The Other Biblical Case

Christian Faith, Palestinian Rights, and the Theology of Justice

Part VI of a Seven-Part Series

Christians who defend Palestinian rights are sometimes portrayed as people who have abandoned the biblical promises to Israel in favor of contemporary political arguments. That characterization overlooks an important theological reality. Many Christians who advocate for Palestinian freedom, dignity, and self-determination do so precisely because of their understanding of Scripture. They are not necessarily rejecting the authority of the Bible. They often reach their conclusions through a different way of reading Scripture—one centered on creation, the image of God, the prophets, Jesus, liberation, justice, and reconciliation rather than territorial promise.

Part V examined Christians whose understanding of Israel has been shaped by biblical ideas of covenant, promise, restoration, and land, including political leaders whose religious convictions have entered the arena of foreign policy. Yet that is not the only Christian reading of Israel and Palestine. Palestinian Christians and other Christian leaders have appealed to the same Bible and reached substantially different conclusions about what faith requires.

Their arguments generally do not begin by constructing a rival biblical title deed for Palestinians. They begin elsewhere: with creation and the image of God, with the Hebrew prophets’ demands for justice, with Jesus’s identification with those who suffer, with Christian teachings about reconciliation, and with the conviction that Scripture cannot legitimately be used to deny another people freedom or dignity.

This is a different kind of biblical politics. Where some Christian supporters of Israel move from covenant to promise, from promise to land, and from land to modern Jewish sovereignty, Palestinian Christian theology more often moves from creation to human dignity, from the prophets to justice, and from Jesus to solidarity with people living under oppression.

The difference is not between Christians who take the Bible seriously and Christians who do not. It is a disagreement over how the Bible should be read politically.

A Palestinian Theology From Within the Land

One of the most influential figures in the development of Palestinian liberation theology is the Anglican priest Naim Ateek, founder of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. Ateek’s work emerged from the experience of Palestinian Christians attempting to reconcile their faith with dispossession, occupation, and Western Christian theologies that presented modern Israel primarily through biblical prophecy.

Sabeel describes itself as an ecumenical Christian organization committed to justice, peace, and nonviolent change. Ateek’s theological project asks what Christian faith means when Scripture itself is invoked to justify political arrangements that Palestinians experience as dispossession or domination. His answer is not that the Hebrew Bible should be discarded. It is that the Bible must be interpreted through the character of God revealed in justice, mercy, and ultimately in Jesus Christ.

That approach received a broader collective expression in the Kairos Palestine document, issued in 2009 by Palestinian Christian clergy and lay leaders from several traditions. The document begins with a theological claim before it makes a political one: every human being is created in the image and likeness of God and therefore possesses a dignity derived from God. From that premise, its authors argue that biblical promises concerning land cannot be turned into a political program that deprives another people of fundamental rights.

Kairos Palestine is explicit on this point. It argues that using the Bible to legitimize political arrangements based on injustice transforms religion into ideology. Its authors characterize the occupation as contrary to God’s purposes because, in their view, it deprives Palestinians of rights bestowed by God. At the same time, the document condemns antisemitism and Islamophobia and calls for a future in which Israelis and Palestinians can live in justice and security.

Whether one accepts all of the document’s political conclusions or not, its theological structure is important. It does not begin by denying Jewish history. It begins by denying that biblical election or promise can authorize injustice toward another people.

Mitri Raheb: Reading the Bible From Bethlehem

The Lutheran theologian Mitri Raheb has developed one of the most sustained versions of this argument. Raheb writes as a Palestinian Christian from Bethlehem and has devoted much of his work to the relationship among empire, land, biblical interpretation, and Palestinian experience.

His recent book Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, the Bible challenges Christian interpretations that, in his view, move too easily from biblical Israel to the modern State of Israel. Raheb argues that concepts such as Israel, election, chosen people, and promised land must be reexamined rather than transferred directly from ancient texts into modern political claims.

Raheb’s earlier biblical reflections show how differently the political meaning of Scripture can emerge when the reader’s location changes. Reading Luke’s Gospel as a Christian living under occupation, he emphasizes Jesus’s proclamation of good news to the poor and freedom for captives. For Raheb, Jesus cannot be understood apart from the imperial world in which he lived, and the biblical language of liberation therefore speaks directly to contemporary experiences of political domination.

This interpretation does not depend upon claiming that ancient Rome and contemporary Israel are identical. Its significance lies in the hermeneutical move. A Christian Zionist reader may approach the modern conflict asking what biblical promises to Israel mean for Jewish sovereignty. Raheb approaches it asking what the biblical critique of empire means for people living without sovereignty.

