On Christian Zionism

 

Painting by Darwin Leon

ON  CHRISTIAN ZIONISM
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

The merchants of these things,

Which were made rich by her,

Shall stand afar off

For the fear of her torment,

 Weeping and wailing,

And saying,

Alas, alas that great city,

That was clothed in fine

Linen, and purple, and scarlet,

And decked with gold,

And precious stones, and pearls!

 For in one hour

So great riches

Is come to nought.

And every shipmaster,

And all the company in ships,

And sailors,

And as many as trade by sea,

Stood afar off,

 And cried when they saw the smoke

 Of her burning,

 Saying,

What city is like unto this great city!

  And they cast dust on their heads,

And cried, weeping and wailing,

 Saying,

Alas, alas that great city,

Wherein were made rich

All that had ships

 In the sea

By reason of her costliness!

For in one hour

 Is she made desolate.

Revelations

  
The evangelist in the White House believes that the United States Empire, like the British Empire before it, has been specifically chosen by Yahweh to tack up the Ten Commandments on every post in the world that the Torah might be fulfilled with the help of chastising forces. 

 

Prominent Israeli rabbis are speaking out against the acceptance of tens of millions of dollars of evangelical Christian money pouring into Israel from the United States . They believe the contributions render Israel dependent on the right-wing policies of America ’s evangelical White House and the extremists in their own government aligned with it. The rabbis are alarmed by the cozy relationships they have perceived over the last few years among such persons as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ehud Olmert, George W. Bush, Ralph Reed, Ariel Sharon, Tom Delay, John Ashcroft, Earl G. Cox, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Lewis Libby, Jr., and others.

The crusading policy of U.S. President George W. Bush, a born-again Christian whose belligerent bible-thumping behavior has caused him to be viewed throughout the world as a religious fanatic, together with the threat and reality of Islamist terrorism, has encouraged Israeli organizations to accept charity from Christian Zionists. Christian Zionists adhere to the doctrine of predispensational premillenialism: they believe Jesus will return and convert the Jews to Christianity; those who refuse redemption will be destroyed; the Christian church will be raptured, lifted up and saved from total devastation; the raptured Christians will assume immortal bodies at that hour. In other words, the rabbis fear that the incoming funds fund the fundamentalist aim to doom disobedient Jews to death or cast them into the Pit of eternal hellfire – fire and brimstone preachers seem fixated on torture for its own sake, at an undisclosed location called Hell.

The fact that untold millions of faithful people who are otherwise rational creatures are doomsday cultists should give those who believe that history already is or can be a rational process considerable cause to pause and reexamine their scientific prejudice or their  faith in logical providence.

The rabbis who warn against accepting Christian Zionist charity believe the donors are wolves in sheep’s clothing. “Troubling to Israelis is the fact that one influential group of evangelicals believes in a final apocalyptic battle between good and evil in which Jesus returns and Jews either accept him or perish – a vision that causes obvious discomfort among Jews.” (1) The United States is the most religious country in the First World . Nearly a third of American Christians have Zionist beliefs. As the saying goes, there are two ways to kill a Jew: Put him to death, or convert him.

Pat Robertson, whose apocalyptic theology and anti-Semite vision of Armageddon is well known – his god of love will have all Jews who do not convert eternally damned – led thousands of Christians gathered in the Holy Land to show support for Israel during the Feat of the Tabernacles in 2004. Israeli officials greeted the support warmly. “We are your friends,” declared Robertson. “We believe that you were called by God to possess this land.” (3) “May I tell you, we love you, we love all of you,” effused Prime Minister Sharon.

As of May 2004, the Chicago-based International Fellowship of Christians and Jews had reportedly raised over $100 million to assist Israel ’s poor, elderly, and immigrants. U.S. evangelical organizations are funding emigration of American Jews to Israel – a historically large contingent of 371 Jews stepped off an El Al charter at Ben Gurion International Airport in July 2002. (2) Their broad smiles upon debarkation were viewed on television: they were apparently not concerned about Christian plans for the end times; no doubt some were smiling at the thought that a Christian Zionist might be born every minute.

