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- [00:00]
A
What's happening in Gaza right now is one of the great moral reckonings of our time, maybe one of the greatest moral reckonings of our time. Tens of thousands of lives have been lost, children buried under rubble, families erased, and whole neighborhoods where laughter used to live are reduced to dust and silence. And we have to call it what it is, which is a genocide. Otherwise, we minimize the suffering and we don't find a solution for the path forward. We have to refuse the comfort of looking away from it. It's too hard. It's too much. There's so much going on here. We can't look away. If we're honest, this moment didn't begin in October. It sits inside a very long story of occupation, of displacement, of dehumanization, the denial of civil rights, of a world that has too often decided that some lives are grievable and others are not. The wound of the Palestinian people is very, very old. The destruction of especially the Christian Palestinian community is massive, and so is the wound of the Jewish people. So were the wounds carried by so many who have been told across history. South of Africa's apartheid, slavery in the United States, the oppression of the Irish by the British regime. So many people who, across history were told, you don't belong, you don't matter, and you're expendable. And if we refuse to look at those who are oppressed and see their pain and see their suffering and advocate for them, then we make the same mistakes of the people who have come before us, who chose comfort over action and who chose to look away. We're having this conversation today because I believe that these wounds deserve to be named. Because silence is not neutrality. Silence is consent and complicity. And because the only way through the darkness is to face it, to be clear about it, to grieve it without flinching and without letting our own hearts harden in return, but also to wrestle with so much of what we've been told, so much of what we grew up believing, and be willing to change. We are here, this whole podcast, but specifically this episode, we're here to learn how to wrestle. We're here to learn about history, about language, about colonialization, about oppression. We're here to grieve a very long history of the world, of choosing who is other and deciding who is expendable and who is not. This episode is about listening to voices we've been taught to ignore and sit with, histories we've been taught to forget or were never taught in the first place because it was inconvenient. But we're also here because I believe something else is possible. There is a way forward that's rooted not in vengeance and not in supremacy, but in the old, stubborn, radical conviction that every single human being is sacred, every human being, including a Palestinian one. There is no liberation that leaves anyone behind, not real liberty. If liberty only occurs for one group, that is oppression and that is supremacy, often taking the form of nationalism. There is no peace, no true peace that's built on another's erasure. And there's no future worth having that does not begin with love. Loving our neighbors so much that we advocate for them because we know that we would never want to suffer as they have suffered. This is the fierce kind of love, the honest kind, the kind that tells the truth and refuses to stop reaching for one another. And to help me have this conversation is Daniel Banoora. Daniel is a Palestinian theologian and podcaster. He is a professor at the University of Notre Dame, where He received his PhD degree in Quranic Studies. He is also the director of Public Engagement at Bethlehem Institute of Peace and justice and a host of across the Divide, a podcast that provides a space for thoughtful conversations about Palestine, Israel through the lens of faith and peacemaking. An expert in his field, a Palestinian born in Palestine, here with us today to talk about how we move forward and fight against systems of oppression, systems of apartheid, and how we create a world where every life is valuable and no one is expendable here on Flipping Tables. Daniel, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.
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B
It's good to be with you.
- [04:46]
A
Monty and I gave an introduction, you know, your bio and what you do. But I would love to start the interview just about your life. Where did you grow up? How did you end up teaching and studying what you study? I would love to kind of have what is your on ramp to that highway?
- [05:03]
B
It's a very long one and very windy. It's good to be with you. It's good to be with you. Just as a, just a, as a little small remark here that Palestinian Christians aren't really heard much, especially by Christians, especially by conservative and evangelical Christians. We tend to be ignored for a lot of ideological, theological reasons. So I'm just super grateful that someone like you who is analyzing and deconstructing a lot of that baggage that a lot of us kind of grew up with that is doing this work to listen to Palestinian Christians because there's a lot to say about what's happening to them and what's been happening to them, and especially Palestinian Christians who have a lot to say about their experience and about our faith, especially in response to a lot of violence that is done in the name of the scriptures and Christianity. So I'm super grateful for this opportunity, Monty. So about myself, I'll keep it brief as much as possible. I was born in Jerusalem and I grew up in Bethlehem. I grew up in the small town of Beth Sahur in Arabic, that is the biblical shepherd's field. So I'm a descendant of the shepherds who first received the Messiah and proclaimed him as king. So I come from the Palestinian people. I'm a Palestinian Christian. Arab Arabic is my first language. I'm a Palestinian. I'm part of a people that has been in the land for millennia. We trace ourselves back to the first church of Pentecost as the people who are indigenous to the land, who have been in the land, who have a lot of culture and history and folklore and a beautiful legacy. And a Christian who have been witnessing in the land of Christ since the beginning of Christianity. My ancestors are the ones who proclaimed the gospel to your pagan ancestors. You're welcome
- [07:06]
A
anytime. You can thank me later.
- [07:10]
B
Exactly. So, I mean, I say that jokingly, obviously, and try to, like, add some clout to myself, but it's to highlight the fact that Christianity is indigenous to the Middle East. Christianity is fundamentally an Eastern religion, not a Western one. Palestine, Palestine, what we call Palestine, Israel, the Holy Land. We can talk about the language and why that language is important, but Palestine is the heartland of Christianity. For us to understand the faith properly, for us to understand the teachings of Christ better in a more coherent way, we think we need to go back to the land, to the people of the land who understood Jesus properly and proclaimed Christ. Since then, I'm part of a small Christian community. Our numbers were much higher 100 years ago. We were about 11% of the population. Very thriving, very significant minority. Always played a significant role in building our society through churches, through schools, through hospitals, through community service, service and other kind of projects, and the development of the Arabic renaissance of the 19th century, for example. But the Christian presence in Palestine specifically and throughout the region has dwindled dramatically when it comes to the Palestinians. That especially specifically happened because of the imposition of Israel on the Palestinian people, where migrant European Jews came into Palestine looking for a homeland which is fine. Palestinians welcome them in their homeland and the land to be a refuge is a beautiful thing and it's part of the culture to be welcoming and hospitable. The people of the land welcomed Abraham into the land and we continue that Legacy of welcoming the stranger, the alien and the immigrant. Of course that was appended by a colonial project through Zionism and through Christianity. Zionist support for the Jewish people, whether through dispensationalism in the 19th century that kind of provided this mythology of Jewish conquest of the land to help poor Jesus to come back because he couldn't do it otherwise.
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A
Right, as if he was.
- [09:28]
B
Yeah, exactly. He's like, he's waiting for the British imperialists to help him. So the development of that very harmful, violent out there and say racist ideology that did not recognize the humanity of the people in the land and wanted to assert some kind of Jewish supremacy in the land and they facilitated the rise of Jewish Zionism, which is kind of the secular Jewish nationalism that wanted to establish a homeland in Palestine. Of course, how do you establish a Jewish homeland when you have people living in the land? You render that land without people. So the Christian Zionists and the Jewish Zionists afterwards use the slogan a land without a people for a people without a land. So render the most significant. Yeah, but that is part of a legacy of dehumanization and disregard for the indigenous populations for the, for the sake of kind of these imperial religious aspirations of domination. Think of the American legacy of conquest and ethnic cleansing of the natives.
