Sacralizing Violence: A Reply to Gerald McDermott

Gerald McDermott has written–and First Things has published–an inaccurate and snidely dismissive review of Munther Isaac’s Christ in the Rubble titled Genocide in Gaza?

McDermott’s review comprises at least three incongruous elements: (1) McDermott appears not to have engaged at all beyond the book’s subtitle–“Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza”–choosing primarily to dispute the word “genocide” rather than Isaac’s actual argument, (2) he idealizes the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in a genuinely bizarre and unrecognizable manner by casting the IDF as an exceptionally ethical military force fighting an unprovoked war of survival, and (3) he plays into the fetishization of Israel by insulating Israel from critique on faulty theological and biblical grounds.

From the outset of his review, McDermott isolates the horrific events of October 7 from their historical context. To be clear, it is true that Hamas’s actions on that day were cruel and traumatizing to countless Israelis, adding on to the many traumas in Israel’s fraught history. But it does not follow that Israel is justified in responding as it has, and the history of the Palestinians, including since the founding of the state of Israel, has likewise been filled with traumas as well. 

But the events since that day make it clear that Israel’s position is more secure than McDermott allows. McDermott attempts to portray Israel’s war in existential terms: it is a defensive war for survival. To lend plausibility to this construal, he homes in on Hamas’s 1988 charter, article 7 (Hamas’s updated 2017 charter can be found here) which codifies their intent to “fight the Jews and kill them.” He cites article 7 as evidence that Isaac has misconstrued the war in Gaza as a genocide against Palestinians when in reality it is Israel who is “conducting a war against genocide.” He then attempts to further discredit Isaac’s argument that Israel is waging a war of genocide on Palestinians by disputing the numbers of Palestinian deaths recorded by the Gaza Health Ministry as either compromised by bias, unrelated to the conflict, or comprising as little as a one-to-one ratio of combatants to non-combatants. Finally, he insists that the IDF practices humanitarian treatment of Hamas and Gazans, thus it “beggers belief” that they could do so while engaged in an act of genocide. McDermott’s concludes, “if the IDF was intending genocide, it was phenomenally ineffective.” Taking apart the various problems in McDermott’s “review” requires working through three specific failures in the piece.

The Precarity of the Israeli Nation-State

First, McDermott takes for granted the popular myth that Israel’s current existence in the Middle East is fundamentally precarious. But this is misleading. 

Note well: I am emphatically not denying Jewish precarity in contexts outside of Israel, like the United States or parts of Europe. Nor do I wish to eschew centuries of Western antisemitic violence precipitating in the Holocaust and persisting to the present. Jewish precarity is no myth. 

My objection is to viewing the nation state of Israel through the lens of Jewish precarity. This paradigm prevents Palestinian suffering from “showing up,” within a Western field of vision. I am not denying the suffering in the state of Israel, but we must acknowledge Palestinian suffering on its own terms as well. When we conflate Jewish victimhood with the state of Israel, it prevents us from seeing how Israel has developed a long history of dominance over its neighbors through its military might, expansionist ambitions, and control of resources. Examples abound: For example, in West Bank Area C, illegal Israeli settlements divert precious water resources away from Palestinian farms to support Israeli farms and settlements. After Assad’s regime fell in Syria, instead of offering material assistance, Israel immediately exploited the instability in the region through their unprovoked annihilation of Syria's military and the seizure of Syrian territory containing key water aquifers, such that Israel now controls 30% of Syria's water and 40% of Jordan's. 

Israel has also exercised dehumanizing forms of force and control over its enemies, as documented by Israel’s own leading human rights organization. Relevant examples include Israel’s fragmentation of the West Bank confining Palestinians communities to “enclaves which are subject to [Israeli] military rule and severe restrictions of movement.” One example of these restrictions is IDF-controlled checkpoints throughout the West Bank. A Palestinian friend of mine recounts the recurring and normalized use of excessive force at these checkpoints: as a ten-year-old he was regularly beaten by IDF soldiers en route to his school. There are numerous IDF testimonies to corroborate the kind of story he tells which also include Israeli soldiers using Palestinian civilians–even children–as human shields when encountering violent resistance on patrol in ghettoized Palestinian neighborhoods.

