Died: Labib Madanat, Who Showed the Bible to Palestinians and Israelis in Word and Deed

Author - Umn ministry

November 24, 2021

Son of Jordanian missionaries organized the Holy Land’s Bible societies and demonstrated the gospel’s love and forgiveness amid war and terror.

During his decades of ministry, Labib Madanat repeatedly passed through Israel’s main international airport. So regularly did security detain and thoroughly search him, he developed his own response.

“Ben Gurion is my mission field,” Madanat would say. “When I tell them that I am a Palestinian Arab Christian, and that I love the God of Israel and their Messiah, I get their full attention!”

The son of Jordanian missionaries who later led his father’s Jerusalem church, Madanat’s role as director of the Palestinian Bible Society (PBS) and later coordinator of all the Bible societies in the Holy Land offered him a platform to live out the gospel in a polarized region. He died on November 14 at the age of 56, after suffering three consecutive seizures during a ministry trip to Baghdad, Iraq.

“There are people in the world who work and provide help to different groups not like them but don’t always have a love for those people,” wrote his brother-in-law Daoud Kuttab, secretary of the Jordan Evangelical Council. “This was not Labib. He genuinely open-heartedly loved everyone he came in contact with, Arabs or foreigners, Palestinians or Israelis, Iraqi Shiites or Sunnis, Amazigh from North Africa, or Kurds in Irbil.”

The Good Book in Gaza

Despite being an outsider to many of his fellow Palestinians because of his Christian faith and a perceived enemy to many Jewish Israelis because of his heritage, Madanat routinely found ways to confound both communities through his insistence on recognizing the dignity of those who disagreed with or traumatized him.

This persisted even after he endured terror and tragedy. In 1998, PBS opened a Christian bookstore in Gaza City, where ...