<\/p>\n
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\u2019s longest-serving head of state met with fourteen influential Americans in the historic Blair House nearby.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0Christian<\/span>, among them Franklin Graham, John Hagee, Robert Jeffress, Ralph Reed, Paula White, Mike Evans, Mario Bramnick, and Tony Perkins\u2014all of them invited by fellow evangelical Mike Huckabee, the next US ambassador to Israel.<\/p>\n Having witnessed Israel extinguish thousands of innocent lives\u2014women and men, young and old\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n Having watched American leaders defend mass killing\u2014and having watched American industries supply, American taxes fund, American technologies streamline, and American weapons accomplish it\u2014these public figures chose not to confront the American-Israeli war machine. They hastened instead to celebrate the choreographer of Gaza\u2019s decimation.<\/p>\n Having witnessed Gaza become the world\u2019s deadliest place to\u00a0be<\/span>\u00a0a 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.<\/p>\n Five days before this assembly of evangelicals would reassert their support for Netanyahu and their love for the Jewish people, Peter Beinart\u2019s latest book hit the shelves:\u00a0Being<\/span>\u00a0Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. I\u2019m guessing few in the group had brought a copy in their carry-on en route to DC.<\/p>\n A professor, editor, political commentator, and notable public figure, 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: \u201cthe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n In what one reviewer calls \u201ca spiritual manifesto for the future of Judaism,\u201d Beinart writes to summon his fellow Jews to a moral reckoning, calling them audaciously to embrace \u201cequality rather than supremacy.\u201d He seeks to persuade his extended family to \u201ctell a new story,\u201d an unvarnished recitation in which:<\/p>\n We are not history\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n . . . . . . . . .\u00a0<\/p>\n 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, and who are witnesses not only to their people\u2019s trauma but also to Israel\u2019s 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. 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.<\/p>\n This book summons a different community\u2014our own\u2014to its own moral reckoning. We are responding to Gaza\u2019s destruction as would-be<\/span>\u00a0followers of Jesus. We write from different cultural contexts, lived experiences, and professional disciplines, but we are united in our desire to see\u00a0Christians<\/span>\u00a0in the West tell a new story. That story must begin with pledges of political allegiance not to the State of Israel but to God\u2019s just and peaceable kingdom; it must\u00a0be<\/span>\u00a0willing to echo Jesus\u2019s \u201cinflammatory critique of those in power,\u201d and it must\u00a0be<\/span>\u00a0marked by a collective lament for\u00a0Christian<\/span>\u00a0complicity in a massacre.<\/p>\n Western\u00a0Christians<\/span>\u00a0shed 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. 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. We have abandoned hapless hostages subjected to unlawful detention and abuse in Israeli prisons. We have demonized non-Jews the way our ancestors demonized Jews.<\/p>\n 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. We have uncritically repeated memes about human shields and self-defense and Israel\u2019s \u201cunprecedented\u201d efforts to avoid civilian casualties.<\/p>\n 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: \u201cthose we are allowed to pity\u201d and \u201cthose whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored.\u201d<\/p>\n In his 2002 book\u00a0A Moral Reckoning, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen summoned the Roman Catholic church and its clergy to confront their complicity in the Holocaust. \u201cWhat must a religion of love and goodness do,\u201d he asks, \u201cto confront its history of hatred and harm, and to perform restitution?\u201d To followers of Jesus, Goldhagen poses several stark questions:<\/p>\n 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\u00a0being<\/span>\u00a0virtually silent, as the Jews were\u00a0being<\/span>\u00a0hounded, tortured, and exterminated? Would Jesus himself, in the face of such evil, have publicly condemned the evildoers?<\/p>\n Goldhagen could imagine three possible replies.\u00a0Christians<\/span>\u00a0could remain silent; they could say that Jesus would not have called for protest; or . . . they could say<\/p>\n that Jesus would have told his Church that it must not\u00a0be<\/span>\u00a0a 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.<\/p>\n Allow me to rephrase Goldhagen\u2019s question for us today:<\/p>\n Would Jesus say \u201cthat his Church should have shouted protest, have spoken moral truth to evil, instead of\u00a0being<\/span>\u00a0virtually silent,\u201d as Gazans were bombed, arrested, \u201ctortured, and exterminated?\u00a0Would Jesus himself, in the face of such evil, have publicly condemned the evildoers?\u201d<\/p>\n Why, in other words, do our theologians and clergy \u201cwhisper when they should scream\u201d?<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n Beinart thinks he knows how his Jewish kinfolk would reply.<\/p>\n They\u2019d 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\u00a0be<\/span>\u00a0clear: 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.<\/p>\n . . . . . . . .\u00a0<\/p>\n What about\u00a0our\u00a0people? How might our tribe of predominantly pro-Israel North American\u00a0Christians<\/span>\u00a0reply to Beinart\u2019s questions: How many?