- [10:37]
A
When you were mentioning yeah, like cleansing of the indigenous people group, I immediately was like, well, America knows, knows a thing or two about that. And for those of you that are listening, if you remember, dispensationalism is the, the belief system, the doctrine created by John Nelson Darby in the 1800s that that changed rapture theology, the way that the end times would play out, but specifically created this doctrine that the nation of Israel would be reborn, would play a critical role and that only when Israel was reestablished, Jesus could come back again. The kind of these man made human parameters on how and when Jesus could come back. Even though the New Testament specifically says you won't know the day or the hour, they have been very determined to try to predict it. But that was a big motivator for what would come in Palestine. And I mentioned when we first started that this topic was really important to me not just because of the genocide that's happened in Gaza. That's what it is. And there's no other explanation for that. And we'll get into kind of, I would like to talk about some of the timeline things, but for me. So when I went to Liberty University in ye olden times, even though I didn't, I wasn't studying theology formally, I went hard Sciences, they required theology courses that I took in Israel. And so I took my courses as an intensive in Israel. I didn't recognize at the time, I didn't know the phrase Christian nationalist. I also didn't know what a Zionist was, and I didn't realize that I was both of those things. But those studies were a dramatic turning point for me because I was in Israel, and I remember being in Jerusalem at the Dome of the Rock, and I'm seeing Muslim families for the first time in my life. And they're worshiping and they're happy and they're crying these tears of joy. And I recognized that the language of dehumanization and demonization that I had heard towards them, that I couldn't justify in that moment. I was like, they're worshiping the same way that I'm worshiping. They're here. They're probably more similar to me than otherwise. And I was there after a previous Gaza incident. We weren't able to access the west bank when I was there because of violence. And, you know, we were. You know, the Israeli soldiers were all over the place, armed. And that was a huge moment of. I felt like I didn't know the whole story. And I was like, this feels wrong. This feels like we're only getting one side of the story. Why are we supporting this group? But we're not even talking to this group over here. And it made me also recognize I didn't know a lot about white evangelicalism's history. And so this was a jumping off point from my own deconstruction. A big part of my deconstruction was Israel and that relationship. And when this happened later, October 7th, and how this all played out, I was able to recognize, in part because of what the US has done, that the word terrorist gets thrown around a lot. And it, a lot of times means person I disagree with and want to be able to be violent against instead of, you know, I didn't know the history of Hamas and I didn't know the history of Palestine. When this all started happening, I dove into that history and was shocked by what I found, because what we were hearing, what the rhetoric was, is, well, Israel has a right to defend itself. October 7. October 7. October 7. But this starts long before that. And the more I found out, the more horrific it became. And a very good friend of mine went to Gaza, and when he and I spoke about what he saw and what happened there, I realized that not only are we. Were we not getting what I think is adequate news in the United States, but people were not taking it seriously enough. Like there's no justification anyone can give me for a justified military conflict that bombs residential buildings, schools and hospitals. I mean, Gaza, Gaza is in large part rubble now.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And so, you know, when I, when I reached out to Tim, I said I really want to speak to someone who knows the breadth of this because this is still a topic I feel in the kiddie pool with. I feel that I haven't done enough to speak fully on it, which is why I wanted to have this conversation, because of this history, but also because of the role that that region played in my own deconstruction of starting to understand. I'm not getting the whole story here. And this feels very one sided and this feels very dehumanizing and it feels very demonizing to different people groups. So I wanted to start with the question of when did this power dynamic within Palestine really start to shift? We mentioned how dispensationalism fed into American Zionism, later, Jewish Zionism. But when did this historically really shift?
- [15:42]
B
Yeah, there's a lot there. And Mati, I just want to just affirm what you just said. Your journey of kind of the eyes opening, it's a very real one. I know countless Christians and others who that encounter has been very transformative. And also October 7th, and we can talk about that as well, how that opened a lot of eyes and people started to question the narratives, mythologies, they have been taught and where people just have been Zionists, Christian Zionists, without even knowing what that is. It's the air you breathe in many ways. You can deconstruct so much. But Christian Zionism would kind of be always implicit in how you think. And it's part of that legacy of dehumanization and the ideology of this country that has been normalized for a lot of, a lot of Christians. So I'm so grateful for that. And again, kind of the encounter, the meeting with a Palestinian is always transformative. So your story resonates with many stories that I've heard before about the importance of that kind of encounter.
- [16:44]
A
Well, there's one of those things that you're right, programmed into how I was taught that I didn't recognize it until I was staring it in the face. It was just, well, if you're a Christian, you stand with Israel and nobody really talked about, well, what does that mean? What does that mean? Does that mean standing with the Jewish people? Because standing with Israel and standing with and for Jewish people is two different things. What you know, and, and it never played out for me in my adult life on such a grand scale where people weren't willing to question it. People weren't willing to say, well, what does this mean, though? Does this support also include what's happening to children in Gaza? Like, how far does this. But growing up, it was so intrinsic to what you believed. You never questioned the United States sending billions of dollars. We never questioned military support. We never. And it was just never talked about. And I think that for a lot of people, both Christian and non Christian alike in the States, this is a very big waking up moment of what does this support really mean?
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B
Right?
- [17:48]
A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
I mean, like I said, the story of Israel is the same story as the US of conquest, of domination, of a chosen people who escaped persecution and who found refuge in a promised land, in a holy land, but who came to face a reality on the ground of indigenous populations that are different, that worship differently, that look differently, and those were dismissed as animals, as savages, who can be ethnically cleansed and pushed out of their homes and lands. That is a Palestinian story as well. So for you, to be an American is to be a Zionist. For you to be an American is to support Israel because it's the same mythology, the same idea of the US is a story of Israel. So for you to challenge that is to go against all of your impulses, all of the learning that you got about the US and therefore about Israel. So, yeah, so there's that hard work all of us have to do to decouple our faith from Zionism, from Christian nationalism, from the ideologies of supremacy and domination that exist in the U.S. and once we do that, we can easily connect to Palestine because that becomes a very important story for us as we decouple ourselves from a lot of the baggage that we grew up with. Okay, so to go back to your question about the power dynamics and structures in Palestine. So like I said, it began with Christian Zionists, and then those kind of laid the foundation for Jewish Zionism. Kind of the anxieties about the end times and the Apocalypse was very powerful for a lot of these people who wanted to see Jesus come back. And so they kind of paved the road for Jewish nationalism, especially in Britain. And then in the U.S. lord Balfour, the Prime Minister of Britain in 1917, made this famous declaration, the Balfour Declaration, where he declared that His Majesty's government looks favorably to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, of course, without consulting the wishes of the indigenous population. So, emboldened by Christian Zionist support, the Jewish Zionist movement grew and expanded and started moving into Palestine. Now, before the Zionists came into Palestine, Palestine was always a pluralistic, diverse society. It had Muslims, it had Christians, a sizable minority, and also Palestinian Jews, who always resided what we call Eastern Jews in the Middle east, in Palestine, in Egypt, in Morocco, in Yemen, today still in Iran, Iraq, as well as sizable minority in Iraq. So they were indigenous to the land alongside every other religious and ethnic and linguistic people group. But the Zionists came with this kind of imperial ideology. This is our land, we're gonna take it by force. Of course, a lot of them, most of them, were compelled by the experience of antisemitism in the west and by a desire for freedom. But sadly, they had adopted the same kind of ideology of supremacy and domination where they grew up. So they came to the land and they wanted to take it by force eventually and establish their own homeland, regardless of the Palestinian people, who, again, who were perceived as insignificant and unnecessary and an obstacle to that vision of domination. So that increased in the early 20th century and of course World War II happens and the Holocaust. And the Holocaust was this kind of rally cry for a lot of Jews in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, to leave Europe. They're not welcomed anymore. