The image that cracked Israel’s Christian story
An Israeli soldier destroyed a statue of the crucified Jesus in Lebanon. The photograph caused an uproar because it starkly contradicted the image that many supporters of Israel have sought to reinforce, writes Antti Yrjönen in his essay.
In the photograph, an Israeli soldier is striking a fallen sculpture of the crucified Jesus with the back of an axe. The sculpture forms part of a small shrine erected in a family’s garden in the Christian village of Debel in southern Lebanon.
The image spread rapidly and was swiftly condemned. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the soldier’s actions went against Jewish values of tolerance. Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, were among those who also quickly condemned it.
The Israeli military later announced that two soldiers had been sentenced to 30 days’ detention: one for destroying the statue, the other for filming the act. The military also said it was working with the local community to replace the statue. At the same time, Israel continues to occupy Debel despite the ceasefire.
Why, of all the images to emerge from this war, did this particular one demand an immediate response from the highest levels? Certainly not because it was the worst thing an Israeli soldier had been photographed doing.
In June 2024, Israeli soldiers in Jenin strapped a bleeding Palestinian man, Mujahid Abadi, to the scorching bonnet of their jeep. Before doing so, the soldiers had shot and beaten him. The military later acknowledged that Abadi posed no threat. The use of Palestinians as human shields has been reported repeatedly in both Gaza and the West Bank.
The investigative journalism site Bellingcat, meanwhile, has documented numerous photographs and videos posted on social media by Israeli soldiers or accounts linked to them. Palestinian detainees are posed for the camera, wrapped in flags and mocked. The systematic humiliation of prisoners appears repeatedly in reports on the Israeli military’s conduct.
Outside Israel, many of the country’s staunchest supporters are evangelical Christians, and support for Israel is often expressed through the language of Christian solidarity and biblical prophecy.
Last autumn, more than 1,400 evangelical Christians gathered in Israel for the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem’s Feast of Tabernacles celebrations, an organisation associated with Christian Zionism. The largest delegations came from the United States and Finland. Participants described their support for Israel as a moral and theological obligation rooted in biblical prophecy.
This helps explain why the photograph from Debel is so awkward for Israel. It stands in stark contradiction to the image that many of Israel’s supporters have spent decades trying to reinforce. It is difficult to speak of an alliance between Christians and Jews, or of a front line of civilisation, while a soldier hacks at the face of Christ in a Lebanese garden.
The image did not offend only Lebanon’s Christians. It also damaged a broader narrative in which Israel’s Christian admirers regard the country as a natural partner of Christians, rather than as an occupying power that has also seized control of areas inhabited by ancient Christian communities.
Jerusalem’s churches themselves made this point in January, when they warned that damaging ideologies such as Christian Zionism mislead the public, sow confusion and harm the unity of their flock, while the political agendas associated with such efforts may harm the Christian presence in the Holy Land and the wider Middle East.
Christianity is a religion of the broken body. At its centre are not intact statues but the incarnation: God made flesh, stripped, put on display, mocked and tortured by the machinery of imperial power. In Christianity, then, the sacred appears not primarily as a protected symbol but as a body exposed to humiliation.
The question is not whether the photograph from Debel should have shocked Christians — of course it did. The question is how many people regarded a broken image of Christ as a greater story than the broken bodies of human beings created in the image of God.
Part of the answer may lie in the different ways images circulate. A photograph of a soldier destroying the face of Christ is symbolically potent. Its meaning survives countless repostings. Photographs of real people introduce friction.
The philosopher and feminist theorist Judith Butler has written about the unequal distribution of public grief: why some lives are immediately recognised as worthy of protection and mourning, while the loss of others remains publicly incomplete, ambiguous or entirely unacknowledged.
In Frames of War, Butler writes: ‘The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start.’
In war, certain groups of people are framed in advance as threats, collateral damage or legitimate targets of necessary violence. Their lives then cease to appear worthy of protection or mourning, and their loss can instead be presented as part of protecting others.
The language of warfare is used to make people less grievable, or at the very least suspect: through appeals to the fog of war, an alleged threat, ongoing investigations, crossfire. The image is then required to defend the humanity and innocence of the person it depicts before it can accuse anyone of the violence inflicted upon them.
A statue does not need to prove its innocence. It is harder to argue that Jesus posed a threat.
Images of real human suffering also demand that the viewer keep looking after the first shock has passed. A still image of Mujahid Abadi lying on the bonnet of a jeep is not obviously symbolic. A defenceless man lies bleeding on top of a vehicle.
Yet the image of Abadi is closer to Christianity’s central imagery than the broken statue is. An exposed body, public humiliation, a helpless man bound to the machinery of power and paraded through the streets. The photograph of Abadi does not resemble a religious icon so much as recall the source from which such iconography originally emerged.
In the thought of the American theologian James Cone, the cross is a sign of a God who identifies with people tortured, humiliated and killed by earthly power.
In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone writes specifically about racist violence and the lynching of Black people in the United States. In Cone’s interpretation, the lynching tree is the place where Christians are forced to confront the true meaning of the crucifixion. The cross becomes safe when it is revered as an abstract symbol.
It becomes dangerous again when it is recognised in the bodies publicly humiliated by those in power: ‘The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.’
Cone writes: ‘There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others.’
If Christian art once taught viewers to linger before a humiliated body with pity and compassion, the images documented by Bellingcat invite something entirely different. Stripped, shackled prisoners; a taunting caption written over one photograph: ‘He won’t sleep well…’
They turn captivity into spectacle. Their message is not ecce homo — behold the man — but rather: look at someone whose humanity has already been stripped away. The point is not merely subjugation, but subjugation turned into shareable content.
The photograph from Debel was dangerous enough to demand an immediate response — and, at the same time, contained enough to be explained away, because it could be presented as the disgraceful act of individual soldiers.
The image of the sculpture does not force us to confront the broader visual archive, which speaks not of isolated excesses but of habituation and a culture of tacit acceptance.
It is easier for a state to apologise for damage done to a statue than for a visual continuum in which real people have repeatedly been shown stripped, beaten, bound, shot and put on display.
This piece was originally published in Maailman Kuvalehti on 6 May 2026 under the title ‘Kuva kirveellä ruhjotusta Jeesus-patsaasta rikkoi tarinan, jota Israelin tukijat ovat rakentaneet vuosikymmeniä’. Read the original →
