Truth in the Age of Propaganda  

Gaza, October 7 and the Question of Whose Voice We Hear

There was something deeply revealing about the scene at the United Nations when Benjamin Netanyahu rose to address the General Assembly. Before the speech had properly begun, delegations were already leaving. The walk-outs were presented by some as an expression of moral outrage. Others saw them as a political gesture. Whatever interpretation one places upon them, there is a more fundamental question beneath the theatre of the chamber. Namely, what happens to truth when we decide in advance which testimony we are prepared to hear? That is not merely a political question. It is a biblical one.

Israel, the Nations and the Purposes of God

Before we consider propaganda, political narratives and the struggle over truth in our own age, we need to step back and remember the much larger biblical story. Scripture does not present Israel as simply one nation among many. God called Abraham and promised that through him “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:3). He brought Israel out of Egypt, entered into a covenant with them, gave them His commandments and appointed them to be a people through whom His character and purposes could be made known among the nations. Israel’s calling therefore carried both privilege and responsibility. 

Deuteronomy sets blessing and obedience alongside warning and rebellion: faithfulness would bring fruitfulness, protection and flourishing, while turning from God’s covenant would bring disorder, vulnerability, exile and loss (Deut 28). Yet even judgement was not presented as the abandonment of God’s purposes. The prophets repeatedly spoke of restoration, of Israel’s eventual return to her God, and of a future in which the nations themselves would come to recognise YHWH (Isa 2:2-4; Jer 31:31-37; Ezek 36 - 37; Amos 9:11-15 and Zech 8:20-23). 

The biblical pattern therefore becomes larger than Israel alone: God is Lord over the nations. He raises up and brings down; He judges injustice; He opposes pride; He defends the vulnerable; and He calls peoples to account for how they exercise the authority entrusted to them. Psalm 2 asks why the nations rage against YHWH and His Anointed, while Psalm 82 depicts a heavenly courtroom in which those entrusted with authority are themselves called to account. Daniel sees earthly kingdoms against the backdrop of heavenly realities, and Revelation ultimately portrays every human kingdom within the greater sovereignty of the Lamb. 

This does not give Christians permission to declare that every contemporary disaster is a specific judgement from God, nor does it allow us to identify particular politicians or nations as instruments of particular spiritual powers without evidence. It does, however, give us a radically different starting point from secular political analysis: nations are not morally autonomous. 

The United Nations may bring the nations together institutionally, but Scripture reminds us that the nations ultimately stand before a higher court. Every member state, whether powerful or weak, democratic or authoritarian, Christian-influenced or secular, remains accountable to the God who made the nations and to the purposes He has established for humanity. That makes truth more than a political commodity. When a nation distorts truth, celebrates injustice, protects corruption, dehumanises another people, or calls evil good and good evil, the biblical question is not merely whether its propaganda is persuasive. The deeper question is whether that nation is aligning itself with, or resisting, the purposes of the King.

The Hebrew Scriptures repeatedly warn God’s people against accepting testimony simply because it confirms what they already believe: “You shall not spread a false report” (Ex 23:1); “You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbour” (Lev 19:15). Zechariah says: “Speak the truth to one another; render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace” (Zech 8:16).

The biblical vocabulary is wonderfully rich. ‘Emet’ is truth, but not truth merely as a collection of correct propositions. It carries a sense of firmness, reliability and faithfulness. ‘Sheqer’ is falsehood, deception, something unreliable. ‘Mishpat’ is judgement or justice – the process of distinguishing rightly between competing claims. ‘Shalom’ is not simply the absence of fighting. It is wholeness, completeness, and rightly ordered relationship. Maybe, therefore, the Christian response to Gaza should begin neither with Israel nor Palestine, neither with Netanyahu nor Hamas, neither with the United Nations nor Washington. Maybe it should begin with a much older question – what is true?

Let’s begin where the story became unavoidable: 7 October

Whatever arguments preceded it, the modern phase of this conflict cannot responsibly be discussed without beginning on 7 October 2023. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups launched a coordinated attack into Israel in which civilians were deliberately killed and hundreds of people were taken hostage. The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry subsequently concluded that the armed groups committed war crimes including intentional attacks against civilians, murder, torture and hostage-taking. Some 251 people were abducted. 

A society cannot build justice upon the selective remembering of suffering.

Those facts matter because a society cannot build justice upon the selective remembering of suffering. They also matter because acknowledging the crimes of Hamas does not require denying the humanity or suffering of Palestinian civilians. Gaza is not Hamas and Palestinians are not Hamas, notwithstanding that many align and engage with Hamas. Equally, Israeli citizens are not synonymous with the decisions of an Israeli government and the suffering of Palestinian civilians does not somehow erase the suffering of Israeli victims. Truth refuses these substitutions. The biblical witness is more demanding than tribal loyalty. It says: hear the testimony, examine it, weigh it, and then speak. 

