Beyond Western Frameworks: A Middle Eastern View of Israel

For a long time, many Middle Eastern Christians—like their counterparts in the West—reached for modern Western ideas to make sense of their world. They included ideas such as colonialism, the all-too-familiar Marxist class struggle, and liberation theology, which arrived as prepackaged explanations. They seemed neat, impressive—imported from universities far removed from the chaos on the ground. For Christians trying to survive as tiny communities in states that could shift overnight, those theories felt like lifelines. This Western framework made the turmoil seem organized, almost predictable. Borrowing it even offered a kind of dignity, albeit an inaccurate one, because it provided a tantalizing framework to look at the situation they were encountering. It let people feel their suffering wasn’t random—that someone had already traced the logic behind it. But the more these ideas took hold, the more they quietly pushed aside older Christian instincts about how God moves in history. Without meaning to, many believers started interpreting Israel and the wider conflict through theories that came from Western universities and political movements rather than Scripture. Their reasons were understandable, but the results were limiting. These modern categories simply weren’t designed to address the deeper religious and civilizational forces at play in the Middle East.

But the very frameworks Christians reached for in their vulnerability ended up narrowing their vision; these Western theories were never built to explain the older religious and civilizational forces driving the region.

In this essay, I argue that modern Western explanations of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict fail because they overlook the region’s deeper religious and civilizational foundations—especially the legacy of Islamic dhimmitude—and that Middle Eastern Christians, long shaped by Western and nationalist narratives, are now offering a more theologically grounded and accurate perspective on Israel’s place in the region.

Western observers, of course, have long done the same thing—filtering Israel’s story through colonial guilt, anti-imperial sentiment, or postcolonial rhetoric. But these frameworks never explain why the conflict carries such enormous emotional and spiritual weight in the region, or why it resists the predictable logic of political disputes elsewhere. They describe pieces of the picture but not the whole picture. And often, they miss the oldest forces shaping the region, which was Islam. They seem to ignore the centuries of this religious hierarchy that defined relationships between Muslims, Jews, and Christians long before anyone spoke of “colonialism” or “resistance.” Without understanding this older world, modern analysis keeps mistaking symptoms for causes.

One of the most important of these older structures is the legacy of dhimmitude—the traditional status assigned to Jews and Christians under classical Islamic rule. The way this system was applied varied enormously across time and place; some eras were relatively tolerant while others were harsh. But its core idea stayed the same, which was that Jews and Christians could live, worship, and work—just not rule. For many Muslim jurists, this wasn’t only a social setup but part of God’s design. Jewish political weakness was taken as proof that Islam was true. So when Israel emerged as a sovereign state in 1948, it didn’t just redraw boundaries—it overturned centuries of ingrained expectations. It was a shock not only to politics, but to the religious imagination of entire societies.

Of course, classical Islam alone doesn’t explain the intensity we see today. Many Muslim societies historically practiced a pragmatic form of tolerance toward minorities, even within a hierarchy. But the modern Islamist response to Jewish sovereignty is different. From an Islamic perspective, once Islam conquers a land it is theirs forever. This wields a more absolute, more cosmic force, and is often infused with end-of-days rhetoric. This shift came from mixing Islamic tradition with modern forces—revolutionary politics, anti-imperial anger, and the sweeping ideologies of the 20th century. Thinkers like Sayyid Qutb and Maududi rewrote old ideas in the language of global struggle. The ancient structure stayed in place, but modernity amped it up. That is why today’s hostility feels both ancient and startlingly new.

This legacy also shaped how many Arab Christians experienced 1948. They endured displacement and social loss alongside their Muslim neighbors and naturally described the events as the Nakba, the “catastrophe.” Their grief was—and remains—real. Arab nationalism was the dominant cultural framework of their world, and many Christians embraced it as a shared identity. Yet theologically, the Nakba lens told only half the story. It explained suffering, but it didn’t explain Israel’s enduring existence.

Christian theology, after all, is built on the conviction that God works through history—not only in comfort, but also in disruption. Scripture never portrays nations as fixed in their hierarchy; God raises up and humbles peoples in ways humans rarely predict. And historically, the endurance of the Jewish people is never presented as meaningless. It is a central thread woven through the biblical story. To treat Jewish continuity—and especially Israel’s political restoration—as irrelevant or mistaken requires ignoring this larger pattern.

This leads to a point that many Christians have been slow to acknowledge, which is that the modern Jewish state, whatever its complexities, sits within a biblical framework that does not end with exile. There needs to be a reexamination of the biblical understanding of Israel, not just in the West, but the Middle East as well. This does not mean that Middle Eastern Christians need to hold a detailed prophecy chart to recognize that Israel’s existence resonates with the scriptural narrative in ways that modern geopolitics alone cannot explain. Many Christians across centuries—Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant—have affirmed that Israel’s future remains held within God’s purposes, even if they disagreed about the details. The modern state is secular, imperfect, and deeply human—but that does not mean it is theologically irrelevant. History often advances through such imperfect vessels.

