Author Response to Round Table on Christ in the Rubble: Faith,the Bible,and the Genocide in Gaza (Eerdmans,2025)

I am grateful to the four scholars who took the time to read Christ in the Rubble with such care and to respond to it with seriousness, thoughtfulness, and intellectual rigor. I appreciate the effort and attention they have invested in engaging this book, and I have learned a great deal from their reflections—even, and especially, where I disagree with them. Coming from different contexts and schools of thought, they bring to their readings distinct questions, sensitivities, and theological and intellectual commitments. I am genuinely thankful for this diversity of perspectives, which reflects the kind of conversation this book was always meant to provoke.

This book was written as an attempt to speak from within, and on behalf of, my community in a time of genocide. For that reason, I do not take lightly any serious engagement with it. I remain grateful for every opportunity in which Palestinians are listened to, debated, and taken seriously—especially at a moment when our very humanity is so often denied, relativized, or abstracted.

At the same time, it is clear from these reviews that there are also stark and sometimes fundamental disagreements—disagreements that, in many ways, illuminate precisely why I felt compelled to write this book in the first place. Some of these differences concern method, some theology, some politics, and some what it means to speak responsibly and faithfully in a moment of catastrophe. For this reason, I have chosen to respond to each review separately, before offering a few concluding remarks that return to the larger questions at stake.

I am grateful to Leyla King for her generous and deeply empathetic engagement with Christ in the Rubble, and especially for the solidarity that shapes her reading as a Palestinian American priest who approaches this subject not only as a scholar but also from within a shared historical and communal wound. I recognize in her review the pain, anger, and exhaustion of a people who have been repeatedly forced to watch their suffering explained away, relativized, or ignored. Her response is written from within that shared location, and I receive it with respect. It is precisely because of this common horizon and shared moral concern that it is important to respond carefully to her central theological critique.

At the heart of King’s argument is the claim that I attempt to replace one scriptural land-claim with another. This reading, however, rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of my position. Nowhere in the book do I ground Palestinian political rights or claims to land in Scripture, nor do I argue that such rights derive from being “grafted into the vine of the Jewish covenant.” On the contrary, I insist explicitly that the Bible must not function as a reference point for adjudicating land, borders, or sovereignty, and that international law and human rights frameworks—imperfect as they may be—must remain our common point of reference. As I state in the book, “The reference point cannot be religious texts . . . If your side of the argument is ‘my God told me so,’ . . . then we make it a war between the gods” (p. 132). Scripture, I argue, should shape Christian ethics—our commitment to justice, dignity, equality, and the protection of the vulnerable—not serve as a theological title deed or political instrument.

My engagement with the Bible is therefore directed not toward constructing an alternative religious claim to land, but toward dismantling Christian Zionist theology and calling Christians to repentance, moral clarity, and accountability. The charge that I am merely substituting one theological absolutism for another is, in this sense, misplaced.

I also wonder whether the very invocation of “supersessionism” in this context reflects a deep and understandable sensitivity to a painful Christian history while at the same time revealing one of the central problems I explicitly critique in the book: namely, how this sensitivity has often led well-intentioned Christians to tolerate, excuse, or even embrace other theologies of supremacy, including Christian Zionist theologies that today function to legitimate oppression and, in our present moment, genocide. Nowhere in this book do I advocate any form of supersessionism—a point already made explicit in the foreword, which names supersessionism as part of the theological problem to be confronted. But as Palestinian Christians facing an existential threat, we cannot afford selective theological vigilance. We must have the courage to name and reject all theologies that sacralize supremacy, exclusion, or domination, even when they are expressed in the language of repentance, sensitivity, or historical guilt.

Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski’s response is troubling, first of all, for the language it uses to describe the present catastrophe. He frames what is happening as a “war between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement,” speaks of “death and starvation” rather than killing, and of Palestinian “suffering” rather than genocide while still treating the charge of genocide itself as debatable. This is precisely the kind of rhetorical minimization the book seeks to challenge. Since the publication of Christ in the Rubble, the legal arguments, documentary evidence, and scholarly consensus have only grown stronger, not weaker, in affirming that what is unfolding in Gaza constitutes genocide. To continue to rely on the euphemistic language of “war” and “suffering,” rather than naming killing, destruction, and genocidal intent, is not a neutral scholarly posture but a failure to call things by their proper names.

More fundamentally, Joslyn-Siemiatkoski’s long immersion in the field of Christian–Jewish relations decisively shapes—and, I would argue, distorts—his reading of the book. Ironically, his response reproduces precisely the dynamic I critique: the tendency of Western Christian discourse, formed within the matrix of interfaith diplomacy, to avoid confronting Zionism as a settler-colonial, exclusionary, and supremacist project, and instead to appeal to an imagined, morally rehabilitated Zionism that bears little resemblance to the actually existing one. I do not call for the “reform” or “reimagining” of Zionism, because I am convinced that, in its historical formation and present practice, it is a colonial ideology that must be dismantled rather than redeemed. The claim that Zionism is “not a singular thing” and that “the great majority of Israelis do not envision themselves within the framework of colonial supremacy” is empirically unsustainable. The record of successive Israeli governments, as well as consistent public opinion data showing overwhelming support for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, points in the opposite direction. A poll in May 2025 revealed that a total of 82 percent of Israeli Jews expressed support for the forced expulsion of residents of the Gaza Strip, and 56 percent supported the forced expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel.

