Genocide in Gaza?

A Book Review: Christ in the Rubble:
Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza, By Munther Isaac

[This review first appeared in First Things and is reprinted with permission.]

The Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, was, according to British historian Andrew Roberts, “one of the largest terror attacks in history,” leaving 1182 dead and more than four thousand wounded. Civilians were targeted with precision: Children were shot in front of their parents, women raped, elderly set on fire, young and old shot or hacked to death. There were gang rapes and sexual mutilation of both living and dead. Two hundred and fifty-one hostages were taken.

Hamas, the Islamist terror group that organized the attack, declares in its charter (article 7) that its aim is to “fight the Jews and kill them.” This intent to destroy a whole people group has been called “genocide,” from the Greek genos for “tribe/race/nation” and the Latin caedere, “to kill.” In 1948, the United Nations approved a convention that defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

For some months now Israel, conducting a war against genocide, has been accused of practicing its own genocide through this war. This is the charge that animates a new book by Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem. Isaac’s argument in Christ in the Rubble is that Israel has “systematically killed a large number of Palestinians, including children” by “target[ing] a significant part of the Palestinian population. . . . If fifty thousand [reported by Hamas] isn’t mass killing, what is?” 

Munther contends that the deaths of many people implies systematic intent and therefore genocide. But everything in the Gaza war suggests the absence of this intent. For example, if Israel intends to kill Palestinian civilians, why does it send Arab-language warnings to civilians before attacks? Why does it evacuate civilians through humanitarian corridors? Why does it send foot soldiers on dangerous missions when bombs dropped from the air can kill far more? As British Col. Richard Kemp once told the BBC, “I don’t think there’s ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.”

No genocidal regime provides humanitarian assistance to its alleged victims as Israel has done. By early 2025, Israel had opened aid crossing points, constructed roads to deliver aid, and in December 2024 alone oversaw five thousand trucks delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza. The provision of any aid at all contradicts the accusation of genocide.

What about the 50,000 deaths, whom Isaac claims are mostly civilians and women and children? Recently, Hamas removed thousands of deaths from its casualty figures. In December, England’s Henry Jackson Society noted that the Gaza Health Ministry numbers include approximately five thousand natural deaths unrelated to the war, and its claim that 70 percent of the deaths are women and children is “nonsense,” with 72 percent being men aged thirteen to fifty-five, probably Hamas combatants.

Every death in war is a tragedy. But even if we accept the number of 50,000, this is a far cry from evidence of genocide, where powerful governments destroy the vast majority of a people group. In the Holocaust, 67 percent of European Jews were killed; 85 percent of Tutsis were murdered in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and 80 percent of Armenians were massacred in Turkish-controlled lands in 1915–1917. If we accept Isaac’s death total and realize that at least half of the supposed 50,000 Gaza dead were armed combatants, that means only 1.25 percent of the Gaza population of 2 million was killed. To put it crudely, if the IDF was intending genocide, it was phenomenally ineffective.

This also means a remarkably low ratio of non-combatant to combatant deaths of almost 1:1. In the Persian Gulf War, it was nine civilians to one soldier; in the 2016–2017 international campaign in Mosul, Iraq against ISIS, it was 9:1 again—which is the U.N. estimate for civilian to combatant ratio in most urban warfare. In Gaza, even with Isaac’s probably inflated death total, it is 1.4:1, and perhaps 1:1. This is stunning when we recall that Hamas purposely uses its citizens as human shields, embedding its soldiers and weapons in or near hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, mosques, and churches.

Finally, it beggars belief that a people intending genocide would care for enemy wounded. Yet terrorists who survived the October 7 massacre were treated in Israeli hospitals alongside Israeli victims.

These are some of the reasons that Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the former U.N. special advisor on the prevention of genocide, refused to call the Gaza war genocide. For this refusal she was dismissed by the U.N. in November 2024. It is also why the Biden State Department in December 2024 insisted that “allegations of genocide are unfounded.” In the same month, German foreign ministry spokesman Sebastian Fischer said the same.

