David, Goliath and the Gospel: Metaphors in Conflict

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to situate the statements on the enduring Middle East crisis inside current scholarship to do with the region. It assumes the need for a deeper historical and geopolitical understanding. It draws upon podcasts to provide an historical appreciation of the importance of Gaza through time. It seeks to explain the emergence of the state of Israel as a consequence of late nineteenth century thinking on Zionism and evangelical understandings of the restoration of Israel. The current situation in the whole region can only be understood in the light of the fall of the Ottoman empire and post-World War 1 reconfigurations of territory. The present plight of the Palestinians was seeded in the establishment of Israel and the dislocation of its people during the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. In the late twentieth century a number of ‘new historians’ arose in Israel to challenge the received Israeli understanding that its people were like David facing an Arabic Goliath. That metaphor has become inverted. The articles mediates Palestinian experience and the emergence of a liberation theology raising afresh the question of how should the gospel be understood in a time of genocide. Munther Isaac presented the image and idea of Christ in the rubble; the Israelis have made use of an AI system to assist in the selection of bombing sites called ‘the gospel’.