\u00a0How long? With American evangelicals consistently proving themselves more reliably pro-Israel than American Jews, 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\u2019d 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<\/span>\u00a0solidarity. Others would identify Palestinians with the biblical Philistines, or with the Canaanites whom Joshua displaced at God\u2019s command. Some would read Genesis as reason to bless and support the State of Israel no matter what. More than a few would simply hold their tongues and scan the clouds for signs of Jesus\u2019s return.<\/p>\n All\u00a0members 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\u2019s protection with something generic about suffering Gazans. But most would hasten to clarify that blame for the body count rests entirely on Hamas, who, it is maintained, uses civilians as human shields and hospitals as staging areas. Israel, by contrast, would\u00a0be<\/span>\u00a0celebrated as a \u201crare example of democracy in a region dominated by authoritarian regimes,\u201d whose army is doing \u201call it can\u201d to avoid civilian casualties.<\/p>\n Like Beinart\u2019s imagined Jewish community, my imagined\u00a0Christian<\/span>\u00a0one 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\u00a0be<\/span>\u00a0that \u201cany violence committed by Palestinians justifies all violence by Israel, and no violence committed by Israel justifies any by Palestinians.\u201d To think otherwise would\u00a0be<\/span>\u00a0for\u00a0Christians<\/span>\u00a0to succumb once again to the sin of antisemitism.<\/p>\n The contributors to this book 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\u2019s 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\u00a0Christians<\/span>.<\/p>\n In one of Winnie-the-Pooh\u2019s early adventures, the beloved bear, clutching a balloon, floats upward toward a beehive on a tree branch where, he reasons, there must\u00a0be<\/span>\u00a0honey. Alas, the bees begin to buzz suspiciously, one landing on Pooh\u2019s nose, prompting him to announce soberly to Christopher Robin that the threatening swarm must\u00a0be<\/span>\u00a0\u201cthe wrong sort of bees.\u201d Which means, he calculates, they would make \u201cthe wrong sort of honey.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of Israel\u2019s evangelical defenders, including the fourteen who pledged loyalty to Netanyahu in February 2025, are likely to conclude that the contributors to this book are \u201cthe wrong sort of\u00a0Christians<\/span>.\u201d Why haven\u2019t 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\u2019s neighbors, and so much about Israel\u2019s rage and revenge?<\/p>\n As we see it, evangelicals don\u2019t 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\u00a0do\u00a0need help is in cherishing the full humanity of Palestinians alongside that of their Jewish neighbors; in acknowledging what should now\u00a0be<\/span>\u00a0obvious: 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\u2019s incineration.<\/p>\n . . . . . .<\/p>\n Declare us \u201cthe wrong sort of\u00a0Christians<\/span>\u201d if you must. But don\u2019t say we haven\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Excerpted from Being Christian After the Desolation of Gaza\u00a0<\/em>(Cascade, 2025), edited by Bruce N. Fisk and J. Ross Wagner. Reprinted here with permission.<\/p>\n CONTENTS<\/p>\n Introduction \u2014 The Wrong Sort of Christians<\/span>\u00a0\u2014 Bruce N. Fisk<\/p>\n PART I\u2014War on the Land: Witnessing Israel\u2019s Desolation of Gaza PART II\u2014The Bible and the Land: Listening for God\u2019s Voice in the Tempest PART III\u2014The Peoples of the Land: Taking Our Stand with the Vulnerable Introduction:\u00a0The Wrong Sort of\u00a0Christians Two Kinds of Victims 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\u2019s longest-serving head of state met with fourteen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19044,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[72,6171,3195,797],"class_list":["post-19043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-christian-living","tag-christian","tag-desolation","tag-excerpt","tag-gaza"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How Many? How Long?<\/h3>\n
The Wrong Sort of\u00a0Christians<\/span><\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
Chapter One\u2014Gaza Undone \u2014 Bruce N. Fisk
Chapter Two\u2014Israel\u2019s\u00a0Christian<\/span>\u00a0Armada Sets Sail \u2014 Bruce N. Fisk
Chapter Three\u2014Bombing in the Name of the Gospel \u2014 Gary M. Burge
Chapter Four\u2014Prisoner Abuse and Evangelical Indifference \u2014 David M. Crump
Chapter Five\u2014Hamas and Violence: Ideology, Militarism, and the Quest for Liberation \u2014 Daniel Bannoura
Chapter Six\u2014Palestinian Citizens of Israel in the Shadow of the War on Gaza \u2014 Lamma Mansour
Chapter Seven\u2014The Political Perils of Biblical Archaeology in the Holy Land \u2014 Donald D. Binder<\/p>\n
Chapter Eight\u2014How Can We Sing the Lord\u2019s Song? \u2014 Lisa Loden
Chapter Nine\u2014Theologizing and De-theologizing Genocide \u2014 Yousef Kamal AlKhouri
Chapter Ten\u2014Doing Justice: The Unequivocal Calling of God\u2019s People \u2014 Ruth Padilla DeBorst
Chapter Eleven\u2014Missiology After Gaza:\u00a0Christian<\/span>\u00a0Zionism, God\u2019s Character, and the Gospel \u2014 Anton Deik
Chapter Twelve\u2014October 7 and Armageddon: Misreading Revelation, Justifying Genocide \u2014 Rob Dalrymple<\/p>\n
Chapter Thirteen\u2014Living the Future We Hope For:\u00a0Christians<\/span>, Jews, and Muslims at the Gaza Border \u2014 Mercy Aiken
Chapter Fourteen\u2014Passing By on the Other Side:\u00a0Christianity<\/span>\u00a0Today Since October 7 \u2014 Benjamin Norquist
Chapter Fifteen\u2014A Tale of Two Trips \u2014 Suzanne Watts Henderson
Chapter Sixteen\u2014Worshiping Jerusalem:\u00a0Christian<\/span>\u00a0Colonizers and Colonized\u00a0Christians<\/span>\u00a0\u2014 David M. Crump
Chapter Seventeen\u2014A Great Awakening: Mennonite Action and Palestinian Liberation \u2014 Amy Yoder McGloughlin
Chapter Eighteen\u2014Being Christian<\/span>\u00a0After the Desolation of Gaza \u2014 J. Ross Wagner
Appendix\u2014A Gaza Timeline \u2014 Bruce N. Fisk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"