The International Fellowship’s president, Yechiel Eckstein, an American orthodox rabbi, acknowledged that many thousands of his organization’s donors hope to convert Jews to Christianity, but he added that the organization does not permit any sort of missionary activity. Other Christian Zionist organizations also proscribe proselytizing in Israel .

No doubt the hopeful alternative to conversion, the destruction of the Jews who refuse conversion on the Last Day, remains in the minds of many of the Christian donors. Christianity, technically a Jewish cult that cannot sever it ties with Judaism, has long had a love-hate relationship with its Jewish father and itself. Christian Jews denounced Jews as hypocrites, continuing a long tradition of prophetic self-contempt and self-criticism. Ancient scripture reveals that Israelites must love the almighty father or else be damned and doomed. Israel apparently went astray shortly after it was born; Isaiah was called upon to indict wayward Israel :

“Listen, you heavens; earth, attend for Yahweh is speaking: ‘I reared sons, I brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner and the ass its master’s crib, Israel knows nothing, my people understand nothing.’ A sinful nation, a people weighed down with guilt, a breed of wrong-doers, perverted sons, They have abandoned Yahweh, despised the Holy One of Israel, they have turned away from him.”

Ezekiel was discomfited that Jerusalem , its shoddy walls covered by rhetorical whitewash, had become a whore or slut, selling the Lord’s gifts to passersby or giving them away to her lovers. The Lord would surely topple the slipshod walls; and then where would the whitewash or those who smeared it be? Wherefore the Lord called on Ezekiel to make a divine proclamation, one that seems even more applicable to today’s Judeo-Christians than it was to the Israelites of old, leaving us to wonder: Which faithful folk, other than a minority remnant of generic prophets, will survive the apocalypse?

“You are indeed wiser than Daniel; no secret is hidden from you; by your wisdom and understanding you have amassed wealth for yourself, and have gathered gold and silver into your treasuries. By your great wisdom in trade you have increased your wealth and your heart has become proud in your wealth. Therefore thus says the Lord: ‘Because you compare your mind with the mind of a god, therefore, I will bring strangers against you, the most terrible of the nations; they shall draw their swords against the beauty of your wisdom and defile your splendor. They shall thrust you down to the Pit, and you shall die a violent death in the heart of the seas. Will you still say, ‘I am a god,’ in the presence of those who kill you?”

Islam is the religion of frustrated Judaism. Muslims are better monotheists than Jews. They too shall surely perish if they do not repent and convert to Christianity. Ironically, Muslims attribute to Satan – who for the love of Allah refused to love man – the inhumane consequences of fanatic monotheism. Muslims are in effect the “iron rod of God’s will”, the role that Luther claimed the Turks played during the crusading episodes of his day. In 'On War Against the Turk' (1529), Luther proclaimed that "to fight against the Turk is the same thing as resisting God, who visits our sin upon us with this rod." (4)

The pope and his crowd, claimed Luther, were "all in all, and through all, like God in the world." But they wanted to be the best Christians in the world, hence the pope urged war against the Turks. Yet these so-called Christians would "endure no evil, suffer neither compulsion nor wrong. I opposed them with this saying of Christ that Christians shall not resist evil, but suffer all things and let all things go."

Luther charged the pope with using the Turkish war as a "conjurer's hat" to fulfill his own agenda. Luther was not pleased by the fact "that the Christians and the princes were driven, urged, and irritated into attacking the Turk and making war on him, before they amended their own ways and lived like Christians."

“We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers,” reads the Koran. “They serve other deities besides Allah for whom He has revealed no sanction. The Fire shall be their home; dismal indeed is the dwelling of the unbelievers.”

Apparently Allah is not the same god as that of the other people of the holy book; certainly not the hypocritical Jews: “ Some (Jews) you slew and others you took captive. He (Allah) made you masters of their land, their houses, and their goods, and of yet another land on which you had never set foot before.”