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Of course, it was proven. The Zionist ideology vision has proven to be true that Jews are not welcome in Europe, they're not European, and they need to leave, sadly. So Zionism kind of was able to be so effective eventually because initially religious practicing Jews, the majority have rejected Zionism because they saw it as a secular imposition on Judaism. Judaism throughout history has adopted a clear messianic vision of what return looks like that comes to the Mashiach, the Messiah. So for the Messiah, God's anointed to be replaced by a secular government and emboldened by imperial powers was understood to be anathema. This is like this is the apex of idolatry. You're replacing God, God's work of the Messiah, who with political maneuvering. So the majority of Jews have rejected Zionism as a secular invention and unacceptable. But then the Holocaust happened, and that was a big kind of wake up call to a lot of Jews to leave. So that's understandable. And as a Palestinian, this is not part of my story. This is the legacy of antisemitism and Christian hatefulness and violence against Jews and other, of course, other minorities. So it's understandable how that happened. The problem is, what are you doing when you are leaving Europe to come to Palestine? Are you going to come and be a neighbor to those who Live in the land or are you going to take over the land eventually? So this is the 30s, late 30s and the 40s. You have a large influx of European Jews, mostly from what is today Poland and Ukraine and so on, and also from Western Europe. And eventually this led to 1948, what Israel calls the War of Independence, what Palestinians, Palestinians called the Nakba, the catastrophe. How do you establish a Jewish homeland? How do you make the land a land without a people? Is by ethnically cleansing and erasing the people from the land. Again, think of what happened to the natives in this country. So that led to a series of massacres committed against the Palestinians in 1947, culminating in the Israeli Declaration of Statehood in 1948, whereby by the end of it, the majority of Palestinians throughout all of what we call historic Palestine were pushed out and becoming refugees. About 700,000 Palestinians were pushed out of the land to make room basically for the Jewish European invaders. About 400 villages and towns were completely erased and ethnically cleansed. You can actually go and see some of the ruins of these villages, including numerous, about four and five Christian villages, completely eradicated. And then the Palestinians have become, the majority of them become refugees now, still refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and also throughout diaspora. People without a home now wanting to find a home, but then by doing so, they made other people without a home. So that is the catastrophe, or what the Palestinians call the Nakba. It devastated the Christian Palestinian community. About 90,000 Palestinian Christians were forced out. Like I said, many Christian villages were destroyed. So when Christian Zionists talk about this is God's promise, God's fulfillment of prophecies, I'm like, you just devastated the Christian community that has been there for Jewish Europeans, right?
- [25:10]
A
And this really was also like, because the uk, Britain, well, Britain at the time, Britain, the United States were so integral to this entire project as. As a political chess move because it gave them a foothold in Southwest Asia and in the region that they could consistently use militarily and politically. Like this was very much similar. Today we see Pete Hegseth is trying to justify the conflict in Iran using spiritual language, using Armageddon, using this End Times language. But it's really just to justify conquest of what they want to do. And the same language was used during this. And it's one of those instances of the victor writes the history. And so we hear one side of it, it's depicted in one way. This was something when I started studying this after October 7th, and really looking at the whole history shocked me, because you read history and you're like, oh, this thing happened and it was this conflict, it was this battle, it was this war. No, it was an ethnic cleansing is what it was. And it actually in similar to in the United States with indigenous groups and later even black communities completely erased, like these places don't exist anymore. And that's a much different story than hearing it as, oh, it was a war. Very, very different. And the language is intentional, right?
- [26:33]
B
Yeah. And of course, just like the natives who were savages, who were uneducated, who fought each other supposedly. Right. The Palestinians are, are not a people. They have no history, no culture, no religion. They are brown people that have no dignity and humanity and we can do with them whatever we want. That is a long legacy of the savage in the Western imagination. Right. You name it. Black people, natives, Jews, Japanese, all of it. You know, so that's the Palestinian is the new savage that the west has adopted as the people to dispossess and to dehumanize. And of course all of that is. Is justified and baptized in righteous language of Christian support and so on. And it's devastating. Obviously. Now Christianity in the Middle east, especially in Palestine, is almost extinct. And it's not because of Muslim violence. It's because of Christians and Western imperialism and continues today. Now Christians are in Palestine, are less than 1% of the population. Wow. Not because of Muslims. And it's mainly because of evangelicals and Christians who are so eager to be at the forefront of justifying Israel's aggression and violence, whether 1948 and what happened to the Palestinian people. And even today, like you're saying, after Gaza and the destruction of all of life in Gaza, so Western racism and violence continues unabated. And we're in 2026. The lessons of the past haven't been learned. The Christian west tried to atone for its sins and its crimes against the Jewish people, but their idea of repentance was to dehumanize and oppress and vilify another people group. So the Jews of yesterday are the Palestinians of today. Same ideology lesson has not been learned.
- [28:30]
A
And so what shifted after that? Cleansing. And there's this kind of confiscation of the land. There's the driving out of especially the Christian Palestin groups. Then what follows in. In the 50s and 60s, really kind of leading into the 90s, where this starts to take a more dramatic shift as far as resistance. And what led to October 7, because all of this, this is a line you can't understand October 7th without this backdrop.
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B
Right? Yeah. I mean I don't know if I can do this. Well, Monty, summarizing 80 years in 10 minutes.
- [29:03]
A
So I'll give me, give me some of the, the, the major pivotal points because I do want to address October 7th specifically. So maybe give me from that time just some specific big turning points, big events that eventually led us there.
- [29:21]
B
Sure. Before I do that, I highly encourage people to get a copy of Rashid Khalidi's the 100 Year War in Palestine. Rashid Khalidi Palestinian American scholar at Columbia, one of the most significant works on this issue. And he does a phenomenal job explaining the, the 100 years of this kind of war on the Palestinian people. So, Rashid Khalidi, 100 year war on Palestine so briefly, 48 happens, a huge shock to the Palestinians and also the Arabs in general Arab nations. As a result of Israeli actions and the declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, they decided to wage a war on Israel as a response to what happened to the Palestinians. A big shock to Arab and nationalist and independence aspirations from the British Empire. There's a long history of kind of what the British were doing and playing both sides. And eventually Arabs were trying to rid themselves of the British. And now we have this new position of a new state from Europe that is now imposed on the most significant religious and cultural site in the Middle east, you know, the Holy Land.
- [30:31]
A
Yeah.
