Rev. Dr. Yazīd Saʿīd is senior lecturer at Liverpool Hope University in the United Kingdom. Born into a Palestinian family in Galilee, he studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (BA) and Cambridge University (BA, MPhil, PhD). An Anglican priest, Dr. Saʿīd is the author of Ghazālī’s Politics in Context (London: Routledge, 2013) co-editor of The Future of Interfaith Dialogue: Muslim-Christian Encounters through a Common Word (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), and numerous articles in Islamic studies, interfaith relations, political theology, and Christianity in the Middle East.

The following interview touches on his upbringing in Nazareth and Galilee, his experiences as a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, perspectives on October 7th and the Israeli response, and the complexities of Palestinian Christianity, among other topics. The interview was conducted by Dr. Matthew Anderson, executive editor of Dialogue Across Borders.

Excerpt I

MA: Thank you so much for your time. Could you begin by telling us a bit about your family history in Nazareth?

YS: Thank you. As you know, I am an Anglican Christian, but my parents were both baptized as Orthodox Christians. My formative years were spent in Galilee, while I was born in Nazareth. From past experiences of speaking to Western Christians in general, and particularly in the United States, people are often quite surprised to learn that I'm a Christian given the fact that I come from a historically Palestinian family. I think this would also be true for others who share my background. They say that people ask them, "When did you convert?" because people assume that if you are a Palestinian, you have to be a Muslim.

I usually respond to that question by saying, "I converted in 33 AD." I say this partly in jest, but it is not merely a joke. It is also not a claim that my family can demonstrate an unbroken genealogical line back to the first century. Rather, it is a way of acknowledging that the Christian presence in the Holy Land, and in Jerusalem in particular, has existed since the very beginnings of Christianity. The history of my family must therefore be understood as part of a much more complex historical picture. In that sense, you might say this is the Sitz im Leben of my formative background. It resembles, in a way, the Jerusalem motif one encounters in hymns or poetry that evoke the city’s complex and multi-layered history. Palestinian Christians are architecturally complex and distinctive. Because I grew up in Nazareth, or in Galilee, I am also a contemporary Israeli citizen. At the moment, I am also a British citizen. I am an Israeli citizen who is not Jewish but Palestinian Arab and an Anglican priest who eventually became interested in the world of Islamic studies. Since I am from the Galilee, the other particularity of my context is that I am not a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza. Therefore, I have not had the same sort of political experience that a Palestinian refugee might have had. I have not had the experience of my home being demolished or my land being confiscated, though my great-grandfathers did. However, as a priest residing in Jerusalem, I was also afforded a glimpse into forms of experience and particular contexts that differed significantly from those in which I was raised.

MA: If I understand you correctly, your family has been based in Nazareth for some generations?

YS: Yes. My mother's side of the family is based in Nazareth. My father's side of the family is from a town just north of Nazareth. They have been there for about three or four centuries. They originally moved there from the southern parts of what is today referred to as Syria. In those times, they were not talking of a distinctly different country nor any sort of border crossing. They just moved regions and provinces within the broader Syrian context, which in Arabic is known as Bilād al-Shām (بلاد الشام , the lands of al-Shām). Palestine was a province of that area.

Excerpt II

MA: Is there a robust debate between Jewish scholars or activists in Israel who argue that the Hebrew Bible or the Talmudic tradition legitimizes something about what is happening today and, on the other hand, Palestinian Christian theologians who have read the biblical tradition differently? Is there any kind of academic debate where people are wrestling with the Hebrew Bible and Jewish texts?

YS: I'm not familiar with anything serious going on in that direction. Obviously, the recent conference in Rome I attended that was brought together by Gavin D’Costa did bring people like that together, but not from the Palestinian side. The Palestinian side was not well represented, except by me. I did raise challenging questions, but that happened in Rome. These conversations did not happen in Jerusalem.

