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We are privileged to republish this powerful cover story from the French Christian magazine La Vie, spotlighting our esteemed alumnus Munther Isaac and his vital work as a voice for Palestinian Christians amidst the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Isaac’s alma mater, we are compelled to share this in-depth look at his vision of non-violent resistance and advocacy for freedom and human rights in Palestine. By featuring Isaac’s impactful ministry, La Vie introduces an important perspective to French-speaking audiences. With permission, we republish this article to further amplify the voices of our courageous alumni striving for peace and human dignity on the frontlines. It was first published for subscribers in La Vie on 2 May 2024 and a digital version of this issue is available for purchase (in french).

“In Gaza today, God is under the rubble.” On 23 December 2023, in the Lutheran church in Bethlehem (West Bank), Pastor Munther Isaac weighed his words carefully. At the foot of the altar lies the divine child, wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, in the middle of a pile of rubble. “Jesus is under the rubble. This is his manger. He is at home with the marginalized, the suffering, the oppressed, and displaced,” he preaches in English from the city where Christ was born. “While the world discusses the fate of the people of Gaza as if they are unwanted boxes in a garage, God in the Christmas narrative shares in their fate; He walks with them and calls them his own.”

This manger has spread like wildfire in Palestine. A symbol of pain and hope, it has spread from mobile phone to mobile phone across the Arab world, garnering millions of views. “The idea came from a sermon I gave after the bombing of St Porphyry’s Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza on 19 October 2023,” says the pastor. Among the 18 civilians killed were the sister and cousin of a woman from his congregation. “I set up this manger and posted a photo on Facebook… The rest is history.”

“Being a preacher and serving God”

Followed by more than 44,000 subscribers on the X social network, Munther Isaac has gained worldwide notoriety for his preaching against the war in Gaza. But this has changed one iota the affable, humble and serene personality of this pastor in an ecclesiastical collar and shirt sleeves. “I’ve just said no to Piers Morgan (a British star presenter),” he says as he welcomes us to the Lutheran church in Beit Sahur, the second church tower under his care. This Christian town backing onto Bethlehem means “home of the night watchmen”, that of the shepherds in the Christmas story. Munther Isaac was born here in 1979. He lives in a house tastefully furnished by his wife Rudaina, an architect, with their sons Karam and Zayd. “My family and my two congregations help me keep my feet on the ground,” he smiles, inviting us into his home to enjoy a Mulukhiyah – a delicious Egyptian stew – after the Sunday service. “My vocation is first and foremost to be a preacher, to serve God.”

He was 10 years old when the inhabitants of Beit Sahur refused to pay tax to the Israeli military authorities. But the descendants of biblical shepherds stood firm, providing home schooling and opening farms. As a student engineer at Bir Zeit Palestinian University during the second intifada (2000-2005), Munther Isaac witnessed the construction of the Israeli “security fence” cutting Bethlehem off from Jerusalem. Eight meters high, it can only be crossed with a permit issued piecemeal by Israel. “A whole generation of Bethlehem residents have never seen Jerusalem,” he laments. On the other side of the wall, the Har Homa settlement looks like an impregnable citadel. “The occupation has made us a people under pressure, and addicted to coffee! The checkpoints, the settlements, the emigration of a family member… We are under constant pressure. Community prayer is the only moment of consolation for the people here.”

Munther Isaac was ordained in 2016 for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land. This Protestant denomination, whose liturgy is close to Catholicism, is a minority among the 1.5% or so of Christian Palestinians (in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem), half of whom belong to the Greek Orthodox Church. But the Lutherans have a social impact that is inversely proportional to their numbers: the Beit Sahur church runs a school for 450 children and a scout group for over 200 young people.

Born into an Orthodox family, Munther Isaac first joined the Bethlehem Evangelical Presbyterian Church at the age of 10. “They had the best youth camp ever,” he recalls. A brilliant intellectual, he went on to study at Westminster Presbyterian Seminary in Philadelphia, USA, and then at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies (OCMS) in the UK, where he completed a doctoral thesis on the Promised Land. “As a winsome and convincing scholar, Munther was a scholar who changed hearts and minds,” says his former tutor Tom Harvey, academic dean of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies.

The Palestinian spirit of resistance

Back in Bethlehem, disappointed by Evangelical circles, Munther Isaac and his wife attended the town’s Lutheran church. Its pastor, Mitri Raheb, encouraged him to enter the ministry: “Rudaina had made me promise never to become a pastor! But Mitri told me: ‘You have a PhD, you can’t just join’. In the process, the Lutheran Church opened new doors for me, particularly ecumenism.”

