When Diplomacy Enters the Pulpit: How Palestine is Taking Public Diplomacy into Zimbabwe’s Churches

As Palestine deepens its engagement with Zimbabwean churches, the pulpit is emerging as a new arena of public diplomacy, raising questions about influence, independence and whose interpretation of the Israel-Palestine conflict gains moral authority.

By Tendai Makaripe

For years, Palestine reached Tinashe Marimanzi through a cellphone screen.

Videos of bombed buildings would surface on social media, but the young Johane the 5th of Africa International Church member, knew little about the history or politics behind them.

Then Palestine began entering another part of his life — his church.

“Before the church started talking about Palestine, I honestly did not know much about the conflict,” Marimanzi said.

“Most of what I knew came from social media.”

Through church discussions, he said, Palestine became less a distant war and more a story about families, children and ordinary people.

That shift is precisely what Palestinian Ambassador to Zimbabwe Tamer Almassri says his country wants.

“Engaging faith communities, civil society, universities, and cultural movements is a deliberate component of Palestine’s broader public-diplomacy strategy across Africa,” he said.

His statement gives new meaning to the Memorandum of Understanding signed on September 9 between the Palestinian Embassy and Johane the 5th.

Public descriptions of the agreement refer to cooperation, coexistence, youth empowerment and “Diplomatic Harmony with official policies.”

The deeper story is what happens when foreign policy enters a space where authority is spiritual, audiences are already assembled and trust existed long before the diplomat arrived.

A country of believers

Zimbabwe offers fertile ground for that diplomacy.

The 2022 Population and Housing Census found that 85.3 percent of Zimbabweans identified as Christian, with Apostolic sects accounting for 40.3 percent, Pentecostals 17 percent and Protestants 13.8 percent.

An embassy normally has to find an audience.

Churches already have one.

“Diplomacy cannot be confined to ministries, embassies and official ceremonies; it must also engage the communities whose convictions shape public life,” Almassri said.

Palestine brings an additional religious connection because Bethlehem, Jerusalem and other places central to Christianity already occupy a place in Christian imagination.

Political scientists Peter Mandaville and Jon Hoffman describe this broader phenomenon as “religious soft power” — the use of religion as an instrument of statecraft and foreign policy — in the 2023 Oxford University Press volume The Geopolitics of Religious Soft Power.

In Zimbabwe, media, communication and international affairs scholar Lazarus Sauti sees a similar mechanism.

“Religious institutions, especially in Zimbabwe, are more than places of worship; they are community institutions, and religious leaders influence how members interact with and interpret sociopolitical and international affairs,” he said.

A foreign conflict entering a church can therefore be translated into a familiar moral language of suffering, dignity, justice, prayer, peace and responsibility.

Not a politically empty space

Johane the 5th already operates in Zimbabwe’s political space.

Makururu has publicly backed constitutional changes promoted by the government and has made supportive statements about President Emmerson Mnangagwa and ZANU PF.

Palestinian diplomacy is therefore entering an institution already accustomed to connecting religious authority with public and political questions.

The relationship itself has developed for more than two years.

Makururu visited the Palestinian Embassy in April 2024 and expressed solidarity with Palestinians, Almassri later addressed a Johane the 5th service, and Palestinian authorities subsequently recognised Makururu for his solidarity.

Both sides gain something from the relationship.

Palestine gets community access and trusted leadership, while Johane the 5th gains international connections and visibility.

Makururu said after signing the MoU that he expected the cooperation to assist the church’s international expansion.

But the most revealing question begins after the ambassador has spoken: what happens when the message reaches the pew?

Diplomacy changes on arrival

Almassri says the objective is to move Africans beyond what he regards as distant or distorted representations of Palestine towards “informed solidarity.”

Marimanzi’s account offers a small example of that intended journey.

“Through the church, I have started hearing more about how ordinary Palestinians are affected, especially children and families,” he said.

“It has made me look at it more as something affecting real people rather than just another conflict happening far away.”

That is public diplomacy working as intended: a distant foreign question becomes emotionally and morally legible.

But the message does not arrive unchanged.

Marimanzi does not describe adopting a detailed Palestinian political position, but instead interprets the issue mainly through humanitarian concern.

“For me it is mainly a humanitarian issue,” he said.

“I am a Christian, so my faith influences the way I respond to suffering, but I do not think you have to belong to a particular religion to be concerned when children and innocent people are suffering.”

Older church member Enesia Kwaramba filters the issue differently.

Her earlier understanding of Israel and Palestine, she said, came largely from the Bible.

Church discussions encouraged her to separate biblical history from the contemporary political conflict.

That exposes a limit to diplomatic control.

Congregants are not empty vessels.

Political messages enter a crowded interpretive space occupied by scripture, sermons, social media and beliefs formed long before an ambassador enters the church.