The Greek New Testament uses ‘aletheia’ for truth. It is the word Jesus uses when He says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32) and is set in the context of John 8:31: “If you obey what my word, then you are really my disciples”. Truth liberates because lies imprison, but there is another word worth placing beside it: ‘martyria’, which means testimony or witness. The question facing our world is therefore not simply about which side we support; it goes deeper to ask which testimony we have actually heard.

Gaza 2005: what happened when Israel left?

There is another piece of the story which is remarkably absent from much contemporary discussion. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew its settlements and permanent military presence from the Gaza Strip. Whatever one’s judgement of the policy, the historical fact is important. 

Something else also happened. There was an attempt to leave behind productive economic infrastructure. American Jewish donors, working with James Wolfensohn, then Quartet special envoy and former president of the World Bank, provided approximately $14 million to purchase thousands of greenhouses from departing Israeli farmers so that they could become the foundation for Palestinian agricultural employment and exports. The intention was extraordinarily practical. They didn’t want to leave an empty desert, rather something that produced, which created employment, that could create wealth and could connect Gaza to international markets.

Notwithstanding the good intentions, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal, the greenhouses were looted. UN reporting recorded damage to pumps, pipes, computers and other equipment. Contemporary reporting described Palestinian looters stripping valuable components from the facilities. That does not tell the whole story, because Palestinian farmers subsequently repaired many of the greenhouses, and there were genuine efforts to make the project work. UN reporting estimated that around 3,000 Palestinian agricultural workers could benefit. Later World Bank reporting, however, documented how restrictions, insecurity, damaged infrastructure and difficulties accessing markets contributed to the collapse of the agricultural opportunity. That fuller story is important precisely because it prevents propaganda from becoming history. 

The lesson is not that Israel left and Gaza was offered paradise. On the other hand, it most definitely isn’t that Israel left and deliberately destroyed Gaza’s economic future. The evidence is altogether more complicated, but one uncomfortable fact remains: economic opportunity was placed on the table, and some of the infrastructure intended to create it was looted almost immediately. This deserves to be remembered, because there is a profound difference between a political movement seeking independence and a political culture in which productive opportunity becomes subordinate to ideological struggle. 

If a greenhouse produces tomatoes, employment and export revenue, it is not merely a greenhouse. It represents an alternative future. A future in which people build rather than destroy. A future in which a young man can become an engineer, farmer, trader or entrepreneur rather than a fighter. A future in which prosperity becomes possible without somebody else having to lose. That is precisely why the biblical vision of shalom is so important, because biblical peace is productive.

The prophets picture vineyards, children playing in streets, people sitting beneath their vines and fig trees, building houses and eating the fruit of their labour: “They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4). The biblical alternative to war is not merely silence, it is flourishing.

The Jewish refugees the conversation often forgets

There is another historical imbalance which needs correcting. The Palestinian refugee story is real, painful and historically important, but it is not the only refugee story created by the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the decades following the 1948 war, approximately 800,000 Jews left their homes in Arab countries including Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Morocco. 

Historian Michael Fischbach documents the scale of this exodus and the loss or seizure of substantial Jewish property. The precise causes varied from country to country: some communities experienced discriminatory legislation, some violence and persecution, some expulsions, and others pressure that made continued Jewish life increasingly untenable. The communities that had existed for centuries were transformed. In Iraq, for example, one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world was effectively dismantled within a few years. This does not cancel Palestinian suffering and it does not make every Israeli policy righteous. It does not turn every Arab into an antisemite. Indeed, the history of Jewish-Arab relations is considerably more complicated than that. But it does mean that any serious conversation about refugees must be willing to remember both peoples.

There were Palestinian Arabs who became refugees. There were Jews who became refugees. There were homes abandoned. There was property confiscated. There were families uprooted. There were communities which disappeared. Justice cannot be built upon selective memory and this is where the word ‘mishpat’ becomes important. Biblical justice does not ask us to choose which victim deserves to be remembered, it asks us to tell the truth about all victims.

Land of the covenant

But perhaps the deepest question is not really about land. For all the arguments about borders, settlements, checkpoints, refugees, Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank and the Mediterranean, there is another question underneath them: who has the right to define reality? 

The Bible does not treat the land as merely a piece of valuable real estate. The land is bound into a covenant. God calls Abram: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen 12:1). In the covenant with Abraham, God declared, “I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God” (Gen 17:8). 

