By Rev. Clint Schnekloth
One could easily make the mistake, given the (admittedly still widely suppressed) rise in media coverage of the State of Israel’s genocidal response to the Hamas attacks of October 2023, of assuming Mitri Raheb’s attention to decolonizing Palestine in his new book arises out of the most recent violence.
In reality, this is just the newest installment in what has been an incredibly fruitful authorship over three decades, beginning with his I Am A Palestinian Christian (Fortress Press, 1995). During the same period of his authorship, Raheb has also been an institution-builder and global advocate, founding Dar Al-Kalima University in Bethlehem and launching multiple projects and institutions serving the social needs of Palestinians living in the Bethlehem area, focusing specifically on women, children, youth, and the elderly.
When I started reading Decolonizing Palestine, Raheb’s most recent work, I thought I knew what I was getting into. But I was wrong. Although it is a straightforward analytical work arguing—convincingly—that Palestine must be understood as one of the last anti-colonial struggles in an era regarded as post-colonial, it is also a work that is powerfully convicting of readers like myself who are still beholden, often in ways we don’t recognize, to the propaganda of Christian Zionism.
Miguel De La Torre says it best in his blurb for the book, “As a ‘Christian in the West,’ my biblical understanding of the birthplace of Jesus justifies, reinforces, and contributes to the settler colonialism which oppresses Mitri Raheb, who was born and lives there… Decolonizing Palestine decolonizes my mind by raising my consciousness to show how my understanding of the so-called Holy Land weaponizes the Bible against the people of the land.”
Raheb catalogues, in stunning detail, how endemic liberal Christian Zionism is in the West. Even some of our most lauded liberal theologians and biblical scholars (like Walter Brueggemann[i]) have, while publishing on the Bible and the land, furthered theological worldviews that essentially erase Palestinians and weaponize Scripture against them.
What I find so compelling about Mitri Raheb’s work: the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, he’s a Palestinian Christian. Yes, he’s a biblical scholar. Yes, he’s an institutional organizer. Yes, he’s a global advocate for an oppressed people. But what this book does is something else altogether: it’s forced me to re-appraise my own Christian assumptions from the ground up, not just about Palestine and the most recent escalation of a longstanding practice of settler colonialism, but about my own complicity in settler colonialism here at home, and the ways all of that complicity and blindness is intrinsically related to how I’ve read the Bible and believed as a Christian.
Midway through the book, Raheb reports taking a walk in Jerusalem with a theologian friend with whom he wanted to write a book. He reports that when they met to discuss the table of contents of the book, it became clear they had very different perspectives on Jerusalem. “For me, Jerusalem was a real city that I used to visit as a boy on a weekly basis [before Israel put in checkpoints and walls between Bethlehem and Jerusalem]… [my friend] was not particularly interested in the city as it is today. Rather, he was obsessed with ancient Jerusalem, with what once existed, and that alone colonized his imagination” (p. 54).
To read the entire article, click here
Photo by David McLenachan on Unsplash
By Rev. Clint Schnekloth
One could easily make the mistake, given the (admittedly still widely suppressed) rise in media coverage of the State of Israel’s genocidal response to the Hamas attacks of October 2023, of assuming Mitri Raheb’s attention to decolonizing Palestine in his new book arises out of the most recent violence.
In reality, this is just the newest installment in what has been an incredibly fruitful authorship over three decades, beginning with his I Am A Palestinian Christian (Fortress Press, 1995). During the same period of his authorship, Raheb has also been an institution-builder and global advocate, founding Dar Al-Kalima University in Bethlehem and launching multiple projects and institutions serving the social needs of Palestinians living in the Bethlehem area, focusing specifically on women, children, youth, and the elderly.
When I started reading Decolonizing Palestine, Raheb’s most recent work, I thought I knew what I was getting into. But I was wrong. Although it is a straightforward analytical work arguing—convincingly—that Palestine must be understood as one of the last anti-colonial struggles in an era regarded as post-colonial, it is also a work that is powerfully convicting of readers like myself who are still beholden, often in ways we don’t recognize, to the propaganda of Christian Zionism.
Miguel De La Torre says it best in his blurb for the book, “As a ‘Christian in the West,’ my biblical understanding of the birthplace of Jesus justifies, reinforces, and contributes to the settler colonialism which oppresses Mitri Raheb, who was born and lives there… Decolonizing Palestine decolonizes my mind by raising my consciousness to show how my understanding of the so-called Holy Land weaponizes the Bible against the people of the land.”
Raheb catalogues, in stunning detail, how endemic liberal Christian Zionism is in the West. Even some of our most lauded liberal theologians and biblical scholars (like Walter Brueggemann[i]) have, while publishing on the Bible and the land, furthered theological worldviews that essentially erase Palestinians and weaponize Scripture against them.
What I find so compelling about Mitri Raheb’s work: the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, he’s a Palestinian Christian. Yes, he’s a biblical scholar. Yes, he’s an institutional organizer. Yes, he’s a global advocate for an oppressed people. But what this book does is something else altogether: it’s forced me to re-appraise my own Christian assumptions from the ground up, not just about Palestine and the most recent escalation of a longstanding practice of settler colonialism, but about my own complicity in settler colonialism here at home, and the ways all of that complicity and blindness is intrinsically related to how I’ve read the Bible and believed as a Christian.
Midway through the book, Raheb reports taking a walk in Jerusalem with a theologian friend with whom he wanted to write a book. He reports that when they met to discuss the table of contents of the book, it became clear they had very different perspectives on Jerusalem. “For me, Jerusalem was a real city that I used to visit as a boy on a weekly basis [before Israel put in checkpoints and walls between Bethlehem and Jerusalem]… [my friend] was not particularly interested in the city as it is today. Rather, he was obsessed with ancient Jerusalem, with what once existed, and that alone colonized his imagination” (p. 54).
To read the entire article, click here
Photo by David McLenachan on Unsplash