God and Gaza: Is Christian Zionism Kosher?

Putting God back into the equation, where does this lead Christians?

If you want to ruin Thanksgiving, here’s one topic you might mention at the supper table: Zionism. Without any effort, I easily found at least eight highly cited academic works dealing with the divisiveness and outright hate this subject generates. The differences are stark. It really should surprise no one that nobody, never mind just Christians, agrees on basic terms and definitions. It’s also unsurprising that people are quick to cast aspersions and threats on those who disagree with their own beliefs about Zionism.

The inclusion of the Israeli flag with the American flag and Christian flag is interesting to me. Benson Free Will Baptist Church is on Church Street in this small town in Johnston County, North Carolina. Photo credit: Gerry Dincher via Flickr.

To cite an example where the gulf is widest, most Palestinians and their supporters refer to the date that the return of the Jews to their Biblical homeland was made reality, as the Nakba, an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe.” Nakba Day is commemorated on the secular calendar date of Israel’s independence, May 15. Israelis celebrate Yom HaAtzma’ut, their independence day, according to the Hebrew calendar, which in 2026 will be the evening of April 21-22 (5th of Iyyar, which in 1948 was the evening May 14-15). The same day, to one people, is the very symbol of hope—Israel’s national anthem is Hatikvah, literally, “the hope”; to another people, it is the manifestation of a calamity.

I want to deal with the question of Christian Zionism, what it is, what drives it, and its roots. Why would Christians have any interest at all in Jews, when Jews mostly keep to themselves, and far away from anything remotely Christian? It’s all in how the question is approached. We know that many misunderstandings begin with history, and while we can get crazy with history, I want to be reasonable, and begin around the year 610 A.D. Allow me to work forward, beginning with Muslims, and find our way back to Christians again.

It’s understandable that Jews and Muslims would share a giant chasm in religious doctrine. The Jewish people are connected and devoted to the five books of Moses, the Torah, which is their law. Arabs largely follow Islam, which was founded on what the Prophet Mohammad claimed was a better, corrected version of the law in the Quran, along with additional teachings in the Sunnah. Many of the passages in the Quran deal with the Jewish people, who are some times regarded with respect and dignity, and other times without mercy. There is no mention of Islam in the Torah, mainly because it predates Mohammad by nearly two thousand years. (I’m not counting Ishmael, for good reasons, which I won’t get into here.)

Even with this dichotomy, in most of the present age, Jews and Muslims co-existed for centuries in various striations of peace, or at least the absence of violence. The history of the Jews in post-Judean times (since 90 A.D.) has seen persecution mostly from idolaters like the Romans and Greeks, then chiefly from Christians. In the Ottoman Empire, to Persia (now Iran), to the Berbers of the Maghreb in North Africa, Jews lived mostly undisturbed under Islamic rule. It was Christians who demonized Jews, based entire doctrines on their forced conversion, forced them into certain vocations, then expelled them and seized their wealth when they excelled in those fields (like banking).

Zionism changed all that. There is a distinct historical inflection point beginning when a movement compelled some Jews to make aliyah, a word meaning “ascent,” to move to the Holy Land of their forefathers, leading in a straight line progression to the persecution and expulsion of Jews from Arab and Islamic-controlled lands where they had been living for generations. The Balfour Declaration was drafted in the heat of World War I, which saw the British fighting the Ottomans, and dealt with the status of the land known as Palestine, also known as the Holy Land, Biblical Israel. Having defeated the Ottomans, the British took control (“mandate”) over Palestine, but couldn’t pull off a decent handoff to Jewish control (some would say from lack of trying). Then World War II intervened.

The Mufti of Jerusalem, the highest Muslim religious authority in Palestine, took up with Hitler and the Nazis, who promised to help rid the Holy Land (along with the rest of the world) of Jews. The Allies were too involved in pushing for a military victory over the Axis to overly concern themselves with the fate of Europe’s Jews. Though there was information and intelligence given to the Allies regarding the death camps, there was little appetite for bombing railways or other infrastructure to stop the constant inflow of Jews into the camps, if it detracted from the military mission of defeating the enemy.