Israel’s recent nation-state law leaves no room for misinterpretation of its overt Jewish-supremacy, further compounding the codified second-class status of Arab Israelis. 

Israel has also constructed sophisticated separation barriers in the name of “national security” but which cut Palestinians off from unmediated access to water, healthcare, grocery stores, schools, and places of employment–not to mention each other. Israel’s myth of precarity is also misleading because it omits the fact that Israel is uncompromisingly backed by the United States (as McDermott’s Biden quote demonstrates) even when doing so is not in the United States’ best interest. 

The University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt outline this well in their book The Israel Lobby. As I write, Donald Trump is announcing that the United States has just entered Israel’s war with Iran by bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities after Israel assassinated Iran’s top generals and nuclear scientists. Israel continues to escalate the conflict by bombing Tehran. In addition to cementing the U.S.-Israel relationship, our nation may become embroiled in yet another protracted Middle East conflict. 

Space does not permit me to recount the injustice of Israel’s occupation, settlements, home demolitions, child detention, forced displacement, and their lesser known act of financing and aiding Hamas in order to prevent cooperation and cohesion among Palestinians in the Gaza strip. Is there any doubt that under these circumstances, many Americans would violently assert their dignity through armed resistance? And yet there is a rich tradition of Palestinian non-violent resistance and peacemakers both Christian and Muslim that gets overshadowed by the exclusive attention American Christians give to Hamas.

If one considers the indisputable power imbalance between Israel and its enemies, including Hamas, then McDermott’s argument that Israel is staving off genocide loses credibility. In order to commit genocide, one would presume the perpetrator has the means and not just the motive to do so–Hamas’ lack of the former should be clear both by these examples and Israel’s battlefield dominance in Gaza.

Genocidal Language from Israeli Leaders

A second reason McDermott’s narrative fails is that while he readily quotes Hamas’s 1988 charter, which also uses genocidal language in its endorsement of murdering Jews, he is conspicuously silent on the manifold genocidal language on the part of popular Israeli news outlets and high ranking politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself. The fact that Hamas has endorsed such language in the past is not reason for Israel to do so in return. The UN Human Rights Council has issued a lengthy report entitled “Anatomy of a Genocide.” Page 13 includes extensive documentation of quotations from Israeli leaders that, ordinarily, would be regarded as endorsing genocide. 

For example, Netanyahu has referred to Palestinians as “monsters” and “Amalek,” invoking Israel’s wars of annihilation in the Old Testament. Defense Secretary Yoav Gallant refers to Palestinians as “human animals.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has expressed his hope to see the population and infrastructure of Gaza “totally destroyed” even projecting conditions in Gaza to be unsustainable for life with the intended result of mass expulsion. He states, “[Gazans] will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.” Smotrich’s words map onto Article 2 of The Genocide Convention which includes “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” None of this should surprise anyone familiar with Netanyahu’s Likud party whose original charter precludes a two-state solution on the grounds that Jews have an “eternal” and “indisputable” right to the land from the river to the sea.

Support for such measures extends beyond Likud leadership as well. A recent poll of Israeli Jews shows that 82% report “a growing comfort with the idea of forcibly expelling Palestinians– both from Gaza and from within Israel's borders.” Additionally, the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 called for Israel to “turn Gaza to Dresden.”  South Africa outlines more evidence of genocidal intent, language, actions and normalization in their case submitted to the International Court of Justice.

The Gaza Death Toll

Lastly, McDermott’s narrative fails because it unnecessarily obfuscates the Gaza death toll. A July 2024 study by The Lancet points out that even Israeli intelligence found the Gaza Health Ministry’s estimates to be accurate at that point in time, and their study placed the death toll around 7-9% of Gaza’s population. The Lancet published another study in 2025 in which they found that because the IDF had devastated Gaza’s healthcare sector, the Gaza Health Ministry was actually found to have underreported the death toll by 49%. 

