Theology in the Raw - An Israeli Settler and Palestinian Christian Become Friends. Fares Abraham and Daniel Klein

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Fares Abraham is a Palestinian Christian and Daniel Klein is a Jewish Christian. Both Fares and Daniel grew up minutes from each other in the West Bank, and yet they were worlds apart—Fares lived in occupied Palestine and Daniel live in an Israeli settlement. Both of them share about their very different journies, which end up in similar places, culminating in a friendship, which offers a glimpse of what peace between Israelis and Palestinians could look like: not through politics or slogans, but through the reconciling power of Christ, honest truth-telling, mutual dignity, and a shared commitment to justice, mutual flourishing, and peace for all who call the Holy Land home. Daniel is the author of My Freedom from Zionism and Fares leads Levant Ministries.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

As a Palestinian, I carry deep love for Palestine, and because I'm a follower of Jesus as well, I take Jewish history and trauma seriously as well. And I acknowledge that Jewish suffering is real. There's no question about it. But at the same time, the Palestinians carry deep trauma too. Many Israelis do not fully understand the Nakba, or they don't understand the ongoing reality how most Israelis don't even acknowledge there are Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation. Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology Rabbi.

Guests today are Ferris Abraham, who is a Palestinian Christian, and Daniel Klein, who is a Jewish Christian. Both Ferris and Daniel grew up minutes from each other in the West Bank, and yet they were worlds apart. Ferris lived in occupied Palestine, and Daniel lived in an Israeli settlement just down the road. Both of them share about their very different journeys, which end up in similar places, culminating in a friendship, which offers a glimpse of what peace, between Israelis and Palestinians could look like, not through politics or slogans, but through the reconciling power of Christ, honest, truth-telling, mutual dignity, and a shared commitment to justice, mutual flourishing, and peace for all who call the Holy Land home. So please welcome to the show, Ferris, Abraham, and Daniel Klein. Ferris, welcome back to The Algeria. Daniel,

welcome to The Al-Jirah for the first time. So excited about this conversation. I just finished rewatching a conversation you two had on Ferris's channel. Go check it out. What's your channel? Ferris, a little promo here. Is it just? The Ferris Abraham podcast. All right. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're not watching this, if you're listening, you got an amazing studio, man. I'm jealous. But yeah, you guys, I was just in awe listening to your guys's stories talking about how you grew up, how you ended up becoming friends. And it's just, it's pretty mind-blowing. So why don't we start there? You guys grew up minutes apart, yet in many ways, on two different planets.

Would that be an accurate way to kind of describe it? Well, we start with you, Ferris. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Preston. It's always good to see you, my friend. I'm just always getting inspired by your podcast, by your writings, by your ministry. So thank you so much for hosting us. You know, I first heard Daniel on a podcast one night before bed.

usually I pick something very boring to help me fall asleep, but Daniel's story actually kept me awake. And my wife was listening too because, you know, he grew up in Ephraat, which is an Israeli settlement, just across this giant wall, you know, on the other side of that wall in Bethlehem, where I grew up, on the other side of that reality that we knew so well.

So our worlds were never supposed to intersect. We lived like minutes apart, but walls, checkpoints, restricted roads, and the realities on the ground by the Israeli occupation kept our people separated. But when I heard Daniel acknowledge what those walls and checkpoints and the daily humiliations have done to the Palestinians, I paid attention. And when I heard him say that, you know, he became a follower of Jesus. that even intrigued me more. And I knew that I needed to reach out to him. So I called him. And, you know, to me, Daniel's story reflects something deeply, you know, biblical.

Jesus was a Jewish man crossed into Samaria and met the Samaritan women. So he crossed boundaries. Other refused to cross. And in a similar way, Christ has brought Daniel and me together, not around politics, for sure, but around the gospel. So now we are friends and we're partners and we share a deep, deep desire to keep Jesus at the front and center

as we work and pray for our people in the land to be healed, to be restored, and to be able to live again in peace and dignity. Oh, man, thank you for that, Daniel. Sorry, sorry, Ferris. Daniel, so you grew up Israeli Jew on a settlement. Minutes away from Ferris, Tell us about that experience.

What's it like growing up in a settlement in the West Bank? Yeah. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. So I grew up for 22 years in a settlement, a religious Zionist settlement in the West Bank. So almost as deep inside of these different systems as you can imagine. And as far as said, you know, the wall that separated us was a spiritual, psychological, mental somatic wall that essentially made Farris invisible to me.

I didn't even have a concept that Farris existed. And in the world that I grew up in, the idea of a Palestinian, or the phrase that comes along with Palestinians are that Palestinians don't exist. One way to understand that is there are just these Arabs that happen to live here, but they don't have a sense of identity. they don't have the sense of personhood. They're just there. And I lived in a very insulated bubble.

So my settlement is deeply established. So many people imagine settlements as caravans or as depicted as these kind of crazy people that are moving into people's homes, when in fact the real reality of the settlements is that it's a giant built-out machine. And so there are currently about 700,000 people that live in occupied territories.

And the town that I lived in has about 10,000 people, part of a bigger block of settlements. And the infrastructure is completely built out. We have mid-rise buildings, single-family homes, all infrastructure of life, banks, restaurants, cafes, parks. And so for me, the transition from the settlement to what people might call Israel proper was completely seamless. For me, it felt like I was just growing up in this idyllic suburb.

playing baseball with my friends on the hilltop. And, you know, in the background, we could hear the Moazin playing, and even that had these stories associated with it. They're playing it loudly to bother us. There's always a story associated with it, but the concept of Palestinianhood was one that they didn't exist. And that is the root of the dehumanization, that these people aren't even real.

Was that said explicitly? Was it implicit? Like, do you just remember that? binds that under that viewpoint being in the air? Or were you like taught it at school? How did you come to view Palestinians is just non-existent? So Palestinians don't exist is a phrase that's used even today at the highest levels of government. And so this is a, it's a fairly commonly held belief.