After the war, over 600,000 Jews remained in the same death camps where millions perished, though technically “liberated” by Allied troops. This went on for over two years, as much of Europe was at the edge of starvation and American forces were quickly exiting and transitioning control to Europeans under the Marshall Plan. Many of these Jews made aliyah, out of desperation, since immigration into the United States, Canada, and other western nations was severely restricted, and return to their old homes in Poland, Russia or Germany was impossible. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the termination of the British Mandate, which the British themselves welcomed, but also determined that the land itself could not support nearly a million souls, both Jew and Arab, predicting that mass starvation would follow.

Wealthy Jewish Zionists in the United States provided money, guns (illegally, and some from surplus U.S. Army war stocks), and a route into Palestine. Christians also joined in donating to Zionist causes. Notably, the Christian Council on Palestine / Christian Friends of Palestine, which today would automatically be read as supporters of Hamas, back in 1947, supported the Jewish population in the land. The American Christian Palestine Committee was formed in 1942, before WWII, as a liberal Protestant group to raise awareness and promote a Jewish homeland. I won’t comment on the irony of how liberal thought has turned on its head, and swung its magnetic north 180 degrees south.

Many pastors in the burgeoning “dispensationalist” church movement urged their congregations to contribute to the Jewish National Fund, which funneled its money to the Yeshuv, the Jewish Agency, which in turn ran a broad operation of internal and external arms smuggling, training, and military equipping of Jews in British Mandatory Palestine.

There was a backlash to Zionism, regardless of the status of Jewish refugees from WWII. For each new immigrant to the land, the sheiks declared there should be one Arab immigrant, to balance the growing population. The U.N. struggled with a plan for both Jews and Arabs to cohabitate in the land, and came up with the Partition Plan, which was adopted by the general assembly, despite a walk-out by Arab League nations. This immediately led to violence.

Since the Jewish settlers were better armed and trained, courtesy of their American benefactors, they persevered over the Arabs, and on May 15, 1948, the British Mandate ended, and the blue-and-white flag of Israel first flew in Tel Aviv. President Harry Truman, who was heavily lobbied (to his great distraction and annoyance) by American Zionist groups, did not listen to the advice of his State Department, who told him to distance himself from the nascent Israeli government. He was actually most influenced by his former business partner and good friend, Edward Jacobson, a Jew. Truman, a devout Baptist, recognized the fledgling government of Israel as the de facto ruling authority, followed within hours by the Soviet Union. Then five Arab nations declared war to “save” Palestine from the Zionists.

That’s about a thousand words to cover a brief history of Jews and Zionism. There’s many book-length histories you can read on your own. I recommend “A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel” by Allis Radosh and Ronald Radosh.

I’ve always questioned and wondered why those who oppose Zionism the most also seem to be the people who think Jews have no right to live among them. It would seem that if you want to claim Jews have a dual-loyalty to Israel and their home nation, it would be self-defeating to force those Jews to emigrate to Israel, or believe that their only safe choice would be Israel. Why do these people care so much about Jews and their lives in the first place, to the point where they invent blood libels and world control conspiracies? It’s no wonder that most rational thinkers believe that anti-Zionism and naked Jew hatred are really the same set of beliefs.

Since Israel’s beginning, Jews living in the Arab states, North Africa, and Iran have almost entirely been expelled, and have in large numbers emigrated to Israel. Whether these Jews were Zionists or not, or whether the Jews of Europe, many of whom considered themselves Germans or Poles over their Jewish identity, were in favor of Zionism didn’t matter a whole lot in the eyes of a fleeing people’s survival. Once in Israel, they were definitionally Zionists because they were Jews living in the Biblical land of their forefathers.

This leaves a question for Christians, and it has to do with God. I previously wrote that Hamas must be disarmed by someone, and it should not be Israel. One of our friends on the site left a comment asking about God’s role in the question. “If we don’t leave God out of the equation, then we have to ask the question of why He’s apparently fine with Hamas remaining armed, and not instead visiting some Egypt-style plagues upon them until they disarm and forswear violence. How the murdered children, raped women, and traumatized survivors fit into His Plan, and all that...”