I was trying to argue that there are two things here. Firstly, the Jewish people have always had a longing for the land. It is written in the liturgy; it is there in the annual celebrations of the Passover, and this longing will not go away. However, we also have to come to realize the complexity of the history of people who are labeled as the Palestinians and the Palestinian Christians in particular. If the Palestinian Christians are indeed as ancient as we are talking about, what kind of relationship is that supposed to trigger with the Jewish community in Israel? What sort of dialectical, mutually challenging relationship do we need to develop here? Do we justify the uprooting of a whole people that have had centuries of belonging to the land simply because of the biblical narrative and assume that anybody who comes from abroad, claiming to be a Jew, can claim more rights to the land than them? It is those kinds of questions that I raise in these meetings. And I said, you know, that there ought to be a kind of awareness on the Palestinian side of what happened with the Holocaust and of recent history and of the Jewish longing for the land. There is a kind of religious element involved here. But the Jewish community in Israel needs to come to realize that the Holocaust does not make those living in the refugee camps feel any better. How do we deal with that situation? The problem is that Satan cannot drive out Satan in the sense that actions and reactions and the devilish way of reacting to an injustice can just go on forever. There has always been that sort of difficult cycle of constant resentment, in which the country is at the moment. How do we break that cycle? I don't know. I find myself in a very difficult position here. I mean, I obviously will not say that power can solve it, but also persisting on the question of justice alone cannot solve it either. Bad decisions that have been made cannot be undone, and their effect will remain. What is the alternative to power and justice?

At the end of the day, I will have to go back to what the Christian tradition offers, which is the sort of relational love that transcends and heals as the difficult answer to the context of tragedy. We all have to question ourselves about how we face tragedy. Every religious tradition has to explore that question. How does it face the issue of tragedy?

For me as a Christian, you need to face your victim, just like we are called to face Christ. Not because he is powerful, but because he is the victim. He is our victim. We need to face our various victims in this world. That is where grace is released, in a sense, and I cannot see any other option for it. We must acknowledge the reality of tragedy but also seek ways to ask how such tragedy might be healed, however difficult that process may be.

Excerpt III

MA: What about Palestinian Christian perspectives within Israel and the West Bank? There are prominent voices like Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac in Bethlehem. Is there anything to be said about the complexity of Palestinian Christian perspectives at this moment?

YS: Yes. I think there are some interesting younger voices who have been articulating perspectives on the situation that are not so limited to Palestinian liberation theology represented most clearly by Munther Isaac, Mitrī Rāheb, and, historically, Naʿīm ʿAtīq. There are others who are slightly more from the evangelical side of Palestinian Christianity, from the Munayer family. Sālim Munayer (b.1955) was historically very active in organizing programs of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. They recently published a book on theology in the light of Gaza, which is titled The Cross and the Olive Tree. It is a small book, but it brings in some different voices from the local communities. They challenge the Israeli narrative, but they also challenge the Palestinian reaction. They want to see a way forward towards some form of reconciliation, not just revenge. I find that very interesting and quite hopeful. I like the fact that these younger voices are publishing.

I have written a review of Munther's 2025 book, Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza, which has come out in the Anglican Theological Review, Volume 108: 1 (Winter 2026), pp. 86-89. In that review, I try to show support for the broader context from which he is coming but also raise questions about some of the very broad generalizations that he makes in the book. He seems to depend highly on journalistic reports. He speaks often of colonialism and imperialism and those connected approaches to the history of the conflict. I raised some questions about that, but not necessarily in a negative way. I tried to do it in a way that allows Munther to live in conversation with me as well. But I also want to point out that the context of Palestinian Christianity is not totally disconnected from the way that Arab nationalism in the region evolved and developed.  

There were two main types of Arab nationalisms that evolved in the 19th century with the weakening of the Ottoman Empire. You probably recall how the Ottoman Empire evolved through the Tanzimat reforms of the 19th century, which shaped communities in a very different way and created the chance and the possibility for Christian thinkers like Buṭrus al-Bustānī (d.1883) of Lebanon to talk about something he called the "fatherland." This form of nationalism developed within a broader Islamic vision and culture. At the same time, there were other attempts to construct a distinctively secular nationalist agenda in the Middle East, more heavily influenced by Western forms of nationalism. I would argue that, in the aftermath of 1948 and in response to other challenges, this nationalist project, which for a significant time was led by a number of Arab Christians, whether they were Palestinian or Syrian, simply ran out of steam. By the late 20^th century, Arab nationalist governments were no longer producing anything substantially beneficial for their populations. They had become much more accountable to external actors, such as the U.S. State Department than to the good of their own people. A kind of vacuum was evolving, and the gap, as we all know, was filled by certain forms of political Islam. Arab Christianity in Palestine, I think, then found itself somewhat caught in between, asking, "Where do we go?"