But the Jews, who generated two world religions seemingly to call Jews hypocrites for their proverbial pharisaic philistinism, are destined to return to Zion; their return shall presage the end of the clashing Muslim and Christian civilizations – as far as Zionist Jews are concerned, Israel is the beginning of a Jewish world order; fortunately, people of all faiths will be spared the hellish end predicted by Christian evangelists. To that relatively pacific end are Settlements established in Palestine ; the Lost Tribes are sought for; Jews and red cows are being imported into the Holy Land from the United States . Christian Zionists have a militant end in mind. However that might be, Christians, consciences ridden with guilt over historically bloodstained hands, are returning to Judaism in droves, waxing enthusiastic over the Old Testament. The evangelist in the White House believes that the United States Empire, like the British Empire before it, has been specifically chosen by Yahweh to tack up the Ten Commandments on every post in the world that the Torah might be fulfilled with the help of chastising forces. Isaiah’s vision shall surely be realized when the troops of the Judeo-Christian anti-Christ are defeated and real Jews fill the vacuum in the promised land:

“Your eyes are going to look on a king in his beauty, they will see an immense country; your heart will look on its fears: where is he who counted, where is he who weighed out, where is he who counted the precious stones? You will no longer see overweening people, the people of obscure unintelligible speech, of barbarous, senseless tongue. Look on Zion, city of our feasts, your eyes will see Jerusalem as a home that is secure, a tent not to be moved: its pegs not to be pulled out, not one of its ropes broken.” Yahweh, angered with other nations, destroys them all, wherefore we see where Christians get their apocalyptic notions.

Christian Zionism or Christian advocacy and support of the return of the Jews to their “national homeland” in Palestine is nothing new. Many Europeans Christians over the last few centuries have encouraged Jewish emigration to Palestine . At least a third of them believed that the proposed emigration would not only rid their respective countries of Jews but would also speed up the advent of Jesus and the setting aside and sacrifice, in a final holocaust, of the offending Jews to their volcanic Lord. We reiterate the mythical outcome: the good Jews, meaning the Judeo-Christians, shall be spared. Yet the Jews have been spoken of admiringly and imitated even more than Jesus, despite the underlying anti-Semitism motif of the Judeo-Christian culture. European Pioneers in the Americas and in South Africa fancied themselves as Jews venturing into the Promised Land. The notion of national justice – that a nation deserves its own country – would eventually be put forward, seemingly on behalf of the proverbially oppressed Jews.

Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright, two English Puritans residing in Holland in the mid-seventeenth century petitioned the government: “That his Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands , shall be the first to transport Izraell’s sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised by their forefathers….”  The Puritans believed the Second Coming would not take place until the Jews were returned to Palestine . During the mid-nineteenth century, Church of England evangelicals sponsored a movement to return Jews to Palestine to hasten the Advent. British consular protection was extended to Jews in Palestine . Notwithstanding the virulent anti-Semitism at the time, or perhaps because of it, Britons believed Britain had been chosen by God to send the Jews home.

Benjamin Disraeli’s novel, Tancred or The New Crusade, provided even more impetus to send Jews off to Palestine after the turn of the century. Lloyd George, who had been raised on the Bible instead of the classics, was the Zionist movement’s British lawyer before he became Prime Minister during the Great War. At issue was whether Palestine was the necessary location for a national Jewish home. Dr. Theodore Herzl, the movement’s founder, did believe that Jews had to have their own political state, but he did not think its specific location was of crucial importance. Lloyd George drafted the Charter for the First Jewish Settlement, which was to be in the peninsula of Sinai , next to Palestine , presenting it to the government in 1903. The government, in what is known as the First Balfour Declaration, greeted the proposal favorably, but the Zionist delegates voted it down; notwithstanding Dr. Herzl’s enthusiasm and eloquence, they were only interested in The Land of Israel, also known as The Land of the Philistines.

Lord George pressed the Sinai proposal again, in 1906, but this time the government demurred. When he became prime minister in 1917, he ordered his armies in Egypt to take the offensive. His generals desisted, preferring to remain focused on the Western front, and it took him some time to overcome their recalcitrance and persuade those concerned that the East, to which Palestine was the bridge, was of present strategic importance as well as crucial for Britain’s future; that is, if Britain were to have the empire he and his imperialistic circle wanted. Of course he wanted to do the Lord’s work by installing a national Jewish home in Palestine , a political entity which would remain, however, part of the prospective British Empire . Oddly, Herbert Henry Asquith made a private comment in respect to Lloyd George’s Zionism, that Lloyd George really did “not care a damn for the Jews or their past or future.” (H.H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley ). Yet the published consensus is that Lloyd George was genuinely keen on Zion providing that the British Empire was suitably aggrandized: again, he saw a Jewish Palestine as a bridge between Europe, Africa and Asia . Colonel House in the United States said: “The English naturally want the road to Egypt and India blocked, and Lloyd George is not above using us to further this plan.”