Even amongst the mainstream politics, this is, we're talking at a systems level. So at the system level, Palestinians don't truly exist. So I was absorbing that from all aspects of life. You could hear it on the radio. You could hear it at home. You could hear it in school. And that's kind of your reality. And when you're programmed from such a young age to not see the other person as human,

and then you add all these different layers of propaganda, they all want to kill us. They hate their children. They don't even exist. Essentially, your program, so that any information that comes in is automatically. rejected. So the reality that people live in is really as such that they can't see them. Right. So when you're, you know, to walk in a person's shoes who's born into this kind of system, anything that rejects these programs just goes right out the window and enforces all of

these core beliefs that you're growing up with that you believe are there for your safety, for your existence. These are existential feelings that we, that we feel when the idea of a Palestinian comes into, it comes into our body and comes into our system. And your shield, like you, so you had zero interactive interaction with a Palestinian growing up? Like, is it, are you that walled off? I mean, yeah. So I like to share that within our settlement, there were low wage workers that would come in. So you could see them boxing groceries or they would be wearing yellow vests and doing gardening work. But to understand what their lived reality was or who they were or where they went back to at night or why they didn't show up when they had curfews.

I didn't even have this concept that we could have a holiday in Israel and all of a sudden, all the Palestinians are under curfew. So why is there nobody on the road? So for me, this was just the way that we lived. And so the interaction was with these workers in our settlement. And when I would drive from the settlement, say, to Jerusalem or towards Tel Aviv, there were times that we would share the roads together. so I would see Palestinian license plates. I would see them waiting in lines at the checkpoints,

but in terms of a grounded human interaction to actually understand them and their experience, that's something that I never had, honestly, until after I deconstructed Zionism. Okay, okay. Farras or Ferris? I go back and forth. What do you prefer?

I think you told me you don't. Do you have a preference? Ferris is fine, you know. What do you, I mean, do you prefer Farris or? That's how it's pronounced, right? I mean, most, most Americans call me Ferris, but just fine. You're good. All right, all right.

It's pronounced a little differently in Arabic, but, you know, fairs. How do you say in Arabic? This is good. Farris. Farris. Farris. Yeah. I can't.

The R role is tough for us. Well, okay, on the flip side, here you are growing up. You see one of many Jewish settlements around. What's the perspective of Jewish settlement? It's from a Palestinian perspective. I mean, to add to what Daniel said, Palestinians are invisible to not only Israelis, but also to all the tourists that they come or pilgrims

that comes to visit the Holy Land. I mean, there is a whole system in place designed to shield the outside world or visitors or tourists coming to Israel or Palestine to shield them from interacting with Palestinians. For most of the world, Palestinians are invisible, despite the fact that there are about 7 million Palestinians living also alongside 7 million Israelis or 7 million Palestinians versus 7 million Jews.

So the population is equally divided. But to most people, Palestinians are invisible, and it's such a tragedy when you think about, about it because Palestinians are indigenous people of the land. I mean, think about my family. I come from a Christian family who have always maintained Christian presence in the land since probably the early church. We're not imported people from Arabia. I mean, they always, the other side always, you know, try to attach the word Arab to us. So it kind of dilute the Palestinian identity. But Palestinians have always lived in the island.

land farm, the land, you know, had great culture, great people, great cuisine. And we have churches that date back literally to the, you know, the third and fourth century, great history and culture. So it really breaks our heart when not, you know, we're not talking about Israelis seeing us, not seeing us, but also our own brothers and sisters who come from the West, who come to visit, our churches that we worship in and we've been worshipping in for the past 2,000 years, and we are invisible to them. But regarding the Jewish settlers who are coming in, I mean, it's also like very ironic

to see the system that we are in making room for a Jewish settler, a Jewish immigrant, who has the right to immigrate from all around the globe, regardless of where they live or where they come from, or whether they have an actual connection to the land or not, every Jewish person on the face of the earth has a legal right to move to Israel or to occupy Palestine and claim a biblical right even, not just a legal right, but they can claim a biblical right.

And the Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from their homes and displaced and dispossessed in 1948 and again in 1967. And again, now in 2023, 2024, in Gaza, they do not have any right to go back to their homes. And this is such the tragedy of the tragedies. I mean, this is the deepest sorrow that every Palestinian carries. in their soul that they cannot even go back to the houses that they grew up in. We have many friends and many families who are not even allowed to go back. But in the meantime, we see many of these settlers, they moving in from, and most of them, you know, ironically, they hold dual citizenship.

They come from New York. They come from Florida. They come from different parts of Europe. and they move in specifically before ideological region to these settlements which are illegally built under international law. So it's such an irony and it's such a tragedy of the reality on the ground. To see it as what it is, it breaks not only our heart, but it also breaks the heart of God. Because it's just a grave injustice. the fact that settlements are illegal according to international law, from what I looked into that, that seems true. Is there a counterargument? Because that seems so blatant. She's so blatant. Like, how can that happen if it's a violation against international law? Is it, can you steal man the case that this is still okay? The only one I could think of is, well, but this is still a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. The Bible trumps, whatever secular.

nation makes up laws or whatever. Is that, is some sort of theological Zionism the argument to get around that these are illegal? Or is it just like, yeah, it's illegal, we don't care. I mean, so people who use these arguments, they use it because it's whatever becomes politically, legally, or theoretically convenient, and they revert to whatever framework they want to operate in. So if you want to, if you want to think about it legally, you cannot consider, make the case for these legal settlement. And if you look at it biblically, there's also no consistent basis for a biblical case for these settlements.

So people usually mix the two, jump back and forth, bounce between the legal aspect and the biblical aspect. So, and, you know, for us, even, you know, we have as a Christian, as follower of Jesus, we have to transcend all of these divides and look at, you know, the biblical, the moral. There is a spiritual dimension of this. It goes against the very character and essence of God.

Our God is a loving God, but he's also a just God. He's pro-justice. He's pro-peace. So it doesn't matter what angle you look at this issue from. You have to look at it from a misiological. and a missional and a Christ-centered lens and see what the Bible truly talks about, not any right, because none of us deserve anything.