That language cannot simply be erased from Christian theology. Nor should Christians use it as a licence to ignore the human beings who live there. The same Scriptures repeatedly insist upon justice for the stranger. Israel is commanded to remember that it too was once a stranger in Egypt. “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut 10:19). The biblical land promise and the biblical command to love the stranger therefore stand together. This is not a simple political programme. It is a theological tension which must be held faithfully. 

The biblical land promise and the biblical command to love the stranger therefore stand together.

The land belongs ultimately to God: “The earth is YHWH’s and the fullness thereof” (Ps 24:1). Israel’s possession of the land does not turn Israel into God and God’s covenant with Israel does not give Christians permission to despise Palestinians or Arabs. Indeed, the biblical story itself refuses such ethnic simplification. The God of Abraham is the God who intends blessing for all the families of the earth: “I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonours you I will curse and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:3). It is important to notice the direction of the promise. Israel is not chosen merely to possess. Israel is chosen to become a channel of blessing and I propose that such a distinction matters enormously. The people of the promise are not the enemy. 

Paul takes the matter further in Romans 9 - 11 and here Christians need to tread very carefully. Paul does not permit Gentile believers to look contemptuously upon Israel. Instead, he warns them against arrogance: “Do not be arrogant toward the branches” (Rom 11:18). This is followed by what can only be described as an extraordinary statement: “As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers.” The tension is deliberate. Israel’s present response to the Messiah matters. But God’s covenant faithfulness is not casually cancelled by human unbelief. Paul immediately follows this with the statement: “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). 

Whatever one concludes about the precise shape of Israel’s future, Paul plainly refuses the idea that Gentile Christians have now replaced Israel so completely that Israel’s story no longer matters, which should make us cautious, very cautious. Because Christianity has too often spoken about Jews in ways that have betrayed the character of the Messiah it claims to proclaim. The Christian cannot simultaneously confess Jesus as Messiah and nurture contempt for the people from whom Messiah came.

Loving your neighbour

To come back to today, there are Arab citizens of Israel who work, study, trade, worship, raise families, enter hospitals, universities and businesses, and participate in the ordinary rhythms of Israeli society. Their existence complicates the idea that this entire conflict can be reduced to a simple racial contest between Jews and Arabs. It simply cannot. There are Arabs who live as Israeli citizens. There are Jews who live alongside Arabs. There are Muslims, Christians and Jews living within the same geographical space. There are Palestinians who want dignity, security and prosperity. There are Israelis who want dignity, security and prosperity. 

There are people on either side of the argument who simply want their children to come home safely and there are also ideological movements whose stated objectives extend far beyond coexistence. That distinction matters, because perhaps the deepest conflict is not ultimately about whether one people likes another people. It is about which vision of reality will govern the future. 

Whose voice will be obeyed? The voice that says: “Love your neighbour”. Or the voice that proclaims that your neighbour must disappear.

Whose voice will be obeyed? The voice that says: “Love your neighbour”. Or the voice that proclaims that your neighbour must disappear. The voice that says: “Seek the welfare of the city.” Or the voice that says that the city must belong exclusively to us. The voice that says: “Beat your swords into ploughshares”. Or the voice that says that the sword is our future. The voice of the Messiah who gives Himself for His enemies, or the voice of the ideology which requires enemies in order to survive?

This is why I believe that the biblical category of idolatry may ultimately be more illuminating than the category of geography. An idol is not merely a statue. An idol is anything which claims authority that belongs to God and therefore the question facing Jerusalem, Gaza, Israel, Palestine and indeed the whole world is not simply: Who gets the land? Rather, we must ask better questions: Who gets to define good and evil? Who gets to define the truth? Whose voice do we hear?

The tragedy of peace repeatedly deferred

This is also why history must be remembered honestly. The 1947 UN partition proposal envisaged separate Jewish and Arab states. Jewish leadership accepted the recommendation; Arab leadership rejected it. The 1993 Oslo process created mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO. The PLO recognised Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and renounced terrorism and violence. Israel recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. The process did not produce the promised final settlement.

Camp David in 2000 ended without agreement. The subsequent Clinton Parameters were accepted by both Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat as a basis for further negotiation, albeit with reservations, but the parties remained unable to bridge fundamental differences over borders, Jerusalem, refugees and security.

In 2002, the Arab Peace Initiative offered a regional framework: Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967, a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and an agreed solution to the refugee question, in return for Arab recognition and normal relations with Israel. That initiative was not accepted as a completed settlement.
In 2007, the Annapolis process again attempted to establish a negotiated two-state settlement. 