Closely related to this is Joslyn-Siemiatkoski’s reliance on what is often called the “two narratives” framework, in which Palestinian and Israeli realities are treated as morally symmetrical stories to be held in tension. This, too, is precisely the framework the book explicitly rejects. As I argue in chapter 8 (pp. 245–246), the language of “two sides” or “two narratives” obscures the fundamental asymmetry between colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed. The problem is not that there are two stories, but that one side controls the land, the borders, the army, and the means of organized violence, while the other lives under siege, occupation, and now genocide. To retreat once again into the language of parallel narratives is not a path toward moral clarity or justice; it is a way of avoiding judgment about a radically asymmetrical reality.

Joslyn-Siemiatkoski’s repeated appeal to “reconciliation” likewise misses the central argument of the book. I explicitly warn against hiding behind the language of peace and reconciliation while injustice and mass violence continue (p. 246). Peacemaking, as I argue, is not neutrality and not moral sentimentalism; it requires taking sides with the victims, naming war crimes, and embracing concrete and costly forms of pressure—including boycott, divestment, and sanctions—until injustice ends. The form of reconciliation proposed here carefully avoids these necessary steps, preferring instead a familiar Western Christian discourse that emphasizes mutuality while sidestepping accountability and consequence.

Finally, there is something deeply troubling in the way Joslyn-Siemiatkoski introduces the question of Palestinian “self-criticism” in the midst of an ongoing genocide. However cautiously framed, this move inevitably shifts moral weight toward the victims and suggests a symmetry of responsibility that does not exist under conditions of radical asymmetry, colonization, and mass extermination. I do, in fact, condemn Hamas and reject antisemitism clearly and repeatedly in the book. But to foreground Palestinian self-critique at a moment when a people are being starved, bombed, and erased is to participate, however unintentionally, in the very moral displacement that allows such crimes to continue.

What ultimately disappoints me most about Joslyn-Siemiatkoski’s response is that, instead of listening carefully to the urgent cry of Palestinian Christians—and of Palestinians more broadly—it bypasses that cry in favor of the habits of a diplomatic Christianity shaped by the culture of Western Christian–Jewish interfaith dialogue, a culture whose failures I explicitly diagnose in this book. My hope is not that Palestinians learn once again to speak more gently to power, but that Western Christians finally learn to listen, to take sides with the oppressed, and to have the courage to support and amplify Jewish voices that are themselves calling for the dismantling of Zionism and for real, concrete pressure until justice is done.

I am grateful to Maayan Raveh for her careful, serious, and in many ways illuminating reading of Christ in the Rubble, especially her articulation of the book as a form of testimonial theology—“when testimony becomes theology.” I recognize myself in much of this description and agree that the book is written from within catastrophe, as witness rather than as detached observer. At the same time, I am concerned that her framing ultimately narrows the book’s scope and, in doing so, displaces its central claim.

The book does not present genocide as a merely theological or confessional category, nor as something that exists primarily in the realm of interpretation. It insists, repeatedly and explicitly, on facts, historical documentation, international law, human rights frameworks, and on the legal and moral meaning of what is taking place. The language of testimony names the mode of address, not the source of truth. The danger of reducing the argument to “witness” alone is that it subtly shifts genocide from something being done in reality to something Palestinians are primarily saying or theologizing. That is not my claim. My claim is that this is what is happening, and that theology—and especially post-Holocaust Christian theology—must be brought back into the matrix of ethics, responsibility, accountability, and the defense of the oppressed.

I also want to question the way the book is described as neither “objective” nor “comprehensive,” as though this implied a lack of historical engagement or analytical rigor. It is true—and I have never claimed otherwise—that this book does not offer an exhaustive history of the war. But this does not mean it is indifferent to factual accuracy, historical grounding, or sustained analysis. Entire chapters are devoted to historical context and to the analysis of colonialism, racism, Christian Zionism in its various forms, and the political and theological structures that have produced this catastrophe. The book does not choose “testimony over analysis.” It insists that analysis without moral clarity becomes a form of evasion, and that testimony without grounding in reality becomes empty.

Finally, I would add that my Christological language in this book is not intended primarily as an epistemological claim about where Christ is to be “located,” but as a call to discipleship, embodiment, and ethical responsibility. To say that Christ is under the rubble is not to construct a new theological abstraction, but to confront Christians with the concrete question of what it means to follow Jesus where he himself chose to be: among the poor, the crushed, and the victims of empire. This is consistent with Jesus’ own teaching and practice and with the logic of the incarnation and the cross—not as metaphysical ideas, but as patterns of life, solidarity, and costly faithfulness. The aim is not to redefine Christology for its own sake, but to call the church to a form of discipleship that refuses distance, neutrality, or moral safety in the face of suffering, injustice, and extermination.