It was under the guidance of Mitri Raheb, who inspired a Palestinian Protestant movement of spiritual and non-violent resistance to the occupation, that Munther Isaac learned to think and preach. The other leader of this movement is the Anglican pastor Naïm Stifan Ateek, founder of the Sabeel (“path” in Arabic) Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, in Jerusalem. “Sabeel was created in 1987, the same year as Hamas, proposing a radically different option: resistance not through weapons, but through the arts, boycotts, witness, education… and theology,” points out Yousef al-Khouri, a Gazan of Orthodox origin and professor at the Bethlehem Bible College.

This Evangelical academy, located not far from the wall, has been organizing the Christ at the Checkpoint conference since 2010. This event provides tools for fighting the occupation peacefully, in line with the 2009 Kairos Palestine document, signed by several Christian dignitaries from the Holy Land. “We say that our Christian option in the face of the Israeli occupation is resistance; this is the right and duty of Christians,” insists the text, which has gone unnoticed in Europe. “But this resistance must follow the logic of love. It must therefore be creative, in other words, it must find human means that speak to the humanity of the enemy itself.” 

Director of Christ at the Checkpoint and academic dean of the Bethlehem Bible College, Munther Isaac is at the crossroads of this specifically Palestinian theology: “We challenge imperialism and colonialism, but we go beyond that, by doing theology in the particular context of the biblical land: pilgrimages, holy places, inter-religious dialogue.”

This football fanatic, a Liverpool supporter long before Mohamed Salah played there, dreams of a future where his sons can kick a ball around with Israeli children. “Our biggest challenge as Christians is not to defeat our enemies but to transform them into friends,” he writes in his book, The Other Side of the Wall (2020). “Even as I am committed today to the urgency of ending the Israeli occupation, I need to remind myself that the goal in itself is not ending the occupation, but rather reconciliation.”

This personal journey means that Munther Isaac now embodies sumud, the Palestinian spirit of resistance. “It’s genocide,” he says calmly, describing the war being waged in Gaza and recalling the figures: 92% of schools, the enclave’s 12 universities and 1,000 mosques have been destroyed. At least 16 cemeteries have been desecrated or razed to the ground. “When you target so many cultural elements, you destroy a civilisation. They want to annihilate any possibility of living in Gaza. It’s a new Nakba,” he explains, referring to the catastrophic exodus of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from the young State of Israel in 1948.

We point out to the preacher that genocide is a legal concept that cannot be used lightly. “The war in Gaza is no longer a response to 7 October, but revenge on a massive scale,” he maintains. Like his compatriots, Munther Isaac is ambivalent about Hamas, which has brought the Palestinian cause out of oblivion. “It’s hard to deny that it’s a national liberation movement,” he says, while denouncing its ideology and atrocities. “What happened on 7 October was evil. No one can approve the murder and abduction of civilians and children. But I refuse to ignore the context. What happened on 7 October was the desperate act of people who have known nothing other than the siege of Gaza. Islamism is a poor and terrible response to that despair. I also refuse to allow Hamas to be used to discredit all Palestinian resistance.”

Unmasking Christian Zionism

But Munther Isaac’s speeches also target one of the spiritual powers fuelling the conflict: Christian Zionism. Its followers – millions of them in the United States, but also in Brazil and South Korea – are convinced by a literal reading of biblical prophecy that the modern State of Israel was established by God in anticipation of the end of time. This conviction translates into blind support for the Israeli right-wing and the settlements. “They do not distinguish between the historical and religious relationship of the Jews with this land, which I do not deny, and the right they would have over it, even to the point of driving out the other inhabitants. They go from ‘the Jews have a connection with the land’ to ‘the Jews have a right to the land’.”

Unmasking this “oppression under the cloak of divine sanction” in his Christmas Eve sermon, Munther Isaac has already clashed with American Zionist evangelicals. “He was disinvited from the Urbana conference, an important gathering for mission in the United States, because his presence was untenable in the eyes of powerful donors,” reveals Tom Harvey. Far from being discouraged, he crossed the Atlantic in November 2023 to deliver to President Joe Biden a letter from Palestinian Christians calling for a ceasefire. On 9 April 2024, he even agreed to an interview with Tucker Carlson, America’s favorite conservative talk show host. “The Bible doesn’t talk about a chosen state,” he insisted in an interview that has been viewed 19 million times on X. This message angered the gurus of evangelical Zionism, such as Pastor Johnnie Moore, a former adviser to Trump, who described him as “the high priest of Christian anti-Semitism.”

