{"id":5032,"date":"2021-05-30T23:44:22","date_gmt":"2021-05-31T06:44:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/faithrethink.com\/?p=5032"},"modified":"2023-10-29T20:59:31","modified_gmt":"2023-10-30T03:59:31","slug":"christian-zionism-misses-the-entire-point-of-jesus-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/faithrethink.com\/christian-zionism-misses-the-entire-point-of-jesus-mission\/","title":{"rendered":"Christian Zionism misses the entire point of Jesus’ mission: A reflection on Jewish and Arab Palestinian History"},"content":{"rendered":"

The author of this blog reflection acknowledges that the wars and conflicts in the Middle East in general and in Palestine in particular are complicated, often nuanced, with varying interpretations within both the Jewish Israeli and Arab Palestinian communities. This reflection offers a perspective that is often neglected or unheard of by Americans and American Christians. Hopefully, it will serve to provide further understanding in support of both the Israeli and Palestinian communities as well as to outsiders looking in.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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The nation of Israel and the Palestinian people have captured international attention again in May. Fighting between the Israeli army and Hamas lasted for eleven straight days and inflicted massive casualties both in human life and in property damage before a cease fire was agreed on for May 21.<\/p>\n

As a person who aims to follow Jesus’ mission and the kind of life that Jesus talked about, I am persuaded to believe that both Israelis and Palestinians matter, and should matter, to anyone who identifies as a Christian. According to Jesus, all people have unsurpassable worth. No exceptions.<\/p>\n

This is why Christian Zionist claims that God supports Israel and the Israeli government no matter what they do, including how they treat Palestinians, is actually antithetical to who Jesus was and what Jesus stood for.<\/p>\n

To find out why, keep reading. But I ask one thing. Please keep an open mind and open heart before you do.<\/p>\n

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My Christian Zionist Upbringing<\/h2>\n

From a very young age, I was taught that the ancient Hebrews were God’s special people. As God’s special people, God had promised to bless their descendants. Part of this promise included giving the Hebrews a large plot of land. This land was called Canaan, The Promised Land<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Fast forward a few hundred years: after being freed from Egyptian slavery under the leadership of Moses, the Hebrews eventually inhabited The Promised Land and renamed it Israel. But because of their ongoing idolatry, forsaking the Sabbath laws and other grievous sins forbidden in the Law during the time of Israel\u2019s monarchy, God allowed other nations to take control of their land and force them into exile.<\/p>\n

The prophets of Israel and Judah spoke and wrote about a future time when God would return Israel to their land. The people of Israel did eventually return, but they never succeeded to self-govern themselves outside of the oversight of another empire or nation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is where the idea of Christian Zionism comes into play. Christian Zionism assumes everything I just mentioned above but goes further to say that the reestablishment of the nation of Israel, which happened in 1948, was a fulfillment of Biblical prophecies.<\/p>\n

Christian Zionists also assert that anything (or most anything) that Israel does to protect it’s national interests militarily is supported and blessed by God. After all, for them, the reestablishment of Israel was according to Biblical prophecy, so God must support (it’s argued) any action done by Israel to protect itself no matter what. The claim coincides with another belief that Christian Zionists hold to–that Jerusalem, the capitol of ancient Israel, will be the location of the second coming of Jesus.<\/p>\n

But does the Zionist movement in any of its forms actually help or hurt the nation of Israel long-term? And what about the Palestinian people who have lived within East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza for many generations? How has Zionism affected them since the reestablishment of the nation of Israel? And for Christians who support Zionism, how has this support helped or hurt our faith and our witness around the world (particularly with Muslims and Muslim nations)? And, of course, is there anything we can gleam from Jesus and his teaching that might shed some light on any of these questions?<\/p>\n

To these questions we will turn.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Diaspora (the dispersion of the Jewish people)<\/h2>\n

When the nation of Israel was reestablished in 1948, there was a very large number of\u00a0Palestinian Arabs<\/a> already living there. In fact, less than half of the total population were actually Jewish. Why?<\/p>\n

Over the last three thousand years, going back to the time of their ancestors, Jewish families have fled their homeland numerous times. Often times, it was due to religious persecution. Other times it was due to economic and political oppression from nearby nation states. In fact, the Jewish people and their Hebrew ancestors have endured numerous empires<\/a>\u00a0who conquered their nation, used their land for its natural resources and for its convenient trade route into Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe and for slave labor. The Jewish people have also returned to their homeland at numerous points in history as well.<\/p>\n

