Christianity has been central to Palestine’s political imagination, cultural production and moral vocabulary. It is precisely this reality that Israel and its Christian Zionist patrons seek to obscure
Last week, more than one thousand American evangelical pastors and Christian "influencers" descended upon Israel in what organisers hailed as a historic pilgrimage, the largest such delegation since the state’s founding.
Arranged by the Friends of Zion initiative and blessed by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the mission was greeted with presidential ceremony by Isaac Herzog. It was marketed as a spiritual awakening.
In reality, it was a political crusade cloaked in the language of revelation.
From Jerusalem’s stages came the predictable liturgy.
US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, urged attendees to return home with "the fire of God burning in your bones", so that they might be "pro-Bible" and therefore "pro-Israel". Mike Evans - founder of the Friends of Zion Museum, self-styled kingmaker behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, by his own account, Donald Trump’s first presidential victory - warned against giving "Bible land to radical Islam Jew-haters".
The message was unmistakable: Israel is presented as the embodiment of biblical truth; its enemy is "radical Islam"; the conflict is framed as a cosmic duel between Judeo-Christian virtue and Muslim darkness.
It is a script long rehearsed by Netanyahu and his allies, faithfully echoed by Christian Zionists who imagine themselves guardians of a besieged Holy Land.
Yet, beneath this theatrical certainty lies an astonishing erasure. The entire spectacle rests on a deception: that Palestine’s story is a binary struggle between Jews and Muslims, and that Christians - by faith, by identity, by history - naturally belong on Israel’s side.
It is a distortion so sweeping that only ideology can sustain it. (more...)
How Zionist evangelicals seek to erase centuries of Palestinian Christianity
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