Africa’s contested pulpit

The Zimbabwean case becomes more significant when placed in a wider African context because Palestine is not the only actor to recognise the diplomatic value of Christianity.

South African writer and researcher Suraya Dadoo has studied Christian Zionism and Israeli religious diplomacy in Africa.

Her 2025 peer-reviewed article, “‘God’s foreign policy’: Christian Zionism and religious diplomacy in Africa,” published in Religion, State and Society, examined the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana and Malawi.

Dadoo’s study found that Israeli religious-diplomacy initiatives had made significant inroads on a continent historically sympathetic to Palestine, although their translation into government policy had limits.

In the recently released pan-African book Rising for Palestine, Dadoo also examines how churches can become channels through which support for Israel is cultivated.

263Chat reached out to Dadoo to ask what Palestine’s growing engagement with Zimbabwean churches means when viewed alongside Israel’s own Christian diplomacy in Africa.

“Churches are a hotly-contested space for diplomacy,” Dadoo said.

She said Israel had invested heavily in Christian networks across Africa with the aim, in her assessment, of influencing African voting patterns at the United Nations and building support for Israeli observer status at the African Union.

Yet strong religious identification with Israel does not automatically translate into state policy, she said.

“Fervent faith-based love for Israel among millions of African Christians has not always translated into diplomatic action at the UN and AU that is supportive of Israel,” Dadoo said.

Her analysis helps explain why the Zimbabwean MoU matters beyond one church.

Palestinian diplomacy is entering religious spaces where ideas about Israel may already have theological as well as political roots.

Dadoo says some Christian Zionist traditions apply biblical promises about Israel, Jerusalem, blessing and prosperity directly to the modern State of Israel.

“Material prosperity lies at the heart of Pentecostal theology, in particular, and Israel is often portrayed as the divine source of blessings,” she said.

Those beliefs matter beyond theology when religious leaders also exercise influence in political and public life.

263Chat asked Dadoo what happens when leaders with significant spiritual authority interpret complex conflicts such as Israel-Palestine.

“Given the increasing influence and growing relationship between church leaders and some African governments, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and so on, these messages are important, as they have the potential to shape government policy,” she said.

Dadoo also placed the debate within the historic public role of African churches.

“African churches have, historically, been much more than just religious spaces, and have played an important role in the processes of liberation, decolonisation, democratisation and justice,” she said.

Her intervention widens the Harare story without changing its central question.

If Israel and Palestine both recognise the value of African Christian audiences, the pulpit becomes part of the terrain on which competing international narratives seek moral legitimacy and political influence.

The authority problem

That competition makes church independence more important.

Pastor Enias Dambudzo, leader of True Gospel of God International and not part of the agreement, says churches can engage diplomatic missions but must guard their independence.

“A church can engage with any diplomatic mission, but the relationship should have clear boundaries,” he said.

“The church must retain its independence and avoid becoming an extension of a foreign government’s political agenda.”

His warning goes to the question underneath both Almassri’s strategy and Dadoo’s analysis: what happens when spiritual authority begins carrying diplomatic content?

Religious leaders accumulate trust through preaching and community leadership.

When they interpret a foreign conflict, some of that pastoral credibility can attach itself to the political narrative being presented.

Marimanzi and Kwaramba show that believers still filter such messages through faith, experience and prior knowledge, making complexity essential.

That matters especially in the deeply contested Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Gaza war followed the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, in which more than 1,200 people were killed according to Israeli figures cited by a United Nations commission, while Palestinian armed groups took 251 people hostage.

Israel subsequently launched a military campaign in Gaza that has caused extensive Palestinian casualties, displacement and destruction.

Israel says it targets Hamas and other armed groups, while Palestinian officials and researchers such as Almassri and Dadoo use terms including occupation, apartheid and genocide when describing Israeli policies and Palestinian experiences.

The key question for this story is whose interpretation acquires moral authority from the pulpit.

Between the pulpit and the pew

The significance of the Johane the 5th relationship therefore lies beyond the MoU.

Palestine gains something an embassy cannot easily create on its own: entry into an existing community of belief, a trusted intermediary and a moral vocabulary through which distant suffering can become intimate.

The church gains international relationships and a larger role beyond Zimbabwe.

Dadoo adds another dimension by showing that the same Christian space can attract competing international narratives seeking resonance through faith, history and morality.

Yet the final meaning is made neither in Ramallah nor at the Palestinian Embassy in Harare.

It is made somewhere between the pulpit and the pew.

For Marimanzi, Palestine was once a procession of violent images scrolling past on a phone.

Now, he says, he sees people behind them.

That is both the promise of faith-based diplomacy and the reason its boundaries matter.

When diplomacy enters the sanctuary, it brings narratives, interests and contested histories into one of society’s most trusted spaces.

The challenge for the church is to humanise without simplifying, to show solidarity without surrendering independence, and to make believers care without telling them what they must believe.