Theology in the Raw - A Christian Approach to Understanding the Narratives about Israel-Palestine: Dr. Ben Norquist

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Dr. Ben Norquist is the director of the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East (NEME). Ben is a researcher and public organizer. Inspired by his study of higher education in Palestine, Ben currently works on the ways educational and epistemological structures develop responsively to physical landscapes, especially those that are highly configured and imposed. He us the coauthor of Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination coming out with IVP Academic, fall, 2025. -- If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe to my channel! Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw Or you can support me directly through Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Visit my personal website: https://www.prestonsprinkle.com For questions about faith, sexuality & gender: https://www.centerforfaith.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest today is Dr. Ben Norquist, who is the director of the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East, or NEMI, as it often goes by. Ben is a researcher and a public organizer who's been following and researching the events in Israel-Palestine for over 25 years, including he did a PhD at Azusa Pacific and wrote his PhD dissertation on higher education in the land of Palestine. I mean, Ben has a, I've gotten to know him over the last several months and he's just got a thorough knowledge of the history of politics of Israel-Palestine, but Ben is a

capital evangelical Christian. So his focus is always ultimately on a gospel centered approach to peace in the Middle East, not simply understanding the political situation for political sake, politics sake. Anyway, he's the coauthor of a forthcoming book called Every Somewhere Sacred, Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination coming out with IVP academic in 2025. Ben will also be leading a breakout at the Exiles Conference alongside Munther Isak and Soon-Chan Ra. He told me the other day, he's like,

is it okay if Soon-Chan Ra joins me in the breakout? I'm like, why we got Soon-Chan Ra? He's done lots of amazing work as well. It's good, this is a tough thing. Like I wanna say, you're not gonna wanna miss the breakout. The only reason why I hesitate is there's a few other breakouts that I also think you're not going to want to miss. So yeah, you'll just have to choose wisely. I wish I could be at all three of these or all four. I

think we have four breakouts. Anyway, if you want to register for the, uh, exiles of Babylon conference and hang out with people like Ben and others, uh, and myself, uh, the allgenrad.com, all the information is there April 3rd to 5th, it's right around the corner in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I just absolutely cannot wait. It's my favorite time of the year when so many awesome people gathered together at Exiles. Okay. This conversation, we do talk all about history, politics of Israel-Palestine. I know I've had on several guests to address this as well. What I love about Ben is, man, just his, he's so gracious and so thorough in his understanding and has just been in this conversation for so long with this really robust gospel-centered focus.

So yeah, we mix it up a bit. So excited for you to join us. Please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and Dr. Ben Wood Norquist. Ben thanks so much for being on the all drama, man. It's been good getting to know you over the last several months. You've been a huge help to my own thinking in so many ways and excited to have you on the show, man. Thanks, Preston. It's a joy and honor to be here and really appreciate our conversations. And yeah, I've been learning a lot from you too.

So good stuff. So you founded and are, what's your title? The president of the network of evangelicals for the Middle East? Yeah, I am the director. I'm not a founder. So this thing has had some life before I came to it. But yeah, I'm the director of the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East, or NEMI as we call it.

Okay. So what led you to what to be a part of this? I mean, there's got to be a backstory here. Yeah, for sure. So NEMI is kind of Motley Cr crew. We call it a network of everyday Christians and pastors and artists and researchers. All of us evangelicals, you know, we're at least kind of at a theological perspective and kind of our cultural identity identifies evangelicals, if not politically, you know, that term has baggage. I was going to say the term probably needs to be defined. I'm assuming it's to separate Nimi from maybe a much more progressive, liberal branch of Christianity. Maybe share some of

the same passions and concerns, but you're doing so from a theologically evangelical... Conservative place, yeah, evangelical place, that's right. And yeah, we're concerned, I would say, with the way that the evangelical church in the United States has engaged with and narrated about the Israel-Palestine conflict broadly, and especially about Gaza, you know, in the last year and a half. It's been deeply concerning the kinds of truths that our fellow evangelicals in the United States have been willing to acknowledge or not acknowledge about what's been happening there. But so, for like, kind of personally, I came to this work after doing a PhD in higher education and studied the

Palestinian higher education system. Oh, that was your PhD. That was my dissertation. Yeah. Yeah. So Palestinian education. Wow. Yeah. Higher education. So it was a case study about, a regional case study about Palestinian higher education in Bethlehem. This is funny because we're talking offline about Palestinians and education, high value. I didn't realize this is your dissertation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm speaking out of that background.

So give us a short snapshot. Why would you want to study that and what did you find in your dissertation? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so, I mean, just at kind of a practical level when I was picking my topic and my question, this topic sits at the intersection of two things that I'm passionate about, education and Palestine. And so, it fit from that perspective. But kind of digging into some of the substance, I was really interested in how higher education, you know, we all kind of have in our heads what it's about, what it's for. We've conceptualized this thing called higher education. How does that change under the really very different conditions under which Palestinians

live? Conditions of a military occupation in the West Bank. Palestinians live in lots of different places. There are Palestinian citizens in Israel. There's a global diaspora, but thinking specifically of Palestinians who are in the West Bank, which Israel militarily controls and in which there's this pretty aggressive settlement movement of Israelis who are coming in and setting up life inside of the West Bank. And it creates a lot of tension and pressure for Palestinians who live there. So I was asking, what do those conditions, what does that context mean for how Palestinian

educators and learners go about their work as educators and learners? It was a life-changing project. That was a few years ago. Even before that, I grew up in an evangelical home and community and churches. And we were, I would say, nominally Christian Zionists. So it was not a big part of how we talked about our faith. But when Israel and or Palestine was in the news, then it would come up. That would trigger conversations, sermons, things like that. I remember when I was 10 or 11 years old in the 90s,