- [30:32]
B
So that leads to a war. Eventually the war ends with Israeli victory, obviously supported by the British and also the Americans. And by the end of that, the Arab nations are defeated. And 78% of historic Palestine now has become Israel. And the vast majority of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed or removed in the Nakba. And some Palestinians remain, whether in some of the homes and towns in what is today Israel or in what have become two areas, the west bank, which is where Bethlehem is, where I'm from, Hebron, and all these cities, the biblical Judea and the newly formed Gaza Strip, where a lot of Palestinians from the surrounding towns, like today, Ashkelon and so on, moved into Gaza and the surrounding areas. And then they were trapped there in the Gaza Strip. So now the British left. Israel is now the new monster imperial power there. And the Palestinians are relegated into these pockets where they live. The Palestinians in the west bank under Jordanian control, and then the Palestinians in Gaza Strip under Egyptian control. Fast forward Tonight, efforts have been made to end this conflict and the idea of a two state solution came about. But the Palestinians rejected, just like any other people. Why would you accept the erasure from your homeland, especially what is today Israel, especially the coast. When you think of Haifa Nazareth, this is the heartland of Palestinian history and culture and the intelligentsia and church Christian communities are mostly in the Galilee area and the coast. Complete devastation of Palestinian life. So Palestinians always said, this is our land and we have a right to our land. Eventually in 1967, because Israel did not want to stop there, they wanted to take over the whole of the land, all of what they imagined to be Israel. So that led to the Israel eventually waged a war in 1967 by which it took over the west bank and the Gaza Strip, establishing what we now call the Israeli occupation over the Palestinian territories. So the the Jordans are pushed back beyond the Jordan river and the Egyptians back into Egypt. A lot of stuff happened since then. Some wars happened in 1973 and so on. But fast forward to the 80s. That was a rise of the first Palestinian intifada or uprising. You might have heard of the word Intifada, which literally means to shake off, to rebel, to resist.
- [33:18]
A
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A
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A
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A
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- [34:17]
B
So that is the Palestinians, stateless, without rights and without freedoms. Launching a movement of resistance called Intifada to shake off the occupation, mostly nonviolent and mostly peaceful and incredibly creative, that fought against the Israeli occupation in the at the time that was very powerful led to a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians who had initially been ignored, especially because of Christian Western guilt towards Israel. You have to support the Jewish people. We need to repent of the Holocaust. We need to support Israel. Eventually the world was able to see the brutality of this real occupation and that led eventually to the peace accords in the early 90s. And maybe people who are old enough remember the famous picture of Clinton with Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian President and the Israeli Prime Minister. It's Haq Rabin, I think in 1993 or 94, signing the Peace agreement at the White House lawn. That was basically the greatest Palestinian compromise, saying, hey, we recognize Israel is not going anywhere. We are willing to accept a solution, a two state solution, whereby we would get 22% of historic Palestine, establish a state in the west bank and Gaza Strip with some kind of highway connecting them and some kind of sovereignty and control over that territory. Eventually, Hakra Bin was killed by a Jewish terrorist from the right wing Jewish extremist. And those kind of plans for the two state solution were eventually dashed. Israelis were not serious about giving Palestinians back their land on establishing and maintaining their sovereignty and self determination for the Palestinians. Eventually, okay, now we're in the 21st century. Eventually, in the year 2000, this leads to the second intifada. Exasperated by Israeli actions in the west bank, expansion of settlements in the west bank that basically made the idea of a Palestinian homeland very difficult. When you have all of these Jewish settlers taken over Palestinian land within the west bank, including for example, my family next to Beitzahor there's a hill and Jewish settlers came in, the military came and took the whole hill from us. My family lost 12 acres of land. And now you have a new settlement called the Harhama settlement right next to Bethlehem, where Jews from Brooklyn or Ukraine live there now on land that belongs to the Palestinians. So it was evident to the Palestinians Israel was not serious about the two state solution. If it was, why would it be moving its population into the West Bank? Right now we're talking about almost a million Jewish settlers within the West Bank. A lot of things happened here, and I'm skipping a lot here, but eventually this leads to the second intifada, the second uprising, which was again grassroots civil disobedience and resistance and also pushing off the occupation, but also was marked by the emboldened Hamas, the Islamic resistance group that understood that Israel was playing with the Palestinians, that the Palestinian government was ineffective and powerless and has been co opted by Israel and by the US in an attempt to become legitimate to the US and to Israel. And they decided, like so many other resistance groups, whether in South Africa, whether it's abolitionists, whether it's Haitian slaves and anyone else, to adopt violence as a method to resist and to oppose Israeli violence and killing of Palestinians. So that led to the dominance of Hamas or of its actions against Israel, which are considered to be terrorist attacks against. Against Israel. We can talk about the term terrorism and how we understand all of that stuff when we talk about October 7th. Eventually that leads to a lot of things that developed then but eventually leads to Hamas taking over the Gaza Strip, winning elections in 2005, which was seen by the Palestinians. Hamas was seen as a replacement, as a credible replacement to the corrupt, impotent Palestinian. The Fatah Party, the Palestinian largest party at the time, and kind of saw Hamas as a potential and hopeful change to the political system that led to a civil war where the US and Israel supported the Fatah Party against Hamas. Hamas were pushed into the Gaza strip and in 2007 a blockade was established over. And now the Palestinian Authority maintain its control in the west bank and basically have become since then the contractors of Israel who manage the occupation and who are paid by Israel to maintain their power. Who lost legitimacy from the Palestinians. Their legitimacy is only given to them through Israel and the US and that leads to kind of specifically to focus on Gaza leads to the empowerment of Hamas, also supported by Israel. Hamas was established by Israel in the late 80s to counteract the Palestinian liberation movement. And just like the US did in Russia and Afghanistan, they supported the Mujahideen who eventually become the Taliban and other efforts by the us. They thought that this idea of divide and conquer, let's defeat the Fatah party by emboldening right wing Islamist groups so that Hamas eventually becomes this kind of monster that Israel has created. They continue to support Hamas financially while Hamas adopting this kind of militant resistance to Israel. And eventually basically Israel lost its control of its monster that it has created. A lot of stuff had happened since then. A lot of attacks and wars by Israel and 2012-2014-2019-2021 and eventually October 7th in the West Bank. Israel continues to oppress and subjugate the Palestinians to a brutal system of occupation, military checkpoints, the apartheid wall that was built in 2001 and basically denying the basic rights of Palestinians. All of that reality in the west bank, the complete control of resources movement, denial of rights and the situation in Gaza had been described by every legitimate human rights organization, including Israeli ones, to be a system of apartheid that is similar worse than the apartheid of South Africa, where one ethnic national religious group dominates and controls the other national ethnic group. Similar to Segregation in the US in the 50s and the 60s, one dominant group controls and dominates the other. 2023, before we talk about October 7th was the most violent year against the Palestinians up to then about 400 Palestinians killed 60 or 70 children, all in the West Bank. And of course, a brutal blockade of Gaza that rendered Gaza, according to the un, uninhabitable. Complete devastation of the Palestinian rights and freedoms. Denial of basic access to resources and food and medicine, and annexation of land checkpoints and oppression of the Palestinians on a daily basis in the West Bank. Israel and the west had assumed that they can manage Palestinians as stateless people without any rights. And they thought that was okay. And that was the psyche and the imagination of many Christians and Americans and others, that Palestinians could be dominated indefinitely. But any kind of system of oppression would lead people to radical actions and violence, just like, again, South Africa. Think of India, think of the Irish resistance to the British occupation. Think of Algeria, think of Haitian slaves. So that was the reality, that they thought this could be normalized. And Palestinians are saying, no, we are humans and we would fight back. Of course, the most extreme elements of that would be these militant guerrilla militia groups like Hamas that refused to kind of normalize oppression. And that eventually led to October 7th. Okay, there's a lot here.
