There are wounds that span generations. Wounds carried not merely in flesh but in memory, in longing, in the very landscape of a people’s story. For Palestinians (Christian and Muslim alike) these wounds have become a defining mark of existence: dispossession, displacement, erasure, occupation, dehumanization, restriction, suspicion, and the daily struggle to live with dignity in a land that holds both their history and their hope.
To speak of this isn’t to enter a political argument; it’s to name a human reality. And naming reality is the beginning of every Christian act of truthfulness.
Yet in much of the Christian world, Palestinian suffering has been minimized, spiritualized, or dismissed altogether. Their longing for safety, dignity, freedom, and belonging is too often framed as a threat, their grief as propaganda, their identity as questionable, their narrative as suspect. This pattern (where an entire people’s humanity is questioned or erased) is what we call anti-Palestinianism.
This is a companion piece to “A Cruciform Witness Against Antisemitism” (click here to see that piece too).
What Is Anti-Palestinianism?
Anti-Palestinianism is hostility, erasure, dehumanization, or prejudice directed toward Palestinians as Palestinians. It includes denying the existence of the Palestinian people; dismissing their historical presence in the land; treating their suffering as fabricated; portraying them collectively as violent, irrational, or untrustworthy; or refusing to acknowledge their equal dignity and right to live in freedom, safety, and flourishing.[1]
Anti-Palestinianism manifests whenever a people’s story is silenced, their grief is ignored, or their longing for justice is treated as illegitimate. At its heart is a refusal to see Palestinians as fully human: neighbors, image-bearers, and fellow children of God.
This isn’t a political category. It’s a moral one.
It’s the sin of refusing to see the face of Christ in the Palestinian other.
The Call to See: Recovering a Cruciform Vision of the Human
Christians are summoned to see the world through the cross: to view every person, every people, every suffering face through the self-giving love of the Crucified One. A cruciform vision refuses the narratives of power that dominate the world; it resists every ideology that redraws human beings into categories of “danger,” “problem,” or “enemy.”
A cruciform church looks first at Christ on the cross and hears him say, “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”
To see with a cruciform imagination is to let the cross recalibrate the way we look at wounded places and weary peoples. It’s to let divine self-giving love reshape our instincts, loosen our defensiveness, and open our hearts to the ones whose pain our culture finds easiest to ignore.[2] The cross refuses selective compassion. It calls us to attend to every cry, especially the cries that get dismissed, politicized, or buried beneath the noise of competing narratives. So, when we speak of seeing cruciformly, we’re speaking of a way of beholding the world that mirrors the One who carried sorrow without flinching and held humanity’s ache without preference or partiality.
Seeing cruciformly means acknowledging that Palestinian suffering is real, even when that reality disrupts the stories we’ve grown comfortable rehearsing. It means refusing the temptation to sanitize, relativize, or explain away the trauma of communities who’ve lived under layers of displacement, dispossession, and daily precarity. There’s nothing righteous about averting our eyes from a neighbor’s wounds simply because their anguish unsettles our politics. Cruciform vision won’t allow it.
Seeing cruciformly also means naming Palestinian grief as valid, even when some would prefer it remain unspoken. Grief that’s silenced doesn’t disappear; it hardens, festers, and isolates. A cross-shaped faith listens to lament with humility, honoring the tears of those who carry generational sorrow, fractured families, and dreams deferred. Such listening isn’t a threat to anyone’s security or dignity; it’s a witness to truth.
To look through the lens of the cross is to affirm Palestinian dignity as inherent: not bestowed by any state or system, not earned by performance or politics, but held within every person as a gift of the One who breathes life into dust. This dignity persists even when it’s denied, ignored, or violated. Cruciform witness insists on seeing what public life sometimes refuses to see.
And seeing cruciformly means confessing that Palestinian humanity is non-negotiable, even when public discourse treats it as expendable. Whenever a people’s humanity becomes conditional, we’ve strayed far from the One who healed enemies and lifted the lowly. A cross-shaped vision draws us back, teaching us to resist dehumanization in all its forms.