this was the era of Oslo. My Sunday school teachers taught us all to fold paper cranes, origami cranes. Cranes, these birds are a symbol of peace. And they had us folding these during the lesson every week, all year long, until we had thousands of them. And then we put them all together into this chandelier. And my church sent that chandelier as a gift to the Israeli Embassy. So it was definitely in the air. And then when I was 25, maybe 26, I heard a story, I heard someone tell a story about a little Palestinian girl, nine or 10 years

old who was walking home from school one day in her Palestinian village in the West Bank. And a soldier, not a Palestinian soldier, foreign soldier from somewhere nearby, probably 18, 19 years old, an Israeli soldier who was there as a part of the military occupation of the West Bank fired a rubber bullet and it struck her in the back of the head and killed her. I remember hearing that story and it gripped me, not necessarily because of the injustice of it or the tragedy of it, although that was certainly there. It was that I thought of myself as knowing a thing or two about this part of the world, having grown up in a context that paid a lot of attention to the Holy Land,

both the kind of biblical history of it and the modern, you know, we sent a chandelier to the Israeli embassy because we were excited about the idea of peace in the land. So I thought I knew. And then I heard this story about this girl. I realized it was the very first time I had ever heard a story in my life about a Palestinian who was named and humanized. And it made me wonder, like, why have I never heard this story or this kind of story in my 25 years of really intense study about the Holy Land? And it set me on a kind of journey and that was 25 years ago. Wow, golly. And since then, you have, like, is it been like you've been following all the events that have unfolded over the last 25 years?

And I assume you've been over to Israel, Palestine several times? I didn't make my, I didn't get to Israel, Palestine until I started my doctorate, my dissertation. And so my trips over there have largely been for research purposes. But then just this last year, I started working with the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East. And so now my travel pertains to that work. Tell us about the work of Neemi. What's your nine to five? What projects do you guys do? What are you working on?

I know you guys are really good. I mean, I'm just hearing about the story that affected you so much, and we've all had stories affect us, and you guys are so good at telling stories. Tell us about the reason behind that. Yeah. So, NEMI exists to help evangelicals, American evangelicals like us, approach this topic more holistically and with deeper roots in the ground of reality. We look out at the way that kind of the American evangelical church has engaged with Israel-Palestine in recent decades and are concerned about the level of influence that American Evangelicals have over the lives of real people who they,

you know, the vast majority will never meet in the Middle East, in the Holy Land, you know, at different levels. That influence is at the governmental level. We have really powerful evangelicals making decisions on US policy that affects the United States' relationship to what's going on over there. Guys like Mike Huckabee and Mike Pence before him, and a lot of friends of evangelicals too, like Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik, who have said things like, you know, Palestinians don't exist, and there's no such thing as an occupation, you know, and who are making these statements that are really inflammatory some of the time. The money that we send as a church,

above and beyond the billions of dollars every year of our tax dollars that go to Israel, the Evangelical Church in the United States also sends millions of dollars voluntarily to Israel, maybe even more kind of concerning to Israeli settlements. And there's, you know, a kind of cottage industry of evangelical groups going over to volunteer their labor in Israeli settlements in the West Bank as well. And then the moral support that we offer as a church to, you know, in problematic ways

to injustice that's happening there. So that's kind of what is concerning us. So our work, to get back to your question, is to help American evangelicals as evangelicals, you know, not compromising our theological convictions, but really like returning to them. Returning and asking, what does a Christ-centered, gospel-centered life and approach to Israel-Palestine, what should it look like? Because we don't think that what we have right now is that. Yeah, I want to back up real quick and just maybe open up some of these terms you've used for somebody that may not know the full

significance of them. So settlements and occupation. It actually took me a while to really get, I had to read a lot of history. I'm like, oh, okay. So that's why this is really profoundly problematic. This is how I found out a few weeks ago that I actually stayed in a settlement during the second Intifada. Isn't that funny? I mean, it's not funny that-

I didn't even know what a settlement was. I didn't know if I was in the West Bank or in Israel. I didn't know anything. I didn't even know that we were in the middle of the second Intifada. It was just a neighborhood. Just stay there. I had some relatives actually that lived there. And I just found out there, I'm like, where was that place that we stayed? I looked at the map and I'm like, oh, and

I said the line. I'm like, wait, that was a Jewish neighborhood. It was beautiful. I mean, all is stone and beautiful. And I looked and it's like, well, that's in the West Bank. I'm like, wait, it was a large Jewish neighborhood in the West Bank, that is settlement, right? I mean, yeah. Yeah, totally. So it's just a good, I mean, there's, you can be, you can go to Israel, Palestine, be so just shielded from any kind of alternative, like from the, trying to use, let me use neutral terms,

from some of the deep complexities that exist in the land. I lived for four months outside of Abu Ghosh, which was a Palestinian village in Israel, not Palestine. And I didn't realize that the hill I used to wake up and look at was right where the border was in the West Bank. Oh, on the other side. On the other side.

Now, this is 1999, so the wall was actually not actually up. And that was between the two Intifadas. So it was a relatively peaceful time. This is the fall of 99, a year before the whole incident on the Temple Mount with Ariel Charon. Anyway, so for somebody that... Can you give us just a quick background of what are settlements? What is this occupation? And why are these... Because if you've hinted that, these are very problematic.

