When Ethan was sitting across from me, I heard something soft in his face, something that does not match the weight he carries. His voice had the calm of a man who has known both love and loss and still refuses, even now, to let bitterness take what is left of his hope. Even when the hope does not make sense. Especially then.
He grew up in Brooklyn in a secular home, distant Jewish blood from his grandmother’s side, nothing more. “I even went to Catholic school,” he said, and he laughed a small laugh, like he was still trying to understand the mixture of things that formed him. At 15, everything changed. He met Jesus. That meeting took him far from Brooklyn, into the Arab world, and it never really left him.
Jack Nassar
His older brother, Aaron, went a different direction completely. He felt pulled toward the Jewish side of the family, became Messianic and rose high inside the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America. For years, the two brothers prayed together, read Scripture together and shared one vision for ministry. Now, every conversation between them feels like walking in a field that might explode under the next step.
I asked Ethan when he first felt the Jesus he follows is not the same as his brother’s Jesus anymore. He took a long breath and went back to the early years. In the early ’90s, both brothers were sitting in a charismatic church in their neighborhood, a church built loosely on dispensational teaching, but underneath all that it was about missions, and that is what carried it.
“The church taught us God’s heart is for all nations,” he said. “Nothing shaped me more than that.”
He talked with warmth about Lebanese Christians who took him in even before he believed. A family from Zahle, who owned a small car lot in Brooklyn, where he worked as a teenager.
“That is where I learned Arabic,” he said. “I did not understand it then. God was preparing me, and I did not know.”
By 18, he was already a missionary in Kuwait, at the National Evangelical Church. There he met Hussam, a Palestinian Christian, and what Hussam carried touched parts of Ethan that no sermon ever touched.
“What he understood about justice, about privilege, about having a home or not having one, all of it changed.”
He told this story like a man carrying something for many years, something that never became past. One afternoon in the heat of Salmiya, Hussam’s old car broke down in the middle of the road. While they were pushing it to the side, a Kuwaiti man came angry, asking where they were from. Hussam’s family had been thrown out of Palestine in 1948, lived years as refugees in Lebanon, before ending up in Kuwait. He told the man quickly that he was Lebanese.
Ethan did not understand. He felt almost offended. Why lie about it.
Hussam’s answer stayed with him. “Ethan, you will go back to America. You have a home. We are here, and we have no home. If that man reports me as Palestinian, I lose everything. Maybe I am sent away from my own family.”
Something in Ethan changed that day. What he understood about justice, about privilege, about having a home or not having one, all of it changed there, next to a broken car in the Kuwaiti heat.
“Palestinian Christians taught me more about the kingdom of God than any book,” he said quietly. “Their only home was Jesus himself; nothing else.”
Years later, Hussam died after being hit by a car while carrying Christian books to distribute in Iraq. Ethan looked down when he said this. “He is home now, finally. That is what comforts me.”
When Ethan came back from Kuwait, he returned to a brother whose world no longer reached his own. Aaron could not see what he had seen. To him, Palestinians were not people with names and wounds and stories. They were a category, part of a bigger picture about nationalism and prophecy. The two brothers kept something between them, careful and fragile, until the war on Gaza broke it completely.
“Palestinian Christians taught me more about the kingdom of God than any book.”
Ethan’s wife is a Christian from Jordan. Her father had land in the Palestinian city of Jericho until 1967, when Israel took it after the occupation. “So when my brother talks about Arabs the way he talks, this is not theory for me,” Ethan said. “He is talking about my own family.”
He stopped, then chose his words slowly. “What I see in my brother, I see across American evangelicalism. People who carry the name of Jesus and still defend things that go against everything Jesus taught.”
The break came when Aaron called him a supporter of terrorism. The reason was a story about beheaded babies, a story already proven false.
“It did not matter that I condemned the killing of civilians,” he said. “If I would not accept propaganda that justified bombing of Gaza, then in his eyes I stood with terror.”
Months of silence followed. Only their mother’s sickness brought them back to speaking. Their parents are both in their mid-70s now, and they want one thing only, peace between their two sons.
When I asked what hurt him most, he did not speak about accusations or shouting. “The most painful thing is to know that he looks at Arabs as less,” he said. “That kind of belief makes it easy to call mass killing collateral damage. But my wife is Arab. My children are Arab. This is not theory I can put aside. This is my life, every day.”
And still he spoke of Aaron with love. “I miss him,” he said, and he meant it. “But to love someone is not to accept his bigotry. Not in the name of Jesus, not ever.”
He believes this story must be told because his family is not the only family breaking under politics dressed as theology. “There are thousands of families like ours,” he said. “If anything in what we went through helps one person see how distorted theology destroys relationships, destroys the church, destroys innocent people, then it is worth telling.”
Ethan and Aaron are preparing for mediation now. Neither of them knows where it leads. “Maybe it ends in tragedy, and he stays where he is,” Ethan said. “Maybe it ends in mercy, like what happened with Peter. Only God knows this.”
But the image that stays with Ethan most comes from Scripture. “Isaac and Ishmael, you only see them together at their father’s burial. One moment of unity, and it is at a grave. I do not want our story to end like that.”
I asked him if Christian Zionism has become a kind of idol inside American evangelicalism. He answered without thinking twice. “Christian Zionism is a sickness inside the church,” he said. “It replaces the gospel with nationalism. It chooses one people over another. This is not the Jesus of the New Testament.”
Why, I asked, do evangelicals keep ignoring Palestinian Christians, people who are, by every Christian definition, part of the same body.
He gave three reasons — distance, propaganda and nationalism that moved quietly into the church and made a home there.
“People do not see Palestinians as real,” he said. “Nationalism teaches you to love your own group more than the family of God. Zionism fits into that.”
Then he said something that landed harder than everything else. “But underneath it all, the real root is absence of love. Every injustice begins when you refuse to see the other as your neighbor.”
So what is Aaron afraid to lose if he ever lets himself question what he believes?
“Everything,” Ethan said softly. “His identity, his position, his work. If Zionism is wrong, then his whole world falls down.”
Before we finished, I asked what he would say to American evangelicals who support what is happening in Gaza. He has Jewish blood. He has an Arab Christian family. He carries both. His answer came simply, and it hit because of how simple it is.
“What they support is the same spirit that chose Barabbas over Jesus,” he said. “Every home destroyed, every child killed, this is crucifixion happening again. Matthew 25 says it clearly. Many will think they followed Christ and find out they did not, because of how they treated ‘the least of these.’ And there is no mistreatment greater than genocide.”
And still the man who sat across from me had not lost his hope. His hope is stubborn, almost defiant in him. He prays for everyone: Jews who want safety. Christians looking for the Jesus of peace. Evangelicals trying to find their way back to compassion. Arabs and Palestinians still waiting for justice. Americans trying to find moral ground under their feet.
He leaned back a little, his voice still steady. “I believe families can heal. I believe hearts can change. I believe Jews and Christians and Arabs and Palestinians and Americans can walk together in justice and mercy.”
As we ended, he said something almost like a whisper, more prayer than sentence. “I pray that Aaron’s community, those Jewish believers in Jesus, will one day lead the way in loving their Arab brothers and sisters. That is the story I am waiting for. That is the hope I will not let go of.”
Jack Nassar is a Palestinian Christian writer focusing on the Palestine-Israel conflict and its social, political and religious dimensions. He holds a master of arts degree in political communications from Goldsmiths University of London.
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