A recent study from The Economist, which interacts with much of the data recorded up to the date of its publication, places the number of dead between 77,000 and 109,000. This death toll amounts to 4-5% of Gaza’s pre-war population and counting. McDermott makes much of Hamas’s control of the Gaza Health Ministry, but we are talking about a population the size of Phoenix or Philadelphia enduring an earth-shattering barrage of U.S.-made weaponry while homeless, besieged, starving, and trapped. Under conditions like these, how does McDermott distinguish between deaths related and unrelated to the conflict? The exact death toll may never be clear. However, a holistic look at the estimates from a variety of sources and proper consideration of the unimaginable conditions in Gaza, together make this clear: the death toll certainly exceeds 50,000 in a war that is endlessly escalating, killing perhaps on average 377 people per day. 

One might rejoin that the numbers, while tragic, still do not constitute a genocide, but are rather the inevitable casualties that come when a nation commits itself to war. But this rejoinder belies the facts on the ground: McDermott’s noble, but unfortunately fictitious, IDF makes use of an AI system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which deliberately targets civilians and large apartment complexes. In the current war on Gaza, one Nahal Brigade soldier confessed that a senior officer in his brigade “tied an explosive cord around the neck of an 80-year-old Palestinian man and forced him to serve as a human shield.” Lest one presume this practice is an outlier, the soldier clarifies that using human shields is a fully institutionalized practice in the IDF. Another soldier, quoted in the same story, reports that even though the IDF denies such practices, “if you ask any combat soldier who fought in Gaza, there’s not a single one who will tell you [the use of civilians as human shields] doesn’t happen. There’s no battalion, at least in the regular army, that can honestly say it hasn’t used this practice.”

Moreover, the IDF’s practices of targeting food and water sources, even manufacturing starvation by recently restricting aid to Gaza for 11 weeks, restricting aid altogether unless pressured by the United States, and destroying over half of Gaza’s hospitals, forcing evacuations that left premature NICU babies among the many patients forced to die helplessly, are all clear violations of humanitarian law. 

Some might look at these atrocities and blame Hamas as ultimately responsible for making use of hospitals, ambulances, and civilians as human shields. But this argument is overburdened, and the lethal license and cover it gives to Israel in their campaign of retribution has become all too clear. Even Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister of Israel from 2006-2009 published a searing opinion essay in Haaretz entitled, Enough is Enough. Israel Is Committing War Crimes in which he writes, “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation, indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.” In a word: genocide. In a recent interview, Olmert says that Israel has eliminated almost all of Hamas’s leadership “so to say that Gaza [is] now a security [threat] for the existence of the state of Israel is nonsense. The only possible interpretation [of their continued fighting] is they want to get rid of all the Gazans, and this [is only] part of the strategy, because the other part of the strategy is to do the same in the West Bank.”

There is something deplorable about the calloused way in which McDermott and others debate the number of Palestinian dead when the wider context makes Israel’s intent to annihilate them all too clear. Is it true that “every death in war is a tragedy”? Israel has killed Gazans on a scale 40 times what they themselves endured after the atrocious events of October 7th.  Yet this fact fails to awaken collective moral outrage on the part of churches like my own communion, the Anglican Church in North America. How then can we say that “all deaths are a tragedy”? This is not the way we ought to have learned Christ.

I will skip McDermott’s misconstrual of Palestinian identity, which overlooks the well-documented history of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine between 1947 and 1949, in order to address his theology. One can find an excellent list of resources from the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East (NEME) for further information on the origin of Palestinians, how to engage the history theologically and biblically, and how to map the current genocide within its historical context. 