The point is not to construct a scoreboard of who rejected how many offers. That is too easy. History is rarely that tidy. The point is more sobering: There have been repeated moments when political leaders have had opportunities to move from conflict toward negotiated coexistence, and those opportunities have repeatedly failed. Sometimes because of Palestinian rejection or violence. Sometimes because of Israeli political choices. Sometimes because extremists on one side or the other destroyed the confidence necessary for negotiation. Sometimes because the issues were simply too difficult. Sometimes because leaders could not persuade their own people to accept the compromises required. 

Truth requires us to say all of that. The ninth commandment is remarkably relevant: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.” The word neighbour is particularly important. The command is not: ‘do not bear false witness against people you like’. It is precisely when the relationship is difficult that truth becomes costly. 
Which brings us back to the United Nations, and the questions it also raises for us. Were the delegates willing to listen to testimony which challenged their own preferred narrative? Are we able to do so? 

The command is not: ‘do not bear false witness against people you like’. It is precisely when the relationship is difficult that truth becomes costly. 

Can we condemn the murder of Israeli civilians without becoming indifferent to Palestinian suffering? Can we acknowledge the suffering of Palestinian civilians without minimising the crimes committed on 7 October? 

Can we recognise Jewish historical and covenantal attachment to the land without denying the humanity and legitimate aspirations of Palestinian Arabs? Can we recognise Palestinian displacement without rewriting Jewish history? 

Can we criticise certain actions of an Israeli government without treating Israel’s existence as illegitimate? Can we oppose Hamas without treating every Palestinian as Hamas? Can we speak about antisemitism without pretending that every criticism of Israel is antisemitic? Can we speak about Palestinian rights without pretending that every Palestinian political movement is committed to peaceful coexistence? 

These are not contradictions. They are clear and unequivocal demands of truth.

The question for Christians

For Christians, however, there is one further step. We must ask not merely what we believe about the conflict. We must ask what kind of people our beliefs are making us. Jesus does not call His followers merely to possess correct opinions. He calls them to become people who hear His voice: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (Jn 10:27). That is the question I would leave hanging over this entire subject. 

We must ask not merely what we believe about the conflict. We must ask what kind of people our beliefs are making us.

Not merely, who owns Gaza? Not merely, where should the borders be? Not merely, which leader was right? 

My question is this: whose voice are we hearing? Is it the voice of propaganda, of nationalism, of grievance, of fear or of revenge? Is it the voice of social media or our tribe? Or is it the voice of our King, King Jesus? 

Because once we have learned to hear the King, something changes. We can mourn without becoming partisan. We can defend truth without becoming cruel. We can love Israel without despising Arabs. We can love Arabs without despising Jews. We can acknowledge Palestinian suffering without rewriting October 7. We can condemn Hamas without pretending that every Israeli military action is therefore righteous. We can hold covenant theology without abandoning justice. We can pursue justice without abandoning mercy. Possibly, most importantly, we can refuse to let the conflict teach us to hate the very people whom God commands us to love.

 The land, the people and the King 

The Bible does indeed speak about a people and a land. It speaks of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It speaks of covenant. It speaks of Jerusalem, Zion and Israel. It speaks of nations gathering against Jerusalem. It speaks of the Messiah reigning. But the Bible never allows the land to become more important than the Lord of the land, which may be the point we most desperately need to recover. The ultimate issue is not simply land; it is lordship. Not simply territory, but testimony. Not merely Jerusalem, but the King of Jerusalem.

Our Christian task is not to become another propagandist; it is to become a witness: ‘Emet’ before tribe, ‘Mishpat’ before outrage, ‘Shalom’ before victory and Messiah before ideology. 

The world needs people willing to listen long enough to discover what is actually true. People who are willing to say that they will not repeat what they have not tested, or condemn people they have not heard. That they will not excuse evil because it is committed by my side and will not deny suffering because acknowledging it complicates my theology. People who will not allow propaganda to become their prophet.  People who, above all else, listen for the voice of the King, because perhaps that is where the entire question finally comes to rest. It’s not about which flag is flying; it is about whose voice we are obeying. It is not about who wins the argument but what does truth require of me? And we must ask, how can we become an instrument of the King’s shalom?

The conflict surrounding Israel and Gaza is not going to be resolved by another social-media argument. Nor will it be resolved by pretending history began on 7 October 2023 or, alternatively, 1948. As much as it pains me neither will it be by pretending that one people possesses all the truth and the other possesses none. History is longer; the human heart is darker, and God’s purposes are larger. So perhaps the Christian response should be wonderfully simple: Hear, Test, Discern, Pray, Speak truth, Pursue justice, Love mercy, Walk humbly and listen again, because the King is still speaking. The question is not whether He has a voice. The question is whether we have ears to hear it.

Nick Thompson

^{Image by Geralt on pixabay.com}