When Hatem El-Sayegh addressed a crowd of more than 550 at the Palestinian-Christian-led Church at the Crossroads conference, he said that his remarks were not intended for people to walk away feeling “pro-Palestine,” but rather “pro-Christ,” because ultimately, the moral path is the godly one, he said.
“We, especially in an individualistic society, measure everything from our own position,” he later told Middle East Eye. “It’s me, me, me. Christ is for me [and] if I was the only one in the world, Christ would have come for me… but the exclusive Christ is inclusive for all who come to him”.
Like most of Gaza’s Muslims, its small Christian community is also religiously devoted and has clung to their faith to get them through two years of what is, by legal definition, a genocide carried out by Israel.
“Right now it’s revolutionary to be pro-Palestinian, but I think what is consistently that revolutionary is to be ever loving in Christ,” Hatem’s daughter Lydia, who works with the Quaker-inspired Friends Committee on National Legislation, told MEE.
Quakers are historically Protestant Christians with a deep commitment to peace advocacy and social justice. MEE asked Hatem and Lydia about their religious denomination.
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“The same one that Christ comes from?” Hatem responded with laughter.
“I don’t know. Was he Baptist? Was he Orthodox? We’ve attended churches from an Evangelical persuasion, if you will,” he said. For the last two decades, he’s been going to a Baptist church in the Atlanta, Georgia area, where he is based, and where he works as an engineering consultant.
Baptists are, on the whole, an older tradition of Evangelical Christianity, but the “born again” style of the US evangelical church has set itself apart for its more literal reading of scripture, and its outsized influence on conservative US politics – particularly in advancing Israeli interests.
NPR’s reporting last year showed many white Evangelicals – who make up the vast majority of the church – consider voting for the Republican Party to be their religious duty.
The Pew Research Center has found that about a quarter of all Americans identify as Evangelical. That figure dwarfs Jewish-Americans, who make up just under six percent of the population.
One of the most prominent names wielding critical influence on Israel-Palestine US policy is Evangelical Christian and US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who has insisted that Palestinians don’t actually exist.
“Did all those Christians who are descendants of Abraham, or who are Jewish, or are in Israel, did they move to southern Alabama or to Arkansas?” Hatem said.
He spoke with a passion in his voice that he appeared to strictly reserve for these matters of faith and indigeneity.
“No, their descendants are there [in Palestine],” he continued. “The fact that somebody prominent is saying it, like Huckabee, doesn’t make it right… Huckabee is misinterpreting the Bible”.
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The misinterpretation, Hatem explained, comes from dispensationalism – a concept largely popularised at the start of the 20th century, denoting that God had different dealings with humanity in different eras or “dispensations”.
Dispensationalists believe that the church and Israel are two distinct entities. In that vein, they believe that God has not yet fulfillled his plan for Israel, which will materialise in the end times upon the second coming of Jesus Christ, who is expected to rule the world from the Temple Mount – also known as the al-Aqsa compound – in Jerusalem.
Israel, as a country, therefore, has prophetic significance to Evangelicals.
But many like Hatem do not see biblical Israel as the nation-state, given the church itself didn’t either – at least for the first 1,800 years.
“I mean, is it everybody who became Jewish? Is it everybody who’s by blood related to Abraham? What about Jews who accepted Christ in the first century? Where did they go?” he said.
“What is the sin of [the people of] Israel, who perceived themselves as God’s people at the time? It was the rejection of Christ, the ultimate fulfilment of prophecy. That is what it’s about. It’s not about a modern-day state of Israel”.
‘They want to wipe their memories’
Israel has now killed at least 40 relatives and friends of the Sayeghs since the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023. That’s four percent of the 1,000 Christians left in Gaza.
Some of his Muslim friends, he told MEE, are unreachable. He has no idea if they’re dead or alive.
Hatem’s aunt, who is older than modern-day Israel at 91 years old, is in the care of the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City.
“Israel killed her father, who was a railroad worker when they bombed Gaza back in 1948,” Hatem told MEE. “She had to work as a school teacher at the age of about 14.”
Like most others sheltering in the church, she isn’t going anywhere, despite recent evacuation orders by the Israelis.
