Being a Christian in the face of violence

I was a young doctoral student in my twenties when I first met someone from Palestine. Until then, I knew nothing about modern-day dynamics in this part of the world, even though I was a biblical scholar. Almost everything I read focused on the Palestine of the ancient past.

All that changed when I was studying at Oxford and met Rev. Naim Ateek. At that time he was serving as the Dean of St. George’s, the Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem. Ateek had recently published his first book, Justice and Only Justice: A Palestine Theology of Liberation. My doctoral supervisor, N.T. Wright, had invited him to Oxford to speak about his book and tell his story.

So my very first introduction to the story of contemporary Palestine was from one of the founders of Palestinian liberation theology who can trace his family tree in Palestine back to the first century. Rev. Ateek told his story very simply. When he was a young boy, his father had gathered the family together and said, “There are people coming to live among us who have suffered terribly. We must do our best to make them welcome here.” At that time, Jews, Muslims and Christians had been living together in harmony in Palestine for many centuries. It was 1948, and British control of the land had just ended; in its place, the modern-day state of Israel was being established.

Armed eviction

The young Naim’s first experience of this new state was when the paramilitary soldiers arrived at his house. But these were not people looking for welcome: these were armed men who had arrived to evict them from their home. Along with 750,000 other Palestinians, the Ateek family was forced to leave their home to make way for this new Jewish state. Many who left were promised they would be able to return, so they took the keys to their houses with them. Most of their homes, however, were completely destroyed.

Other Palestinian homes were taken over by Jewish families. Displaced Palestinians have never been allowed to return; many are still in refugee camps in Palestine and neighbouring states, and the keys to their homes have become a powerful symbol of both their displacement and their longing to return to the homes from which they were forced.

The mass destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages in 1948, and the forced removal of Palestinian people, is called the nakba, an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe.” The nakba, however, is not just something that happened in the past. It has been ongoing for the last 78 years and continues today. For instance, Israel is still engaged in the destruction of Palestinian homes as a way to force Palestinians off the land. This happens in rural areas, where Israeli settlements are attempting to take over the villages of Palestinians farmers, and it happens in built-up urban areas.

One such urban area is the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan, home to the pool of Siloam, where Jesus healed the man born blind (John 9). Home to 40,000 Palestinians, almost every week a house is reduced to rubble. In a cruel twist, not only does Israel offer no compensation when a house is destroyed, it also charges demolition fees to Palestinians for the destruction of their own homes.

Christians aid the destruction

In Silwan, homes are being destroyed so that Israel can establish a park called the Garden of King David. The project is funded largely by Zionist Christians in the United States who seem unaware that they are rendering fellow Christians homeless. Or perhaps they simply do not care. In fact, it is because of such strong “Christian” support for the state of Israel that Palestinian Christians feel that they have been abandoned by the church.

So why is it that so many Christians support the ongoing violence against Palestinians by the state of Israel? Why is it that there are so many Christian Zionists – in fact, more Christian Zionists than Jewish Zionists? There are a number of interwoven reasons.

Many Christian Zionists believe the establishment of a Jewish state in modern-day Israel will hasten the second coming of Jesus. Deeply rooted in the dispensationalist theology made popular by John Nelson Darby and the Scofield Bible, this desire for a Jewish state does not arise out of a respect for Judaism. Rather, these Christians assume that most Jews will be converted to Christianity before Jesus returns. For this reason, many Jewish communities view Christian Zionism as deeply antisemitic.

Further in the past, many Western countries were concerned about what would happen to Jews who were experiencing persecution and violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the hands of the Russian state (the context of the popular movie Fiddler on the Roof). Since many Western nations did not wish to welcome Jews to their countries, allowing them to return to Palestine became politically expedient. Once again, sending Jews to Palestine was rooted in a fundamentally antisemitic agenda.

Most recently, after the Second World War, there was a feeling of collective guilt in Western nations about the genocide of the Jewish people by Germany, and the way that other nations had, to varying degrees, collaborated in that violence. Affirming the Zionist project, which sought to establish a predominantly Jewish nation in Palestine, was one way to assuage that guilt without any sacrifice on the part of those nations that had themselves engaged in the atrocities.

An empty land?