To see cruciformly, then, is to let love take the lead. It’s to let compassion grow deeper than fear, truth stronger than propaganda, and solidarity more enduring than convenience. It’s to stand where the Crucified One stands (in the hard places, with the hurting ones) until our vision aligns with the holy, steady gaze of grace.
Anti-Palestinianism survives wherever Christians fail to see.
“To refuse to see a people’s suffering is to refuse the face of Christ.”
This vision isn’t sentimental. It’s the costly clarity of love. It asks the church to allow the wounds of others to pierce our indifference, to enter our prayers, to shape our moral imagination. It calls us to look at the cross and then look again at every crucified people in our world, including Palestinians.
The Sin of Erasure: When a People’s Story Is Silenced
Anti-Palestinianism thrives in silence.
It appears when Palestinian identity is dismissed as invented, when their connection to the land is denied, when their stories are filtered through suspicion, when their cultural, religious, and historical presence is erased from memory and map.
It appears when Palestinian Christians are treated as theological footnotes in a land where their spiritual ancestors first confessed Jesus as Lord.
It appears when the world describes the land as empty, despite the fact that families have lived, loved, planted, worshiped, and buried generations there.
Erasure isn’t merely historical. It’s spiritual. It’s the refusal to honor the God who plants every people in their land and breathes into every community a story worth telling.
“Erasing a people’s story is a form of violence; remembering them is an act of Christian fidelity.”
A cruciform people resist erasure because the gospel calls us to remember:
remember those experiencing poverty and hunger,
remember those experiencing occupation and oppression,
remember those experiencing abuse and dispossession,
remember those experiencing silencing and violence,
remember the stories that powerful empires would rather hide and bury.[3]
Critique, Conscience, and the Difference Between Justice and Antisemitism
Christian fidelity demands the courage to name injustice wherever it appears, even (and especially) when that truth is uncomfortable. To critique a government’s actions isn’t to condemn a people, a culture, or a faith tradition. It’s simply to practice moral clarity. This distinction has been affirmed not only by theologians and ethicists across centuries but also by Jewish scholars themselves, most clearly in the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021). The Declaration insists that holding a state accountable for its policies isn’t antisemitism, and that “criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism” or “evidence-based criticism of Israel’s laws, policies, and actions” doesn’t constitute hatred toward Jewish people.[4] The line between critique and prejudice is real, but it’s neither thin nor fragile.
Israel is a state with political power, military capacity, and responsibility under international law. Naming the harm endured by Palestinians (including displacement, occupation, systemic inequality, and restrictions on movement) isn’t an attack on Jewish identity; it’s a refusal to let suffering go unacknowledged. When Christians speak truthfully about these realities, they’re not entering a partisan debate but responding to a biblical imperative: to defend the oppressed, to honor every person’s dignity, and to resist systems that diminish life.
The Jerusalem Declaration reminds us that antisemitism is a hatred directed at Jews as Jews. Justice-oriented critique is directed at political actions, structures, and systems. Confusing the two only protects the powerful and obscures the plight of the powerless.
In fact, refusing to lament Palestinian suffering for fear of being misunderstood can itself become a form of moral evasion. Genuine solidarity with Jewish communities must walk hand-in-hand with genuine solidarity with Palestinians. One love doesn’t cancel the other.
To tell the truth about injustice isn’t to abandon compassion for Jewish neighbors; it’s to honor the prophetic legacy they’ve given the world: a legacy that calls us all to seek justice, love mercy, and refuse every form of dehumanization.
Distinguishing Prophetic Critique from Anti-Palestinianism
Christians must learn the discipline of moral clarity.
A cruciform life doesn’t ask us to suspend moral judgment; it invites us to deepen it. Scripture calls us to name injustice, confront wrongdoing, and discern between paths that lead to life and paths that lead to harm. It’s never unfaithful to critique destructive actions taken by any person, community, or authority. Moral clarity is part of discipleship. Truth-telling is part of love. And a commitment to justice requires that we hold all people, including ourselves, accountable for the ways we wound others.
