By Gerald McDermott, First Things. (Photo Mohammed Ibrahim/Unsplash)
Book Review: Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza, Munther Isaac, Eerdmans, 279 pages.
The Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, was, according to British historian Andrew Roberts, “one of the largest terror attacks in history,” leaving 1182 dead and more than four thousand wounded. Civilians were targeted with precision: Children were shot in front of their parents, women raped, elderly set on fire, young and old shot or hacked to death. There were gang rapes and sexual mutilation of both living and dead. Two hundred and fifty-one hostages were taken.
Hamas, the Islamist terror group that organized the attack, declares in its charter (article 7) that its aim is to “fight the Jews and kill them.” This intent to destroy a whole people group has been called “genocide,” from the Greek genos for “tribe/race/nation” and the Latin caedere, “to kill.” In 1948, the United Nations approved a convention that defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
For some months now Israel, conducting a war against genocide, has been accused of practicing its own genocide through this war. This is the charge that animates a new book by Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem. Isaac’s argument in Christ in the Rubble is that Israel has “systematically killed a large number of Palestinians, including children” by “target[ing] a significant part of the Palestinian population. . . . If fifty thousand [reported by Hamas] isn’t mass killing, what is?”
Munther contends that the deaths of many people implies systematic intent and therefore genocide. But everything in the Gaza war suggests the absence of this intent.