Yeah. Well, so I'm happy to do that. Before I do, you mentioned that you could be in the land and not have any clue about some of these things. Some of that is intentional. And I like to, I often when I, I'm in the land and I'm like, you know, we're talking about this particular thing with people. I think of the Truman show. Have you ever seen that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like this constructed world that's not real, but it presents itself as such. The way that roads are laid out so that you see some things and not other things, the way that communities are structured so that you see some of them and don't see others, is a part of the way that the story is told, you know, and constructed. So occupation, so if you go back to 1967 and, you know, what we call the Six Days War, Israel

conquered the West Bank and Gaza and several other territories as well. And they gave the Sinai back to Egypt. They've legally, according to their own rules, annexed the Golan Heights. And they've militarily stayed in the West Bank and until a while ago, Gaza as well. Then they withdrew from Gaza and set up a perimeter. But so occupation just refers to the continued military control of those territories that they conquered in 1967. Now, somebody could say, and I'm gonna try to represent

kind of a pushback or the other side as best and fairly as I can. They could say, well, I mean, that six days war was started by several Arab countries. And yeah, they conquered these territories because these were hotbeds of terrorism and they had to control these territories. And they conquered it. It was war. They conquered it. I mean, America conquered, we conquered California or whatever. I don't even know if that's true, but that's just what happens. When people fight against you, you fight back and you win and you get the

territory and especially if they keep shooting rockets at you all the time, yeah, we need to have military presence here so you don't keep killing us. Is that a good representation of- Yeah. Oh, I hear that all the time. Yeah. I mean, I guess what I would say though is that kind of a response is getting a little bit beyond a kind of definitions of terms and facts. Even someone who might say that could or should at least be able to agree that what is happening is an occupation. They might feel the need to say, yeah, but the occupation is justified.

Okay. That's it. Okay. So nobody disagrees that it's an occupation that is not good. Yeah, there should be very little disagreement about that. That's pretty factual and it's defined legally and all that. Now, there are, I should say, there are people out there who even will disagree with the legal definition of an occupation. And so they'll say, no, this is not a military occupation. But 99% of the world's countries consider this to be an occupation and whatever else. So, yeah, that's kind of occupation. And from the ground, what that looks like is Palestinians who have lived in, who are living in the West Bank, when they go from one town to another, they have to

use roads that Israeli soldiers stand at, and they have to go through the checkpoints. And Palestinians are subject to being detained by the Israeli military, and then they're subject to Israeli military courts. You know, those are facts on the ground. There's no dispute about that. And that is, that's what I mean when I say military occupation. Settlement is beyond that. So if a military occupation is kind of the military control of a territory, you could

do lots of different things with that territory. One of the things that has been happening since almost day one of the military occupation of the West Bank is Israeli civilians have been moving into the West Bank to live there. And that also is not, that's just factual. That's, you know, you can argue about whether that should be happening or whether it's permissible to be happening, if it's moral or legal or whatever. And those conversations are out there. But the kind of the fact remains that, you know,

there are hundreds of thousands now of Israeli civilians who have moved into the West Bank and are setting up these neighborhoods and communities, one of which you stayed in. Some of them, a lot of them are kind of arrayed around the Jerusalem metro area. And then there are others that are like on hilltops throughout the West Bank, and connected to Israel by roads, some of which only Israelis are allowed to use. And some of them are actually inserted right inside of Palestinian cities and towns like Hebron. There's an Israeli settlement presence in the Palestinian city of Hebron as well, which is why Hebron is

one of the most violent, high tension places in the West Bank. Just to answer your question, that's what the settlement of the West Bank is. Is that illegal or why is that, just what I asked what might seem like a dumb question? Why is that wrong? Like Palestinians can, I mean, 20% of Israel, people live in Israel, Palestinians, right? So yeah, Palestinians can live in Israel. Why can't Israelis live in Palestine? Yeah. So Palestinians who are Israeli citizens can live in Israel. Palestinians in the West Bank cannot move into Israel. They have to fight really hard to even be able to visit family in Israel or religious sites in Israel or whatever. But yeah, so I mean, on a legal perspective,

moving a civilian population into an occupied territory is illegal. By international law or something? International law. A lot of those conversations are, legal conversations revolve around that. And then there's just the moral question of what has been, what is the human result of this settlement of the West Bank? It's a lot of bloodshed at the end of the day. It's a lot of tension that results from Israeli civilians moving into the West Bank and taking people's land, taking people's space. I don't know if you've been,

this documentary that just came out hasn't been distributed widely in the US yet. No other land is all about that, about this Masifur Yata Palestinian area in the Southern West Bank where Israel has been pushing, pushing, pushing to get, like to displace them off their, their family land.

People are dying. People are being shot and killed. Yeah, there's a lot of them. And I don't know the statistics. I probably have them written down somewhere. I've just set settler violence. Like these, I don't want to say every single settler is violent or even most of them are violent, but there's, does seem to be a kind of

an aggressive spirit that underlies somebody who would go and move. There's a statement being made, we're going to go and move into this land that belongs to us, and we might even take over. It might have previously belonged to Palestinians, and we're going to grab the land. It's not like they're coming in with a peaceful spirit, right? I mean, is that fair to say? Is that too big of a generalization? I mean, I've seen, you know, you could go online and just see, you know, settler violence. I mean, it seems to be pretty common. Israeli society is a complex society. And so, you've got all sorts. You know, that should go without saying, of course. People who believe in the image of God and the preciousness of all people, God came and

died for the whole world, should, with just a little bit of reflection, realize all societies are complex societies. And we do an injustice to them and even to like our evangelical convictions when we reduce them to one thing. And that is part of what's been so concerning to Nimi is that we as American evangelicals, when we look at this complexity over here, we reduce it so that we can like wrap our heads around it and understand it and feel less morally disturbed. And even we reduce it in order to take sides too. So a lot of what we've been doing at NIMI over the last year and a half is we've been listening really carefully

to what our brothers and sisters here in the US say about Israel and Palestine, what we're observing is this reduction of complexity and detail into partisan stories. I meet so many people who don't feel fulfilled in their current stage of life, but they struggle to make a change because they're just unsure of where to start and who to trust. If this is you, then I highly encourage you to check out an awesome opportunity for you to give the gift of English to the next generation of students in amazing places like Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. So for over 40 years, an organization called