Is God “fine” with Hamas remaining armed? Is God, to whom Christians owe their devotion and allegiance, and is Jesus Christ a Zionist?

We can certainly ask if God is so devoted to His “chosen people” if he subjected them to the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms in Russia, and the Holocaust. We can ask how a God who was said to love His people so much has rained so much misery, punishment, and death upon them, even in the Bible, and much of that historically verifiable. Yet Jews, through history and even today, celebrate the coming of the Angel of Death to Egypt, in that those who had the blood of a lamb applied to the lintels and doorposts of their dwellings were spared, and the cry of the people through Moses, “let my people go!” so they may worship God, was realized.

In the desert, the Bible recounts thousands of Hebrews were consigned to perish, drinking the ground up gold from the golden calf, for their sin at Mount Sinai in the desert. Many of the rest who gained freedom from slavery were condemned to march in the desert for 40 years, never crossing into the Promised Land (which was a journey measured in months, not years), because they complained to Moses and said they’d rather return to Egypt than perish in the desert. Those who did cross the Jordan faced war with the people who lived in the land, and had to conquer it by force. Once in the land, the people had to contend with corrupt judges, priests, and kings. Only during the reign of Solomon was the combined kingdom of Judah and Israel operating at its peak of economic wealth and military might. After that, a long decline while prophets warned of calamity and pointed to the coming of a Messiah who would save Israel.

Christians believe the Messiah arrived as prophesied, and He is Yeshua Ha Moschiach, Jesus the Christ in the transliterated Greek. The entire New Testament consists of the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the epistles to the churches, and the Revelation of John, and it is all about Yeshua, who was born in the land of Israel, then known as the province of Judea, escaped as a baby to Egypt, returned to the Galilee, conducted his public ministry for three years, and was barbarically executed on the cross for blasphemy. The New Testament relates how Yeshua raised from the dead in three days, appeared to over 500 people, including his closest disciples, charged them to remain in Jerusalem until receiving power from the Holy Spirit, then departed to join the Father in Heaven, where He remains until the day, which no person or even Yeshua himself knows, when He will return, setting foot upon the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, which will herald the days of His rule and the end of our “last days” age waiting for Him.

Those who don’t believe those basic elements of Christianity are not within the bounds of orthodox belief. I’m sorry to say, but that means certain groups that include “Jesus Christ” or various terms relating to the name of God in their group’s official titles. Orthodox Christian belief has set the place of Christ’s return as the Bible declares, upon the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, a Jerusalem ruled by Jews.

One historical question I ask God is why Zionism began when it did? For about 1,800 years, a relatively modest number of Jews lived in the Holy Land, in Jerusalem, which was also shared with Muslims, and Christians, who fought over the land, back and forth, for hundreds of years. Over the centuries, as Jews were persecuted in Europe, messianic movements attempted to stir up Zionist desire, but did not gain much traction. In the early 1800s, several rabbis began preaching a doctrine of return to Zion (the Holy Land) before the arrival of the Messiah (as Jews don’t believe, as Christians to, the Messiah as come once already). At the same time, some Jewish financiers such as Moses Montefiore, provided money for agricultural settlements in the land. By the 1880s, after the Russian pogroms, Hovevei Tzion (“Lovers of Zion”) societies formed in Eastern Europe, sending more settlers and money.

In 1895, Theodore Herzl, a Hungarian Jew, journalist, and intellectual, penned Der Judenstaat, “The State of the Jews,” and published it in 1896. It was the first explicit political work that advocated for the return of Jews to the land known as Palestine, the historical, Biblical home of the Jewish people, Zion. He did this after observing the horror of French antisemitism following the Dreyfus affair, where French army captain Albert Dreyfus, a Jewish man, was falsely accused and convicted of spying for Germany. As a correspondent, he heard the crowds shout “Death to the Jews!” (something that has again become familiar in some places in Europe, or at certain soccer matches). Herzl concluded the solution must be political.

The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilised countries—see, for instance, France—so long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level.

Herzel ended his essay with this, a prophetic echo that can still be heard today.

Therefore I believe that a wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence. The Maccabeans will rise again. Let me repeat once more my opening words: The Jews who wish for a State will have it. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes. The world will be freed by our liberty, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there to accomplish for our own welfare, will react powerfully and beneficially for the good of humanity.

