“Even in this deepest agony, God was there. And the empire did not have the last word.”
–Mitri Raheb
In November of 2025 Notre Dame doctoral candidate in theology, Daniel Bannoura, sat down with Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb and theologian and professor of Latin American Liberation Theology Graham McGeoch to discuss their recent edited volume, Theology after Gaza: A Global Anthology (2025). Bannoura, who is Palestinian, hosts the Across the Divide podcast exploring “the intersection of the Christian faith and social justice in Palestine-Israel.” Their conversation explores the stark hypocrisy of Western discourses of democracy and human rights for some but not others, laid bare by the live-streamed genocide in Gaza. They also ask: If much of Western Christianity has been complicit in justifying and even “sanctioning” this genocide, what is the path forward for Christians? What should theology after complicity in genocide–AGAIN–look like? This essay recounts the conversation, gently edited for legibility, while drawing out threads of particular interest to Contending Modernities.
The book borrows from the movement in theology and ethics that reckoned with Christian complicity in the perpetration of the Holocaust, while also offering a profound critique of that movement. “From the Global South, we thought this post-Auschwitz moment was transformative of the structure of modernity, of political order and human rights…. The assumption was that ‘never again’ was ‘never again for everyone,’” reflects Bannoura (9:58). But instead of dismantling the discourses of domination that facilitated the wholesale destruction of communities, this movement sought justice within the system of domination (103). It went beyond reversing theological supersessionism to incorporate modern nationalist and philosemitic narratives of Jewish chosenness and divine right to the land. In many post-Holocaust Protestant churches, the distinction between biblical Israel and the modern-day State of Israel was collapsed, obscuring the settler colonial project that began with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the subsequent genocide and relocation of Jews from Europe. Palestinians became the new minoritized scapegoats as the “Jewish Question,” now socially unacceptable, played out in a new location as the “Palestinian Question.”
Gaza as a Rupture in Modernity
Palestine has long found itself outside the dominant “progressive” frame of modernity, or, better yet, on the “underside of modernity,” to use Enrique Dussel’s famous theorization. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide were being ratified in 1948, proto-Israel Defense Forces were ethnically cleansing 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of the State of Israel (in the catastrophe known as the Nakba). Thus, while the very discourse of rights and the UN system was designed to protect civilians from the depredations of some groups, it invisibilized, racialized, and orientalized others. In the case of Palestine, this resulted in Nakba denial and the fantasy that this was a religious conflict between two states.
The 2023–2025 Gaza genocide was a rupture in this denial, Raheb notes. It suddenly made the violence of modernity and empire tangible and visible even to the overclass. Empire, Raheb goes on to say, is “a global system of capital and military force run by interconnected countries with settler colonial history.” These forces of empire supported the State of Israel in creating a “deathworld” in Gaza; nowhere else was this politics and financing of destructive necropolitics quite so transparent. “Gaza sits outside of the modern project; Gaza is not a nation state,” added McGeoch, so the genocide in Gaza collapsed the illusion of a two-state conflict. The United States and other liberal democracies, supposed bastions of human rights, provided billions of dollars of heavy weaponry as the Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, killed tens of thousands of men, women, and children, and instituted aid blockades that put half a million trapped people into the category of famine. Raheb laments, “By the end of this decade… Christianity will be erased totally from Gaza. Israel… destroyed all six Christian institutions, including the campus of Dar al-Kalima… during Holy Week of last year” (33:07).
The title, “After Gaza,” responds to the failure of Western Christianity to make an ethical pivot after the Holocaust. Yet, as McGeoch notes, After Gaza isn’t temporally oriented so much as it is spatially oriented; it is a theology that emerges from “outside of modernity, responding to modernity through the situation of Gaza” (6:41). After Gaza is a place for theologians and thinkers speaking from the “underside” of modernity/empire to break through the silencing and speak back to empire. In decentering power from Western states and European modern frameworks, the book creates new alliances as people with similar struggles cohere around Gaza and Palestine.
The Way Forward for Christian Theology
McGeoch argues that Zionism runs deep in contemporary Protestant Christian theology. This can lead many Western Christians to support Israeli state policies, even genocidal ones. “People are Zionist by default…. We’ve asked people in Bible circles to find Palestinian stories in the Bible, and people struggle with that, because of the way the texts have been translated, because of the way cities and things have been presented” (22:46). Raheb and McGeoch urge churches to learn to read the Bible again, to re-translate the Bible, addressing the erasure or vilification of Palestine and Palestinians. They argue that the New Testament is a Palestinian story of resistance, resilience, and hope, not a story about the Roman Empire or the Greek language. (As documented by Laura K. Field, for many right-wing interpreters of the Bible, it is in linking modern “Western Civilization” to the Greeks and Romans that the US and Europe’s intellectual and political supremacy—and thereby perceived right to dominate others—is established.) Liberation theology offers a way forward away from empire but it too must grapple with anti-Palestinian narratives.
In decentering power from Western states and European modern frameworks, Theology after Gaza creates new alliances as people with similar struggles cohere around Gaza and Palestine.
Latin American liberation theology focuses mainly on the Exodus story and its happy ending–”the oppressed will be set free,” reflect Raheb and Bannoura. But violent settler colonial narratives are insufficiently addressed, notably the claiming of Jericho, which ends in the ethnic cleansing of Canaanites (Joshua 6). Here, the oppressed were set free and became the new oppressors. Palestinian liberation theology problematizes these power dynamics and the portrayal of Canaan (contemporary Palestine). It problematizes the narrative that a stranger comes into the land and claims that it has been given to them by God.
Brazilian Catholic Bishop and Liberation Theologian Don Pere Casaldàliga famously said: “If you make the option for the poor, then you will always be on the side of those who lose.” McGeoch confesses that this exhortation is deeply challenging to enact but central to liberation theology’s commitment to the marginalized. Religious communities must ask what their theology is for, and for whom. “If we find ourselves… suddenly on the winning side, we need to make that option once again to be in the place where the struggle has to continue with those who have not gained their human rights, who don’t have their democratic system” (49:00). Rather than ethereal narratives about democracy, human rights, secularism, and the Enlightenment, McGeoch continues, theology should instead attend to and accompany the lived reality of those on the underside of modernity: those who experience xenophobia, racism, patriarchy, and colonialism.
The Theology of the Cross
Liberation theology contests the triumphalist narratives of European modernity that preach the relentless advance of progressive norms, human rights, democracy, and free markets. For these narratives mask or advance a totalizing system of domination. As Santiago Slabodsky writes:
The religious dictum from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘Convert—for your own good—or I will kill you,’ lived on in subsequent translations: during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in a cultural key, ‘Civilize—for your own good—or I will kill you,’ and, in the (late) nineteenth and twentieth, in an economic-social format, ‘Develop—for your own good—or I will kill you.’ Finally, the overtly political dimension was added in the (late) twentieth and twenty-first centuries: ‘Democratize—for your own good—or I will kill you.’ These were programs of forced inclusion (which ‘altruistically’ saves, civilizes, develops, and finally democratizes non-Europeans), but were predicated on complete control of bodies and knowledges under the threat of—or under actual—genocide (103).
Christian liberation theology challenges Christian communities to stand with those who are left outside of modernity, whose very lives and communities are faced with extinction. Raheb concludes: “the revelation of Palestine is that you find God in unexpected places…. It’s not that the almighty God is there and will fix everything, it is that when you think everything is lost that a new start is possible.” (53:56).”