But critique becomes something else (something corrosive and contrary to the way of the cross) when it slips into anti-Palestinianism. This happens when the actions of a few are projected onto an entire people, as though a whole community can be reduced to the worst choices of some. Such sweeping judgments flatten complexity, erase nuance, and create distance where compassion should dwell.
It becomes anti-Palestinian when Palestinians are cast as inherently violent or somehow less deserving of the rights every human should enjoy. When rhetoric frames a people as fundamentally suspect, morally deficient, or perpetually threatening, it’s no longer the work of truth-seeking; it’s the work of dehumanization. A cross-shaped imagination refuses these narratives because they contradict the very heart of the Gospel: a Gospel that insists every life bears divine breath.
Anti-Palestinianism shows itself when Palestinian claims to safety, freedom, and dignity are dismissed or downplayed. When legitimate longing for justice is recast as instability or danger, or when political calculations mute calls for fundamental human rights, we betray the biblical call to stand with the oppressed and to hear the cry of those pushed to the margins.
It’s anti-Palestinian when Palestinian voices are excluded from the conversations that determine their futures. Silencing a people (whether through fear, bureaucracy, or paternalistic narratives) undermines any honest pursuit of peace. A cruciform community listens first, especially to those whose agency has been ignored or constrained.
And it becomes anti-Palestinian when Palestinian grief is treated as exaggerated, manipulative, or suspect. Grief is sacred. Tears reveal truth. When a people’s sorrow is interrogated instead of honored, we drift far from the One who gathers every lament with tenderness.
To walk the way of the cross is to cultivate a moral discernment shaped by compassion, not caricature; by justice, not fear. It’s to critique what harms, while refusing to diminish the humanity of those who suffer. In a time of hardened narratives and quick condemnation, cruciform love calls us back to honesty, humility, and the fierce defense of every person’s dignity.
“Critique is moral; dehumanization is sin. Christians must know the difference.”
Christians can and should speak with moral clarity about violence wherever it appears. But a cruciform witness insists that judgment never collapses into hatred, suspicion, or collective blame. Justice without love becomes vengeance; love without justice becomes sentimentality. The way of Christ holds both together.
The Witness of Palestinian Christians
One of the great tragedies of Christian discourse is how seldom Palestinian Christians are heard within the global church. Yet their witness is essential: both spiritually and morally.
For centuries, Palestinian Christians have carried the gospel in the very land where it was first preached.[5] They have endured injustice, displacement, discrimination, and loss, yet have preserved a vibrant theology of hope. Their voices echo the biblical prophets: calling the church to truthfulness, justice, reconciliation, and nonviolent resistance grounded in the love of Christ.
They remind us that the Christian story in the land isn’t foreign, imported, or recent. It’s ancient, rooted, and alive.
Their cries aren’t abstract. They’re concrete:
We long to live in dignity.
We long for freedom.
We long for safety.
We long for peace for all our neighbors.
We long to raise our children without fear.
These longings are profoundly Christian longings.
To ignore Palestinian Christians is to silence part of the body of Christ.
A Cruciform Approach: What the Way of Jesus Requires
A cruciform approach is a way of seeing and living shaped by the cross.
A cruciform church doesn’t measure its faithfulness by its influence, its reputation, or its proximity to the powerful. It measures faithfulness by its willingness to stand where the Crucified One stands: near the wounded, the weary, and the forgotten. To live this way is costly. It requires a community shaped not by fear or ideology, but by the love that poured itself out for the healing of the world.
Such a church centers the suffering of others rather than the comfort of the privileged. It listens before it speaks, attends before it defends, and draws near to those most easily overlooked. It recognizes that the Gospel always moves toward the broken places, and so it follows that movement with trembling courage.
A cruciform church breaks cycles of vengeance by absorbing pain with mercy. It refuses to mirror the world’s violence back into the world. It bears witness to the truth that retaliation never brings restoration. That mercy (costly, patient, persistent mercy) is the only force strong enough to interrupt the spirals of harm that tear communities apart.