Seen up close, the shift looks even more jarring. The speed of it alone would’ve rattled the old men who used to sit outside churches in the evenings, counting who left the village this time. One generation grows up with biblical maps pinned to their Sunday school walls, then the next starts quoting nationalist slogans as if they were proverbs. Arafat didn’t just conjure up Palestinian identity out of thin air, but he also staged and sharpened it. He gave the world a story that Jews were the invading force, Palestinians the rooted ones. It played well. Too well. Pain loves a narrative that explains it.

Many Middle Eastern Christians believed it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t after careful analysis, but because it felt familiar. It helped to explain their sense of loss and their feeling that their communities had been bleeding for decades.

But in the trade, something slipped. Scripture ended up leaning against the back wall like an uncle nobody introduced. Political myth walked right up to the podium. Nationalism can rally a crowd, sure. But it’s blind in places where the Bible demands you keep your eyes open. It likes its protagonists spotless and its enemies obvious. The region has never operated that way.

And a faithful reading—an actual Christian reading—doesn’t ignore suffering, but it refuses to let suffering hold the camera. The evidence of grief is everywhere: half-empty sanctuaries, families moving to Toronto or Melbourne because they can’t see a future for their kids, priests trying to stretch dwindling congregations across three villages. The wound is real. No one doubts that.

But grief isn’t supposed to rewrite theology. You can mourn Palestinian funerals without erasing Israel from God’s story. You can acknowledge the weight of occupation, the checkpoints, the displacement—all of it. But your understanding has to be anchored in something deeper. Middle Eastern Christians can’t act as if God’s promises to Israel were some minor footnote. Yes, the human stories matter, and the pain is real; I’ve heard it from almost every Middle Eastern Christian I know. But those feelings aren’t the compass. They never have been.

Arab nationalism spun one kind of story. Western postcolonial theory spun another. Each gave people a tidy framework and the comforting sense of being on the morally superior side. But neither ever told Christians how to make sense of the promises God gave Israel, or how to interpret a people who somehow outlasted every empire determined to erase them.

When Christians set aside that bigger frame—God’s sovereignty, God’s timing, God’s way of disrupting our political certainties—they start looking at history like activists instead of believers. And once that happens, everything goes flat: Israel becomes just another state, Palestinians just another grievance.

Some of the Christians who are stepping back now—really stopping, really questioning the slogans they inherited—are rediscovering something older. A clarity their great-grandparents lived by without needing to defend it on the internet. They’re finding the old compass again, the one that didn’t swing with the politics of the moment.

Western academics tried to hand the Middle East a ready-made script: oppressor, oppressed, insert theory, cue outrage. It played well in seminar rooms, and for a while some Arab Christian thinkers borrowed the language because it promised moral clarity. But everyone forgot the obvious—these terms were minted in Western universities, not carved out of the region’s own memory. Liberation theology stirred the emotions, yes, but you could feel the thinness underneath, like a drum stretched too tight.

October 7 didn’t “challenge paradigms.” It blew straight through them. All the Western theories—Marxist, postcolonial, revisionist, whatever the trend du jour was—snapped in half the moment the footage hit phones in Beirut and Haifa. Nobody there needed a symposium to sort it out. They’d already stood beside too many coffins, swept too much broken glass out of sanctuaries. You don’t consult Foucault when you recognize the same ideology that’s stalked your neighborhood for decades. You just know.

Inside Israel, the split was obvious. Pastors like Eitan Bar responded immediately with moral clarity, but others—Jack Sara, Munther Isaac, and the circles around Bethlehem Bible College—leaned fully into the Western and Islamic frameworks they had already absorbed. Their statements echoed the language of postcolonial theory on one side and long-standing Islamic narratives on the other. The contrast said more than any press release could: even inside Israel, Christians were divided between those who interpreted events through borrowed ideological lenses and those who recognized the ideology they’d seen before on their own streets.

This tension—survival pressed against theology like two stones grinding—is their daily geography. Not metaphor. Daily. A priest might be your pastor at dawn and your go-between with the authorities by noon. “History” isn’t a course; it’s whatever happened last week when your cousin filed papers to leave the country.

And here’s the part Western analysts never manage to hold in their hands: Israel isn’t the destabilizer. It’s the revelation. A kind of regional x-ray. It shows every fault line that was already there. Go talk to a Bethlehem shopkeeper about who owned what land three generations back. You’ll get a story so detailed it could be a genealogy. Sit with a Haifa priest and ask him about the hills; he’ll talk as if they’re relatives who’ve betrayed him and blessed him in the same breath. That’s why every diplomatic blueprint collapses on first contact—because it tries to flatten a civilization into bullet points.

Western commentary misses all this because its experts quote each other instead of the people who’ve survived this terrain for two thousand years. The Christians there know how belief knits itself into borders. They know why a line on a map is never just a line. So when they say Israel sits inside a spiritual battlefield—not diplomatic, spiritual—they’re not being poetic.

They’re reporting the weather.