Visit Palestine: Rediscover the Risen Christ in a Land That Still Waits for Peace | Daniel Bannoura

April 7, 2026·1 hr 23 min·6 clips

A Palestinian Christian theologian calls the war in Gaza a genocide and says Western Christianity has been hijacked by power.

1. The Jason Jones Show, recorded on Easter Monday, presents an extended interview with Dr. Daniel Bannoura, a Christian Palestinian theologian from Bethlehem. 2. Bannoura is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Notre Dame, holds a PhD in Quranic studies from Notre Dame, and grew up in Beit Sahour near Bethlehem in an Orthodox tribal family with a Baptist pastor father. 3. The episode's core thesis is that Western Christianity has been corrupted by its alignment with empire and military power, and that Palestinian Christianity offers a more faithful model rooted in the Gospel. 4. Bannoura describes his family's 12 acres of land near Beit Sahour as having been 'stolen by settlers' and converted into what is now called the Har Hamas settlement. 5. He recounts that during the second intifada, his cousin was shot, a neighbor was killed, and his 12-year-old friend Johnny Thalji was shot in the neck by a sniper while breaking curfew to buy bread for his family. 6. Bannoura explains the word 'intifada' derives from the Arabic root meaning 'to shake off,' comparing it structurally to the ANC in South Africa and the U.S. civil rights movement as a response to systematic oppression. 7. He contrasts Western Christian theology, which he characterizes as centered on individual piety, end-times prophecy, and power, with Palestinian Christian theology, which he says developed over a thousand years of minority status by returning to Christ's teachings on mercy, forgiveness, and peacemaking. 8. Jones describes personally evacuating wounded Palestinian women and children from Gaza into Egypt for medical treatment alongside his associate Halil Sayegh, and acknowledging his own prior prejudices toward Palestinians. 9. Bannoura argues that Palestinian Christians are systematically ignored or vilified in the West because, as Christians who share the same trinitarian faith, their testimony disrupts the 'good guys vs. bad guys' binary used to justify the occupation. 10. He cites every major human rights organization and 'the vast majority of Holocaust and genocide scholars' as now classifying what is happening in Gaza as a genocide. 11. On Zionism, Bannoura makes the argument that Zionism can only function by denying Palestinian rights, and that Western support for a Jewish homeland is implicitly an admission that Western societies 'cannot be trusted not to molest Jews' — which he calls the structural logic of anti-Semitism. 12. He notes that five Israeli soldiers filmed raping a Palestinian prisoner were recently acquitted and subsequently appeared as guests on Israeli morning television programs. 13. Bannoura states that South African anti-apartheid activists including Desmond Tutu visited the West Bank and said the situation there was worse than what they experienced under apartheid. 14. Jones describes wearing a Palestinian flag shirt to his gym in Texas and says every encounter it prompted led to a 'beautiful conversation' about his earlier prejudices growing up in Chicago. 15. Bannoura explains that the word 'Allah' is the Aramaic cognate of 'God' used by Jesus himself, and that Arabic-speaking Christians use Allah as their ordinary word for God. 16. He describes how the West's perennial 'savage' enemy — from Native Americans to Black Americans to Jews to Japanese — has now settled on Muslims and Arabs, and says the problem is not bigotry per se but the power structures that translate it into ethnic cleansing and war. 17. The episode is conducted as a direct, personal interview, with Jones offering frequent self-disclosures about his own conversion from atheism to Catholicism and his evolving views on Palestinians. 18. Bannoura is candid and theologically specific, drawing on scripture (Matthew 25, the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus's table-flipping), church history, and personal testimony in roughly equal measure. 19. Listeners interested in Christian ethics, Middle East politics, and the intersection of faith with human rights will find dense material here. 20. Listeners who prefer policy analysis without theological framing, or who are not interested in detailed critique of Christian Zionism and U.S. foreign policy, may find the episode difficult.

As heard by us

A blunt Christian argument for finding faith among the vulnerable, not the powerful.

This episode stays with a hard subject and does not try to smooth it over. Jason Jones introduces a Christian theologian from Bethlehem and lets the conversation move through Palestine, the West Bank, Gaza, Christ among the vulnerable, and Matthew 25, while also pressing on how…

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You want a Bethlehem Christian to challenge power while staying rooted in faith.

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