for the people of Gaza. After I heard Isaac speak, I felt compelled to do something in response. The fact that it’s taken me this long to publish an essay that I wrote almost a year ago shows my hesitancy.

Isaac doesn’t see this conflict as complicated, but Americans like myself often do. There is no doubt about the horrors unfolding in Gaza, but there is also a long history of cruelty on both sides. Then there’s the fact that Munther Isaac is a firebrand, and says things that can come across as extreme. I don’t always agree with him, believing he sometimes sounds more like student protesters on college campuses than a faith leader calling for peace. I don’t want to align myself with Isaac’s more inflammatory statements, yet I’m in a unique position to write about him. And, frankly, I’m less worried about keeping my hands clean, because what is happening in Gaza is a stench that clings to humanity itself.

My Friend

Isaac has been challenging my perspective for a long time. I didn’t go to hear him speak last summer because I’m an activist, but because he is an old friend of mine. I knew him before the Christ-in-the-Rubble sermon and before his interviews on CNN. I met him twenty years ago, when we both attended Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

Isaac was the first Palestinian Christian I’d ever met. Our first class together was a Hebrew language intensive and I remember wondering if his knowledge of modern Hebrew gave him an advantage in the class that I was almost failing. It wasn’t long, however, before he started to make a more meaningful impression on me. Isaac has an uncanny way of affecting how people see the world, and it’s that story I would like to share.

During one of our practical theology classes, Isaac mentioned that we should think twice before placing an American flag in the sanctuary of our churches. He said something like, “Until you’ve been on the other side of that flag you, might not know all the implications of flying it.”

I had grown up thinking that patriotism was a fruit of the Spirit. By the time I got to seminary, I could imagine a situation where America wasn’t always the hero, but I had never heard a firsthand account of it. I never considered the fact that the American flag would be a source of pain for a fellow believer. But Isaac wanted us to see the flag from his perspective, where our nation had foot the bill for the sufferings of his people.

The Other Side of the Flag

Westminster was always teaching us to check our presuppositions. Professors talked about how we often mistake our interpretation of a truth for the truth itself, and how we sometimes think that our perspective is the only perspective. The seminary has been teaching that since its inception back the 1920’s, but Isaac taught that lesson as well as any of my professors.

What perspective do you have when it comes to Israel and Palestine? Who is the “us” and who is the “them?” Is that the only way to see it? Where did you get that perspective?

The perspective of Israel comes naturally to most Americans. Israel is a cultural and strategic ally of the United States in a region where we’ve had few. Not only do they have the money and technology to broadcast their perspective to the Western world, most Israelis are fluent in English and have similar interests to our own.

To hear the Palestinian perspective, however, you almost have to cross an invisible line. Entertaining the Palestinian narrative means signing up for a different interpretation. It means questioning the reality that feels natural, and doubting the system that we usually take for granted. Will you have to start watching Al Jazeera or hanging out with activists and revolutionaries? It’s not the kind of thing normal evangelicals do. It feels radical.

The Palestinian perspective is nothing more than the perspective of our fellow human beings, but listening to that narrative is almost a political statement. Isaac would say that’s because the Palestinian story is happening on the other side of the American flag. He asks if we are willing to pay attention.

The Other Side of the Wall

Isaac once again entered my life several years after seminary. I was on a guided tour of the Holy Land and we were making plans to hang out. My only form of transportation was a tour bus, so it made sense that he should come visit me in my hotel. "Are you staying in Bethlehem or Jerusalem?” he asked. “Jerusalem,” I said…

Bethlehem is only about 6 miles from Jerusalem but was a world away from my hotel. Isaac said something I found almost incomprehensible: “I can’t come to your hotel because I’m not allowed in that part of Jerusalem.” He wasn’t allowed! He went on to explain that Bethlehem was part of Palestine and my tourist hotel was in Israel. I crossed between the borders without even noticing, but Isaac would need a special permit and then have a potentially difficult exchange at a checkpoint.

Munther Isaac has a masters degree from an evangelical seminary and a PhD from Oxford in Christian missions. Isaac is a believer. He is a pastor. He is even a seminary professor. He has earned every right to walk through any door he wants within American society, yet he can’t get in his car and drive six miles. That is what it looks like to be oppressed, to have your life determined by those who are in power. That power looms over him and his family. It treats him as a threat even when he just wants to see a friend from seminary. That power cares nothing for his interests or his credentials, and it disqualifies him based on its own (mostly ethnic) bias.

Isaac says that the Israeli occupation has dehumanized the Palestinian people. During a blockade in the late 2000’s, the Israeli government counted the calories that were shipped into Gaza in order to put pressure on Hamas. This was long before the mass starvation that we see today. According to Israel’s own defense ministry, the goal of that calorie count was to send enough food to “avoid malnutrition.” They probably intended it to be humanitarian, but it shows how inhumane politics can become. The Israeli government willingly leveraged the lives of fellow human beings, keeping them on the edge of starvation, to put pressure on its enemy.