- [43:21]
A
There's a lot. Well, and one of the things I want to touch on really quick, because during this long, prolonged period of occupation, seizing land, and we're talking the denial of civil rights, not having freedom of the press, periodic curfews, military checkpoints, denial of resources spanning decades, decades of this. And. And there's, you know, beyond. And I'm glad you mentioned Hamas, because I wanted to talk about that. Like, you know, the people who really don't want to have a conversation about Zionism will immediately say, well, Hamas needs to be eradicated. It's like, well, Hamas was created to. To be a control kind of political group in Palestine in favor of, you know, Israeli dominance. And then they were elected, shocking Britain and America against the Fatah. And so then the UK And America gives arms and money to the Fatah to spur on this civil war. And then we have this. This action where the group who has been stomped on for decades now finally responds. And then we see the use of the word terrorist, and it's like, well, what about what was happening when you were murdering children, when you were denying people civil rights and in the apartheid wall? And so I'm so glad that you laid that out, because typically when I have this conversation with people, the first thing they'll say is, well, but Hamas needs to be dealt with. They're a terrorist organization. And it. It just does not encapsulate the history of what's happened.
- [44:57]
B
You can never get Rid of resistance. As long as oppression exists, people will revolt. And I give and I tried, and hopefully this is making sense. Like, I'm not justifying Hamas, and we can unpack that, especially as a Christian, like any kind of violence, I'm like a radical pacifist. You know, I take the teachings of Christ to love my neighbor and to love my enemy really seriously. I take that very literally, that I need to love my enemy. So I reject any kind of violence, and I see it antithetical to the gospel of Christ and to the cross, where God takes on suffering. He doesn't inflict suffering and violence. So that's kind of my position. And it's very clear. At the same time, it's a bit naive and foolish to assume that oppression would not lead to violence by the oppressed.
- [45:46]
A
And I think that's a. That's. I think that's the point of the conversation, is you can say, I don't support Hamas's actions. But historically, I also understand that when you beat people down over and over and over and over, eventually some of them are going to fight back, and it's not gonna be never ending. Peaceful protest. I mean, there isn't a historical instance that I'm aware of where oppression on. Especially on this scale didn't lead to that. Even people consider apartheid kind of a peaceful revolution in the sense of there wasn't a major war. You know, it wasn't like the civil war in the States, but apartheid. There was a lot of violent resistance to end it in South Africa there. You know what I mean? So it's. It is this understanding of, no, I don't agree with those things, but I also understand that people will fight back. You can only push people so far.
- [46:39]
B
Yeah. I mean, the ANC was a Christian group, and Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. He was in jail for 22 years.
- [46:47]
A
I think he was in jail for so long.
- [46:51]
B
Think of. I can give you so many examples from, you know, look at, like, slavery and John Brown and all these abolitionists who committed what we can call evil. Right. You know, John Brown, I think, or Nat Turner, you know, killed, like, innocent women and children. But if we understand the context of slavery and racism, it makes sense not to justify it, but we understand why they would do what they did and all the way to the Civil rights movement and the Black Panthers and all that stuff. Of course, violence comes as a response to structural violence. So there are two kinds of violence. There is. This is what kind of sociologists talk about. There is kind of this structure of Violence that you don't see it. There's nothing wrong with the black person sitting in the back of a bus. That's not violent. That is good structure, ordering society. But for the black person, that is violent, even though it doesn't seem like violent. So then the black person would resist and fight and protest and push back, but then he would be portrayed, or she would be portrayed as violent, as aggressive, as disruptive, whatever. Disruptive and not keeping the peace. And then I think Dr. King analyzes that really well when he talks about invisible violence. So we have to understand this, that every Palestinian has been living under a violent, racist, dominating structure for 80 years. The vast majority of Palestinian resistance to that system of domination and violence has been and continues to be nonviolent. Of course, we want to highlight Hamas because it's convenient, but Palestinian resistance has been beautiful and creative, what we call this kind of creative resistance. And I can tell you a lot about it. But of course we want to highlight Hamas because that is the most compelling talking point for those who want to justify Israel. And it's been kind of normalized like this. And so for The Palestine Palestinians, October 6, there was no ceasefire, there was no peace. October 6, the day before October 7, was a continuation of war, of violence, of oppression against the Palestinians, whether the blockade in Gaza and the continual attacks by Israel or the killing of Palestinians in the west bank and the denial of the lands and taking their lands and so on and so forth. So October 7th, for a lot of the Palestinians is only the next chapter of oppression and fighting against oppression. But people in the west think, yeah, what's wrong with Israel? It's fine. You know, there's conflict there. Like, there's some disagreement, but it's normal, it's fine. We can go like you did, let's go to Israel and go study there. Let's go to see the holy sites. It's normal. But if you consider the experience of the Palestinians, you would realize, like you had Monty, there's something fundamentally wrong in. In the system, on the ground and how we have understood and perceived the Palestinian people. So any kind of action and violence by the Palestinians, whether it's nonviolent or violent or extremist, for example, what happened on October 7 is a natural byproduct of that system of domination and racism and oppression against them.
- [50:02]
A
And so how do you. Because again, the two most common responses, rebuttals to standing for Palestine, you know, free Palestine, advocating for, like, people to, like, advocating against what Israel has done. The first two responses are Hamas, which we addressed. But then the second thing that they'll say is, October 7th, the state of Israel has the right to defend itself. And so we're back in this dialogue of this long history of creative resistance, this 80 years of oppression, and then this, this one violent action has especially, you know, Bibi Netanyahu's PR has been able to spin it as this justification to level Palestine, where, you know. And how would you, how would you engage in that conversation? Because I think a lot of my listeners who are people that are in various stages of deconstruction as well as non religious, but they're interacting with Christian Zionists. How, how would you, how would you approach that conversation about October 7th of saying, Hey, I don't agree with this action, but also I know what this action resulted from and it is not an excuse to start bombing schools.
- [51:16]
B
Okay, so there's a lot there. So I'm gonna bracket the whole conversation about Christian Zionism because they use different talking points about the land, about God's chosen people, and about we need to bless Israel, like Ted Cruz and, and Mike Huckabee and so on. So I'll bracket that for now. So to the question about Israel having a right to defend itself, actually Israel does not have a right to defend itself against the people it occupies. Its duty is to protect the people it occupies. That's according to international law. Gaza is not a foreign country that invaded Israel. Gaza is dominated by Israel. And Israel has rendered Gaza into an open air prison and had denied them their basic rights. If you're born in Gaza, you never leave Gaza. You're stuck in Gaza. I have friends in Gaza who've never left Gaza. Right. They have been doomed because of the place they were born. So the duty, the right, the responsibility of Israel is to protect them and to, to provide rights and freedoms for them. Not to put a blockade, which a blockade that is considered illegal, not to deny them food and basics, amenities. It's to protect them against any kind of destabilizing realities or oppression or denial of rights and freedoms. So Israel's legal obligation is to protect the people it occupies. So, so if Jordan invaded and attacked Israel, then Israel has the right to defend itself, but does not have the right against the people it occupies. Secondly, there's an assumption in the imagination of people that Israel is a legitimate good state, therefore it has a right to defend itself. Israel is a racist apartheid state that has been oppressing and suppressing the rights of Palestinians for 80 years. This is not a state that has a right to defend itself. It's a state that has to dismantle its apartheid racist system and give rights and freedom to the Palestinians. It's like saying that Germany, Nazi Germany, sorry for that hyperbolic example, is like saying that Nazi Germany has a right to defend itself against what the French and the British were doing. It doesn't make sense to us. No, what Nazi Germany has to do is to dismantle Nazism and fascism and grant freedoms to the people and go back to its own borders and stop occupying other countries. That is the responsibility, the duty of that state. And we can give a lot of examples for any other country that has been oppressive. Same thing with Russia. You know, Russia, you invaded a country, you need to go back. Right? So that is the duty of Israel. It's not to defend itself. When we use the language of Israel has a right to defend itself, we're obfuscating. We are denying the reality on the ground. We're taking, assuming that Israel is a legitimate, good state that has a right to defense. It does not have a right to defense when it has been subjecting Palestinians for 80 years. Monty, this is not, you know, something urgent.