During times of dispersion (or the Diaspora<\/a>), nearby people groups would then occupy the land in their absence. One of the enduring ethnic groups who remained were Arabs. By the 20th century, Arabs who lived in the land identified as Palestinians, named after a portion of the land during Roman occupation (Palestine).<\/p>\n

Fast forward to the last hundred and thirty years.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Modern Day Israel<\/h2>\n

In the late 19th and early 20th century, there was a growing Zionist movement<\/a> among European and Russian Jews to return to their former homeland (The Promised Land), the land they once inhabited and governed as a nation. This was in large part due to the antisemitism they were experiencing across Europe and Russia.<\/p>\n

In 1920, in support of the Jewish people, the League of Nations issued the\u00a0Mandate for Palestine<\/a> granting the United Kingdom the authority to reestablish “a Jewish national homeland.” The UK oversaw this process for the next twenty years within Palestine.<\/p>\n

Then, after the horrendous murder of over six million Jews<\/a> under the direction of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime in the 1930s and early 40s, the United Nations (formerly known as the League of Nations) decided to push forward plans for the Jewish homeland. Aware of growing tensions between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, the UN recommended that Palestine be partitioned into two states<\/a>, an “independent Jewish state and an independent Arab state.”<\/p>\n

Initially,<\/a> the majority of the Jewish leadership in Palestine accepted the proposal, but the Arab Palestinian leadership did not. Up until this point in history, Arab Palestinians had feared that an increase in the Jewish population in the land would also mean a gradual reduction in Palestinian rights and livelihood leading ultimately to “political domination”<\/a> under the Jews. Some Jewish agencies and individuals, however, opposed the two-state solution advocating, instead, a one-state solution<\/a> between Jews and Arab Palestinians. To complicate matters further<\/a>, when the Jewish council in Palestine met privately to discuss their plans for Israel’s statehood, there was disagreement over where the borders would be (in the tradition of the United States when the founding fathers declared independence from Great Britain without first defining what their borders would be–ultimately affecting the lives of countless Native Americans). Then on May 14, 1948, Israel declared itself an independent state<\/a>, which Arab Palestinians and other Arab nations took as an act of war. Palestinians’ desire for their own state was ignored, granted they had rejected the two-state solution.<\/p>\n

In fact, between the years of 1947-1949,\u00a0 some 726,000 Palestinians<\/a> fled or were forced by Israeli forces to leave their homes. Palestinians refer to this mass exodus of their people as the Nakba (the Catastrophe)<\/a>. Remember, Palestinians had lived in the land of Palestine for generations, perhaps hundreds of years. For them, the land that is now referred to as the state of Israel was their homeland, and it was taken from them. Not only this, but the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes by the Israeli government has been reoccurring off and on over the last seventy years.<\/p>\n

Ever since Israel’s declaration of statehood in 1948, there have been ongoing wars and conflicts between Israel and Arab nations, including the conflicts between Israel and Hamas since the 1990s.<\/p>\n

In my formative years growing up under the influence of American Christian Zionism, I was not taught some of this, particularly that Palestinians might have a reasonable case for staying in the land.<\/p>\n

I was also taught that the nation of Israel was always the victim<\/em> during the latter half of the 20th century, and that Arab nations, like the State of Palestine (as well as other predominantly Muslim nations), were always\u00a0<\/em>the aggressors.<\/p>\n

As I already mentioned, the Jewish people and their ancestors have (without question) experienced horrendous persecution over the last two thousand years and near annihilation in Europe in the mid 1900s. I am not downplaying this. I believe the Holocaust actually happened. At the same time, I must also acknowledge that over the last seventy years, the nation of Israel has demonstrated numerous times that they, at least at times<\/em>, have been the aggressor<\/a> in the Middle Eastern conflicts.<\/p>\n

That may be hard to believe if you were taught different. I can understand this dilemma. It was difficult to hear the first time it was presented to me. My recommendation, if it is hard to hear, is to reread the history of modern Israel and Palestine.<\/a><\/p>\n

Another thing I had previously been taught was that the wars and conflicts in the Middle East were wars of religion <\/em>as if to say they are purely about religious differences or power plays between two religions–either as Judaism versus Islam (or perhaps Judaism & Christianity versus Islam). While it’s true that religion plays a large part, it must be understood that any religious hostility between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians is directly connected to very real concerns like–<\/p>\n