As far as, you know, we all have fallen short from the glory of God. So we have to look at what God has done through Christ and the grace that he bestowed on his people. Did you know that 30% of Americans grind their teeth at night, whether it's a nervous habit or something you do in your sleep, it's time to join over 350,000 Americans, including yours truly,

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So as the borders changed, where we were shown in school included everything. Okay. I wasn't even aware of the fact. I didn't even understand what the green line was or what the West Bank was. I had no concept of that whatsoever. You're just living in Israel in a nice neighborhood. I'm just living in Israel. Exactly.

I mean, when I was there in 99, so a lot's happened since then, I was between the two and defaadas. But I don't even remember when I was in the West Bank and not. I'm sure we visited settlements. In fact, a few years later, I'm pretty sure I stayed in a settlement for a week. And I didn't even realize that to a year ago. I looked up like, where did I stay? I know it was outside of Jerusalem somewhere.

I'm like, it was north. I'm like, oh, that's West Bank. But it was a Jewish neighborhood. I'm like, oh, I guess it was a settlement. It's not seamless. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And as a tourist, I mean, I was always aware when, hey, we're going into, you know, a biblical site, Jericho. And hey, this is a, you know, this is Palestinian territory. So just kind of, it was just kind of like, be careful, you know, like just keep your heads down, you know. It was all just kind of somber. Like we're leaving, you know, a Jewish village going to a Palestinian village. So there was that, there was that, we did have a sense of Jewish and Palestinian different neighborhoods. And I remember hearing the term West Bank, but I didn't know what that meant. I'm like, I think it's on the east side of the state.

So why is it called the West Bank? I don't know, whatever, you know. But that, you know, 99 things were different. You know, still, there were still a lot of stuff I probably should have seen that I didn't have the eyes to see. But that's still now. It's, it's, you can grow up in two different worlds and not even really realize it. Did you ever face? I know there's a lot of talk.

And I guess I kind of want to hear both your perspectives of settler violence toward Palestinians. And there seems to be an increase in that over the last couple of years. Ferris, did you, was that a thing for you growing up? Yeah, personally? Oh, of course. I mean, I grew up in a little town down the road from Bethlehem. It's called Bays Sahur, and it's biblically known for the town of the shepherds,

the angel, abeep to the shepherds and announce the birth of Jesus. So, and that, that town is right next to many different settlements. I mean, we could see the settlements, the Israeli settlements, across the valley or across the mountain. So there were a lot of settler movements in our neighborhoods. And I lost so many friends. I mean, I mentioned a lot of testimonies of many stories on, when, in my interview with Tucker Carlson. And we have experienced firsthand many attacks by settlers. And to put things in perspective

from recent studies, the Rossing Center, which is an Israeli organization based in Jerusalem, they documented over 150 Israeli settler attacks against Christians only. So, and not counting even, know the attacks against Palestinian Muslims, which is also incredibly high, but 150 attacks on Christian living in the West Bank, living in East Jerusalem, living in Palestinian territories. So settler violence is real. It leaves deep trauma on many different segments of society, especially children. I mean, I remember growing up, if I hear a siren, if I hear an Israeli jeep patrolling our town. I mean, that meant bullets, that meant, you know, gas, tear gas, that meant, you know, it terrorized us as kids. And I was here during the second Intifada.

I was in the United States studying at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, while my parents and my family lived in Bethlehem. And my siblings and my family had to sleep on the floor to avoid the stray bullets coming through the windows. And my parents, they took my siblings to be treated for psychological trauma many times. So that leaves a huge impact psychologically, emotionally, and physically in many cases as well. So, and Daniel can talk more about these kind of settler violences and the reason behind it and why there is such, you know, deep hatred. for against Palestinians and also you know I'm Palestinian I can also speak that there are some

violent Palestinians that have carried also attacks against innocent Israelis but the you know we have to mention that you know Israel is in charge Israel is in control of the whole territory and it is it is enabling those settlers they kind of created a culture of impassioned where these settlers' attacks go unchecked and nobody is holding any settler accountable. But when a Palestinian commits an acts of violence against an Israeli, I mean, there would be severe, severe consequences against those Palestinians who came violence against Israelis. So would you say the justice towards people who commit violence is there's a deep imbalance there? Oh, huge.

I mean, Palestinian who attempts to commit a violence will be shot there on the spot, whereas an Israeli can come into your home, an Israeli settler, you know, kills, you know, and recently we've seen how a settler almost killed a dog. I mean, a chained dog, he was beating that dog to death that belonged to a Palestinian family. And nobody cared about that settler. I mean, the army comes in to protect those settlers and to provide protection and security, and nobody holds them accountable. Daniel, what's your growing up?

What was your perspective on, I don't know, the things, what's the other side of the story of what? I'm going to, I might even be more far reaching than what Farias is describing. Growing up in the settlements, this kind of violence was largely, invisible to me because the vast majority of settlers are not violent in the way that the media is depicting them. And so what Farras is describing, I never realized that this was happening because there's a small group of people that are propped up certainly by the government and the military that perpetuate these incredibly violent crimes. And I recently wrote about this that this is in a way a sort of pressure valve to get people to look at this really extreme horrible violence

without recognizing that the even more extreme violence is the occupation itself, which is affecting, well, millions of people. And the depths of the brutality of the systemic occupation and subjugation and dehumanization of the Palestinians is so far greater than what people imagine. And so within Israel, when we have this violent group of settlers that are committing these horrific crimes, most people, most Israelis will, they'll protest it. They'll say we're completely against this form of violence.

At the same time, though, they're participating at every single level in the occupation of the Palestinian people. And then we could use this extreme violence in order to disavow it and whitewash the even, you know, the bigger reality. And so growing up, not only did I, you know, was I not witness to that kind of violence, when we would hear about it, we would protest it. We would say that that's absolutely terrible without realizing that I was living on a hilltop that was also a caravan once, and now it was a city, right?

And so these really extreme settlers or, you know, the extremists are, almost a way to distract people from the even deeper reality. And so what you see there is really just the tip of the iceberg of what it's like to be a Palestinian. And Fares could speak more to that about the reality of the tiered ID system, the biometrics, the checkpoints, the surveillance, the brutal, brutal violence that most Israelis partaken, again, while still disavowing the extreme settler that you see on the news. I am on the go quite a bit these days, which means I'm always looking for snacks that are actually healthy and don't taste like cardboard. That's why I was very excited to discover Mosh bars.

