Why I am NOT a Christian Zionist

Anyone reading the articles posted on this blog will be able to see for themselves the reasons why I am not a believer in the very popular heresy known as Christian Zionism, but for the sake of those who don’t have the time to look through all the articles on this site, I thought I would briefly lay out my basic complaints with this so called Biblical doctine.

My first issue is with the Christian Zionist claim that (according to the Bible) God has unconditionally given the land of Israel-Palestine (call it IP in the rest of this post) to the Jewish people such that they own the land and therefore have the right to take it and do anything they wish with it. Christian Zionists claim that God has given the Jewish people “the title deed” to the land and hence since they own the land, they have the right to dispossess any non-Jews from the land regardless of how long or how many of them have lived there in the past or present.

This claim is so patently wrong that it amazes me that any serious reader of the Bible could hold to it. For the last two thousand years, no Orthodox Jew has ever believed that Jews have an unconditional right to IP.  The Orthodox Jewish understanding of thier relationship to IP is grounded in their concept of exile and redemption. According to this view, based on what Christians call the Old Testament of the Bible,  Jewish enterance and habitation of the land is absolutely conditional upon their adherance to the teachings of the Torah. Teachings that (apart from many other requirements) demand that non-Jews living in IP must be treated as equals with Jews living with them. Orthodox Jews all over the world still beleive that the Jewish exile is not over. Orthodox prayers seeking the end of exile are still regulalry prayed by Orthodox Jews all over the world. Exile is a spiritual problem and can only be solved by spiritual means. Military or political power are impotent to end Israel’s exile.

The understanding of the Christian Church is much the same as the above as it is based in the Old Testament, just as the Orhtodox Jewish view is. It seems that only Christian Zionsits ignore this point. How a secular Zionist state like modern Israel lives up to the covenental conditions of possession of IP is beyond the understanding of any serious student of scripture. This is no side issue. Anyone reading the curses given by God to a disobedient Jewish people inhabititng or, even trying to take IP,  by force or diplomacy (actions forbidden to Jews according to the famous Three Oaths of the Talmud) realise that it is the Israeli nation that is in a precarious position and rather than encourage them in their Zionist colonialist project (illegal as it is under International Law) we should be crying out to them to reform themselves and bring peace and justice to the land.

Secondly, Christian Zionists believe that the existence of the current Zionist state of Israel is an unambiguous portent of the imminent return of Christ. The most obvious problem I have (amongst others) is that scripture nowhere teaches that any such sign even exists. The Church has long believed that Christ can return at any time and hence the faithful should always be ready for His return in that they should be “about the Father’s business”, that is, living a life that exemplifies the Gospel of Reconcilliation that Jesus preaches in the New Testament. A life of righteousness, a life that seeks peace and justice for all God’s people and a special desire to standup for the poor and marginalised in our world.

Put another way, my problem is that if the Chrisitan Zionist understanding is correct, then believers in Christ, before May 1948, could have rightfully said to themselves that, ” He is not going to return today!” A proclamation quite logical according to the Christian Zionist view, but at odds with the plain teachings of the New Testament.

The prophets of scripture speak more like social critics, than Judaised pre-cursors to Nostradamus! The fatalism and indifference to the troubles of our world that is inevitable from the Christian Zionist viewpoint is nowhere to be found in the writings of either Testaments, or of Orthodox Jewish Rabbis for that matter.

Lastly, for this post, is the Christian Zionist view that unless we unconditionally support the Zionist state of Israel, God will bring punishment on us at both a national and personal level. According to this doctrine, since the Jewish people are a special chosen people of God, they have a sort of “get out of Jail free card” in that they must be supported in a manner that no loving parent would support even their own children. Unconditional love and unconditional support are two very different things as the scriptures so clearly teach.  A more Biblcial approach would be that God does not unconditionally support the nation of Israel because He unconditionally loves them.The prophet Amos clearly reveals that at times God’s wrath is upon Israel because of their priveliged status, not despite it. God has always lent his ear to the real complaints against the nation of Israel regardless of where those complaints come from and warned israel about not listening to the cry of the non-Jew and the vulnerable living with them in IP. To criticise the secular Zionist state of Israel is not remotely at odds with God’s attidue to the ancient nation of Israel. If Israel deseves criticism, then God is ready to hear it. In fact, as is plainly seen from scripture, it is God who ends up having to send prophets, critical of Israel, because noone is Israel is listening to the cries of the poor and the alien in the land.

Much more could be said than this and I encourage readers of this blog to look deeper into this matterr. Professor Yakov Rabkin’s book, “A Threat from Within – A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism” would be a good start.

CRAIG NIELSEN

Zionism – Biblically and Morally bankrupt

Supporters of Zionism are supporters of Colonialism and deniers of Human Rights.

Israeli intellectual Boaz Evron summed up the relationship between Zionism and any Biblical understanding of Jewishness and their relationship to the land of Israel when he said:

“Zionism is indeed the negation of Judaism” .

Professor Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin of Ben-Gurion University is alleged to have once made the sarcastic comment, “Our claim to the land could be put in a nutshell: God does not exist, and He gave us this land.”

Trying to legitimize the colonialist and racist ideology that has dominated the lives of so many Jewish people in the last 100 years, by any type of Biblical means, is a contradiction in terms.

Uriel Zimmer, an Orthodox Jew and former United Nations reporter for several newspapers, states the ultimate goal of Zionism:

“The real aim of Zionism is the one stated innumerable times by the various Zionist thinkers and ideologists from its earliest conception until this day. From the essays of Achad Haam to the speeches of Ben Gurion, we can hear definitions of one goal, in various versions and phrases but with never-changing content: TO CHANGE THE IDENTITY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE!”