I turn now to McDermott’s conclusion. While it is beyond the scope of this article to give a full theological account of Israel and the Church, I offer the following reflections. I reject (along with many Jewish theologians like Joel Teitelbaum) the attempt to simply equate the theocratic, biblical Israel with the secular, modern nation state of Israel. However, even if one were to grant that they are the same thing, McDermott’s conclusion makes me wonder, if we were dealing with biblical Israel, what is more biblical than prophetically criticizing Israel’s failure to live into its most life-giving ideals? Yet McDermott’s exegesis reflects a familiar logic of insulating the modern nation state of Israel from critique. This insulation is in part what I am referring to when I describe his argument as playing into the fetishization of Israel. When Christians shield Israel from critique, even in some cases weaponizing antisemitism in order to silence such critique, they collude in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

Many theologians have regarded Luke 4:16-30 as a critical moment for understanding Jesus and his mission. In it, Jesus reads a passage from the prophet Isaiah which soars with eschatological hope and renewal. Jesus was anointed to bring good news to the poor, to set the captive free, to give sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. But Luke tells us that Jesus then closes the scroll and begins to speak, and his words rewrite Israel’s understanding of its chosenness. Compare Jesus’ commentary with the continuation of the passage in Isaiah 61, where now Israel’s oppressors will become oppressed, and the foreigners will labor in Israel’s vineyards, Israel will live off the wealth of other nations, and Israel will glory in their shame. Instead, Jesus says, 

Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there was a severe famine over all the land, yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many with a skin disease in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian (NRSV).

In a moment that echoes his refrain in the Sermon on the Mount–“you have heard it said, but I say to you”--Jesus invites his audience to notice the way God has always been drawing Israel outward, toward the nations, for whom he chose Israel in order to bless. This is what it means for “this scripture to be fulfilled in your hearing.” And the very idea fills the Nazarene audience with such murderous rage that they attempt to throw him off the highest place in their town. 

Jesus' life and ministry ultimately reconfigures Israel and the eternal promises God made to Israel within his own body in order to expand Israel to embrace more and more people unlike itself. This expansion fulfills the purpose for which Israel was originally chosen: to be a blessing to the nations. And as anyone will tell you who’s gained a sibling through adoption or merged to become a more culturally diverse church–it changes you. Your family or church are no longer what they once were, but a new creation. A tree with branches grafted in produces a new fruit. Israel in the body of a Jewish Jesus is changed in the process of embracing Gentile existence, and that is what Jesus invites his audience in Nazareth to glory in. But as their response shows, there is something threatening about a God who “shows no partiality” (Acts 10:34) but instead tears down the oppressive distinctions used to exclude Jew from Greek, slave from free, female from male. 

To be clear: this is not a Jewish problem but a human problem. Creating an ‘other’ both establishes one’s personal sense of identity and the identity of one’s group–and that feels safe. But, as is exemplified in the widespread Zionist support of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, it’s a safety that traffics in death. Jesus reverses the human tendency to curve in on ourselves by only treating the people who are most like ourselves as the ones whose lives count. But God’s love trespasses separation barriers. 

Doubtless McDermott has strong misgivings about framing Jesus, his ministry and the nature of the Church in this manner. But interpretation is always an instrument of change, and as St. Augustine would have us ask in his On Christian Doctrine: what kind of change? Does the interpretation increase love of God and neighbor or not? I submit that McDermott’s interpretation is not capable of doing equal justice to the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians, in other words, of loving God and neighbor. But this is not just a problem for McDermott, it's a problem for Zionism of all stripes, Christian or Jewish: from its conception, Zionism was a movement for political sovereignty rooted in ethno-religious identity and narrative. As such, its strange fruit inspires and continues to justify a politics of expansion that inevitably sacralizes violence.

Simone Weil issues a prophetic warning that Israel would do well to heed. In her essay The Iliad or the Poem of Force, she writes, “Violence obliterates not only its victims, but also those who wield it.” May the Church participate in the all-embracing, ever-expanding shalom of our Jewish Messiah, and in doing so become a people capable of rejecting theologies of death in favor of loving God and neighbor–Israeli and Palestinian alike.