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then you need to check out ELIC. You don't need an English or teaching degree to go. ELIC will train you, whatever experience you do or don't have, just go to ELIC.org forward slash TITR. That's E-L-I-C dot org forward slash TITR to learn more. How would you unpack the story that has been told to and from the evangelical church in America, but let's just say since October 7th. Yeah. So, we've been listening across kind of different swaths of

evangelicals and where they are in society, you know, at the level of government. I mentioned Huckabee and Pence and, you know, that kind of cast of folks and the things that the kinds of things that they say, like there's no such thing as a Palestinian, you know. Huckabee also a few years ago said, this is not between, you know, right or left, this is between heaven and hell, good and evil, you know, the Israelis are represent heaven, you know, in that scenario for Huckabee. So, at the government, governmental level, then you've got kind of organizations and influencers. And this is where like Christianity Today has done a lot of writing and a lot of they've produced podcasts about, you know, kind of telling their take on

what's happening in Gaza. Russell Moore, you know, within the Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, within the first couple days, I think, published an article calling for moral clarity and for American Christians to stand with Israel. And Mike Cos know, who's also at CT wrote several articles and produced a whole limited series podcast, you know, kind of tell with his take, you know, his version of the story. And David French, who's, you know, an evangelical and now a columnist for New York Times has been out there. Richard Land, the executive editor of the Christian Post, called this conflict a clash between civilization and barbarism. So, you've got that whole tier, and then you've got the level of individuals and churches

at a kind of congregational level, many of whom, I'll say at least for churches and pastors, many of whom, not all, but many prayed for Israel after October 7th as they should, you know, appropriately so, but then have been silent since then, and you know, for various reasons, avoiding the topic that feels too complicated or like a live wire. Like if you touch this, you're going to lose people at your church. So that's what we've been noticing and listening to that whole kind of group across those different tiers.

What is the story that we've been hearing? What's coming out from those places? And there are some kind of high-level themes that we've been noticing. One of them I mentioned is this kind of story, this account of Israel and Palestine that is oversimplified and flattened. And in particular, the roles the different groups play in the story have become predictable, almost like the cowboy and Indians. As soon as, when I was growing up, if there was a cowboy and Indian story on TV, I knew before I even pressed, turned the TV on, who the good guys were. Yeah.

You know, and we can recognize that there's a, that that's like a cultural mythology that, that is so oversimplified that it, that it doesn't correspond any, any longer to reality. And something similar is, something similar is happening with the way that American evangelicals have been talking about this. It's like a cowboy and Indian story. Palestinian absence among the narrators, Cosper's podcast called Promise Land, six episode series. He interviewed a lot of different people for that and includes snippets from those interviews. Depending on how you count 14, 15, maybe 16 different people that he interviewed, four of them were Palestinians.

All four of those Palestinians appeared in one single episode. Throughout the rest of the series, whenever Palestinians came up, Palestinian history, people were being characterizing Palestinians, it was non-Palestinians talking about them. And that was, so that's kind of a case in point of a larger pattern that we saw, you know, across these different media. So. And if I recall correctly, it's been a while since I listened to it. The four conversations with the palace, the conversations with the four Palestinians was very clearly like had a dis, I had a, I don't say combative. It wasn't combative. He was listening and trying to understand, but it was very much, you know, he would kind of push back and question

and, and, and then, and then give, you know give his own kind of response. You get the audio of him talking to the Palestinians and then he kind of records later his thoughts on it. So, it definitely had a very adverse tone to it, whereas his conversations with all the Israelis was just whatever they said was never questioned. It was framed as here's the true story. Yeah. What I found to be kind of problematic, well, not kind of, quite problematic was, you're getting to it here. First of all, for just his willingness to allow all, like, so much characterization of the Palestinian story by non-Palestinians. And then he grouped all of the Palestinians into one episode. And actually, I would use the word combative with, at least with regard

to a few of those interviews, he was combative with them, actively challenging things that they said. And then, you're right, it wasn't like that with the other interview subjects, but what I like to compare is his interviews with the settler. He interviews an Israeli settler, and he's settler and he's joking around He's chummy the settler says some deeply problematic things do like very racist violent things and and

You know those go unchallenged so So that is an example of what we're noticing when we talk about Palestinian absence from among the narrators of these stories. American evangelicals are inviting Israelis to collaborate with them in telling the story. So Israelis, Jewish folks, there are a lot of Israeli narrators in American evangelical storytelling about Israel-Palestine. There are fewer Palestinians in those places. And the storytelling, you know, way more about this than I do. But I read John Mersheimer's book, The Israel Lobby, who, you know who it's got over a thousand footnotes. He's a professor at University of Chicago,

a premium, I mean, just one of the experts in foreign policy. Brilliant. I mean, some people are like, oh, he's wrong, he's terrible. How can you cite John Mersheimer? But it's like, you just show me the evidence. I remember I posted that book. It's a really fat, I mean, one of the most thoroughly researched documented books, just showing how much money and

power is behind so many things with regard to Israel and America and the connection there. I mean, deep, I would say pretty dark things, but specifically the money and power behind telling the narrative. The narrative is a very, very well-funded narrative, and alternative narratives are also funded to not be told. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so the kind of fancy academic word that I've used to talk about this in the past is that this is, it's not just a conflict of physical force.

It's an epistemological conflict as well. For hearts and minds, over understanding, how will this conflict be understood, how it will be framed? So yeah, as we've been thinking about that very question, we've we actually distilled down the story behind these stories. The kind of meta narrative that seems to be animating a lot of these podcasts and articles that we've been reading. And I wrote it down. It fits in three paragraphs. Can I read it to you?