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Okay, that's 25% off your first pack and 20% off your subscription of brain boosting bars delivered straight to your door. Start building brain health into your everyday life with Mosh bars. Thanks to Mosh for sponsoring this episode. People have imagined Holy Land, Preston. You know, when they think about Palestine, Israel, they always think about biblical times. You know, we want to go there and visit where Jesus walked. We want to see where he performed his miracles. And this is the system has also, the Israeli occupation system has created this tourist trail that is designed to shield people from interacting and seeing the reality on the ground right now.

The reality is that Israel has achieved its self-determination. It has created an Israel. But it's all, you know, the other side of the argument is, or the other side of the reality, I should say, that it was created on the ruins of Palestinian villages. there were 500 Palestinian villages that had been depopulated and for the state of Israel to be organized. And many people, you know, and as a Palestinian, I want to, you know, I carry deep love for Palestine and the Palestinian people. And a deep gratitude, you know, for, you know, the great history and culture. and because I'm a follower of Jesus as well, I take Jewish history and trauma seriously as well.

And I acknowledge that anti-Semitism is real, Jewish suffering is real, there's no question about it. The horrors of the Holocaust and the centuries of persecution must never be minimized or dismissed. But at the same time, Preston, the Palestinians carry deep trauma too. Many Israelis do not fully understand the Nakba. for example, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948,

or they don't understand the ongoing reality as Daniel clearly and articulated, you know, how most Israelis don't even acknowledge there are Palestinians, you know, who live under Israeli occupation with restrictions and dispossession. Gaza has become today unlivable, as horrific as, October 7 was, and we will always condemn the killing of innocent Israeli civilians, but as horrible at that was, this does not give any justification to completely and intentionally destroy Gaza or starve its people or kill 73,000 people, including the vast majority of those people who have been killed are women and children.

Many Christians have also suffered in Gaza. So under this system, you know, my own family have suffered. My wife was born and raised in Gaza, Christian. She grew up in Gaza Baptist Church. But in the meantime, many Palestinians as well do not fully understand the depth of the Jewish trauma and fear. Part of the tragedy is that the two people live so close to each other, and yet often do not understand each other's wounds. But as followers of Jesus, I believe we are called to tell the truth with compassion.

We must reject anti-Semitism, which is, I believe, most of the majority, now they're anti-Israeli policy. They're not necessarily anti-Semitism. But we also must reject any anti-Palestinian hatred. We must reject anti-Muslim hatred, you know, and we must reject violence. domination. We must reject ethnic cleansing and the very ideologies that diminish the image of God in another person. So that's how I see this. Yeah, Daniel, going back to a fair to say that the, like the Nakpa, the 47, 48, over 750,000 Palestinian refugees, many people were slaughtered, targeted,

villages emptied. And this is all, you know, prior to the 80s, we didn't really know about people that didn't experience that, didn't really know about that since the 80s. All the documents have come out. I mean, it's well documented that it was, you know, very much orchestrated and planned. What was the narrative that you grew up with as an Israeli settler, about 47, 48? Yeah, we had a very carefully constructed narrative that you could see both in the mainstream and in textbooks. And there's a common phrase in Israel called Nakabai. The Nakba is nonsense.

And this is kind of a common, we have all these little phrases and all these little ideas that are kind of installed in you, right? So you immediately, when you hear the word Nakba, you associate it with fake news, essentially. That's one way to understand. Nakba means catastrophe, right? Is that in Arabic?

Yeah. In Arabic, yeah. Yeah, it's fake news. And we were taught a very specific story, which is we came, we wanted to, peace. We wanted to divide the country. They said no. And they were war, they left voluntarily because the Arabs wanted to kill all the Jews. And they left and we won and it's ours. And that's the story. And yeah. So you have three different groups of people according to the narrative you grew up

with. You have Israelis just wanting to settle in the land, take their portion. Then you had militant Arabs that were fighting against them. And then you had all these civilians that were like, yeah, we got to get out of here. And that's where all the refugees come from. I would actually collapse that into two. There were the Jewish people that arrived, and then everybody else were the violent ones. So we love to use this they, right?

Which is also the essence of dehumanization is to create this straw man of a category and just project everything that we want onto it. So what we say is they, the Palestinians, wanted to kill us. They wanted us out. They didn't want to compromise. compromise.

You close the book. So it sounds like you don't agree with that narrative anymore. What are the facts? And when did you discover maybe some pushbacks to the narrative you grew up with? And what was that journey like for you? It was a very long and destabilizing journey because when you start to, and it's also very connected to the Christ journey, because when you start to pull at the thread,

of your reality. And when you start to pursue truth, once you truly start pulling on a thread, everything slowly starts collapsing. And it's a destabilizing process when you realize that you need to challenge everything that you were taught to believe, everything that you grew up in.

What does this mean about your identity? What does it mean about your safety? What are the costs of speaking out? There are financial costs. They're familial costs. There are societal costs. So going down this journey, the system is designed in such a way that exiting is scary and costly.

And it was really a very, it was a long journey. You probably took me a decade of starting to see until the information finally comes through because our own system is really trying to hold on for dear life to the story and the narrative that it constructed, whether about Zionism, whether about all the lies we tell ourselves, or whether it's about the truth of Christ. All of these things are interconnected if we're dealing with the question of truth. So for me, it was a very long process

starting with questions I had even about rabbinic Judaism growing up. That was actually the first crack for me from a very young age, kind of seeing through the rabbinic order, and then starting to see Palestinians at checkpoints and starting to recognize the way that I describe it is

Palestinians would line up and it appeared to me as they were herded like animals through these checkpoints. And I just remember that something didn't feel right. And then slowly one thing after another, all of these cracks are forming

and then there's really a moment where the veil lifts. And once the veil lifts, you see and you simply can't unsee. So it's many cracks that are formed. And then as you're moving through this journey, now that you're becoming aware of the reality and the truth, now you start having to asking questions of, okay, can they even talk about this? What's that going to cost me? And many people along their journey start getting to this point where they start to have doubts, but they're not safe.