The same Bible produces different political questions.

Munther Isaac: Finding Christ Among the Victims

That difference has become especially visible through Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Lutheran pastor and theologian in Bethlehem. Isaac has long written about land, justice, and Christian peacemaking, but the Gaza war brought his theology to a much wider international audience.

In Christ in the Rubble, published in 2025, Isaac argues that Western churches should subject Zionism, colonialism, racism, and military power to Christian theological critique. His language about Gaza is forceful and some of his characterizations, including his use of the term genocide, remain politically and legally contested. The theological argument beneath them, however, is clear: Christians should look for Christ among those suffering rather than assume that political power carries divine approval.

That argument draws upon a much older Christian theology of the cross. God is revealed not only through triumph but through suffering, and Christ identifies with people whose bodies are broken by political violence. Isaac therefore asks Christians to interpret Palestinian suffering not as an inconvenient complication within someone else’s prophetic story but as a theological claim upon Christian conscience.

His approach also illustrates why it would be a mistake to reduce Palestinian Christian theology to Palestinian nationalism with Bible verses attached. Isaac explicitly describes the conflict as fundamentally political rather than essentially religious, while insisting that theology matters because theology can either challenge injustice or provide religious justification for it.

Desmond Tutu and the God of Liberation

Palestinian Christians are not the only Christians to construct a biblical case around justice rather than territorial promise. Desmond Tutu carried into Israel and Palestine a theology formed through the struggle against South African apartheid.

Tutu’s argument was explicitly theological. He affirmed Israel’s right to secure borders while insisting that Palestinian dignity and freedom could not be sacrificed to Israeli security. He spoke of a God who judges political power by its treatment of the poor, the voiceless, and the oppressed, and argued that genuine peace requires justice for both peoples.

The biblical pattern behind Tutu’s approach was liberation rather than restoration. During apartheid, South African Christians had drawn upon Exodus and the prophetic tradition to interpret God as hearing the cry of people under oppression. Tutu applied the same theological intuition to Palestinians while continuing to affirm Jewish security and political existence.

This is an important distinction. Biblical concern for Palestinian rights does not necessarily require denying Israeli rights. Tutu’s argument was that the moral standard applied to one people must also be applied to the other.

Jimmy Carter: Justice and Righteousness

The most important American political example may be Jimmy Carter, because he demonstrates that a biblically informed Christian approach to Palestinian rights has also reached the presidency.

Carter was an evangelical Baptist who taught Sunday school for decades, and he explicitly connected his Middle East outlook to Scripture. Reflecting on his work for peace, he described the ideals he taught from the Hebrew Scriptures in terms of “justice” and “righteousness” and said his efforts were directed toward peace for Israel alongside justice for Palestinians.

That theology did not make Carter anti-Israel. His basic premises included recognition of Israel’s right to exist and live in peace, rejection of attacks on civilians, and the conviction that Palestinians were entitled to live in peace and dignity. His political conclusion was therefore not the replacement of one national claim with another but an attempt to hold Israeli security and Palestinian political rights together.

Carter is particularly useful when placed beside the officials discussed in Part V. His religious convictions did not disappear when he entered foreign policy, but the biblical themes he emphasized were different. Covenant and restoration were not the principal categories through which he framed Palestinian rights. Justice and righteousness were.

The contrast demonstrates that Christian biblical conviction does not point automatically in a single political direction.

The Catholic Tradition: Dignity, Peace, and Two Peoples

The Catholic tradition offers another model. Its approach is generally less dependent upon interpreting particular biblical land promises and more heavily grounded in natural law, human dignity, the common good, peace, and the rights of peoples.

Pope Francis repeatedly defended Israel’s security while supporting Palestinian political rights and a two-state settlement. In January 2024 he called for the release of Israeli hostages, humanitarian protection for Palestinians, and renewed international commitment to two states—one Israeli and one Palestinian—living in peace and security.

Pope Leo XIV has continued that framework. Addressing the diplomatic corps in January 2026, he said diplomatic initiatives should guarantee Palestinians in Gaza a future of lasting peace and justice “in their own land” while protecting both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. He again described two states as the institutional framework capable of addressing the legitimate aspirations of both peoples.

The theological grounding here differs from both dispensational Christian Zionism and Palestinian liberation theology. Leo’s broader teaching on peace describes Christian peacemaking as rooted in the risen Christ and emphasizes an “unarmed and disarming” peace. Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin has similarly connected Christian teaching on peace with justice, diplomacy, mediation, and international law.