‘They don’t just want to kill people or drive them out. They want to wipe their memories’
– Hatem El-Sayegh
Israel now occupies more than 80 percent of the Gaza Strip, but areas it has designated as “safe zones” like al-Mawasi in the south have been regularly bombed.
Some of Hatem’s fondest memories are in Gaza, including his wedding to his wife Marlyn at the Church of Saint Porphyrius in 1999 – a church built in the 12th century, now under imminent threat of destruction.
Today, the places he used to frequent like the barbershop, the dentist’s office, and the bakery, are rubble and ash.
“They don’t just want to kill people or drive them out. They want to wipe their memories,” he said.
“You try to say over and over and over: ‘There are no Palestinian people,’ but they still came. They still existed. So what do you do? You just erase everything. You erase what connects them together. You erase where they met, where they communed, where they prayed together,” Hatem says.
So what is the way forward? How does this war end?
“I don’t know what will happen,” Hatem said, exasperated, and leaning back in his chair for the first time in an hour-long discussion. “I don’t know”.
But he was sure of one thing – that his faith demands a non-violent response.
“We as Christians don’t see war as an option to meet some objectives,” he told MEE. “We’re against weapons. We’re against arms,” he said.
“But this is not going to solve the problem, because once the resistance drops their arms, they are going to be crushed and kicked out, and that’s what happened before. We’ve seen it”.
Fighting back
When Hatem says “resistance” he is referring to the armed Palestinian factions fighting against the Israelis in Gaza, largely led by the Qassam Brigades, which is the armed wing of Hamas, and Saraya al-Quds, which is the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Both are considered terrorist organisations in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Smaller, lesser-known factions are also operating alongside them.
As enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, armed resistance is a right of an occupied people. From an Islamic point of view, it can be a duty, depending on the circumstances.
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The issue has, at times, caused a political rift between Muslim and Christian Palestinians in how to respond to 77 years of Israeli dispossession and aggression, but most especially when it came to the 7 October Hamas-led attack, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 people inside Israel.
“If anyone has the right to armed resistance, it’s me,” Bethlehem-born Christian theologist Fares Abraham told MEE.
His family in the occupied West Bank, he said, has suffered greatly at the hands of the Israeli military.
“As a Palestinian, as a Christian, as a citizen of Palestine, I do not choose to participate in armed resisting,” he said.
“When Jesus was arrested – wrongly arrested and unjustly – Peter wanted to resist violently, and he withdrew his sword and he cut off Malchus’ ear. But Jesus told him, put your weapon down,” Abraham said.
Palestinians have historically employed a number of non-violent tactics to draw attention to their plight, with the most recent and well-known being the 2018 Great March of Return, when tens of thousands of demonstrators in Gaza made their way, on foot, to the Gaza-Israel fence to protest Israel’s sea, land, and air siege of the enclave.
Israeli soldiers immediately opened fire, ultimately killing 190 Palestinians.
“God gives so many different examples of who our neighbour is, and [how] our neighbour can be our enemy,” Abraham told MEE.
“If Jesus was alive in the Holy Land today, he would go and grieve with the mother of an Israeli soldier who was killed in Gaza, and he would also go to Gaza and grieve with the mother who lost her child in an indiscriminate bombing”.
Whether any part of that is surprising or controversial is precisely the point of the Church at the Crossroads conference, Daniel Bannoura, the man who conceptualised the event, earlier told the audience as he kicked off the programme.
“Some of the things that are going to be said here might be a bit uncomfortable. Some of the people are going to say stuff that you’re not used to,” he said on stage, largely referring to some of the fiery criticism of Israel that was to come.
“This is a time for us to listen, to learn, to engage and to think seriously what needs to be done next,” and talk to Palestinians rather than talk about them, he said.
Abraham, who spends his time between the US and the occupied West Bank, has three children with his wife Soha, who is from Gaza. He now runs Levant Ministries, which is one of the conference’s conveners.
The church, he said, must maintain the kind of empathy that rises far above the politics and instinctual urges of humanity.
“For the church… the way of peace is bringing people together, is peacemaking, bridge building,” he told MEE.
“[Christ] chose to show us a better way. But that way was so costly that he paid [with] his own life for it. That’s the Christian message. And if Christians are not willing to to present this message, we will never have peace”.
