Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac Insists That We See Jesus in Every Child Pulled from Under the Rubble

On March 27, 2025, Religion and Public Life’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Harvard Divinity School hosted Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac for a lecture based on his recently published book Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza. Isaac challenged what he characterizes as the prevailing theological, political, and ethical narratives surrounding the ongoing destruction of Gaza and the broader conditions of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. The discussion was moderated by Hillary Rantisi, Associate Director of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. 

Opening the discussion, Hillary Rantisi situated the talk within RPL-RCPI’s commitment to analyzing structural violence, power, and decolonial potentialities through the lens of religion and peacebuilding. As the discussion continued, Isaac presented his work as more than a mere scholarly analysis but also as an act of witness deeply rooted in his vocation as a Palestinian Christian pastor and theologian. 

Isaac began by foregrounding the stakes of his discourse. He based his invocation of ‘genocide’ upon the definition laid out in the Genocide Convention. Citing documentation by UN experts, legal scholars, human rights organizations, and Holocaust and genocide studies academics, he argued that Israel’s actions in Gaza fulfil the legal criteria for genocide. 

“The question,” Isaac insisted, “is not whether what is happening is genocide. The question is why it is being denied,” especially by people of faith. The selective application of international law, and the suppression of Palestinian voices through the theological rationalizations offered by prominent Christian leaders and institutions, formed the object of the lecture’s central ethical indictment. 

Isaac’s account of the complicity of Western Christian institutions introduced what he described as the “matrix” sustaining this injustice—coloniality, racism, and theology. 

He contended that coloniality is the system wherein economic, political, cultural, and military power converge to dominate and exploit marginalized peoples, protected by the self-interest of powerful nations. Isaac sees racism as the essential companion of colonialism, one which renders Palestinian life expendable to many Christians, allowing mass displacement and death to be rationalized or ignored. Theology, in this framing, functions to sanctify these structures of domination by providing a moral narrative that renders conquest righteous and indigenous resistance evil. “Empires need a religion,” Isaac stated. “They need a discourse that declares that you are entitled, chosen, destined, superior.” Isaac sees the case of Palestine as particularly illustrative of these dynamics, especially as manifest through Christian Zionism, which he characterizes as transforming biblical language into a theological justification for dispossession.  

Isaac’s theological position emerged most vividly in the story behind his book cover image of a baby Jesus, wrapped in a keffiyeh, lying amidst the ruins of Gaza. The creation of the image was originally conceived as a pastoral act following the Israeli bombing of a church that killed 18 people, 9 of whom were children. The question that followed such suffering was simply, “Where was God?” The rendering of this symbolic image sought to reassert the presence of God alongside those suffering rather than aligning the divine with imperial power. 

Preaching on Christ’s crucifixion, Isaac described Christ’s cry of abandonment, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” as resonating with the Palestinians now more than ever. Issac asserted that God is found among the victims of empire so that he could reclaim the heart of Christian witness from its co-optation by imperial theology. 

“We insisted,” he said about his work, “that we see Jesus in every child pulled from under the rubble.” 

Throughout his remarks, Isaac emphasised a repeated return to his central claim: that true solidarity must be willing to bear cost. In an environment where speaking openly about Palestine incurs real professional and social risks, he argued that neutrality is no longer an ethical position but a form of complicity. He demanded churches and faith communities to move beyond vague appeals for peace and to explicitly name and condemn genocide, apartheid, and occupation. 

“Can you really claim to be in solidarity if you are not willing to call things by their name?” he asked the audience. 

Isaac concluded by insisting on the necessity of hope even in the face of overwhelming devastation. In a world where “never again has become yet again,” he said, to hope is to refuse to allow the oppressor to shape reality and to insist on the dignity of survival. Drawing on the Palestinian concept of sumūd (steadfast resilience), he framed hope not as passive optimism, but as a defiant stance against tyranny: “Hope becomes a choice, an action.” 

Read the full transcript of this event here.