Even where I ultimately disagree with her framing, I remain genuinely grateful for the depth, seriousness, and theological acuity with which Raveh has engaged Christ in the Rubble, and for the care with which she has taken its Christological claims with full intellectual gravity.

Yazid Said’s review raises a more fundamental question: what counts as academic seriousness in a moment of mass violence and catastrophe? Is it measured primarily by genre, tone, and conformity to dominant Western academic conventions? The review repeatedly reduces the book to a merely pastoral or sentimental work and then questions its “academic quality” on that basis. But this begs the question of whether academic rigor, in such a moment, should not instead be judged by fidelity to reality, careful engagement with sources, and the courage to draw clear moral and analytical conclusions from well-documented facts.

Christ in the Rubble is not written as a detached historical monograph, but it is grounded throughout in history, documented evidence, engagement with a wide range of scholars, legal frameworks, church documents, and human rights reports. It does not merely react; it argues. It does not merely express moral anguish; it insists on naming reality truthfully. To characterize its method as primarily “journalistic” or “sentimental” is therefore not a neutral assessment of its sources, but reflects a narrow and highly restrictive understanding of what constitutes serious knowledge and responsible scholarship in a time of catastrophe.

There is, of course, a place for different genres and registers of writing. But in a moment when universities are destroyed, hospitals are bombed, and a people are being starved and killed, the more urgent question is not whether one has preserved the rituals of academic distance, but whether one has spoken truthfully, responsibly, and with intellectual and moral clarity about what is taking place.

At a deeper level, however, our disagreement is not simply about genre or style, but about how one judges Zionism and Christian Zionism. When Said suggests that my claim that there is no meaningful difference between the Zionism of John Hagee and that of Joe Biden could “discredit the cause of the book entirely,” he reveals a fundamental divergence in perspective. I insist on evaluating Zionism—and Christian Zionism—by its effects and consequences on the ground, by what it does, not by how it describes itself. Joe Biden has publicly described himself as a Christian Zionist; he has defended Zionism; and he has funded and politically shielded Israel in the midst of a genocide. From the perspective of those who are being bombed, displaced, and killed, the distinction between “respectable” liberal Zionism and “eccentric” evangelical Christian Zionism is morally irrelevant.

The attempt to divide Zionism into “good” and “bad” forms is precisely what I critique in the book. Much of Western Christian response to the Holocaust, however well intentioned, has in practice generated new ideologies of supremacy and exceptionalism—something Said appears unwilling to confront. The same pattern is evident when he argues that one must distinguish between “the eccentricity of American Christian Zionism” and other, supposedly more benign, forms of Christian support for Israel, citing figures such as Pope John Paul II. This is exactly the logic the book challenges: the habit of imagining a morally acceptable Zionism while refusing to reckon with the actually existing Zionism that structures dispossession, apartheid, and now genocide.

Said also claims that I “deny any value for the use of religious language in the conflict” or that I “dismiss the need to engage the religious elements of the situation.” This is the opposite of what I argue. I wrote this book precisely to redeem the use of faith and theology, and to resist the weaponization of religion in all its forms—including when it is done by Palestinians themselves, as in the religious rhetoric and practices of Hamas. My argument is thoroughly faith-based and theological. But it insists that the conflict is not, at its core, a religious one; it is a colonial reality that demands a faith-shaped, justice-oriented, and truth-telling response. To say that religion must not be used to sanctify oppression is not to say that religion has nothing to say; it is to insist that faith must be reclaimed from all who use it—whether state or non-state actors—to legitimate domination, violence, or dehumanization.

Finally, I am troubled by Said’s concluding suggestion that “Palestinian Christianity has to offer something more” by seeing “all of this in light of the long-term trust that this upheaval is genuinely in the interests of all the communities of the Holy Land.” However unintended, such language risks implying that genocide, destruction, and mass killing could somehow be interpreted as serving a greater good—even the good of the victims themselves. I wrote this book to call for accountability, for action, and for a faith rooted in the justice of God—not to spiritualize catastrophe or to invite Palestinians to find consolation in their own annihilation. Genocide is not redemptive. It is a crime. Faithfulness in such a moment means naming it, resisting it, and demanding its end.

I want to conclude by reiterating my sincere appreciation for all four reviewers and for the seriousness with which they engaged Christ in the Rubble. I do not take such attention, time, or intellectual labor for granted—especially in a moment such as this—and I remain grateful for every effort to think with, argue with, and wrestle seriously with what I have written.

If, at points, my responses carry a strong, urgent, or aggressive tone, it is not out of defensiveness, but out of a deeper concern: that in several instances the central arguments of the book were not fully heard. In this sense, these exchanges themselves confirm why this book needed to be written. For if, after a genocide, we find ourselves still repeating the same patterns of thought, the same ideological frameworks, and the same rhetorical habits that helped lead us to this moment—still hesitant to name reality clearly, still searching for ways to soften, relativize, or manage it—then we are facing not only a political and moral catastrophe, but a profound theological and ethical failure. This is precisely the crisis Christ in the Rubble seeks to confront.