Leading British Jews were dead set against the Zionist movement, perceiving Judaism as a religion, and not as a nationality. Jewish immigrants in the United States were glad to be there and simply want to be assimilated. President Wilson, who was in favor of a Jewish national homeland but averse to the imperial ambitions of Great Britain and France, endorsed the second Balfour Declaration (1917), a brief, ambiguous statement favoring the establishment of a national home for Jews in Palestine providing that the rights of non-Jews would not be prejudiced. Political leaders believed that the endorsement of the Balfour Declaration would help the Allied war movement by gaining the support of Jews, particularly those in Russia , where the Tsar had been overthrown and where the greatest number of Jews lived. There was actually a specific, secret European plan to divvy up certain contested areas, a plan President Wilson did not want his fellow Americans to know about lest they think he was in on it; when Colonel House saw the secret plan to partition Palestine, he made his famous prescient remark: “They are making it a breeding place for future war.” (5)

The betrayal of Israel , the only bride of the Lord, by the British Christian Zionists during World War II is well known. The Balfour Declaration and the humane terms of the mandate giving London control over Palestine turned out to be propaganda and were thoroughly dishonored as the British government forbade entry to the Promised Land of “illegal” Jewish immigrants fleeing the holocaust, on the absurd grounds that there might be Nazis in their midst, while encouraging, at the same time, the immigration into Palestine of “natural” immigrants, Arabs, whose sympathies, particularly in regards to the Jews, were with Hitler and the Nazis.  “Toward that end, the boatloads of Jews ‘who had already passed through Dachau and Buchenwald’ concentration camps to reach the shores of the ‘Jewish National Home’ were deported…. 1,580 Jewish refugees – men, women, and 116 children who were ‘taken to the port of Haifa,’ and who had already become Jewish immigrants in the Jewish National Home – were deported to concentration-camp-like facilities… their personal possessions, including cameras, had been ‘confiscated’ and ‘sold, the proceeds being retained by the government of Palestine.’ “(6) The Americans were not much kinder than the Britons when it came to accepting Jews fleeing from the Holocaust.

With this brief retrospective view of Christian Zionism in mind, we can hardly blame several of Israel ’s prominent rabbis for bewaring of Christian pilgrims bearing gifts. Considering the broad grins of Jewish American immigrants stepping off free flights and collecting their baggage on the way to their new lodging, we think a fool or two is born every minute. Just who the fools are remains to be seen. As long as everyone keeps reading the same old pages, the prophecy of doom may fulfill itself, and in short order given modern high technology.

But never mind the prophecies of doom; unless murder lurks in the heart of humankind, they were not intended to actually condemn but as a warning to people to save themselves from their selfish passion before dire circumstances obtain. Neither shall the promise of paradise save people from the death instinct. Despite what is said, people use religion to do whatever they have always wanted to do – is not that at least the sacred principle of revolt at the foundation of the modern religion of freedom, that a man if not a woman should do as he likes? Yet, notwithstanding our philosophical praise of virtual anarchy, we cannot stand anarchy instantiated; in a word, chaos. It is not so much life in itself that we treasure most of all; it is our ways of living or living orders that we would die for. If only we could somehow live and let live contentedly, our ways of living would lead to a natural death, a conclusion that suicide-murderers are wont to withstand; for the sake of freedom alone they forsake the given order, they would fain die by their own hand and take us with them. We have already seen hell on earth; we shall not go along with the vicious plan: we shall seek out and find the cloverleaf to the highways of good living. At least that is our prophecy.  

 

 

XYX

 

 Kansas City 2004 

  (1) May 11, 2004 Associated Press, The Kansas City Star
(2) July 10, 2002, Chronicle Foreign Service

(3) October  4, 2004, Associated Press, The Miami Herald(4) Works of Martin Luther (The Castle Press,1931)
(5) A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin
(6) From Time Immemorial, Joan Peters (JKAP Publications, 1984)