Post by Fr David Neuhaus SJ | 11 May 2026
Decolonizing Palestine
I am reading a 2023 volume by Lutheran Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible (Maryknoll, Orbis Press, 2023). It is an important critique of Christian theology from the perspective of a Palestinian, who is a resident of Bethlehem. Raheb is one of Palestine’s foremost theologians.
I strongly recommend this book to all who seek to become more aware of the extent to which we are complicit in the destruction of Palestine and the ongoing wiping out of its people. This applies also to Christians who have adopted a “biblical” idiom, often unconscious, when they talk about the “Holy Land”, the “Chosen People”, and replace the real geography, history, culture and society of Palestine with an imaginary “biblical” panorama, focusing on biblical Israel and Israelites, regularly confused with the modern state of Israel and Israelis.
In a particularly striking paragraph, Raheb writes, “We should confess that Christian theologians have played, consciously or unconsciously, a major role in aiding the ongoing colonization of Palestinian land and people. Land theology has been a theological tool for Palestinian dispossession and oppression. Christian theologians have failed to see that the promised land is confiscated land. The preoccupation of Christian theologians with the Bible, fear of being called anti-Semitic, and guilt about the Holocaust have disguised the ongoing colonization of Palestine.” (p. 80)
View an interview by Robert Ellsberg, editor-in-chief of Orbis Books, with Mitri Raheb on his book:
Raheb has published a number of books and many articles on these themes.
The Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christianity in the Age of Empire. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2021.
Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible through Palestinian Eyes. Maryknoll: Orbis 2014.
I am a Palestinian Christian. Augsburg Fortress: Minneapolis, 1995.