- [54:28]
A
Almost a hundred years, like.
- [54:30]
B
Right.
- [54:31]
A
That's almost a century of time like it is. And in perspective, it is so much time like that. And that makes the situation that much more enraging. And this was a really frustrating point for me, deconstructing all of this. And this really started. My deconstruction around this started in 2015, but realizing not just how much I didn't know, but how it felt like the. You know, and you can call it. You can call it pr, you can call it propaganda, but the story that had been laid out was so different than what actual reality was. And there's this underpinning, there's this idea, and you're right, even in the language of saying defend yourself, there's this assumption that the state of Israel is justified in whatever it does, which no state is. That doesn't matter if it's the United States or if it's Russia or if it's France. No state is justified in anything they do when anything they do includes occupation and genocide. And this language, I think, has been heightened even more than when I was young because there's this fight to justify it, but it is. It's a very different thing. And also it's the same thing in the. There's a lot of equating Zionism or being pro Israel with being pro Jewish, which is not the same thing. Not the same thing. And in fact, I believe especially there is a rise of anti Semitism in the United States. I think in large part negatively impacted by Zionism, that it's create, it's heightening this conflict because there is a rise in violence against Jewish people in the United States. But Zionism is making that worse. And you can, you can look at this, the nation state of Israel and Bibi Netanyahu and look at them and say those actions are wrong. The oppression is wrong, the genocide is wrong, and also support and love Jewish people. Because the whole premise of this is we have to get rid of racialized imperialism and you can't just pick a new target. That's what led to this in the first place. This, this course correction for the Holocaust created a system where they're like, well, we're just gonna go oppress somebody else and, and write a really nice PR paragraph about it. But they just created the same problem in a different region. And so it is the, the language around this has created kind of an illusion almost of a world that doesn't exist. And the more you learn, and even, you know, I think of the photos that come out of Gaza now and have over the last several years, and it's just, it's just decimated and there's no. And there's still people. I get so upset when I hear people say the war in Gaza, like this isn't a war. Like this, this is obliteration. This is, this is a place that doesn't have a standing army. You can't, you can't have a war with a region that doesn't have a standing military. And it's just. But you know, I think for me, and I'm absolutely sure for you, it's so frustrating to come up against this language all the time when it's, it's like, it's an integral kind of PR centerpiece with the Trump administration, with America as a whole. And how do we start to dismantle this? It's a false reality. How do we dismantle this false reality?
- [58:05]
B
Yeah, I just wanna make a quick comment before I respond to this. Also, I need to talk about antisemitism, about going back to the issue of self defense. Okay, let's say Israel, it's a state, it's acknowledged, it's a member state of the un. It has a right to defend itself against aggression. I understand what happened in Octo 7th was very shocking. Of course Israel wants to defend its people and make sure that doesn't happen. Again, question. If we assert that right to Israel, do the Palestinians also have a right to defend themselves against what has been happening to them over 80 years? I get the Israeli argument. Are we afforded the same rights? Are we afforded the same dignity and sovereignty and self determination? Or is that given to one people at our expense? And that is the issue here. For me, it's. There's this kind of centering of Zionist and Israeli feelings and position and safety at the expense, necessarily at the expense of the Palestinians. If we're treating both people equally, both people deserving dignity and security and self determination and freedom, then you would not frame it that way. You would say, okay, well, what are the conditions for justice and equality and liberation that we are pursuing here? If we're framing it in terms of security of one people while denying it for the other people? That is what we have right now. That is what you're describing here. Fundamentally, that argument of Israel has a right to defend itself is inherently racist because by definition, the way it's been framed, it has to negate Palestinian right to defend themselves, Palestinian freedom and liberation and justice for them. So I had to make sure that this is also. We have to be critical again, deconstruct the language and the mythologies we've been telling ourselves about the Palestinians and the Israelis. To your second point about antisemitism, this is actually very sensitive to me. And I grew up as a Christian Palestinian and I grew up hating Jews. Like I would say maybe I was anti Semitic, not because I inherited some kind of Christian Western animus against Jews. It's because this is a state that defines itself as Jewish. And because of that Jewish identity, it killed my friend, my classmate, it imprisoned my dad, a pastor five times. It killed my friends and my cousins and my neighbor and took my land. I hated them. But they were only Jews, incidentally. They just happened to be Jews. If those people were Turkish or Russians, I would hate them. And reasonably so.
- [60:44]
A
It would be so illogical if you didn't hate them.
- [60:47]
B
Exactly. So every Palestinian by that logic is anti Semitic because we hate those who oppress us. Right. There was a lot of work I had to do. When it's like taken faith seriously, what does it look like to love my enemy as a Palestinian? And there was like, this is really hard work. So putting that aside, there is a very pernicious way that antisemitism has been framed where our resistance to our oppressor, our rejection of their violence has been framed as antisemitic in a way to conflate it with classical antisemitic, semitism which mostly comes from the Christian right and from European Christian bigotry and, and hate towards the Jewish people. Antisemitism is not indigenous to Palestinians. Jews in the Middle east were thriving and were living as Palestinian Jews in the Middle east and Jewish Iraqis and Yemenis and Egyptians while they've been attacked and slaughtered in the Christian West. Antisemitism is fundamentally a Western issue, not a Middle Eastern issue.
- [61:53]
A
Well, and to clarify, when I brought up the issue of anti Semitism, I specifically meant in the United States. And what I find like, because what I find, again, having this conversation with people who, even if they're not religious, have been somewhat indoctrinated into this language, they will point out, well, antisemitism in the US Is on the rise. And I'm like, that has nothing to do with the conflict over here. And, and in fact, the Zionism that causes this conflict, that is causing people who see with their own eyes what's happening in Gaza to have an animosity and to have it, it increases the anti Semitism here because people see the harm that is going on, or there are people who are Palestinian or are of Palestinian descent or they have family there, and of course they're going to have that emotion and that reaction. But often I find in these conversations that people will use anti Semitism in the US as an excuse to justify again, this, this support for the state of Israel there. It seems to be very hard for people to separate the two things, that someone who is of Jewish descent or Jewish ancestry is not the same entity as the state of Israel. So I wanted to clarify that because I wasn't talking about the anti Semitism there, but here, which is still often used to support Israel. And I'm like, what Israel is doing is actually increasing this feeling of disgust, this feeling of anti Semitism, because what's happening is so unbelievably wrong. You know, and, and, and using the comparison of, you know, what happened In World War II, there was a period of time where people hated Germans, a lot of people hated Germans, and they had a really good reason to do that. Did that mean they were born with this default hatred of German people? Of course not. But with the cruelty and the crimes and the viciousness, there grew to be not only a rise in nationalism in the United States and in other countries, but there grew to be this animosity because of the crimes that were committed in Europe. And that's the same kind of cycle that we're in here where there's this growing animosity in the United States because of crimes that are being committed and the UN is refusing to address. And so I, I mentioned that more because I feel like, again, people that are trying to have this conversation with other Americans especially are going to run into that, that kind of conflation of topics when it's not the same thing. And, and also, you know, anti Semitism as we understand it in the US is uniquely a Western thing. Yes, that is our thing, and it is our thing to deal with. It has nothing to do with the conflict in Gaza.