It refuses narratives that demand an enemy. Whenever public life is reduced to sides, camps, and foes, the cross stands as a quiet but unyielding contradiction. The cruciform community won’t let fear harden into suspicion or suspicion harden into hatred. It remembers that every person, even the antagonistic or mistaken, carries a story held by divine compassion.
Such a church resists every theology that turns people into problems. It rejects doctrines that justify exclusion, diminish dignity, or baptize injustice. Instead, it seeks the kind of theological imagination that sees every person as a bearer of divine breath, every community as capable of renewal, and every conflict as a place where truth and grace can meet.
A cruciform church renounces violence as a means of healing. It trusts that peace can’t be manufactured through coercion or domination. It knows that wounds don’t close when inflicted by force, but when met with courage, repentance, and tenderness.
It prays for those on every side of conflict: not as a way of avoiding hard truths, but as a way of keeping its heart from calcifying. Prayer expands the soul until it can hold the grief of all.
And it advocates for justice without hatred. It names wrongs clearly, defends the oppressed boldly, and confronts systems honestly, yet always with the compassion of Christ. Its work isn’t to win, but to heal.
A cruciform church embraces the world’s wounded ones with open arms, trusting that love, poured out without fear, is still the path by which new creation breaks in.
“To be cruciform is to be shaped by the self-giving love of Christ on the cross: where power becomes service, justice becomes mercy, and reconciliation becomes the final word.”
A cruciform witness doesn’t minimize evil. It confronts it.
But it confronts evil without becoming evil.
A cruciform church refuses to baptize injustice with religious rhetoric. It refuses to sanctify inequality. It refuses to call oppression “peace.”
It stands alongside every people who suffer: not with weapons, but with presence; not with slogans, but with solidarity; not with despair, but with resurrection hope.
The Christian Mandate: Love Your Palestinian Neighbor
Jesus did not give us permission to choose who counts as neighbor. Neighborliness isn’t a matter of geography but of willingness.
The command is clear:
“Love your neighbor as yourself.”
And even more radically:
“Love your enemies.”
And even more shockingly:
“Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”
A Christian ethic of neighbor-love doesn’t let us choose which neighbors count. It doesn’t ask us to measure whose story is easier to hear or whose suffering is simpler to explain. It pulls us toward the places where compassion is contested and where human dignity is debated. It insists that love must be wide enough, brave enough, and patient enough to hold the pain of every community caught in the shadows of conflict.
Such love refuses prejudice against Palestinians. It confronts the quiet biases that shape our imagination, the inherited assumptions that narrow our compassion, and the political narratives that make some lives appear less grievable. Neighbor-love dismantles these distortions because it knows that fear never tells the truth about anyone.
Neighbor-love listens to Palestinian voices, not as an act of charity, but as an act of justice. When a people’s experience is minimized or ignored, the body of Christ becomes less whole. Listening restores sight. It opens space for truth to surface, for testimony to be honored, and for healing to begin.
To honor Palestinian humanity is to affirm that no circumstance, ideology, or history can erase the God-given dignity carried in every life. It’s to recognize the image of God in every Palestinian child, whose future shouldn’t be determined by violence, displacement, or despair. Their laughter, their learning, their flourishing, all of it belongs to the sacred.
A Christian ethic of neighbor-love prays for freedom, safety, and dignity for all people in the land. Such prayer isn’t sentimental; it’s a spiritual protest against systems that diminish life. It’s a refusal to accept that injustice is inevitable.
And this love steadfastly rejects narratives that demonize one people to vindicate another. The cross exposes such thinking as false, for it reveals a love that refuses to weaponize suffering or scapegoat entire communities.
To love our neighbor (every neighbor) is to stand where Christ stands: with truth, with mercy, with courage, and with a compassion big enough to heal what fear divides.
“To love Christ is to love the Palestinian neighbor; the two can’t be separated.”
Neighbor-love isn’t partisan.
Neighbor-love is cruciform.
Neighbor-love asks:
Who is being wounded?
Whose humanity is being denied?
Whose story isn’t being heard?
How can we stand alongside them in the spirit of Christ?
The Spiritual Discipline of Lament
Before Christians speak, we must learn to weep.