This demonstrates how wide the Christian theological spectrum actually is. Christians can arrive at support for Palestinian rights through liberation theology, biblical prophecy, Catholic social teaching, traditional Christian ethics, or some combination of them.

The Difference in Political Power

Part V showed that biblically informed support for Israel has at several important moments been carried by people holding substantial governmental authority: British prime ministers and foreign secretaries, American presidents and vice presidents, a secretary of state, and the present U.S. ambassador to Israel.

The Christian case for Palestinian rights has also reached political power, most notably through Carter and through the diplomatic influence of the Holy See. Yet much of its intellectual development has occurred elsewhere—in Palestinian churches, seminaries, ecumenical organizations, liberation movements, and global church bodies.

That difference should be investigated rather than exaggerated. It would be too simple to conclude that one theology possesses power and the other does not. Catholic diplomacy operates internationally, mainline churches influence public debate, and Christian arguments for Palestinian rights have affected political discourse in Europe, South Africa, and the United States.

Still, the contrast is difficult to miss in contemporary American politics. The biblical argument for Jewish sovereignty has developed a large organized evangelical constituency with direct relationships to Republican administrations and Israeli governments. Palestinian Christian theology has produced important theologians and international church statements but has not developed an equivalent American electoral constituency capable of exercising comparable influence over Republican Middle East policy.

The reasons are partly theological and partly political. White evangelical Protestantism has become deeply integrated into conservative American politics, while Palestinian liberation theology is rooted in a small indigenous Christian community with limited demographic power. Catholic and mainline Protestant traditions also tend to frame Palestinian rights through universal principles of justice and human dignity rather than through an exclusive national claim, which gives their politics a different institutional form.

The Same Bible, Different Questions

The contrast between Parts V and VI therefore should not be reduced to “pro-Israel Christians” and “pro-Palestinian Christians.” The deeper difference is hermeneutical.

One tradition asks how God’s promises to Israel should be understood after the creation of a modern Jewish state. Another asks how the biblical commands of justice should be applied when Palestinians experience occupation, displacement, statelessness, or war. One emphasizes covenantal continuity and restoration. The other emphasizes human dignity, prophetic justice, liberation, and Christ’s identification with those who suffer.

Neither tradition is internally uniform. Christian Zionists differ over borders, settlements, prophecy, and Palestinian rights. Palestinian Christian theologians differ over political strategy, resistance, Zionism, and the precise meaning of biblical land theology. Catholic teaching is not identical to liberation theology, and Carter’s Baptist vocabulary of justice is not identical to either Ateek’s or Raheb’s theology.

What they share is more important for the argument of this series: Christians on both sides bring the Bible into politics.

That realization changes the final question. The Christian challenge is not simply to decide whether the Bible supports Israel or Palestine. It is to ask what happens when competing biblical interpretations produce political claims about two peoples who both already exist, both possess histories and attachments to the land, and both claim rights that the other cannot simply erase.

Parts V and VI have shown two Christian ways of entering that argument. Part VII must ask whether there is a moral standard capable of judging both.

Notes

1. Naim Ateek, A Palestinian Theology of Liberation; Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, Jerusalem.
2. Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth — A Word of Faith, Hope and Love from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering, December 2009.
3. Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, the Bible (2023); and Raheb’s writings on Palestine, empire, biblical interpretation, and land.
4. Mitri Raheb, Bible study on Luke and occupation, presented to the General Council in Leipzig, 2017.
5. Munther Isaac, Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza (Eerdmans, 2025). The book’s description of the Gaza war as genocide reflects Isaac’s position; the legal and political characterization remains contested.
6. Munther Isaac, “Challenging the Empire: Theology of Justice in Palestine,” in the Kairos Palestine theological materials.
7. Desmond Tutu, “Apartheid in the Holy Land,” 2002; Episcopal News Service coverage of Tutu’s statements in Israel, 1990.
8. Jimmy Carter, “Peace With Justice in the Middle East,” Oxford University, June 21, 2007.
9. Jimmy Carter, “The Major Obstacles to Peace in the Holy Land,” Council on Foreign Relations, March 1, 2006.
10. Pope Francis, address to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, January 8, 2024.
11. Pope Leo XIV, address to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, January 9, 2026.
12. Pope Leo XIV, Message for the World Day of Peace 2026; Cardinal Pietro Parolin, reflections on diplomacy, peace, and justice, January 2026.