(Zimmer, 1961, p. 14)

Defections from the Zionist camp by some of the worlds greatest thinkers, like Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, have inevitably come when the real brutality of the Zionist colonialist project finally showed its true visage.

The famous mathematician and atheistic philosopher, Bertrand Russell, initially embraced Zionism. In 1943, Russell wrote, “The Role of the Jewish State in Creating a Better World”. Calling just before his death in 1970 for ‘an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967’, Russell, in a change of heart, particularly deplored the fate of the Palestinians:’ No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their country, how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment nobody else would tolerate?’ (Spokesman, no.2 (Nottingham: April 1970), excerpted in Ronald Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (New York: 1975, p. 638). (Finkelstein, 2003, p. 200) Second Edition

Anti- Zionist Orthodox Jewish Rabbis, like those from Neturei Karta and other theologically Orthodox Jews like Professor Yakov M. Rabkin of Montreal University, put the Christian supporters of Zionist Israel to shame when they reach beyond the tragedy of the Holocaust and the injustice of Arab terrorist attacks and proclaim with one voice:

“Its (State of Israel’s) cruel treatment of the Palestinian people is against the Creator’s imperative that we deal justly and kindly with all men. To all our Arab and Islamic brethren around the world, let the message go forth today, that your quarrel is not with the Jewish people, the people of the Torah. We stand with you in your suffering. We feel your pain. We are with you. Let there be no more innocent victims, neither Palestinian nor Jew. Let us pray that the Zionist state will, with God’s help, soon become a distant and dismal memory” (cited in Rabkin, 2006, p. 128).

Ruth Blau, wife of a Neturei Karta Rabbi, had this to say only a few days after the ‘67 war was won:

“If the Zionists had even an iota of common sense…,they would invite the Arab states to form, with them, a confederation that would embrace the Palestinians, who thus would recover their rights. Peace should be made when one is strong. Now they, (the Zionists), are strong. But they will not do it, because they are prideful, and will refuse to make the slightest concession. They prefer to put the lives of millions of Jews in jeopardy rather than ever see an Arab as president over such a confederation. By this spectacular, lightning war they imagine they have won. No one can deny that today they are at the height of their power. It is at this point that their downfall will begin. It will not be long before they witness all the problems their conquests will bring. The hatred of the Arabs will deepen, and they will seek revenge. The Zionists now have hundreds of thousands of enemies within their borders. All of us who live here are now in great danger “(cited in Rabkin, 2006, p.121).

No prohibitions exist in the Old Testament regarding the giving of portions of the land of Canaan to non-Jews. The land of Canaan was never meant to be at the disposal of the Jewish people, rather the Jewish people were meant to be at the disposal of God. The land was never theirs, it was always Gods, as revealed by numerous scriptures: King Solomon gave away cities in Galilee to the Phoenicians in order to gain produce he needed for the construction of the Temple.

“The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants.” (Lev 25:23)

“And I brought you into a plentiful land, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when you entered, you defiled My land, and made My heritage an abomination.” Jer 2:7

“And first I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double,because they have polluted My land with the carcasses of their detestable things, and have filled Mine inheritance with their abominations.” Jer 16:18

Scriptures detailing how God in fact has given portions of the land of Canaan to non-Jews are conveniently overlooked by Israels Christian cheer squad.

” Then we turned back and set out toward the desert along the route to the Red Sea, as the LORD had directed me. For a long time we made our way around the hill country of Seir. Then the LORD said to me, “You have made your way around this hill country long enough; now turn north. Give the people these orders: ‘You are about to pass through the territory of your brothers the descendants of Esau, who live in Seir. They will be afraid of you, but be very careful.  Do not provoke them to war, for I will not give you any of their land, not even enough to put your foot on. I have given Esau the hill country of Seir as his own.”” Deut 2:1-5

The region of Seir, is between Mt Horeb and Kadesh Barnea in the Negev. This region was given to the Edomites and the Israelites were forbidden to settle there or to try and expell them. Today’s Zionist government in Israel is trying to colonize the Negev by the forced expulsion of the indigenous Bedouin and is therefore in clear breach of this Biblical statue of God. Don’t hold your breathe waiting for Christian Zionists to demand the literal interpretation of those verses.

Later in the very same chapter of Deuteronomy we see God giving the Israelites further instructions as their wanderings brought them to the region of Moab.

“Then the LORD said to me, “Do not harass the Moabites or provoke them to war, for I will not give you any part of their land. I have given Ar to the descendants of Lot as a possession.”
… When you come to the Ammonites, do not harass them or provoke them to war, for I will not give you possession of any land belonging to the Ammonites. I have given it as a possession to the descendants of Lot.” Deut 2:9,19

This huge piece of land was also off limits to the Israelites even though it sits within the boundaries of the land that God had promised to Abraham. Today, Amman, the capital of Jordan, is named after their ancestors. The point is that the Kingdom of Israel was always more universal than nationalistic.

Their is not one single verse in the Old or New Testaments of the Bible that can be used to justify the dispossession of even one Palestinian Arab. Christian supporters of the Zionist state of Israel can only do so if they either deny the atrocities of Zionist colonialism or justify them on racial grounds. Either way, the Bible is no friend to their twisted moral equations.

References:

Rabkin, Y. (2006). A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism. Fernwood Publishing: Canada, Zed Books: London.

Zimmer, U. (1961). Torah-Judaism and the State of Israel. Jewish Post Publications, London, England.

Craig Nielsen

ACTION FOR PALESTINE