I learned of Rev. Munther Isaac during my first trip to Israel/Palestine in 2012. He was a speaker at the Christ at the Checkpoint, a Christian conference dedicated to advocating for peace and justice in the Holy Land. In the years since, I’ve followed his work and witness for peace and justice in the region. So, when I went to Israel/Palestine last October, I was eager to spend time with the man who delivered a sermon heard around the world just days after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
The second Sunday following the attack, amid the state of Israel’s onslaught against the Gaza Strip, Isaac delivered a homily to his church that would come to be known as “God Is Under the Rubble in Gaza.” The sermon was specifically responding to the fact that Israel’s indiscriminate airstrikes on Gaza had resulted in the bombing of the Church of Saint Porphyrius, where more than 450 people, Muslim and Christian, had gathered to seek shelter from the rain of fire. Eighteen civilians died, many of them crushed by debris.
The Israel Defense Forces claimed it was an accident, a wayward airstrike meant to hit a Hamas command and control center. Early on, many of us wanted to believe them. Surely it was unintentional; either God or goodwill would eventually prevail, and eventually the needless killings would cease. But as Israel’s onslaught against Gaza continued and as it became increasingly clear that Israel was intentionally targeting civilians, our naivete and faith — both in humanity and in God — was laid to ruin, much like Gaza itself.
Last October, in the basement of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, where Isaac pastors, he explained to the delegation I was with that it was under these circumstances that he had written his new book, out this month. Christ in the Rubble is Isaac’s attempt to offer a pastoral, theological, and prophetic response to what he calls a “war of genocide.”
Up until March 18, when Israel resumed its bombardment of Gaza, there was a slight hope that this war of genocide was coming to an end. But then Israel, with the support of Steve Witkoff (U.S. special envoy to the Middle East) ripped up the original ceasefire deal, demanded new terms, which it knew Hamas would never agree to, and then used this as a pretext to resume airstrikes in the Strip, which have so far killed more than 400 people. For those who hoped that the ceasefire might bring lasting peace (something that Isaac yearns for as an ardent advocate of nonviolence) and even pave the way toward ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, their hopes have been dashed with this new offensive.
Not only does Isaac reject the idea that Israel’s onslaught against the Strip is a reasonable response to Oct. 7, 2023, but he also takes issue with the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” framing, as it suggests we are talking about combat between “two roughly equal entities.” But there is no such thing as a Palestinian state. And because Israel’s 2018 nation-state law echoes Jim Crow segregation and apartheid South Africa insofar as it provides a legal basis to discriminate against non-Jewish, non-Israeli citizens, the fighting between the IDF and militant forces committed to Palestinian liberation mustn’t be framed as a conflict. Instead, Israel’s past and present demonstrates that it is necessary to frame what’s currently happening in the country as the continuation of “settler colonialism.”
“Settler colonialism,” Isaac writes, “is a form of colonialism in which the existing inhabitants of a territory are displaced by settlers who take land by force and establish a permanent society where their privileged status is enshrined in law.” As journalist Peter Beinart notes in Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, Zionism — not to be conflated with the religion of Judaism — is a political belief system that promotes a Jewish nationalist ideology and is rooted in colonial logic. Citing Israel’s own leading human rights group, B’Tselem, Beinart reaches a similar conclusion to that of Isaac: The settler colonialism inherent in Zionism has birthed a nation built on apartheid.
Christians, especially evangelicals, are some of the staunchest advocates of Zionism and, therefore, apartheid. Theologically, there is a certain interpretation of the end times that insists the state of Israel must exist in order to usher in the apocalypse. So, when Israel was established in 1948, many Zionist Christians interpreted it as a fulfillment of prophecy; some 700,000 Palestinians simply experienced it as displacement from their ancestral land.
Isaac notes that 1.7 of the 2.1 million people living in Gaza are either refugees of this original displacement or the direct descendants of those who were displaced in 1948. The displacement, commonly referred to as the Nakba, was part of Israel’s larger neocolonial plan to occupy the land and expel its Arab inhabitants. In 2023, before the war, Nakba survivors and their descendants lived in eight refugee camps that suffered poor conditions because of Israel’s blockade, but those camps have now been “completely destroyed as a result of the war.”
Israel dropped 85,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, killing 50,000 people. That’s more than just a retaliation for the violence of Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel’s bombing of Gaza is the continuation of the Nakba. In pointing this out, Isaac (as well as this reviewer) does not “intend to justify or endorse the events of October 7.” Instead, Isaac seeks to show how “coloniality, racism, and empire theology” can create the material conditions that lead one group of people to take shelter in God’s house only for another group of people to turn it into rubble in God’s name.
It’s because of catastrophes like this one that I’ve not positively invoked God’s name in almost a decade — really ever since the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. All evidence seems to indicate that if God exists, then God is decidedly unbothered by the injustice of the world or, worse, has taken the side of the oppressor.
Isaac himself admits to feeling anger and confusion for God’s lack of intervention. As far as answers to the question of suffering go, Isaac’s theodicy is at least a compassionate wrestling even if it still leaves something to be desired. “God suffers with humanity and shares its pain and anguish,” Isaac writes, after detailing the story of one of his congregants, Nuha Tarazi-Awwad, who had a family member killed in St. Porphyrius Church. “This is the mystery of the cross.”
For the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing during the time of the Shoah, God was on the cross; for the Black theologian James H. Cone, writing during a time of anti-Black terror in America, God was on the lynching tree; and for Isaac, writing during a time of genocide in Gaza, God is under the rubble.
And yet the thing that stays stuck in my craw and is only exacerbated by the fact that we are in Eastertide is this: If the angel Gabriel was telling Mary the truth when he said that nothing is impossible for God, and if the angels at Christ’s tomb were telling the truth when they said that God had rolled away the rock of the dead, then why were the people in that church not spared from being crushed by its rubble? For all that Christ in the Rubble illuminates and clarifies I imagine that I, along with many others, will be hounded by that question for the rest of our lives.
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