- [64:46]
B
Yeah. The conflation of antisemitism with anti Zionism or rejecting the policies and critiquing the policies of Israel with antisemitism has been effective in silencing people. I know that many Christians would not speak about Israel and others because of the fear of being slandered as anti Semitic, but this conflation is in itself anti Semitic because it's necessitating that for Jews to be Jews to exist, they have to oppress Palestinians. And if you object against the oppression of the Palestinians, that is criticize the Israeli government, you become anti Semitic. So you're saying to be a Jew is to oppress people and that is anti Semitic. To be a good Jew is to be a bad Jew. So that in itself you're saying if you would criticize Israeli policy, you are hating Jews. So you're telling me I should not do that, so I should be okay with Jews being oppressive to other people. But yeah, that has been very effective and very powerful in itself, is very malicious in how it has been used to silence objection and critique of the policies of Israel. Many Jews reject Zionism, many Jews in the US Rejection.
- [66:05]
A
And very passionately, very passionately they are adamant about it.
- [66:09]
B
From the beginnings of the October 7th and what happened since then, Jews have been anti Zionist. Jews have been at the forefront of opposing the Israeli policies and opposing Zionism. I learned so much from my anti Zionist Jewish friends who are asserting because of our Judaism, we reject Zionism. Judaism fundamentally is about Tikkun olam, about redeeming the world, about pursuing justice and mercy and, you know, drawing on the traditions from the Hebrew scriptures. Right. And Zionism is a distortion of that. And other Orthodox Jews, Haredi Jews, who would say Israel, like I said earlier, is an affront to Judaism. It replaces Judaism as its religion of the Torah and the Talmud, of religious piety, a religion of the Diaspora, of being present in the world, and replaces that with an ethnic supremacist state. So it's antithetical to Judaism. In different ways, whether you are religious and it's antithetical to the messianic expectation of Judaism. And it's also ethically more immoral in its denial of the basic rights of the Palestinians. So this conflation is, is not only bad and awful and also it cheapens antisemitism. It cheapens legitimate antisemitism when you are saying that those who oppose oppression have to be anti Semitic. So I'll finish with this because I care about Palestinian justice and peacemaking. I reject racism, I reject white supremacy, and in the same breath I reject antisemitism. It's not either or. It's a consistent ethic that rejects any kind of dehumanization, whether against Muslims and Islamophobia, against Palestinians or against Jews. It's the same ethic that we use. And because we reject antisemitism and the wholesale demonization of Jews as Jews, we reject Zionism because that is oppression and violence against the Palestinian people.
- [68:15]
A
Yeah. And it's the same way that, you know, for me, like I reject Christian nationalism in that same breath because it, it excludes other groups, it doesn't allow for the freedom of those groups to self determine and to thrive. And, and for. If you're someone in the United States and you're kind of wrestling with all of this for the first time, we see this in, in American conversation as well, especially with the Trump administration where anyone who opposes the Trump administration or conservative policies is, you'll, we see it all the time anti American. You're anti capitalist, you're anti this. You immediately get branded as you hate your country because you're protesting against its action. I think the most patriotic thing you could do as an American is protest a wrong action. But if you're, if you're kind of wrestling with all of that language we just covered, that's really the same thing where if you protest against an administration and suddenly you are anti American, it's very much that same kind of conflation to bully people into submission or to at the very least silence.
- [69:16]
B
It's the most loving thing you can do. The most loving thing to protest evil and dehumanization. Justice is love in action. That's what love looks like in the public sphere is to pursue what is good and equitable for everyone. Any kind of minority, any kind of people, group. Right. Whether it's the Jewish, Jewish people or Palestinians. That's just like a basic loving my neighbor. To critique oppression and violence and illegal wars is to be a loving person, is to care for my Neighbors to make sure that my country that I love is a good country, country that is doing what is right. This is the most, like you said, patriotic and loving and good thing that anyone can do.
- [69:53]
A
Yep. And ultimately, especially for members of the Christian faith, like there is no way to live out love your neighbor as you love yourself without empathy in action. You simply cannot follow that mantra and stay silent in the face of oppression. And that's why, you know, as and even you know, the Nazi party was branded a Christian movement, right. Where they, where they did the same thing. They capitalized on religion, they capitalized on religious language to justify things that they did. But it was also real Christ followers who were integral pieces of the resistance to that, of the resistance to that oppression. The people that said, I will not tolerate this kind of hatred and abuse. And as we move forward, for people who are trying to advocate for Palestine, whether that's in their church or in their family or online, where do you. I have two questions, a two part question. Where do you suggest that people start? And what would be the top three books you would recommend they read? You recommended the Hundred Years book, but for people that really want to learn this history and want to be on the right side of it, where would you suggest they start? Specifically for people who are American Christians who have been raised with this language?
- [71:12]
B
Yeah, that's a fantastic question. And I think that's where we need to move the conversation. I mean, there's a lot that can be said about the history and the politics and what's happening on the ground, but fundamentally we need to move towards action. So one thing is we continue deconstruction. We need that work has to happen. I'm going to make a plug for my podcast in a bit, but I had just interviewed an ex rabbi, an ex ultra orthodox rabbi who, fascinating story, but basically he left Judaism 10 years ago, but it took him 10 more years to denounce and reject his own Zionism. It was like embedded in him. Fascinating conversation with him, but I think for a lot of progressive ex evangelicals and others and other progressive folk, they have rejected racism and white supremacy and Christian nationalism, but Zionism is still embedded in their psyche. Just like you were saying, Monty. So there's a lot of deconstruction we have to do about our hateful ideas we have constructed about the other, whether it's queer people or Palestinians, it's the same ideology. So we have to kind of do that work and make sure that we're not being what we call pep, progressive, except Palestine. So we have to do that work.
- [72:35]
A
That's a word. That's a word.
