Rockets, Riots, Sermons, and Soccer: 10 Christian Views on the Conflict in Gaza and Israel

Author - Umn ministry

May 20, 2021

Messianic Jews and Palestinian Christians tell CT how they and their churches minister across the divide as Hamas and the IDF war once again.

Bombs fall in Gaza as rockets target Israel.

Frustrated Arab rioters are met by extremist Jewish settlers.

And in the middle of it all, Danny Kopp sent his boys out to play soccer.

Numbers were down at the Jerusalem neighborhood park frequented by Jew and Arab alike, but his 13-, 10-, and 8-year-old sons still translated between the sides.

“These encounters, as small as they are, remind belligerents that coexistence is still viable,” said the chairman of the Evangelical Alliance in Israel.

“Wholesale vilifying is simply inaccurate.”

But it is easy to do, if attached to a favored narrative.

Since the outbreak of fighting on May 10, Israeli bombs have leveled 450 buildings in Gaza, including 18 hospitals and the headquarters of the Associated Press. Hamas authorities count 217 dead, including 63 children. More than 1,400 people have been injured, and 52,000 displaced from their homes.

But 160 of these have been militant fighters, said Israeli authorities. Hamas’s indiscriminate barrage has launched 3,450 rockets and killed 12 people, including two children. Israel’s Iron Dome defense system has intercepted most rockets, but Iranian sponsorship of Hamas has led to a dramatic increase in long-range missiles able to target Jerusalem.

Such missiles represent 17 percent of the thousands fired this month. Nine years ago, only 1 percent.

The weapons evolve, though the animosity is familiar.

But what has shocked and saddened the nearly a dozen sources interviewed by CT—half Jewish and half Palestinian—was the ethnic violence that has torn through previously peaceful towns of coexistence. In Lod, Haifa, Nazareth, and elsewhere, Arab rioters have set 10 synagogues and more than 100 Jewish homes on ...