On the one hand, we have got this Israeli narrative, and on the other hand, we have got this political Islamic narrative. The fact that you started seeing the rise of figures like Munther Isaac and Mitrī Rāheb before him is part of that development. It is a reaction to the broader context. They are trying to present a national narrative, but it has not always been very successful, because it seems to be always constrained by that broader Islamic nationalism. Palestinian Christianity seems to assume its belonging within a wider Arab Muslim culture.

I think that the broader Christian community in Palestine is not always very positive about this. They have a slightly sensitive engagement with the Islamic tradition because of the rise of this political form of Islam. The official line will be that we are all one people. In practice, however, a lot of Christians have anxieties about this. I do not think that many people are talking about this. It is interesting to me that Palestinian liberation theology never really took deep-rooted following among Palestinians. There are not huge numbers of people following those movements, right?

It's not necessarily well respected in Western academia either. I mean, people are interested in reading what Naʿīm ʿAtīq wrote, but it is not really reliable Old Testament scholarship. It is not engaging with the history of the biblical tradition in a way that would convince some scholars in other parts of the world to engage with it seriously on an academic level. On the other hand, do we really want to bother with scholarship if people are on the ground being killed and victimized? That would be the initial emergency that needs to be addressed.

Apart from all of that, there is a very important Roman Catholic Palestinian voice. The Roman Catholics took a slightly different approach and a lot of them wrote in Arabic. Their engagement with the community was much more easily locally disseminated than Naʿīm ʿAtīq, whose books were mostly written in English.

MA: On the Roman Catholic side, I have been struck by some of the work of the Jesuit priest in Israel-Palestine, Rev. Dr. David Neuhaus. He has been sharply critical of Israel and the Israeli narrative and I believe has framed the current situation as a genocide. I would be interested in your assessment of his approach.

YS: I have great respect for David. He is a good friend of mine and I see exactly where he is coming from. I do not have a problem with calling Israeli policy in Gaza after the seventh of October genocidal. However, I also want to point out that there have been all sorts of conflicts where genocides happened. I do not want to talk about this as the only genocide existing. Without giving names, I have a Muslim friend who once said to me, "You Palestinian Christians, why are you sticking to your Western Christianity? Nobody cares about you in the West. You should become Muslim like your predecessors."

I did not take his comment as a joke. I said, "No, I do not think that is acceptable. Who would we go to today in the Muslim world? Who is the leading figure? Who are the figures standing up for Palestine? Is it Erdogan, the ISIS enabler and denier of the Armenian Genocide? Or do we go to the leaders of the UAE and Qatar and Bahrain, who funded the re-election of Netanyahu and are funding the other genocide taking place in Sudan?" These are the kinds of questions that people can easily forget. When you think about what the British and the Americans did in the Second World War, when they sought to bring an end to Nazism, and the kinds of bombing campaigns they carried out in Germany, in which thousands of innocent people were killed because defeating Nazism was considered the overriding priority, their actions were nonetheless understood as necessary. But what I am trying to say is that I do think we have to face the fact that there was a genocidal policy here.

Killing is still happening in Gaza. Despite the ceasefire, life has not become easier at all. Thankfully, there is no war in the sense there was before, but people are still being killed, and they still have very little access to food, and everything else that comes with it. The use of food as a means of pressure is a genocidal policy. That is how it is. But I just want to point out that it is a historical trend that happened in various contexts in the past. Think of the genocide of the thousands of Christians who got killed in Damascus by their Muslim brothers, sisters, and neighbors in 1860. Unfortunately, these things happened. It does not mean that we accept them or condone them. Israel has to be accountable for its actions, but at some point, once all of this is said and done, what do we do then? What is coming next?

I have great respect for what David Neuhaus has to say, especially because he is connected to the various communities in Israel and Palestine in a very unique way. He lives there, comes from a Jewish background, and has led the Jewish-Catholic, Hebrew-speaking Catholic communities in Israel. He speaks good Arabic, taught at Bethlehem University, and is very familiar with the region. He can probably reflect on the actual reality of Israeli society a lot better than I can, simply because he lives there. My impression is that, faced with the tragedies around us, he feels we cannot just be concerned with intellectual rigor. That is his difficulty.  He believes there is something here that requires a different kind of action.