They're not safe to express them. They still live in homes that are very, very hostile to these ideas. Their livelihood is dependent on it. And, you know, it's scary out there, right? all the stuff that you get when you start, when you put yourself out there. When you talk to other Israeli Jews, how does that go? Do you get a mixed reaction, anger, denial agreement? I mean, a lot of anger, a lot of denial, a lot of name calling,

Kapo, Nazi, Udnrat. I'm married to the most amazing Lebanese-Armenian women, so I'll get a lot of comments that it has to do with sexual degeneracy. There's no end to what people will say or deny in order to avoid sitting with truth and sitting with reality. I am perceiving that as time goes by, though, more and more cracks are starting to form as people are moving through different stages. Well, and now, I mean, unlike any other flare-up of this ongoing history, I mean, the most recent one was it was life-send strained. I mean, it's, you almost have to be a, I mean, it's shielding people from what actually

happened in Gaza, and it is happening in Gaza, the West Bank. I mean, am I right? It seems like in the past that you can get away with propaganda and covering that, but now it's like, golly, I mean, you've got an internet connection. I mean, you even have, and you have so many influential people in the world that, uh, like a Tucker Carlson or, uh, Theo, Vaughn or Joe Rogan or you know Tim Dylan I'm just Marjorie Taylor Green you know there there's so many people that were very much you know typical conservative right wing people who were very much supportive of Israel for the most part and so many people and many in the church as well you know many I speak to many pastors as well and they have you know

challenged the inherited narratives that I that I call inherited beliefs about Palestine and Israel. And I think as Christians, we should begin where Jesus begins. He begins with people, not maps. Too often Christians start with geopolitical categories, or they start with prophecy or theological systems. But Jesus starts with human beings, made in the image of God. Before we ask, who owns the land or we should ask whether we are loving the people who already live on it, right? We get so much caught up in whose land and who has the right to be here and politically speaking or theological speaking. I want Christians to really care about, you know, Jewish dignity and Palestinian dignity,

Jewish security and Palestinian freedom as well. This should be this should be our posture as Christians. Jewish flourishing and Palestinian flourishing. I call it mutual flourishing, right? So the gospel does not give us permission to choose one people's humanity over another. But, you know, the Christian imagination should really be large enough to say Jewish people, you know, should live in peace and security. And Palestinians should live in freedom and dignity. Both are true.

Both are biblical. Both matter. So Jesus never commanded us to love territory. He commanded us to love our neighbor. Right, right. So good. I'm curious, Daniel, growing up in a settlement, I've heard that settlements are partly funded by evangelical Christians.

I don't know. Is that, can you guys, is that true? I think organizations give money to help the settlements. Did you grow up with a high view of Christians growing up? Because, I mean, it was, I don't even know, were there any Christians in these settlements or all Jewish. and did you feel like, oh, we're kind of on the same team as Christians? Great question.

There were no Christians that were living on the settlement. And I think that before we talk about Christians, there's a deeper level of the attitude towards Christ, which was, I would say, varies from extreme hostility to agnostic. And a lot, well, and based on where you, you are in society, you'll have a different view of that. So either people simply don't care at all or some people will violently oppose it. I grew up in a home that had an environment that had a deep, deep resentment of Christ who often would be considered or equated to Hitler. It was very evil.

And in the same way that there was programming about the Holocaust so that the Holocaust was imprinted in our body, there was inquisition and Christ trauma that was imprinted in the body so that when people hear about Christ, they have a visceral reaction in their body to reject it. And Christians are also held in a different category than monotheists, which within the Jewish theology places them as idol worshippers as opposed to monotheists. So Christians are even put at a lower category than, let's say, a Muslim, if we're just labeling people. Oh, really? So Christians are in, yes.

Wait, that? Yes. Hold, I need to sit with that. Just for a second. I'll let you finish. Because I have always thought, like, Muslims are the real enemy. Christians are like, yeah, we don't believe the same, but at least they're kind of on, we're on the same team, sort of, so to speak.

Well, that explains the soldier in Lebanon with a sledgehammer. and, you know, hammering the statues of Jesus. That explain the bombing of Christian churches in Gaza. That explains the spitting on clergy and pastors in Jerusalem. That explains, you know, the shoving of the nun and pushing her and almost, you know, murdering her. So that explains that culture in many so many different ways. But is that, Daniel, can you say that this is prevalent to how most Jewish people, view Christians or Christ?

So I wouldn't, if you go to the average Israeli, right, every time I talk about these things are the people that are going to say, what, I don't think that, but we need to go a layer deeper, right? And so in many communities in Israel, there is the deep, deep, deep resentment of Christ. And if you ask like the mainstream Israeli in Tel Avid, he'll probably say, you know, that's fine, no problem. But the deeper layer is that, first of all, that rabbinic Judaism is essentially, built on the rejection of Christ fundamentally, right? From a theological perspective,

whether we like it or not, there is the sub layer of the rejection of Christ and what that means, right? What does it mean if your belief system rejects the idea of the eternal omnipresent reality that's available to everyone in this present moment? What does that cause a person to embody? What do those beliefs project out into the real world? So whether or not the average person is hostile to Christ or rejecting of Christ, there's something deeper that's at play that sometimes is uncomfortable to talk about but needs to be examined. And so to your question, I grew up in an environment where on the one hand, Christ was despised, but on the other hand, the evangelical Christians were in bed with us in alignment on the political project. And so what was

happening was, was actually, it's highly degrading because the position that we took was, we think that the Christians are idol worshippers, that Christ is the devil, but we're willing to take evangelical money in order for this project to continue. And so we both had political Zionism as the overarching religion, even though we fundamentally despised each other. Or I should say we despise them, right? Not to speak for them. And so this is what I witnessed and the way to describe it is that Christians are useful idiots. Useful idiots. Useful idiots. Yeah. And yet they are funding the settlement, illegal settlement project that is ultimately hostile toward, well, Christianity in general. Some of them were, some of them

Preston, we're fundraising for military gear when October 7 happened. You know, there are hundreds of millions of dollars raised by some, you know, so, quote-unquote, Christian organizations that fund, and I know some of the churches, they even partner with these settlements directly. They partner with the mayor. They partner with different groups that build settlements. confiscate Palestinian lands. They are involved in so many different things.