Lament isn’t weakness. It’s the refusal to let the world’s pain be normalized or silenced. Lament is how Christians tell the truth: before God and before one another.[6]
A cruciform witness doesn’t begin with arguments or positions; it begins with tears. It starts in the place where words tremble and fall quiet, where the heart can no longer pretend that suffering is abstract or distant. Lament is the first language of love in a wounded world. It refuses to rush past sorrow. It refuses to let politics dilute compassion. It lets grief soften us until we can see others as God sees them: beloved, precious, irreplaceable.
So, a cruciform witness against anti-Palestinianism begins with lament for every life lost. Every life (named or unnamed, noticed or forgotten) matters to God. To grieve these losses is to resist the lie that some deaths are less tragic or less worthy of mourning.
It laments every home destroyed, each one a universe of memories, meals, and stories. When a home falls, a world collapses with it. Lament keeps us from treating rubble as a statistic instead of a shattered sanctuary.
It laments every mother grieving. No theology is sound if it can’t sit with a mother’s tears. Their grief is holy ground. To honor it is to honor the heart of God.
A cruciform witness laments every child who’s afraid, whose nights are filled with explosions rather than dreams. Children should learn to read and run and hope, not to hide.
It laments every young person who’s known too much violence, who carries trauma too heavy for their years. Their wounds aren’t collateral; they’re a call to conscience.
And it laments every elder who dies still longing for peace. These are souls who’ve prayed across decades of disappointment, still carrying a flicker of hope for a dawn they never saw.
Lament isn’t weakness. It’s the courage to feel what the world refuses to feel. It’s the church’s first act of truth-telling. It’s how cruciform witness begins: by letting the sorrow of others become our own, trusting that God meets us in those tears and leads us toward justice, mercy, and peace.
Lament keeps our hearts human.
It protects us from despair and from apathy.
It trains our spirits to hope.
“Lord, teach us to weep where you weep and hope where you hope.”
The Hope That Doesn’t Yield
Christian hope is neither naïve nor escapist.
Hope gazes directly at suffering: not to explain it, but to proclaim that suffering isn’t the final word.
Hope believes that the God who raised Jesus from the dead will raise justice from the ashes, peace from the ruins, and new life from the rubble of history.
Hope sustains the Palestinian parent teaching their child to dream.
Hope strengthens the peacemaker refusing to hate.
Hope empowers the church to speak truth without fear and love without limit.
A cruciform church proclaims a gospel that refuses despair.
A Cruciform Prayer
O Christ,
who walks among the wounded,
teach us to walk with you in the places where pain is real and hope is fragile.
Break our addiction to comfort
and draw us toward those who suffer.
Free us from the fear that blinds us to another’s humanity.
Deliver us from the lies that divide and the hatred that destroys.
Give us the courage to name injustice and the tenderness to seek healing.
Let our witness be shaped by your cross,
our hope anchored in your resurrection,
our love wide enough to embrace every neighbor,
including our Palestinian neighbor.
And make us instruments of your peace
until justice and mercy meet
and all your children flourish.
Amen.
Bibliography
Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001.
Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988.
Jewish Community Relations Council. “Criticism of Israel vs. Antisemitism.” https://jcrc.org/blog/criticism-of-israel-vs-antisemitism/
Kairos Palestine. Kairos II Document: A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide. Bethlehem: Kairos Palestine, 2025.
Kairos Palestine. Kairos Document: A Moment of Truth: A Word of Faith, Hope, and Love from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering. Bethlehem: Kairos Palestine, 2009.
Raheb, Mitri. Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible Through Palestinian Eyes. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2014.
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/ (2021)
Zogby, James J. Palestinians: The Invisible Victims: Political Zionism and the Roots of Palestinian Dispossession. Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1988.
References
[1] Zogby, Palestinians.
[2] Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation.
[3] See the Kairos Document and the Kairos II Document.
[4] See The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and also Jewish Community Relations Council, “Criticism of Israel vs. Antisemitism.”
[5] Raheb, Faith in the Face of Empire.
[6] Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination.
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