Supporting all of this is the belief, on the part of some Zionist Jews and Christians, that the land of Palestine was empty before the establishment of modern-day Israel. Many Zionist Christians believe that there was no one living in Palestine before the establishment of the modern state of Israel. Such a belief ignores the history and stories of Muslims, Christians and Jews who occupied Palestine’s villages and countryside for millennia.

One of those communities is Taybeh, the only entirely Christian community on the West Bank. Taybeh is mentioned in the gospel of John (11:54), where, after raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus went to Ephraim (Taybeh’s ancient name) for refuge because he feared violence from the Jewish leaders. The Christians in Taybeh are very proud of the role they played in providing refuge for Jesus and his disciples, and murals of the event can be found in churches around the town. Now, however, the town is no longer a refuge, for violence from Israeli settlers has increasingly threatened the community and their livelihood. I recently visited Taybeh with a delegation of Canadian Anglican and United Church leaders. The night before our delegation arrived, settlers entered the community and set fire to a car. Such incidents are common, along with the smashing of car windows, spray-painting hate-filled graffiti, and damaging people’s homes.

Intentional sabotage

But the violence is not limited to physical objects. In an attempt to sabotage the olive harvest, settlers have let their cattle loose in the olive orchards that belong to the town’s farmers, damaging and destroying many of the trees. They have also attacked and wounded the farmers themselves.

At the same time, additional checkpoints, roadblocks and barriers at the town and village entrances are making it more difficult for residents to move around or access essential services like medical care.

Most frightening of all, on May 3, 2026, approximately 30 Jewish Israeli settlers established an outpost near Palestinian homes at a crossroads near the village. They damaged the water pump and attacked those who attempted to document the incident. The settlers continue to vandalize the land, graze it, and cut the fencing, raising fears that the outpost may become a launching point for further assaults on Taybeh itself.

Establishing such outposts is often the first step in Israeli settler attempts to drive out the local Palestinian community and erase their presence on the land.

When we visited Taybeh last December, Father Bashar Fawadleh, who is the Priest at Christ the Redeemer Church in Taybeh, met with us to talk about the violence facing the community. But he also described all the ways that the churches in the village work together to provide stability, support and hope for those who refuse to be driven off their land by these intimidation tactics. There is a school run by the church in Taybeh which welcomes both Christian and Muslim students. The churches provide summer camps, football clubs, a music and a dance school, and Christian youth groups, all of which provide stability and community for the children of the town and which ground them in their Christian and Palestinian identity.

In addition, the parish runs a guesthouse, as do other churches in the village. The parish radio station and online platform, Nabd El Haya, explicitly exists to “promote dialogue, Christian identity, and a culture of coexistence.”

It is difficult to co-exist, however, or even simply exist, when ongoing violence is undermining your ability to make a living, escalating anxiety in your community and threatening your ability to live safely in your own home.

Resilience and hope

Taybeh’s story is mirrored across the West Bank. Increasing violence and escalating attempts to push Palestinian communities off the land are being met with creative solutions by the churches and the mosques to provide hope and resilience, whether that be training programmes for youth or affordable housing for women who come to work in the city (both projects of Anglican parishes in and near Ramallah). Even so, the situation for Palestinians in the West Bank can only be described as an emergency.

So what can we do in the face of such violence?

First of all, write to your elected officials, calling on them to take action to stop the flow of arms to Israel and to engage in meaningful political action to stop the violence against Palestinians by Israel.

Second, learn about what is happening in Palestine and how misreading the Bible has led to this crisis. Some recent books include Christ in the Rubble by Rev. Munther Isaac, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, the Bible by Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, and Ten Myths About Israel by Israeli scholar Dr. Ilan Pappé.

Third, check out the website of Canadian Friends of Sabeel, which is a Christian voice for Palestinian liberation in Canada. They have helpful resources and calls to action. (Rev. Naim Ateek was the founder of Sabeel in Jerusalem; this is the Canadian arm of that organization.)

Fourth, pray. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem and the peace of Israel and Palestine. Pray that the people of Israel and Palestine will find a blueprint for living together so that all can flourish. And pray that those who are enabling the ongoing violence will be motivated to turn their attention to funding and creating gardens rather than destruction.

You can find part 1 of this story, ‘We refuse to be enemies,’ here.