But, you know, some of them, let's say we can't take a wide brush and say all of these are not, you know, well, you know, they have bad intentions. Some of them, they genuinely believe that they are contributing to this divine project. They believe that God brought the Jews from all around the world to the land of Palestine because this is biblically and rightfully theirs. Some of them are very, they hold the deep. sincere believe in that and God is going to redeem them somewhere sometime in the future it's always speculative and they believe that sometime you know at some time at some point in the future God is going to restore the whole nation maybe establish his kingdom if you're following a dispensational framework you can you can have

those theological beliefs but when you when these theological and biblical understanding translates into expelling other people, stealing their lands, creating unjust systems, then it's time to really re-examine what that means. And whether you are contributing to this divine project or actually contributing to the suffering and pain of the people who are living there. I just find it deeply ironic and not kind of terrifying that Christian money is going to fund a project that is actually hindering the growth of the gospel in the place where it started. Yeah. In my mind, I mean, that, if you sit with that for a second, it's just, it's discouraging.

Is that a strong enough word? It's just like, oh, my word. Let me give you a number. Had the Palestinian Christians, specifically Palestinian Christians, remained in Palestine since 1948, the number of Christians today would be about 2 million Christians. Oh, my gosh. living in Palestine and Israel today. That number is 50,000 right now in the West Bank.

50,000 Palestinian Christians in the West Bank. 50,000 Palestinian Christians living in the West Bank and in Gaza. In Gaza, it's almost 500 people left. That's it. And it is not because of the Palestinian authorities pushing them out. It's not because of the Muslim neighbors. It's not Muslims persecuting the Christians. No, it is the system, the occupation that

Israel is imposing. Israel doesn't differentiate between a Christian and a Muslim. To them, to the system, we, you know, Palestinians are people that need to be God. They need to be displaced. They need to be, they don't belong here. So it really breaks my heart when we see evangelical money going to the growth of these settlements, rather than spending money and those millions of dollars investing them in outreach to Jewish people or an outreach to Palestinian people or implanting new churches,

creating new community development, peace initiative between the two people. I mean, this is my heart desire and Daniel's heart desire is for his family and my family to be able to live side by side, not separated by wall. Because for us Christians, Jesus already turned down that wall, that wall of hostility that he talks, you know, Paul talks about in Ephesians. So for the two people to become one, Jews and Gentiles. So why are we resurrecting it back up? Why are we building those walls back up? So from an evangelical perspective, from a Christian perspective, you know, I believe that evangelicals could become one of the most powerful forces for healing in that region if we are willing to listen, learn, and engage faithfully and biblically.

But for decades, many evangelicals have passionately advocated for his, but often without building meaningful relationship with Palestinian Christians. So as a result, millions of believers know a political story about Israel, but very little about the living church in Palestine. Daniel, you served in the IDF, right? Did you do like the two-year mandatory time? Is that? Three years at the time.

It fluctuates. So I spent three years as a tank commander, though I spent most of my time in training. So I was working primarily with new recruits. Okay. And then I spent a couple of years in reserve duty, part of which was serving in the West Bank. Okay. We're often told the idea of his most moral army on earth. Did you experience that?

Well, when you're in it, I would actually take a step back now and see what I see now, which is that it's a slogan that's used and it's violated so many times. And each time it's violated, we come back to, well, that's just not, it doesn't align with our values. When the absolute reality on the ground is indicating the opposite, it is certainly not the most moral army in the world. It's just another line of propaganda that we use in order to blind and decent. sensitize ourselves to to what it means to occupy another people completely 24-7 for generations. And the fundamental premise is flawed. I want to know about your Christ's journey.

I mean, yeah, given your background where Jesus was not an attractive religious figure to you growing up, how did you come to Christ? Well, I like to say that for me, Christ was not a shift in belief systems. For me, Christ was a discovery. And as I went down this journey of pursuing truth, I started moving through a process of confessing the truth, keeping my heart open, and suffering the consequences of the things that I did, the things that I saw. And at the end of this journey of everything that I knew to be true, being completely

deconstructed, I met within me the eternal omnipresent truth. And that was the direct discovery and direct experience of Christ. And what that means. How does that tie into salvation? Why is it that anybody who seeks this idea of salvation will ultimately meet this concept and meet Christ? Why does that happen? So for me, as I was moving through this journey, I was confessing the truth, I'm starting to pay the costs. My family's evaporating, money. Everything is gone and everything is burning to the ground. And I'm keeping my heart open,

and that's when I open the gospel for the first time. And when I read the gospel, I realized, oh, this is not a book that I am reading. This is an experience that I'm having. Wow. And then everything came into perspective. So my discovery of Christ was walking the path keeping my heart open and encountering the gospel.

So my encounter doesn't come from a certain, from a certain doctrine or a certain dogma. It's the absolute direct discovery within me. And yeah, we could probably dig on all sorts of things, but that part of it is recognizing what it is that was blocking me all the time from experiencing that within me. What were all the beliefs that I was holding

and what were all the walls that prevented that encounter with what has always been there? there. Right? So for me, the discovery was the Messiah can't be some sort of future event that we keep projecting out to. It's something that's available and accessible right now. So I had, I moved through this process of tearing down all of the walls within me and facing all and reckoning with everything that I needed to reckon with in order to see what was left at the end. So it's almost like your process of deconstructing from Zionism, Judaism, that was kind of paving the way. That was part of your salvation process so that when you read the Gospels, you were already

kind of, your values were already kind of pre-aligned, if I can say it like that? Was that? Yeah. And I was also moving through very deep processes with my personal transgressions and what it meant to bring those to light to the people that I harmed. facing those consequences. So it wasn't just the collective aspect. It actually started with the personal journey for me

of coming forward to all the people that I hurt and taking ownership over what I've done, even though I spent a decade of my life trying to postpone that reckoning and trying to push it aside and trying to bury it. And there was a psychospiritual process that was happening this whole time, right? The process of denial, the process of pushing everything off

into the future, not facing it, not telling the truth, of those things I was moving through, what I realized was that my inside world and my personal reckoning was deeply tied to the outside reckoning of what it is that I grew up seeing. And then as everything was imploding, it's like you're saying, I was already, I was doing the process, right? So when I encounter the gospel and I'm understanding, but be like me, right, go through this journey, right? You need to go through a process, right? It's not, none of this is free. There's a cost. There's a cost to truth. And as I was walking through it, the gospel then is kind of, yeah, just brought it all up.

