Mitri Raheb. Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, The Bible. Orbis Books. 2023. 184 pages.

In May 2021, war broke out in Palestine over the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. (I later learned the precipitating event was Israeli order for several families to evacuate their homes to make way for Jewish settlers.) At the time, I committed to learning as much as I could about the ongoing “conflict.” Since then, I’ve read several books, two reviewed in this blog, two others awaiting review,

and then this one by Rehab.

The first three were history from the perspective of a Palestinian scholar and an Israeli journalist. One covered 100 years since the Zionist manifesto of the late 1800s; one covered the events before and after the 1967 Six Day War; a third covered the period of the British Mandate, between world wars. The fourth was a political analysis asking why the US and UN policies treat Palestine different from the way they treat the other nations of the world.

Among all those, the challenge for me has been to realize that Israel is a bully and we are bullies by proxy. There is no equivalence, there can be no equivocation. The Palestinian people have been forced from their homes and killed for more than 100 years; the movement in support of Palestinians has been growing incrementally over the decades, and then suddenly over these past months, since Hamas launched an attack in Gaza on October 7 last year.

The response to the Hamas attack, an act of resistance against illegal Israeli occupation of Gaza, has split the international community; in this country, supporters of Palestinian liberation have been vilified, as Israel supporters point to the atrocity of Hamas’ attack on a concert venue, deflecting attention from the very many atrocities by Israel against Palestinians over a century. Any call for Israel to stop its illegal occupation and genocide has been met with vitriol from Republicans and Democrats alike. Israel, we discover, is the actual third rail of US American politics.

Why?

This is a larger political question intertwined with religious issues, which means the US position is maintained by Christians as well as Jews, and which means that, as a preacher, I have needed a theological overhaul.

I have listened to myself preach in the years since Sheikh Jarrah, and reflected on my preaching in the months since the Gaza war began, and have realized that I have O So Much to learn. As I’ve read and learned, my political understandings have grown and changed, and I’ve become an outspoken advocate for the Palestinian people; I’ve begun thinking about the land, Palestine, in a new way, “the Promised Land,” we call it; I even rewrote the words to the favorite Advent carol “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” with its plea to “ransom captive Israel,” which no longer felt honest or helpful.

But there had to be more. The bible, we know, has been delivered to our generation with the understanding of Israel’s favored status explicit and undisputed. It is what I’ve learned since I was a child, a faith thing to which I never gave much serious reflection. Lately, I knew something was off, but I hadn’t yet found a hermeneutic — an interpretive lens — for a faithful alternative reading. I mean, how do you engage the Hebrew scriptures (the “old testament”) without centering Israel?

In anticipation of a gathering next month of the Alliance of Baptists, with the program theme “decolonizing the great commission” and featuring Mitri Rehab, a Palestinian Lutheran Christian (who was familiar to me since my days as a Lutheran long ago), I bought this book, Decolonizing Palestine, hoping for insights.

I found very much more. In four short and very readable chapters, Raheb offers:

a critical examination of our US self-understanding as exceptional, the New Israel, god’s gift to the world, and our US history of Settler Colonialism — that time we took over a continent and killed everyone who lived here before ("One can argue convincingly that were it not for the destruction of Native nations in North America, there would have been no destruction of Palestine”);
an explication of Christian Zionism as based on a particular evangelical theology and broad reading of scripture that has centered Israel in our own time;
a redefinition of what the term “Israel” means — four things, actually: the northern part of Palestine during a very short period of history 3000 years ago; an abstract theological concept to describe “God’s people;” “Ancient Israel,” a modern construct that pastes ancient myth onto modern reality; and the modern political entity called “The State of Israel,” which has existed only since 1948 (this is the one we center, to the detriment of biblical integrity and Palestinian well-being);
a deep dive into what it means to call people “chosen;”
a short history of the land of Palestine, its place in the crosshairs of multiple world powers, and its varied inhabitants and occupiers over multiple millennia;
a new understanding of King David’s kingdom and his relatively small arena of power or influence.

In some ways, my inclinations have been affirmed; in other ways, my mind has been blown.

Things I knew:

Israel today is not anything that was “Israel” then, but is more akin to Egypt, Assyria and the empires that occupied and exploited the people of the land.
Christian Zionism is the US weapon in our own ongoing intent to own the world, not unlike the Doctrine of Discovery of the late 1400s CE sent Christians off to murder people and colonize the world (and was cited in US Supreme Court rulings as recently as 2005).
Empire is as empire has always been. Just as the US began as a colonial project and became a world power, so has Israel.
Religious tenets cannot trump human rights. Ever.

Things I suspected, or needed to know, but didn’t:

There is a way to read the Hebrew scriptures without deifying Israel.
The land promise in ancient scripture cannot be considered a land promise in this modern world.
Israel today is not a continuation of Israel then; the terms don’t even mean the same thing. “Palestinians today stand in historic continuity with biblical Canaanites, Philistines, Israelites and Judahites, and are the native people of the land…. Palestinian Jews belong to the people of the land, and followers of the Jewish faith have been part and parcel of the region throughout the last two millennia. But settler colonial Zionists are not part of the people of the land. They are invaders and subcontractors to the empires.”
US support for the expansion of a State of Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people is born of Holocaust guilt by white US Americans and Europeans and driven by the continued — perhaps intentional — misreading of scripture. Our imaginations have been colonized, suggests Raheb.

Raheb gently corrects the notion that the situation in Palestine is a “conflict” or that it is “complicated,” as we are so often told. It is rather very basic — settler colonialism with the end-game of genocide. Khalidi had noted that “In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously proclaimed that ‘there were no such thing as Palestinians… they did not exist’ and they had never existed…. She thereby took the negation characteristic of a settler-colonial project to the highest possible level: the indigenous people were nothing but a lie.” Genocide is all the easier to enact if the target people were never there in the first place, or if you can convince the world community of that.

Raheb’s foundational premise is that modern Zionism cannot be defended by or built on anything in the Hebrew scriptures, and we all — Jews, Christians, all of us — need another way of being religious without taking it out on other people. We, progressive Christians especially, have been duped into supporting a Zionist state in our worship, our preaching, our songs and prayers. It would be faithful to reconsider and let the Palestinians be. Anything less, in fact, calls for repentance and renewal.

Luckily, those things, repentance and renewal, are things we know something about.

How then to read the scriptures? Raheb expounds on three Palestinian Christian scholars who offer ideas. One, Naim Ateek, identifies three strata in the old testament that he says correspond to stages of human development, a paradigm that seems to hold promise for me. The three are the nationalist, the Torah-oriented, the prophetic. I have long found my homiletic home in the “old testament“ — the prophets, the stories of the wilderness and exile, the hope and expectation. But it was into this prophetic understanding that I made a solid landing, for its justice focus, when they poisoned the water in Flint. This prophetic stage, Ateek says, suggests a “deep, profound and mature understanding of God. That’s what I want. I’m grateful to Raheb for inviting me further down this path.

I never thought this book was dull or too academic (but maybe I’m not the best judge of that). It was a quick read, even with a lot of underlining and moments for reflection. I noted at one point that there were bit of jargon from the world of professional theologians, but nothing that should be a deal-breaker. I think every serious progressive Christian would want to read this book, and I believe every Christian pastor, seminarian or theologian absolutely should read this book. In it, I believe, are keys to a new way of living our faith in a world of genocide and colonialism.

Faith needs to be reevaluated in every generation. The only option — for me — is to quit the faith altogether.