So much for the case for Jewish persecution: having at least one place in the world safe for Jews, explicitly, politically founded upon that concept, is the political case for the existence of Israel. Its mere existence indicts the world for forcing dual loyalty on all Jews, because if Hertz is right—and prove he isn’t—then the question of Jews is one of either Israel must exist or there will be no Jews. That’s modern Zionism, the political kind, in a nutshell.

But the Biblical basis for Zionism runs deep. To keep it simple, I refer to Dr. Michael Brown’s post on Christian Zionism. Psalm 105:7-11 rehearses God’s covenant with Abraham, “He remembers his covenant forever,” and “To you I will give the land of Canaan as the portion you will inherit.” The prophet Ezekiel wrote two chapters regarding the coming regathering of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland. In Galatians 3:17, the Apostle Paul wrote that the Sinai covenant does not annul the earlier covenant with Abraham: the promise remains. In Romans 11:29, Paul wrote that God’s gifts and his calling are irrevocable. Zechariah and the Gospel of Matthew both refer to the future return of the Messiah to a Jewish Jerusalem. Early Church fathers such as St. Augustine believed in the coming of Christ and the salvation of Israel.

The time will come, the end of the world will come, and all Israel shall believe; not they who now are, but their children who shall then be.

More modern Puritans, whose doctrines flooded young America with revival, believed that the prophets and the Bible indicate that Zion will be fulfilled by the covenantal promises of God to Abraham’s descendants, the Jews, and that Christ will return to Israel, and it will be saved. English evangelists such as Charles Spurgeon, were not dispensationalists, but also believed firmly in the fate of the Jews, and that this is deeply Christian calling.

I think we do not attach sufficient importance to the restoration of the Jews. We do not think enough about it. But certainly, if there is anything promised in the Bible it is this. I imagine that you cannot read the Bible without seeing clearly that there is to be an actual restoration of the Children of Israel.

The rise of Zionism, in Jewish hearts, in response to centuries of persecution at the hands of Christians, and the response of some Christians to embrace this, both in real political terms and in spiritual unity with Jewish brothers in covenant with the same God, is a very kosher concept.

Those who call it heresy are engaging in heretical doctrine themselves. The concept of “Replacement Theology,” which places the church, absent its Jewish roots and its Jewish savior, above the covenants upon which the foundations, the very cornerstone of the Christian faith are built, is a house built on vapor, on sinking sand.

Those who value the “conversion” of the Jews, who begin their ministry to “reach” Jews for Christ, will be frustrated to no end. This is what happened to Martin Luther, who, at the end of his life, became enraged with Jews who rejected his overtures of fellowship. Luther wrote some of the most stinging, violent denunciations of Jewish culture and life. He did not do this in the spirit of honoring God. He did it in his own flesh and anger.

There is only one way Israel will be saved, and it’s the same way Jews all over the world are now accepting Yeshua as the Messiah. It is the same way Simon, called Peter, became a follower of Christ. Matthew 16:16-18:

Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.

The rock is built on divine revelation to the Jew. It is not the words of preachers, or the doctrines of churches that will bring Israel to its Messiah. It is the Father himself, through the land, Zion. Am Yisroel Chai!, the People of Israel Live! is more than just a chant, it’s the heart of Zionism. God’s plan of salvation, indeed for the coming reconciliation of the world, the judgement of the sinner, and the forgiveness of the faithful, are hinged upon the fulfillment of the promise of God’s covenant with Abraham.

Christian Zionism is really a misnomer. It’s like saying “Fish Water.” Christianity lives in Zionism. It is the only proper doctrine.

Israel will be Jewish, and Jerusalem will be ruled by Jews. Does that mean these Jews will be perfect and not sin? No, of course not. But it does mean opposing the existence of modern Israel is opposing God. If you don’t believe in God or Christian orthodoxy, then you’re already in opposition to God. But if you claim the name of Christian and oppose God, then you are the heretic. Read John chapter 1, then John chapter 3, and repent. That would be a good place to place your heart this Thanksgiving.