As the saga in Gaza continued to unfold, Israel partially opened the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. While the opening has allowed some medical evacuations and limited returns, it is a modest change when set against the scale of need and the absence of a broader resolution.
More recently, Donald Trump announced a new “Board of Peace” aimed at resolving global conflicts, expanding from an initial focus on Gaza to other global crises. The proposal may sound constructive, but it also risks bypassing existing international norms, including the United Nations, and it raises questions about who is invited to the table. It is notable, for example, that the Palestinian Authority appears to be sidelined in favor of Palestinian technocrats.
Rubin McClain
Even as a plan for Gaza’s reconstruction is discussed, the underlying drivers of this war are often underreported and poorly understood. A surface impression of “progress” can obscure the more basic reality that Gaza has been devastated.
One recent estimate published in The Lancet Global Health suggests deaths may be far higher than widely reported, putting the figure above 75,000, which would be roughly 3% to 4% of Gaza’s population.
Thus, in the wake of the last few years of violence and tragedy, some Christians still champion and even praise Israel’s actions in Gaza. In contrast to this theological confusion, what would it look like for Christians to rally around a careful, text-shaped reading of Amos that informs how we think about Israel and Palestine, and how we speak about accountability before God?
Richard T. Hughes, writing for Baptist News Global, captures the contrast well when he observes:
For years, I have asked my students what they know about the book of Amos in the Hebrew Bible. This tiny book has inspired virtually every Christian advocate for social and racial justice for centuries on end. It inspired Ida B. Wells and Fredrick Douglass in the 19th century, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer in the 20th century, and in our time John Lewis, William Barber III, and the scholar-activist Catherine Meeks, to name just a few. But when I ask my students about Amos, no hands go up.
Where does our theological framework for justice reside? Do we emphasize sin, atonement and forgiveness in ways that become detached from the concrete harms Scripture condemns? Or do we take seriously a theology of accountability that names injustice, calls out abuse and disrupts patterns of harm?
“Where does our theological framework for justice reside?”
Much of Western Christian theology can drift toward abstraction, and we often default to the individual’s need for salvation, with less attention to the social and political dimensions of sin that the prophets refuse to ignore.
In Amos 1:1, God speaks through the prophetic voice of a Judean herdsman from Tekoa. Amos 3-9 primarily directs his critique toward the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Yet before he confronts Israel directly, Amos 1-2 speaks against the surrounding nations and their “war crimes.” Although this prophetic indictment ultimately includes Israel as well in Amos 2:6-16, the opening sequence places all the nations on the same scales of justice.
This overflowing guilt is reiterated through the repeated formula, “For the three sins … even four.” The pattern is not simply a rhetorical flourish; it is a deliberate strategy that emphasizes repeated cruelty, destruction and violence. Amos directly names guilty kingdoms, including Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab and Judah. The sins he condemns include brutal warfare in Amos 1:3, mass deportation and human trafficking in Gaza in Amos 1:6 and even the desecration of the dead in Moab in Amos 2:1, which signals a deeper dehumanization of others.
Amos offers many takeaways, but three are especially significant here.
First, the nations are not outside God’s concern or beyond the reach of prophetic critique. For us today, this matters. Our sermons, discussions and purview are not just a matter of local ecclesial life.
In its reporting on the events of 2025, Human Rights Watch described Israel’s conduct in Gaza as amounting to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. We should hear Amos as a word that reaches into these realities.
The prophets are not just material for sermons about abstract “oppression.” They press us to name concrete harms in our own time and to pursue accountability.
“God cares about injustice everywhere.”
Second, God cares about injustice everywhere. We cannot limit our moral attention to what happens in our own backyard.
In the United States, the immigration raids and the strain on democratic norms can dominate the news and our emotional bandwidth. But we cannot become numb to the ongoing crisis in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, or to suffering in places like Sudan, Nigeria and Iran.
It also is true that our attention is limited. No one can keep up with every conflict and human rights crisis in the world. Yet Israel and Palestine occupy a distinctive place for many Americans because they intersect with the United States’ religious, political and financial commitments. That is why we can offer a focused critique of geopolitical Israel while also refusing to ignore other humanitarian catastrophes.
Finally, the content of Amos’s indictments is concrete and specific. In modern terms, much of what he condemns would fall under humanitarian violations and war crimes. Brutal warfare, desecration of the dead and the exploitation of the vulnerable are not abstract “spiritual” problems. They are moral realities bound up with how a people conduct war and how a society treats those with the least power.
Amos rebukes the way theology can drift into abstraction. He forces the discussion back onto the ground. Real people are being harmed, and any faithful theological reflection has to take that suffering seriously, not as an afterthought, but as the very thing God’s justice addresses.
We can make a difference by helping Christians hold religion and justice together in the “Holy Land,” staying informed about the realities on the ground, supporting international aid efforts and centering Palestinian suffering in our theological reflection.
My hope is that by bringing Amos into our frameworks for injustice, peace and the critique of nations, we can expand our moral imagination and recover a more public and accountable faith.
Even as daily life in the Occupied Palestinian Territory continues under pressure, we can make small changes that shape the hearts and minds of those around us. The arc of justice is long, and in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr., and before him, Amos, we can still pray and work toward the day when we “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Rubin McClain is an Ambassador Warren Clark Fellow with Churches for Middle East Peace and recently completed a Ph.D. in New Testament at the University of Glasgow. He also writes about peacebuilding in the Middle East, with particular attention to Israel and Palestine.