How did you guys be? Ferris, you said you heard him on a podcast. Is that where you first, you just heard about him from a podcast? Yeah. You guys know each other before? Kept me up, listening to him and listening to his story. So I decided to reach out and, you know, we got connected and we found out that, man, we can team up and tell the world that, too.

There is a path to reconciliation. There is a path to peace. There is, if we can just dialogue, if we can talk. And it's, you know, for us, we know that Christ is the one that brings healing and restoration and brings hope. So we decided that we need to speak up because we care so deeply about the integrity of the gospel. This is for me, I mean, personally, I haven't spoken about Israel, Palestine before October 7 in a public way. I haven't written much. I haven't done any podcast,

but ever since October 7, I decided I wanted to go publicly, and that's, you know, it's a similar, similar kind of background of what Daniel had experienced. You know, I serve young people across the Middle East with Levant Ministries,

and I sit with Muslims. I sit with secular people, nominal Christians, and new believers. And again and again, I meet people who, assume Christianity is not about Jesus. They assume, you know, they assume that Christianity is about Western power, political agenda. That's the perception in the Middle East. When you're introducing people to Jesus, they associate Christianity with like American political power.

That's it. Yeah. So, and that grieves me. That grieves my heart. That grieves the heart of God because the Jesus I know consistently moved toward the margin. marginalized, right? The Jesus that lived in Palestine and Israel, 2,000 years ago, he moved among the suffering and the forgotten. He crossed boundaries. He dignified people, others dismissed. He confronted even hypocrisy. He wept over Jerusalem. He taught us to love our neighbor and even, you know, he dared to say, love your enemy in a context where the Jewish people were occupied. and persecuted by the Romans. But he told his followers,

oh, well, let's take it a step further. Love your enemy. So my concern is not really simply that Palestinians are misunderstood. My concern is that Jesus is being misunderstood. When Christians attach the gospel to political power, the witness of the church suffers. And the Middle East, you know,

the Middle East some people are watching. people all across the region are watching. They are asking whether Christianity is truly good news for all people at all time or only, you know, good news for certain people where, you know, power and agenda lies. So, you know, this is my deepest, deepest concern. This is what keeps me up at night. This is what gets me up in the morning is that, you know, it's not that people would agree with me, but my concern is that people can still

see Jesus. I mean, that's really profound that the Christian rhetoric that is sometimes, well, more oftentimes recently, used to support America's involvement in the Middle East, whatever war we're waging today. And, you know, there's a few people with a lot of power at the top of the American machine that use Christian rhetoric. and I'm hearing you say that that has a profound negative effect on the gospel expansion in the Middle East, which should be the primary thing we want to celebrate.

Okay, support this war, don't support that war, vote this, direction, vote that, whatever. Yeah. We all, as Christians, want to see the gospel go forward around the world. And if there's something American leaders are doing and even using Christian rhetoric that is hindering that, We should grieve that. Like, that doesn't seem debatable to me at all. The gospel is good news. You know, it's supposed to be the good news to everybody.

The greatest threat to the gospel is not a position from the outside. It is the distortion from the inside. And it really grieves my heart when we are seeing the church being diminished and weakened in the Middle East. Because of the Iraqi war, for example, you know, Iraq prior to 2003 had 1.5 million Christians living there. Thriving communities, amazing churches.

Now there are less than 150,000 people. The same in Syria. There were 2 million Christians living in Syria before the civil war. Now they're less than 200,000. Palestine is the same way. I mean, Lebanon right now is being destroyed by Israeli policies. So it

it grieves me when we attach the gospel to a political agenda and we somehow believe that political power or American domination somehow advances the gospel. The gospel flourishes when there is persecution, not when we vindicated by power. Couldn't agree more. Daniel, I'm curious, you know, are you taking a risk speaking out the way you are? Because, I mean, I, there seems to be a pretty strong backlash against people that criticize the state of Israel. You know, any kind of criticism of the state of Israel is considered like anti-Semitism, which I don't know. Does anybody buy that anymore? I don't like criticize a guy. If I criticize the Chinese government, what? You're anti-Chinese. Like, nobody thinks. that way, but I still hear that. I know like Tucker Carlson, it was labeled like anti-Semite semi-Semite of the year, I think, and I've never heard him say anything remotely anti-Semitic. I've heard him criticize the government of Israel a lot. I've also heard him say the hatred of Jewish people is categorically sin, evil over and over and over. And yet he's labeled the anti-Semite

of the year. But I don't, does anybody with half a brain and internet connection actually like, yeah, if you say Israel shouldn't be bombing so many Gazans, like that's anti-Semitic. I don't, I don't know. For Daniel, I think they call him self-hating Jew. A self-hating Jew?

Self-hating Jew or anti-Semi. Everybody will call me something for a different for a different angle. And the system is doing such a good job of conflating everything that I think that it is true that many people, when they see what they see,

I do see that I do see that some people do swing in the pendulum. And they do start to conflate what is happening with Jews at the same time. And they're not doing the process of recognizing within that they need to break the cycle of violence. For me, the Christ-centered principle is learning how to separate the people

from what they do and from the government and to keep your heart open and end the cycle of violence. So I do see that there are people that do, you know, they're so angry what Israel is doing. I do see, I do see that terrible rhetoric against Jews as well. Oh, I see that. No, yeah.

No, that's certainly true. Yeah. So the pendulum, and that's the trap, right? This is the trap that if we're working with Christ-centered principles, we have the ability to break that cycle and the pendulum shift and within ourselves not to allow ourselves to move from one form of dehumanization into the other dehumanization. Because if we dehumanize the dehumanizers, we become dehumanizers. and this never ends.

