The Notion that the Polite, Western Liberal Ever Stood for Anything At All.

One day, everyone will have always been against this, Omar El Akkad. Canongate 25th Feb. 2025 187pp

Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza, Munther Isaac. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 27th Mar. 2025 279pp

Omar El Akkad is a journalist and Munther Isaac is a Church minister. They are both very angry. The proximate target of El Akkad’s anger is Western journalism, and of Isaac’s is Western Christianity, but the source of their anger is one and the same: Western complicity in genocide. Brutal, barbaric, slaughter of Palestinian people, with the aim of eliminating Palestinians from Gaza.

El Akkad traces the journey from his birth in Egypt to his life as a respected journalist with a good house and family in North America (via 16 or 17 different homes on the way). He recounts lessons learnt on the journey, such as an experience from his childhood in Qatar of people who can be ignored, or worse. People who are “nonhuman, non-anything”: simply don’t exist. In Qatar it was a Southeast Asian man involved in a road accident with a local man. El Akkad notes that the Southeast Asian man had done something far worse than dent a fancy car’s bumper: “he had violated the bounds of his assumed nonexistence”. For El Akkad, it shaped the way he thinks about every country, every community: “whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?”. It is not difficult to see where he’s going with this. There was his own experience of racism in America, but beyond that it is the reaction of Israel to the Hamas attack of 7/10/23, with the support of Western powers, which treated all Palestinians, men, women and children, as ‘human animals’ (in the words of the Israeli Defence Minister) to be slaughtered without mercy.

El Akkad describes his book as an account of a fracture “a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all”. When growing up in Qatar he longed for “a fundamental kind of freedom” which he expected to find in the USA. He knew that “there were deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing called ‘the free world’”, but he believed “the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable”. He believed that until the aftermath of 7/10/23.

While Pastor Isaac is equally horrified by the events in Gaza, it is not so much of a fracture for him. He is a Palestinian Christian in charge of a Church in Bethlehem and has never had any illusion about ‘the West’. Chapter two of his book is entitled “This was did not start on October 7” and he knew that Palestinians were second class citizens long before Israel’s uncontrolled rage in revenge for 7/10/23. Isaac attracted international attention around Christmas 2023, both through his uncompromising sermons and the extraordinary symbolism of the Christ in the Rubble nativity scene which was set up in his Church. Pastor Isaac’s Christmas message was shocking. “I did not call out for peace and reconciliation” he says, “Instead I called out the Church for its complicity”.

This war has confirmed to us that the world does not see us as equal. Maybe it is the color of our skin. Maybe it is because we are on the wrong side of the political equation. Even our kinship in Christ did not shield us. As they said, if it takes killing 100 Palestinians to get a single “Hamas militant” then so be it! We are not humans in their eyes. (But in God’s eyes… no one can tell us we are not!)  The hypocrisy and racism of the Western world is transparent and appalling! […]

To our European friends. I never ever want to hear you lecture us on Human rights or international law again.

And listen to this:

Your charity, your words of shock AFTER the genocide, won’t make a difference. Words of regret will not suffice for you. We will not accept your apology after the genocide. What has been done, has been done. I want you to look at the mirror… and ask: where was I?

This is essentially the same message as encapsulated by the title of El Akkad’s book, but all the more shocking to hear a Christian minister apparently refusing to forgive.

Neither author supports what Hamas did on 7/10/23 and both oppose violence as a matter of principle. For Pastor Isaac: “my Christian faith requires unwavering commitment to nonviolence, peace, and reconciliation rooted in truth and justice”. But, another aspect of his presentation which some might find shocking from a Christian minister, is his rejection of neutrality: “[B]eing a peacemaker unavoidably entails willingness to sacrifice, take sides, and speak truth to power”.

Although El Akkad opposes violence, he notes that “one of the most damaging, longest-lasting consequences of the War on Terror years is an utter obliteration of the obvious moral case for nonviolence”

The argument that violence in any form debases us and marks the instant failure of all involved is much more difficult to make when the state regularly engages in or approves of wholesale violence against civilians and combatants alike. Instead, the case for nonviolence becomes, in the ugliest way, pragmatic: the state wants violence, because in that playing field it maintains every advantage, from bigger guns to the privilege of perpetual victimhood.

The numbers are mind-blowing (see the box) but, humanly, we struggle to know what to do with bare numbers, and stories of individual people engage with us better on an emotional level. Both El Akkad and Pastor Isaac recount the story of Hind Rajab. Pastor Isaac starts with it at the beginning of his book:

“Come take me. Will you come and take me? I’m so scared, please come!”

These were the last words heard from six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza. She was trapped in a car with five of her relatives, all of them dead. Israeli shelling had forced them to flee their homes. Due to poor weather, the mother had made the difficult decision to send her daughter in the vehicle along with her aunt, uncle, and three cousins while the rest of the family fled on foot. But the Israeli military ambushed the car, and Hind was the only survivor. She managed to call an emergency line in Gaza and pleaded for more than three hours on the phone for help. “The tank is next to me. It’s moving.”

“I’m scared of the dark, come get me.”

Twelve days later, Hind was found dead in the car with her relatives. A few meters away were the remains of another vehicle—completely burned, its engine spilling onto the ground. It was the ambulance of the Red Crescent, sent to rescue Hind. Tragically, the two crew members—Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun—were killed when the ambulance was hit by Israeli forces. Yusuf and Ahmed sacrificed their lives trying to rescue Hind.

This is an effective story to recount because we know the details, and there exist beautiful photographs of a happy smiling Hind Rajab before the war (a web search will turn them up instantly). But we have no reason to doubt that it is representative of how the other 15,612 Palestinian children died as well.

And the numbers do matter: of course they do. Apart from the scale of the suffering they represent, they are part of the evidence that this is genocide, and neither El Akkad nor Pastor Isaac have any doubt that this is genocide. Pastor Isaac discusses it at length, and concludes:

Genocide is not a matter of opinion. My opinion should not count. I am not an expert. However, given all the facts, studies, and expert testimony, we can say that the burden of the proof now lies with those who deny that it is a genocide. For those who object to the use of this term, I must question not only their analysis but also their motives.

As Pastor Isaac is particularly angry with, particularly let down by, Western churches, so too El Akkad, the journalist, is scathing about Western media, drawing especially contrast between the cowardice of Western journalists and the heroism of Palestinian journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ): “as of April 29, 2025, … at least 176 journalists and media workers were among the more than tens of thousands killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992”.

In the midst of all the darkness in both of these books, after all the condemnation and despair, both authors find points of light: people to admire and reasons to hope. El Akkad draws attention to extent of Jewish opposition to the actions of Israel and America’s support of Israel:

In New York City, Joe Biden is met by Jewish protestors. It has become an almost everyday occurrence now, this resistance…

It’s not surprising, I don’t think, that in the midst of this indiscriminate killing, many of the Westerners doing the most active work in opposing genocide are Jews. Here is love born of pain, of the past century’s most horrific crime, love of one’s own spread out into love of another.

Pastor Isaac has an epilogue to his book: Hope, Survival, and Sumud. He holds on to hope from his deep Christian faith.

[O]ver the past year I began to doubt myself and the validity of preaching hope

he says, but:

When we stop hoping, we declare that we give in to tyranny and oppression, allowing the oppressors of the empire to shape our reality. When we stop hoping, we accept that injustice is the norm. Hope in this sense is a struggle. It is painful. It is illogical. It even feels wrong, at times. But we cannot surrender to the alternative.

The hope of Christ in the Rubble.