Yeah, go for it, yeah, yeah. Okay. The conflict is religiously based and ancient. The history of the Jews is one of suffering and victimization, and Israel is threatened on all sides by hostile neighbors. And Palestinians have rejected every offer for peace. In fact, Palestinians teach their children

to hate Jews and Israel from an early age. So while Israeli society is fundamentally virtuous, democratic, Palestinians unfortunately are basically violent as they grow up in a culture of violence. So what else should Israel do than to maximize its military power and maintain control over the Palestinian people and land for its own safety? After all, God brought Israel back to the land after 2,000 years in exile, fulfilling land promises and prophecy from the Old Testament. According to those promises from God, the whole land belongs to Israel.

And God will bless our country if we stand with Israel and curse us if we don't. Indeed, God is planning for the state of Israel to play a significant role in his plans for the redemption of the world in the end times. On October 7th, the evil that was allowed to grow in Gaza broke out. Since then, the tunnels have forced Israel's hand, regrettably leading to too many

civilian deaths. But this is actually their fault. They elected Hamas after all. And Hamas is fundamentally dedicated to destroying Israel and the Jews wherever they are in the world. That is the cowboy and Indian story that sits behind so much of what we have interacted with and read over the last year and a half from American evangelicals. Yeah, that was really good, like scary good, the way you retold that story. Yeah. So what? I've heard it so many times.

I mean, obviously people can sense that you disagree with that narrative probably on so many levels. What's wrong with that narrative? What's wrong with it? Yeah. So the main problem is what it omits. There's a lot in there that has echoes of truth. So the second line was- Like in a cowboy and Indian story, you can tell a cowboy and Indian, like,

my fellow cowboy was scalped by this violent Indian in this village and they raided our, without talking about, we took over their land and committed genocide on the people. Committed genocide on the people. So, so much of what's in there on its face, there's a lot of truth to it. But you can tell a lie through omission, of course. You can mislead through omission. So that's the main problem. That's the main problem. So what it does is it's selective about what reality to pay attention to.

And so you know i need me what we're trying to do is help evangelicals realize oh this this is such an incomplete story. That were that were buying into realizing that it's a powerful story. We love cowboy and Indian stories. They help us feel comfortable about the world and about being on the right side. But actually stories that are that distilled and partisan are a part of the problem. It's why so much effort and money is spent on storytelling, on framing up in people's minds what is going on because of how powerful those stories are. But like I said, they ignore so much of reality. So here are some of the things that are a part of the wider world of Israel-Palestine

that don't fit into this story. So we'll call these counter-stories. The very first line of that mythology that I just told is that it's an ancient conflict. The relationship between the Jewish minority in that part of the world and the Arab majority until the British mandate, until you know, the Ottoman Empire fell apart, you know, after World War I, the British came in and started executing or implementing the policies around the Balfour Declaration. Until that point, those two communities did

not have anything like the relationship that they have today of violence and conflicts and oppression. They got along more or less fine? Yes. And it's not that those identities were meaningless. It's just that they meant something different. And there were other identities that they shared in common that in many contexts were more important to them than the differences between those identities. For example, their relationship to their colonial power, the Ottomans, foreign power that was dominating

both of those communities in common. And so that identity as local residents versus foreign oppressors was more salient in many contexts than the differences that they had between each other. All that changed with the British mandate. When the British came in and started implementing the policies of the Balfour Declaration, the Jewish community was being systematically empowered to be, for this land to become a homeland. Immigration was being facilitated by the Brits in the first decade of that. Then all of all of a sudden that difference became salient

and quickly became salient with violent consequences. So that's a story that doesn't fit the mythology. What else? I guess what I'll say is there are a whole range of stories within these two insights. The insight that Israeli society is complex and the insight that Palestinian society is complex. And this mythology that basically actually says no, Israeli society is not complex, it's basically virtuous, and Palestinian society is not complex, it's basically vicious, is challenged.

As soon as you start seeing Israeli cruelty, and as soon as you start seeing Palestinian virtue, and I could tell countless stories of both. I guess, I don't know if you wanna get into specific examples or not, but. Yeah, share a couple. Okay, okay, so Israeli cruelty is a reality in this world. And that's not to say Israel is a cruel country.

It's not to say, it's not to like let the pendulum swing the other direction and say, you know, Israel is not complex. It's basically vicious. But it's to recognize that there are really vicious elements within this complex Israeli society complex Israeli society that are allowed to kind of run amok. You were hinting at some of them among the especially more radical settlers, some of whom were systematically stopping and attacking aid medicine to Gaza, is really settlers just ransacking them. And there's video footage of that. That's pretty easy to find.

I remember watching that. Totally. There are some soldiers from the state Taman military prison where a lot of prisoners from Gaza were taken and detainees. They're currently being prosecuted because, and sorry about this, it's not family friendly, but because of a rape that they, you know, they raped a detainee. And there's footage of this too. This is actually why they're being prosecuted because it's, they're dead to rights, you know. But I bring that up to

say that's not the only testimony I've heard of Palestinians being raped in Israeli prisons by Israeli guards. It is a theme, it's a pattern. I guess maybe last story, there are so many that need to be told and that as difficult as it is, the one-dimensional picture that we have of Israel needs to be challenged, you know, among American evangelicals. But I'll just tell the story of Hind Rajab. She was a six-year-old. I think of Abir Arameen, the girl whose story I heard when I was 25. When I hear Hind's story, she was, her family was from Gaza City, from the north, and they were trying to comply with an Israeli directive to evacuate. And so her parents put her into a car with her aunt and uncle and three cousins and they