- [72:38]
B
So we have to understand that our rejection of Christian nationalism and white supremacy has to also include the Palestinians, because these are the two sides of the same coin of domination and religious supremacy against people, any other people. So that's the first thing. Secondly connected to it is tackling Christian Zionism. There's dispensationalism, which we mentioned, which I think a lot of people have already rejected for the most part. Dispensationalism is a dying ideology. I think our parents and grandparents kind of believed in it because of, you know, left behind and all of that garbage. But a lot of young Christians do not adopt kind of this apocalyptic vision of the end times. But they're also driven by a lot of theological maneuvering. For example, the blessing of Israel language. We need to bless Israel, like, so you don't have to be dispensational to adopt that. You just have to come from a charismatic Pentecostal idea of prosperity gospel. And you think that, oh, if I bless Israel, give them money, God would bless me. So there are a lot of manifestations of Christian Zionism beyond dispensationalism. There's also another kind of dispensationalism of Christian Zionism that is grounded in proper. Like, not I don't think it's proper, but in some kind of theological analysis about God's faithfulness to the. To. To the Jewish people, about the covenants, about Romans 9 to 11. So there's a legitimate theological conversation that has been used to justify and support Israel because of concerns of antisemitism or what is called supressionism, this kind of classical idea that the church has replaced Israel. So that has led some Christians to say, well, God does not reject his people, as Paul would say in Romans 9, Therefore we have to support Israel. It's a bit of a stretch. That's not what's happening in Romans 9. 11, Galatians 3 is very clear. The offspring of Abraham is actually Christ himself. And if we belong to Christ, then we belong to God's people. So there's a clear shifting in our thinking about who are God's people. Those who are in Christ becomes heirs according to the promise given to Abraham. So there's a legitimate theological conversation that eventually could lead to Christian Zionism. So there's a whole spectrum of Christian Zionism, and we have to tackle it on different fronts. So the Christian Zionism of dispensationalism and of DTS Dallas Theological Seminary is different than the theology of other kind of Christian, especially evangelical denominations. So we have to do that theological work. So how do we do this? Yes, read, educate yourself. I can provide free. Monty. I have this kind of a document of resources for people to.
- [75:21]
A
Oh, that'd be lovely. I'll put it in the show notes
- [75:23]
B
for people and put it in the show notes. It's a collection of resources that I put together, including documentaries and films and articles and so on. Second, two other things. Gonna plug my podcast here. It's called across the Divide. It's a Palestinian run, Palestinian Christian run podcast where we have conversations on faith and peacemaking in the context of Palestine and Israel. Right now we're running a series on Judaism and Palestine and it's a fascinating conversation with. I'm so excited with Jewish people. Previously I ran a season on Christian Zionism, like a 10 episode series which was really, really fantastic. I think primarily what I'm leading to here is that American Christians, progressives or evangelicals or anyone in between need to listen to Palestinian Christians. We have been ignored for a long time. We disrupt the narratives that people have been told about us and them. Like I'm an Arab Christian who reads the Quran but also believe, but also follow the NIC and you know, the confession of faith and believes in the Bible and the Trinity and the crucifixion. Right. So but we disrupt that narrative of us versus them. So we have been pushed to the sidelines because we are so disruptive and make people uncomfortable. We've been doing a lot of work theologically in our writings, in our conferences, in our podcasts and so on. So I think many Christians in the west have to adopt a position of coming alongside their siblings in Palestine to be in solidarity with them, to listen to them. We've been witnessing to Christ, like I said, for 2,000 years. We have some things to say. Maybe you should listen to us. Not to say that we're perfect, we're not. Not to say that everything we say is good and true. No. But adopt this posture of listening and learning, just like you've done to listening to black folks, to queer folks, to others. Maybe extend the same love and charity towards Palestinians. And here I would highlight the organization that I work with. I'm the director of Public Engagement of bipj, the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice. This is a Palestinian Christian organization that works to encourage Christians, especially evangelicals and ex evangelicals, to come alongside them in the pursuit of peacemaking and justice in Palestine and in Israel. We run a conference called Christ at the checkpoint, which happens in Bethlehem every two years. This year is going to happen in December, over Christmas time in Bethlehem. So if you have the time, consider coming to Bethlehem and come alongside your Palestinian siblings. We also do another conference in the U.S. it's called church at the Crossroads Conference, happens on an annual basis. We're kind of organizing it for this year right now. So this is one way that you can come alongside your siblings in prayer and fellowship and in learning and to think of ways where you can be involved in that work. Okay, to answer the question about. I'm throwing a lot here at you. That's okay to answer the question about books to read. So Rashid Khalidi, 100 year war in Palestine is a fantastic one. There's a book that came out since the genocide in Gaza by my friend and also my boss, Pastor Mundras Haq. It's called Christ in the Rubble. People might have seen the image of the babe Jesus wrapped in the Palestinian scarf in the rubble. And this is a significant book that, that presents the Palestinian Christian response to the genocide in Gaza. Christ in the Rubble, Gaza. The Bible and the church, the Bible and the genocide in Gaza, Something along those lines. So highly recommend that book. If you care more about listening to stories and experiences of Palestinians. There are a lot of books that have been kind of effective in doing so. I can mention, for example, the Lemon Tree and I can mention Blood Brothers by Father Elias Shakur. These are very helpful narrative books that could be helpful in helping people understand the perspective and the narrative of the Palestinians. There's a lot that has been written by Christians and otherwise on this issue. But yeah, start there and check out the resource link in the show notes and go from there.
- [79:38]
A
We will. And for those of you, because I have a large group of you who are not believers, you're not religious, you don't have a background in religion, but a lot of you are wanting to learn about Christian nationalism and like, why is this language flying around and how is it being used to control. And I, I encourage you to also engage with these conversations, engage with the terms. It will help you so much when you are having these real life conversations and understanding the history of how like specifically religion has been used in this way. But also, you know, Christianity has this beautiful kind of dual history where it's been weaponized in so many different instances. But also it is always a critical piece of resistance against these oppressive movements. And Daniel, before we wrap up today, can you tell everybody where they can find you, where they can find the organization, how they can support you.
- [80:28]
B
Yeah. So you can find across the Divide, my podcast everywhere, wherever. You can listen to podcasts on YouTube as well. The organization I mentioned is bipj.org bipj.org and you can look me up. I have my own website, danielbandora.com I need to work on updating that website. And also I have a small substack and some other stuff that I'm doing right now. But I think the podcast and BIPJ would be a good places to start.
- [80:55]
A
Okay. That's amazing. I really appreciate you coming and having this conversation with me. This is something that is really difficult even for people who are deconstructing to talk about because it's such a volatile topic and it typically comes with a lot of vitriol and a lot of baggage. And I really appreciate you taking the time to help me engage with it and grow with it. I'm still. I'm deconstructing saying Middle east and saying Southwest Asia, you know, and things like trying to deconstruct this language that I've grown up in. It still takes practice. So I'm so thankful for you taking the time. I'm thankful for what you taught me. And I'm very excited to hear more about BIPJ specifically. Thank you for being here on Flipping Tables, and thank you for being a testament to what faith in Christ actually looks like.
- [81:42]
B
Thank you, Monty. Just a quick kind of appeal to the audience. This is a moment in history that we need to take seriously. I think this moment in history is similar to the moment in history after with segregation and the civil rights movement, like the Holocaust. So if you've wondered what you would have done in the 50s and the 60s or what you would have done differently in the 30s against the Jews and antisemitism, ask yourself what you're doing now in light of a genocide in Gaza. This is one of those moments, and this is a theological crisis where our faith, our Bible, have been weaponized to justify manifest evil. And it is up to us, all of us, to come collectively for mutual flourishing and for liberation of all of us. So let's do this work together. Thank you, Monty.
- [82:30]
A
Amen to that. And I will see everybody next week on Flipping Tables.