27/10/2025
Choosing the Side of the Oppressed: A Christian Duty in the Question of Palestine
The Bible is unambiguous in its command: God’s people must always stand with the oppressed against their oppressors. From Genesis to Revelation, God reveals Himself as the defender of the vulnerable and the one who hears the cry of the afflicted. Isaiah exhorts us, “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause” (Isaiah 1:17). The psalmist likewise calls God’s people to action: “Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked” (Psalm 82:4). Even the ministry of Jesus begins with this same call when He stands in the synagogue of Nazareth and proclaims, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me… He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18). Neutrality in the face of oppression is not an option for followers of Christ. To stand aside when injustice is being done is to betray the very heart of the Gospel.
When we turn our eyes to Palestine today, the reality becomes clear: Israel stands as the oppressor, and Palestinians, including our Christian brothers and sisters, are the oppressed. This is not merely a matter of political opinion but a reality documented by the highest authorities in international law and human rights. Since 1967, Israel has occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, territories that the United Nations and the International Court of Justice have affirmed belong to the Palestinian people. The recent July 2024 ICJ advisory opinion ruled that Israel’s occupation is unlawful and must end immediately. Yet, like Pharaoh hardening his heart against Moses, Israel persists in dispossession and control, uprooting families, demolishing homes, and replacing communities with illegal settlements. Just as the prophets condemned those who “join house to house and add field to field until there is no more room” (Isaiah 5:8), so too must Christians today condemn a system that strips an entire people of their land and dignity.
The system Israel enforces over Palestinians has been described not only as occupation but as apartheid. This is not the language of activists alone but the conclusion of major human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli organization B’Tselem. They have all documented how Israel maintains two systems of law—one for Jewish settlers and another for Palestinians. There are separate roads, separate legal codes, and discriminatory policies that echo the racial segregation once practiced in South Africa. The prophet Amos warned, “They sell the innocent for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals. They trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground” (Amos 2:6–7). In the same way, Palestinians are treated as strangers in their own land, forced to the margins by a system of calculated inequality. For Christians, who once rallied worldwide to oppose apartheid in South Africa, silence in the face of this modern apartheid is hypocrisy.
Beyond occupation and apartheid, the charge of genocide now weighs heavily against Israel. B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group of international repute, has openly declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, in her 2025 report, described Israel’s actions as part of an “economy of genocide,” documenting mass killings, forced displacement, starvation, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure. Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel have presented evidence of deliberate bombing of hospitals, targeted starvation, and systematic violence that meets the criteria of the Genocide Convention. When Pharaoh decreed that Hebrew male children should be killed in Egypt (Exodus 1:16), the Bible recorded it as an act of oppression crying out to heaven. Can we then remain silent when children in Gaza are buried beneath rubble, when hospitals are reduced to ashes, when famine is wielded as a weapon of war? To remain silent would be to stand with Pharaoh, not with Moses.
The situation in Gaza today has even been called the world’s largest open-air prison. For nearly two decades, Israel has imposed a crippling blockade, controlling food, medicine, electricity, and water. In effect, an entire population has been cut off from the necessities of life. Jeremiah condemned leaders who “oppress the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed innocent blood” (Jeremiah 7:6). Jesus Himself identifies with the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, and the imprisoned (Matthew 25:35–36). In Gaza, Palestinians are all of these: hungry from blockaded food supplies, thirsty from destroyed water infrastructure, sick from the collapse of healthcare, and imprisoned within walls they cannot cross. If Christ is found among “the least of these,” then He is surely found among the Palestinians suffering in Gaza today.
Nor can we ignore that Christians themselves are targets of this oppression. Palestinian Christians—whose communities trace their faith back to the very apostles—are being bombed, displaced, and forced to flee. Even within Israel, Christian clergy are spat upon, churches desecrated, and cemeteries vandalized. This makes it clear: the modern State of Israel is no “protector of Christianity.” To support Israel’s violence is to abandon the very body of Christ in the land where He once walked. Paul reminds us that if one member of the body suffers, all suffer together (1 Corinthians 12:26). When Palestinian Christians suffer, African Christians cannot stand apart; their pain must be our pain.
In light of this overwhelming evidence—from scripture, from history, and from the testimony of the world’s most respected human rights bodies—the conclusion is unmistakable: Israel is the oppressor, and Palestinians are the oppressed. A good Christian cannot bless the works of oppression, for to do so is to side against God. Neutrality, in this case, is complicity with injustice. As African Christians, who know from our own history the wounds of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, we must heed the biblical call to stand with the oppressed. For when we choose their side, we choose the side of Christ Himself, who said: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for Me” (Matthew 25:40).