were trying to comply with these instructions. But en route an Israeli tank opened fire on their car and killed Hinn's aunt and uncle and two of her cousins immediately. And her last remaining relative alive in that car with her 15-year-old cousin called the Red Crescent Society to plead with them to send an ambulance to take them away. And the dispatcher, you know, that was common practice as I understand it was that in these kinds of situations the Red Crescent Society would collaborate with the IDF, coordinate with them in order to to send an ambulance somewhere and take them. But this older cousin was then

shot and killed as well. So here was this six-year-old girl, hind, in a car surrounded by the bodies of her relatives. She found the phone on the floor and there is a recording of her, a three-hour recording of this six-year-old girl pleading with the dispatcher to send someone to take her and that she was so scared. And the Red Crescent Society was able to get through to the IDF. They finally had approval from the IDF to send an ambulance. But when it was about a block away, Israel bombed it and killed the two medics inside. And it wasn't until several days later, a week, two weeks later that Hind's relatives were able to make it to that car and Hind was killed as well. The last three hours for life were terrifying. And that story is also common. The story of Palestinians in Gaza who were

trying to comply with instructions, who were shot and killed along the way, is also common. I can't tell you how many of those stories I've heard. So that's one side of this picture. Another side of Israeli society that we also don't hear about a lot is the minority within Israeli society, but really compelling minority of Israeli human rights champions for Palestinians who are Israelis. And we don't hear a lot of those stories as well. That's a part of the complexity that we should come to appreciate. Um, and then kind of the, the, the last piece that I just want to introduce of this larger reality that doesn't fit into, um, the myth, um, is Palestinian virtue. You know, the myth talks about Palestinian terrorism and brutality, which is a part of

the truth of Palestinian society. But Palestinian virtue, like our friend, Dawood Nasser, who lives in Area C in the West Bank, it's a part that Israel is particularly, you know, working hard to displace Palestinians from. His family farm is there in Area C. And so they've been in court for decades trying to preserve their property rights to their farm. And he, whenever we visit, he always talks about refusing to be enemies. And he connects that to, like he roots that in his Christian faith as a Palestinian Christian. I sat on my last trip, I sat down with a former combatant who is now a peace activist and

co-founder of an organization called Combatants for Peace, a Palestinian guy, you know, former militant, who is now working with former Israeli soldiers who have also come out of that and who are seeking another better way, realizing the impotence of violence to solve these problems. There is an irony to the clash of narratives when you think about, and I think you can verify this, that among the fairly large Christian population among Palestinians, nonviolence is one of the most nonviolent branches of Christianity I've ever seen. I mean, it's just, it's kind of built into the gospel ethos of Palestinian Christians. Like, it's just...

I had learned so much about nonviolence from Palestinian Christians. And the irony that the narrative that American evangelicals have largely believed, and American evangelicals are, and I'm just trying to speak objectively if you look at global Christianity among the more violent branch of evangelicalism. And so, the narrative that those are barbarians, those are violent people over there. I mean, that's really odd if somebody is looking on from the outside, like, wait a minute, here's a bunch of largely oppressed Christians who have, who are your family, by the way, who are responding to nonviolence.

You guys over here are, you know, very much just war, or even not even if it's just, it's just if it gets the job done. You can look at video footage of Gaza, 80% level, 40, 50, 60,000 people dead and it's like, well, they started it and we need to get Hamas. We need to slaughter, like slaughtering women and children to get rid of this evil is a good, like this is, no though this is a good thing. Like, and we can get down to weeds there, but if you just look objectively

at the two different approaches to violence, and yet one, the one that's way more violent is accusing the other ones of being barbarians, prone to violence. It's just, that's just, I don't know, like when you look at it, it just shows how powerful a narrative can be that somebody would actually frame things in that way. Yeah, it's a little bit like Truman Show.

Like you live inside of the narrative in your head and like it interprets all data for you. And it's really hard to challenge the reality of it or to look beyond the set to realize that there's this wider world that has been shielded, you've been shielded from. Did you see the testimony from the American doctors that were working in Gaza and the X-rays that they said, and I don't know the

number, it was like off the, I don't know if they said every kid or almost every kid that came in had, I mean, sniper bullets to the skulls. So it's one thing, okay, collateral damage, you're inside a building, they bombed the building because they're trying to get Hamas and you die because the rebel crushes you. But a sniper bullet to the head to a child, like a child, not like a 17 year old, but like a five year old, six year old, seven year old, like that's, there's no, like, that's a, you're targeting, not just civilians, children. You've targeted a person, right?

When you're talking about military marksmen and there's a bullet in someone's head, that was an intentional shot. And the American doctors said this was pervasive. Like dozens of doctors said this is, where should we see this like all the time? And they even had like x-rays and stuff showing people. The other thing that has concerned me, you know, when I think about like, here we are, we are followers of the Prince of Peace. So, what does that mean for how we understand and interpret and morally evaluate

what's happening? What's like the other aspect of the war, you know, in Gaza That's been deeply concerning to me is the Israeli use of artificial intelligence in creating targeting lists The the the level of destruction and of human devastation in Gaza in the last year and a half dwarfs previous incursions into into Gaza and part of the reason for that is the use of AI. It's created an industrial capacity for killing in a short timeframe. And we all, when I use chat GPT,

I find three, four, five, six mistakes in the results. three, four, five, six mistakes in the results. When you're talking about using AI to generate targeting lists for killing, that is high stakes. And as an evangelical, we should all be deeply concerned about that. Isn't one called Daddy's Home? Is that one of the programs?

And Lavender and yeah, one other one. But yeah, read more about that on 972 Magazine on their website. They have two investigative pieces that they did last year and the year before about these AI systems that are just deeply concerning. But the other thing too that- 972 is Israeli too, right?