Even in Europe, Munther Isaac is disturbing. In February 2024, the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, forbade him to take part in a pro-Palestinian protest in London if he wanted to meet the primate: “I chose the protest!” The prelate then apologized, and received him… by videoconference. “I suggested that he come with Pope Francis to the Gaza border to call for a ceasefire!” For his part, the Bishop of Rome met a group of Palestinians in November 2023, including BBC teacher Yousef al-Khouri. “He described the war in Gaza to us as ‘genocide’,” says al-Khouri. “The Vatican denied it, but I have good ears…”

A voice for all Palestinians

“I hope my activism played a part, but I wasn’t consulted by anyone,” says the man who is regularly visited by ambassadors from southern countries.

At a time when the Palestinians are extremely angry at the double standards applied to them by the West, Munther Isaac’s voice has been heard in the Global South. In December 2023, a delegation of South African pastors visited Bethlehem. “In South Africa too, the Bible was used to justify the system of oppression,” he points out. The South African Council of Churches denounced a “genocide” in Gaza, and suggested taking the matter “to the International Criminal Court”: in the end, it was to the International Court of Justice that South Africa brought the case against Israel.

At a time when the Palestinians are extremely angry at the double standards applied to them by the West, Munther Isaac’s voice has been heard in the Global South. In December 2023, a delegation of South African pastors visited Bethlehem. “In South Africa too, the Bible was used to justify the system of oppression,” he points out. The South African Council of Churches denounced a “genocide” in Gaza, and suggested taking the matter “to the International Criminal Court”: in the end, it was to the International Court of Justice that South Africa brought the case against Israel. During her closing arguments on 11 January 2024, Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh quoted Munther Isaac. Did the Bethlehem pastor inspire the South African approach? “I hope my activism played a part, but I wasn’t consulted by anyone,” says the man who is regularly visited by ambassadors from southern countries.

With his scathing words, Munther Isaac restores dignity and pride to Palestinians deprived of a moral figure, who recognise themselves neither in the corrupt Palestinian Authority nor in the rigorism of Hamas. The Qatari channel al-Jazeera and the Turkish channel TRT broadcast his speeches. Islamic sites spread his preaching, “including my Easter sermons, which is significant when you consider that Islam does not profess the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus,” notes the pastor. A large proportion of the Internet users who follow him are Muslims. “I speak for all Palestinians, not just Christians. We are not called to defend our own interests, but to sacrifice ourselves for others. To speak for the oppressed.”

Many Christians are nevertheless grateful to him for speaking for them. “He says what no one else dares to say,” says a young Orthodox man from Bethlehem. “Before the war, he blamed other priests for being more involved in organizing weddings than in social justice.” A Catholic priest in the town is even more enthusiastic: “Munther Isaac is one of the three prophetic voices of Christianity in the Holy Land”, he exclaims, quoting also the Jesuit priest David Neuhaus, converted Jew and former deputy of the Latin (Roman Catholic) Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Yohanna Katanacho, Dean of the Evangelical College of Nazareth.

Shadi Khalloul, a Maronite politician with ties to the Israeli right, is unmoved by this enthusiasm: “Most of us 180,000 Christian Israelis prefer to live under Israel freely rather than under a Palestinian Islamic (sic) Authority regime controlling Bethlehem”, he declared on X. His view is shared by some Christians on the other side of the wall. A barrier that Munther Isaac can no longer cross: his preaching has caused him to lose his Israeli permit – he can still travel abroad via Jordan. “If that’s the price I have to pay, I accept it,” he says simply.

“Munther has more freedom of speech on his side of the wall than on ours,” says a slightly envious Jerusalem pastor, fearing reprisals. However, living in Beit Sahur does not protect him from being arrested by the Israeli army. “My wife keeps telling me to be careful. I feel protected by prayer,” he confides. Tom Harvey urges him to not leave the equipoise and winsomeness that brought him to this point : “What makes Munther a powerful voice is he is viewed, rightly, as a fair voice that is not partisan, but seeks the truth in love.”

Basically, the danger that threatens the pastor is giving up his hope. “I have always believed that we could share this land, not divide it into two states, and live as good neighbors. It’s an important part of my theology. Is this dream dead? I don’t know, but it looks like it,” he admits, sinking into silence. The next day, after the service in his church in Bethlehem, Munther Isaac regained his determination: “I’m not abandoning the desire to live alongside the Israelis. But it will be difficult.” At the foot of the altar, in the rubble used four months ago for the manger, now sits the bare cross of the Resurrection.

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