That event, which was one of many, didn’t happen outside of Israel’s jurisdiction. Gaza is a region where Israel has control of everything that comes in and out of the territory. The calories are a testament to how granular and absolute their control can be. To hear Isaac describe it, Israel wants control but they aren’t interested in taking moral responsibility. No government should ever have one without the other.

However, most of us didn’t hear about that calorie count because we only get the Israeli perspective. Isaac made sure I knew that before I left the Holy Land. He gave me an assignment while I was sightseeing in Jerusalem: “Ask your tour guide to show you The Wall.” Not the Western Wall, where Jewish people go to pray, but the West Bank Barrier. The Israeli government constructed it in an act of self-defense, but it separates West Bank towns and Palestinian loved ones from each other. It’s not unlike what the Berlin Wall did in Germany.

My tour guide just laughed. He admitted that the Israeli government didn’t want me to see that part of Israel. That's why Isaac mentioned it. He wanted me to watch Israel curate the narrative.

The Other Side of Theology

Israel has its own rationale for the wall and many other defense measures. The current situation is the result of countless bombings of busses and restaurants in Israel. Israel has its own perspective just like Isaac has his. If this were just an essay about global equality, then I wouldn’t be writing it. I’m writing this essay because the American Church is partly to blame for the problems that are plaguing that region.

Like many Christians from the American South, I grew up a religious Zionist. My home church taught that the current state of Israel was the direct fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. We interpreted large portions of the Bible through the lens of modern Israel with the hope of rebuilding the temple. Implicit within that view was the idea that any person of Jewish ethnicity had a God-given right to inhabit the land that was given to Abraham. We took this ideology for granted, drinking in the water and breathing it in the air.

It never occurred to me that there were disturbing ramifications to that theology. It certainly never occurred to me that there was a different way to understand those Old Testament promises. Zionism focusses the believer solely on Israel, ignoring the other people who are living there and even those Christians who share our faith. Worse still, Zionism teaches that people with a certain ethnicity have a God-given priority over other people with a different ethnicity. No matter how Christians may try and explain that, to the Palestinian this sounds like divinely sanctioned racism.

There are countless well-meaning evangelicals in America who have not been introduced to the consequences of this theology. The hardships faced by Isaac and the members of his church is a consequence. The New Testament is emphatic, that the only ethnicity that matters in the kingdom of God is the divine ethnicity: people who are “born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13).

The Palestinian Christian is just as “chosen” as anyone else who belongs to Christ. No one has priority over them. For “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise” (Galatians 3:28-29, emphasis added).

Yet Zionism continues to be taught in our churches, consumed through Christian entertainment, and voted for during each election. The result is that Israel, with American support, claims more and more Palestinian land for itself. In fact, there were 60,000 Americans living in these Jewish settlements as far back as 2012. These settlements are illegal under international law because they are being constructed on land that officially belongs to Palestinians. It is theft, and it is ongoing. Israel planned to build another 4,000 units on Palestinian land just before the war broke out in Gaza. Isaac tells the heartbreaking story of elderly Palestinians who still have keys to the homes that they lost when Zionists displaced them.

What Can American Christians Do?

Israeli citizens and Jewish Americans are often less Zionistic than the average American evangelical and Israel’s hardline government. For that reason, we Christians have a right and responsibility to act. Believers should talk to their pastors about this teaching and churches can explore less troublesome alternatives. If any of us hold a theological position that requires us to abandon a central teaching in the gospel, then perhaps we are interpreting the Bible the wrong way.

Isaac also encouraged the American Christian to listen to our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ and break the taboo associated with seeing things from their perspective. We need to have the wisdom and the heart to consider what it looks like on the other side. At the very least we need to have the courage to face the moral and human cost of the theology of Zion.

I believe the current state of Israel has the right to exist and defend itself. I believe Israeli citizens have the right to pursue their lives without the threat of terrorist attack. Yet I also believe that the Israeli state is nothing more than an earthly government and, as such, it is subject to human and international law. They should not be free to pursue a Zionist agenda, at least not with American Christians voting to foot the bill.

The atrocities and justifications of this conflict repeat themselves year after year. October 7th and its aftermath are just an intensification. But Munther Isaac offers us the chance to see it from a different perspective. I cannot imagine the day-to-day experience of my friend, but I am grateful that he is speaking out. When Isaac got his PhD and then published his first book, I remember thinking that he was on “the fast track.” Little did I know that his track couldn’t go six miles.

As an activist for social change, Isaac is out there fighting for justice, even when his language is problematic. But I believe that, as a Christian, Isaac’s ultimate hope is not in politics but in Christ and the Church. With that in mind, it only seems appropriate to conclude with Isaac’s message to fellow believers:

It is time for the church to produce a theology that is a blessing to both peoples in the land. Promote a culture of peace. Be peacemakers yourselves. It is possible! Empowered by the Spirit and by our radical obedience to the teachings of Jesus, we can make a difference. The world is in desperate need of crazy and radical people like us, who hope and work for a better reality and who preach peace and good news.