“Iconoclasm of Place: Land, Memory, and Ecological Violence in Palestine-Israel”

This paper proposes an Orthodox feminist theological framework for addressing the destruction of land in Palestine-Israel through the category of desecration. Drawing on trauma theory and ecofeminist theology, it argues that ongoing devastation in the region cannot be adequately understood solely through juridical, political, or even ethical paradigms of injustice, but must also be named as a theological rupture in the sacramental vocation of creation. In Orthodox theology, land is not a neutral backdrop for human conflict nor merely an object of possession or symbolism; it is a liturgical and iconographic participant in divine-human communion. The systematic destruction of neighborhoods, agricultural land, water systems, cemeteries, and religious sites thus reveals itself not as collateral damage but a form of contemporary iconoclasm and theological violence.