Isaac insists that the Jewish state rests “on someone else’s land,” that of “the indigenous people.” This is historical nonsense. Joshua and his tribes conquered much of the land 3400 years ago. Jews were the majority population from the thirteenth century B.C. to A.D. 135, and in the last two thousand years clustered in the land repeatedly to preserve their culture, until a massive return to the land began in the eighteenth century. Muslims invaded the land two and a half millennia after Abraham settled there with God’s promise that his progeny would have title to the land ever after (Gen. 12:7; 15:8; 17:7–8).  

It was only sixty-eight years ago that Isaac’s people started calling themselves Palestinians: Before 1967 they called themselves Jordanians, because in 1950 Jordan illegally took control of Judea and Samaria, ignoring protests from the Arab League. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian academic and activist, concedes that it is “a relatively recent tradition which argues that Palestinian nationalism has deep historical roots.” This “anachronistically read[s] back in to the history of Palestine . . . a nationalist consciousness and identity that are in fact relatively modern.”

If Isaac errs on who was indigenous and the meaning of “Palestinian,” he also is wrong to accuse Jews of stealing the land. Much of the land alleged to be stolen actually came from Jewish purchase of lands from absentee Arab landlords before and after 1948. In his memoirs, King Abdullah of Jordan wrote that the real history of Jews taking over Arab lands is a story of commerce, not theft: “Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in . . . weeping [about it].”

Perhaps because this history undermines his narrative, Isaac makes the theological claim that God cannot “have a special relation with a particular nation or race.” In his earlier book From Land to Lands, Isaac explains his reasoning: Since Jesus came to fulfill everything in God’s first covenant with Israel, Israel as a people no longer has a special relationship with God. Christians are the new Israel because the old Israel broke its covenant. A broken covenant is not a binding covenant, so the new covenant nullifies the old.  

Like many Lutherans, Munther anchors his theology in Paul’s letters, claiming that for Paul, “Jesus is the only legitimate recipient of the Abrahamic promises, denying in essence any other claims by any person or people group to the benefits of this covenant.” Furthermore, Paul “says the law is no longer needed” for “it has achieved its purpose,” and the promised land has been universalized into “the promised earth” for all Christians.

Tellingly, Isaac ignores Paul’s clear assertion that his fellow Jews who had rejected Jesus “are [present tense] beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Rom. 11:28–29, emphasis added). For first-century Jews, God’s principal gift to the Jewish people was the land, and their “calling” was to be the Chosen People “above all peoples,” the apple of his eye (Exod. 4:22; Deut. 10:15; 32:10).  

Isaac also ignores Luke’s description of Paul’s sermon at a synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia (modern Turkey) where the apostle declared that “the God of this people Israel chose our fathers . . . and after destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land as an inheritance”(Acts 13:17–19, emphasis added).  

Nor does Isaac mention Paul’s clear affirmation of Jewish law in Romans: “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law. . . . The law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. . . . I agree with the law, that it is good. . . . I delight in the law of God in my inner being. . . . God has sent his own Son . . . in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us” (Rom. 3:31; 7:12, 16, 22; 8:3–4).

It is worth noting that the Catholic Church has rejected Isaac’s interpretation of Paul on Israel. In Nostra Aetate at Vatican II, the council fathers quote Paul in Romans 9 to say that Jews have the “sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises.” In the 2015 document “The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable,” the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity pays tribute to “the continued love of God for the chosen people of Israel.” In 1991, Pope John Paul II referred to the return of Jews to the “mountains of Israel” in the last centuries as a fulfillment of Ezekiel’s promise in 34:13. English Catholic theologian Gavin D’Costa sees in recent magisterial documents a trajectory toward a “minimalist Catholic Zionism” whose building blocks are the assertions that “the Jewish covenant is irrevocable; that this covenant applies to the Jews today; that part of this covenant has been the promise of the land; that this promise is not superseded or annulled in the New Testament and is firmly based in the Old Testament.”

Isaac has just completed a triumphant tour of elite Ivy, Catholic, and evangelical universities, telling the story he relates in Christ in the Rubble. He received standing ovations from standing-room-only crowds. As in the book, his speeches exploit genuine suffering that tugs on the heartstrings of naive listeners and demonizes Israel. Tragically, his invented history and distorted exegesis will be used by cynical Palestinian leadership to prolong Palestinian suffering. As Abba Eban observed decades ago, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Christ in the Rubble:
Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza
By Munther Isaac, Eerdmans, 279 pages, $24.99