And this is the opportunity to see that for what it is and break it. Yeah. To be clear, I do see on social media and stuff, you know, like people that criticize the state of Israel who also use very clearly

anti-Semitic language. The Jews, all the Jews, Jewish people. They use horrible, horrible things. So, yeah, my only point was... Which then becomes fuel for them. That's the cycle. And yet I know another group of people who very much criticize the state of Israel when it does things that are just immoral or illegal, but make it very clear they're not talking about Jewish people.

I mean, there's plenty of Jewish people. There's plenty of Orthodox Jews. You see these protests, these Orthodox Jewish believers holding Palestinian flags. And, you know, you have religious Jews, you have non-religious Jews, you have secular Jews, you know, who are very much against. Lakud and Zionism and all the, you know, horrible things that some Jewish leaders have done. And so to your first question, I think you asked if I pose any risks or if I'm at risk. Dealing, facing this was a long journey because growing up I saw firsthand or I heard stories about how people would be persecuted for speaking out. I was personally witnessed.

to organizations that would basically hunt down anti-Zionists in order to destroy their lives. And so I saw all of this. And as I was awakening to it, I was like, yikes, maybe I should just keep this to myself. Is it really worth the cost? Is it really worth dying for this? Because ultimately, I had to get to the point where I had to face and conquer my fear of death. Ultimately, the journey with Christ was one of the things that made me realize that there's absolutely nothing to worry about. If you stand in truth and keep your heart open, there's

nothing to worry about. One, because they can take my life, but they can never take my soul. When you truly understand that, not as a concept, when you truly embody that this is, this is nothing, right? Where am I putting my real treasures? What am I really guarding? And am I willing to give up everything in my material life in order to stand in truth? Once I integrated that aspect of the gospel, any fear was completely dispelled. I know that my job is to stand in truth today, come what may. And if at any point, this leads to a moment of persecution, then I know that in that moment in court, I'm going to know what to say. And I trust that. I have faith in that, but it's more than faith. It's a knowing. It's the true integration. And I think that everybody

encounters this one way or another because that's that that journey isn't unique to me whether it's Christians who have communities and they're afraid of what it'll cost them in order to speak up the truth because of their the revenue that they're generating from their communities or anybody who encounters this question of do I really want to move through the discomfort of what truth costs me they're facing that exact decision in that exact moment the fear is really the same for everyone and So to answer your question, I don't feel that I'm at risk. I feel that I'm protected just by standing in truth and come what may. Man, I've really enjoyed this conversation.

I guess one more question. I would love for you both to kind of speak to our audience who there's going to be a lot. I mean, especially now, a lot of people listening or enjoying this. They've heard probably both of you before. They've rethought how they think about these things along the lines of a lot of the ways. has articulated. But for those listening who might be like, yeah, but this one side, there's a whole other side, you know, Palestinians are, they do, at least some, maybe many are very anti-Semitic. They do want to, they chant, you know, death to Israel and, you know, from the river to the sea,

Palestine will be free means we're going to get rid of all Jewish people in the land and take it over and they support, they voted for Hamas. And so, yeah, this is all good, but there's a whole other side of the story press, and you should have another person on who gives the other side of this very one-sided take of the situation. What would you say to somebody

that maybe has that perspective? Maybe I can start because I grew up believing everything that you just said. Not only as a matter of belief, it was theology, the everything that, that you said, all of these slogans were my lived reality.

And I believe them wholeheartedly. And what I discovered was that even though it's scary to challenge those assumptions, I understand why it's scary. I understand what it costs to examine these things. And the conversation and the relationship that Fares and I have is the result of going down that journey and challenging what we think is true, what is comfortable to us.

And then the other side of that process, even though it might be scary and destabilizing, an entire new framework and field of possibilities emerge that aren't available when you're stuck in dogma. So what I speak about is not switching from one dogma to another. It's about moving out of one framework into an entirely new reality. And this is the reality of this conversation of the people that are sitting here across from one another. Yeah, Ferris. Yeah, that's great. Thank you, Daniel. I would challenge every Christian listening to this today to come and see, to come and see what God is doing. You know,

we know what the media is saying. We know what the politicians are saying. But I believe we have a duty and we have a calling that we need to tune into what the Holy Spirit is saying in all of this. And to go where the suffering is, to go where the pain is, because that's where Jesus, Jesus, God is so close to the brokenhearted. So I'm going to speak a little pastorally to you today and say that my prayer is that we would approach Palestine, Israel, the way Jesus approached people with truth, compassion, humility, and courage. The answer is not choosing between Israelis and Palestinians.

The answer is choosing the way of Jesus, and this is the greatest commandment, is to love God and to love people. I long for a future of mutual flourishing where Palestinians live with dignity and freedom because they deserve it. And where Jewish people live with peace and security, where churches thrive in the West Bank, in Israel, in Jerusalem, in Gaza,

where children are not raised to fear one another and where followers of Jesus are known not for defending power. but for healing what has been broken. So we don't need less truth. We need more truth, but we also need more humanity. Because every person in this conflict bears the image of God, Preston. And if we lose sight of that, we have already lost the side of Jesus. So the most important question is, you know, in Israel and Palestine, is not who owns the land.

and who has the right to be here. It is whether the people who live on it today will see Jesus in us as Christians, ministering to them, reaching out with hope and with love, whether they are Muslims, whether they are Jews, whether they are nominal Christians, whether they are believers, part of the body of Christ.

We cannot honor the land of Jesus while ignoring the people Jesus taught us to love. So the future of Palestine and Israel must be mutual flourishing or it will remain mutual suffering, unfortunately. And the church has a big role to play in there. Paris and Daniel, thank you so much for being on theology. This has been a challenging and invigorating conversation. Where can people find you and your work for both of you? Levant Ministries.org can find me there.

follow us on social media, Instagram. And you can find all of my work and writing at www.dmanuel. daniel.l.living. Daniel.org. Awesome. Thank you guys. Really appreciate it.