That's not- Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's an Israeli source. So if that matters to you, if you feel like you can trust that more for that reason, great. Read 972. Yeah. One of the other things that I've run across as I'm interacting with my friends and family and evangelicals out there is that they kind of collapse the whole region down

into one place. So the kind of logic that they apply to Gaza because it's a war zone in their minds. They import in their conversations with me about things that are happening in the West Bank as well. And so when someone is targeted by a sniper and shot in the head in the West Bank, they're still thinking of it as like a collateral damage kind of context, because it's all a war zone, right? But the West Bank is not the same as Gaza. And so, you know, Shireen Abu Akhla, Palestinian American journalist who was shot

and killed in 2022 in the West Bank by an Israeli sniper, while she was wearing her press vest. There was no like bombing there was no immediate in the immediate context war going on. She and her colleagues all of them were wearing their press vests were just there and this the sniper shot her and and and she that was a headshot as well she was. shot her and she, that was a headshot as well. She was killed by a shot to the head by an Israeli sniper. Different context. So, be able to parse some of that out would be good as well. I want to, because I could hear, I could feel people thinking, Preston, you're doing, you're

just doing the opposite. You're highlighting all, singling out the bad things that some Israelis have done. And you haven't even mentioned hundreds, over a thousand people that were brutally slaughtered on October 7th, and all the rocket fire and all the violence on the other side. Like you're just flipping the narrative in the other direction and giving a one-sided picture. Can you speak into that? Is that... Yeah. Well, so our encouragement isn't to become partisan on the other side. It's to leave space for a holistic approach that accepts the true things that are true about the current narrative while adding these other pieces in to our understanding.

You're filling out the complexity of both. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I think that that's needed. And when I think about the Jesus who sat with the Samaritan woman, we follow a Lord and Savior who's world was constructed

in a way that he didn't have to do that. And his disciples were surprised that he did, that he would walk through Samaria and sit with this person. So I follow a Lord and Savior who goes out of his way to find the person who's been omitted and to like take the path less traveled in search of the Samaritan women of this world. And for American evangelicals, we should be asking, who are our Samaritan women? And for a lot of us, it interfaces with, interacts with the Israel-Palestine conflict

in particular ways. Let's turn the corner a little bit and focus on, like, what does it look like for a gospel-centered approach to thinking about these things. Because we could get locked… I don't want to diminish at all the political situation and the political history and all these things. But I don't want to, yeah, if people said, well, Ben, are you pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli? It sounds like you're pro-Palestinian. I think people still have those kind of binary categories. But as a Christian, right, I mean, we view the world differently than you're on this side and therefore you're against that side. So help us unpack, as you think, like a Christian of how we should think through the situation. What does that look like?

Yeah. So as an evangelical, I'm pretty excited about the role of Jesus and the gospel in life and in, you know, God's relationship to the world and all of that. One of the things that I think that the gospel does is recapitulate or re-emphasize this earlier commitment and insight to the value of humans created in the image of God. Jesus came to die for the whole world and God loves the whole world. So I think it's a very evangelical thing for us to ask, what parts of the world have we been overlooking or ignoring?

And that's not to say, so just, yeah, Israelis are equally dehumanized by the, or Jews in particular are equally dehumanized in a lot of the ways that American evangelicals talk about Israel and Palestine. They're also instrumentalized towards this story, flattened out, presented as something less than complex humans, you know. And that's, you know, the dehumanization of people, no matter who they are, should be a problem to us as Jesus followers. How does that interface with this particular topic? I think that what it means is that American evangelicals should be making common cause with peacemakers who are Palestinians and Israelis. There are Palestinian peacemakers and there are Israeli peacemakers.

Instead of saying I'm pro-Israel or I'm pro-Palestine, which actually just perpetuates the problem, we should be saying I'm pro-peacemaker. And so that's one of the things that we're trying to do at Neemee. I've learned to not call this like a conflict or even frame it as to, and again, here I am talking about kind of the political situation, but as you know, I've, we're not talking about two equal powers.

We're talking about a massive power differential. And I don't know, I still think, how does this factor into, I mean, again, so Israel is the, you know, a thousand times more powerful, right, than any kind of Palestinian resistance. It is the occupying power. It is the, you know, funded by several empires. I mean, it's in on and on it goes. So, it's not like, oh, these two people just can't get along. It's like you have a massive power differential. Is that, okay, here's my question. Is that important to keep in mind as Christians are seeking to empower peacemaking. Or is that a worldly way of looking at it?

Because I could see a secular activist really stressing that power differential, and almost excusing any kind of Palestinian violence is nothing but resistance toward the evil, powerful person. So that's more justified justified than, you know, they decided we can get lost in secular categories. I just wonder, would Jesus frame it this way? Yeah, I'll let you... Totally. Yeah. So, you know, Jesus lived in an occupied context as well. You know, the Roman Empire militarily controlled that region, you know. And so there were military governments, you know, and soldiers and those trappings were a part of the world that he moved in. And he sometimes ignored it. You know, he was interested in

the kingdom of God and inviting people into this kingdom of God and to express, you know, what does it mean that it's a small seed that's being planted now that's going to grow and get bigger, really challenged the kind of political assumptions of his disciples who thought that he would come and, you know, be a convincing critic of the Roman Empire and that he would lead them in rebellion against the Roman Empire. All that stuff was kind of disappointing to them. That wasn't actually his goal. So, on one level, as followers of that Lord that kind of confounds our expectations, we should, like, it doesn't matter. You know, people are deeply valued by God and they should be deeply valued by us, whether

