When I decided to write about Gaza, I knew it would be costly. For some strange reason, it is a conflict where many Christians have decided that their normal apprehension towards suffering, violence, and death should be silenced, in favor of narratives that openly support a war that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the enduring trauma for millions of others.

Instead of mapping out a viable future that involves all the people who currently live in the lands of Israel, or entering into negotiation, an unwinnable war has produced another generation of young people who will eagerly join organizations that will fight the state of Israel, ensuring that Trump’s Riviera of the Middle East will instead be a scorched earth of misery, and unending conflict.

We now live in a world where ‘you are not allowed to say this’ covers most topics. ‘You might offend someone,’ or some other veiled threat is used to silence discussion. As for Gaza, it ends careers even faster than Covid. I discovered during the pandemic that you could deny every single doctrine of the Christian faith as a minister, but as long as you supported the vaccine mandates then the church was on your side. Now, the common view in Christianity is that anyone who dares to speak out on the Gaza Question is not only an enemy of the church, but an enemy of God.

Such bold presumption. I would never dare to put words into the mouth of the divine. But that is the world we live in. God is now a recruit in Israel’s war against the children of Gaza. As for Jesus, many in the church now believe that Jesus will arrive in Palestine, walk over the corpses of thousands of dead Palestinian children and proclaim to a complicit and corrupt church ‘Thank you for paving the way for my return.’

This week, I had the chance to talk about the Gaza Question with a few other people on a brand-new news outlet run by a few Aussies, the same people who brought us the popular TNT Radio during the pandemic. You can find the link below.

These days, many Christians in the West have fallen silent over Gaza. Maybe the money has dried up, or the memos have stopped coming through, or maybe there are new people to demonize, but God is not silent. God is righteous. God owns the patent on righteousness and killing children is not in his remit, nor does he condone it, and nor does he work for Donald Trump or the Republican Party, or Israel, or America.

God stands for the weak and the vulnerable, the women and the children and what has happened in Gaza, and what continues to happen will not be forgotten by the God in whose image all are created.

Freedom matters today, because you matter to God

Michael J. Sutton, CEO, Freedom Matters Today