What explains the fervent support among America’s Christians for Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza’s Palestinians? Dying children cry beneath the rubble; doctors testify to atrocities; journalists and medics face sniper fire; experts cry genocide; Jewish Americans decry Israel’s ethnic cleansing; protesting college students jeopardize their careers. Yet millions of Americans who profess allegiance to Jesus continue defending the desolation of Gaza, or refuse to speak against it. In these essays you will read stories and hear cries from Christians—American, Latin American, Jewish, Palestinian—who have spent years listening, laboring, and praying for a durable, equitable peace between Palestinians and their Jewish neighbors. Their perspectives have formed over years in the land, through lingering encounters, hard conversations, and troubling personal experiences. Disagree with them if you must, but first hear them out, and consider why so many of Israel’s Christian partisans have confused a love for the Jewish people with a defense of the apocalypse Israel has unleashed since October 7, 2023. It may be too late to save Gaza’s millions from starvation, amputation, displacement, and death. Is it too late to repent of our complicity? Too late to save our own souls? How should we be Christian after the desolation of Gaza?

Bruce Fisk (Ph.D., Duke) taught undergraduate students in the U.S. and Canada for a quarter century, as often as possible in the Holy Land. Since 2018 he has been a scholar-nomad based in Peru.