they're Roman soldiers or Samaritan women. On that level, it doesn't matter. I will say, if you are interested in peace and peacemaking, then being able to understand the dynamics of unequal power is important. So on another level, I think for people who really are serious and want to kind of be part of the solution, being able to recognize what power does and unequal power in different scenarios is really important. Just let me give you one example. This is coming from a researcher on terrorism. Audrey Cronin has written extensively on this, and one of her books is called How Terrorism Ends. And she just asked

this research question. It's a deeply Christian question in my mind. How does terrorism end? If we're really interested in peace and peacemaking, we should be able to ask questions like that and then follow the data. That's a really Christian research agenda, I would say. What she found is that forceful repression of these kinds of movements rarely works. It doesn't end these kinds of movements. In fact, sometimes it gives more fuel to the fire. She's got probably six or seven different things that do, factors that she sees at play in ending terroristic movements. And so many of those factors relate to understanding the kind of underlying reasons why people would consider taking up arms and addressing those reasons.

and addressing those reasons. So like a structural approach that recognizes the role of power. So on that level, I would say it's critical to recognize that kind of stuff. That's what a lot of people got upset when people responded to kind of the moral clarity response to October 7th, this is black and white, good and evil to say, well, this was an evil act and profoundly so. And this isn't the first inning, this is the eighth inning of a very long baseball game and to not understand the context leading up to this, won't do anything to help us make choices that will prevent something like this from happening again.

But people got, I mean, you mentioned context and people think you're a Hamas supporter. Right, right. No, really what I'm in favor is of recognizing reality, a wider, more complex reality than our reduced mythology allows for. Pete Slauson Ben, I can't wait to have you at Exiles. We have you talk about this, Ben, and your team, right? You're going to be leading one of the breakouts

at Exiles. Can you give us a little, yeah, chum to waters? What are you going to be talking about? Ben Fies I can't wait. So, we're going to be talking about What are you gonna be talking about there? So we're gonna be talking about how American evangelicals have engaged with and responded to Gaza as a crisis of discipleship. So we're gonna talk about our, it's kind of like what we've been doing. We're talking about our own response

to what's been happening over there as something itself that needs to be paid close attention to. And Munther Ishak is going to be with me in that breakout as well as Seung-chan Ra. So, that's going to be a really rich conversation. And then can I make a couple of other invitations as well? Sure. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Neemi is collaborating with a whole network of evangelical organizations to bring a major conference on Israel and Palestine to Chicagoland September 11, 12, and 13. And we would love for anyone who wants to dig more deeply into this to join us there. It's called Church at the Crossroads.

And the website's not up yet, but it's going to be churchatthecrossroads.com. So in a few weeks, invite people to go check that out. And then- I've already blocked it out. I'm going to be there. You have. You're going to be there. That's awesome.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, 100%. I've been talking to Daniel about it. So- Gotcha. I've already blocked it out on my calendar. That's great.

Yeah. And then the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East has resources too that we invite folks to engage with. We have a curriculum that just launched a few months ago for individuals, churches, small groups, homeschool groups to dig more deeply into this. It introduces key history. It introduces who are the Christians of the land, who are the Jews of the land, who are the Muslims of the land, and then turns towards some of these, some of the political context and the conflict. And then we also have recommended resources

for people who want to learn. One of the things that I ask, especially if the myth, the narrative, the template that I read earlier is the one that all of your media choices, your favorite podcasters and whatnot adhere to that one, expand your sources, just read more widely. And you can go to our website, neeme.network, neeme.network.network. slash resources. And we've got everything from kind of Christian Zionist articulations all the way to more progressive.

And we put it all out there for you to look at and consider. Yeah, that's great, man. Yeah, you have to read beyond just your traditional, whatever you want to call it, legacy media, mainstream media. There's so much really good independent journalism out there, an explosion obviously of podcasts and stuff. Once you get beyond the mainstream media outlets, which again, there's financial incentives

for telling a certain narrative that lie behind a lot of these places. Once you go to independent outlets, you just start getting a whole different picture of things. I've been listening to a lot of breaking points ever since you mentioned it to me a few months ago. Breaking points, there's drop site news. They do a lot of stuff. There's some that are a little more activist and are definitely one-sided.

Now, I agree with a lot of what they're saying and I cross-check it with more, maybe less activist-y sites, places like The Gray Zone, Max Blumenthal, who's made this kind of his life mission, and others. Yeah, there's just so much out there, and podcasts. There's just so much out there, and podcasts. Oh, man. I'm excited to see you next month in Minneapolis. April 3rd to 5th, Exiles, you guys. Still some tickets available.

If you can't make it out to Minneapolis, you can stream it virtually as well. Ben, thank you so much for your heart and the work you're doing. And thanks for being a guest on The Elgin Arraw. Thanks, Preston. And I'll just encourage your listeners. Ask who are your Samaritan women and let's go find them. Hey, so I'm launching a new season on the podcast, the doctor and the nurse.

World renowned brain coach, Dr. Daniel Lehmann joins me as a co-host as we dive deep into the mind and the brain of everything high performance. I've been fascinated for years as I've worked with top athletes, high powered CEOs, Hollywood actors and all high performers in all types of different fields of how they breakthrough pressure, ignite drive, how they overcome distractions, how they put fear on the bench, how they tap into flow state and just dominate all these different areas of high performance. So on this season, my good friend, Dr. Daniel Lehmann will break down what is actually going on in the brain in these different areas, and I will give actionable tools to be able to use

and apply in your life. So buckle up, the doctor and the nurse on The David Nurse Show coming at ya. Hey friends, Rachel Grohl here from The Hearing Jesus podcast. Do you ever wonder if you're truly hearing from God? Are you tired of trying to figure it all out on your own? The Hearing Jesus podcast is here to help you live out your faith every single day,

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