The Anti-Empire Project

“The Jews came to Zionism long after the Christians”, Yakov Rabkin writes in What is Modern Israel?

Christian Zionism precedes 19th-century Zionism, and is based on a particular Protestant reading of specific, violent passages of the Bible that were used to justify genocide against Indigenous people in the Americas by American settlers before being used by the 20th century Zionist movement.

 US-based professor Samuel Goldman summarized some of his work on Christian Zionism in “The Real Reason Americans Support Israel”, a 2019 Tablet Magazine article.

The Christian Zionist literary story begins either late in the 1500s or early in the 1600s. The colonization of the Americas is underway and an apocalypse of disease and genocide is very much being unleashed upon the Indigenous peoples there (to get a sense of that, David Stannard’s book American Holocaust is a good starting point). The genocide in the Americas was justified in Biblical terms, using the same passages of Genesis and Joshua that Zionists find so useful.

In England, Thomas Brightman wrote the 1611 book Revelation of the Revelation, Henry Finch in 1621 wrote The World’s Great Restauration, or Calling of the Jews, and with them of all Nations and Kingdoms of the Earth to the Faith of Christ. Both men believed that for the Jews to return to Palestine would accelerate the Apocalypse. In 1643, Isaac La Peyrere, a Huguenot Calvinist of Jewish background wrote Du Rappel des juifs – about a Jewish return to Palestine and facilitating the Second Coming. 

In 1649, Johanna and Ebenezer Cartwright petitioned the Thomas Fairfax Council of War for Jewish re-entry to England (as a path for return to Palestine). “this Nation of England, with the Inhabitants of the Nerther-lands, shall…transport Izraells Sons & Daughters in their Ships to the Land promised to their fore-Fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for an everlasting Inheritance.”

Anglo-American Zionism continued with Joseph Priestly (1733-1804) attempting to convince British rabbi David Levi (1740-1799) to “organize a transfer of Jews to Palestine”. Levi, however, “rejected the idea of reinstating the Jews in the Holy Land by material means and affirmed that the Jews must accomplish their mission in their countries of residence.” 

Anglican preacher John Nelson Darby (1801-1882) formulated the “premillennial dispensationalist” doctrine. His sect was the Plymouth Brethren, and he founded a sub-group of bible students called the Exclusive Brethren. Darby read the bible and believed the Rapture was coming. For those who don’t know, the Rapture is when all the dead Christians will be resurrected, all the living Christians will join them, and they all ascend to heaven together. Before this, there will be violent years of tribulation for Christians on earth who live through the end times, with the rise of the Antichrist, the restoration of the Jewish Temple in Israel and the sacrifice of a perfect red heifer there. This view of the bible, reading it as a codebook for future events (also called futurism) is novel – Catholics, for example, don’t learn it. But it is mainstream in American evangelical Christianity and has been popularized by the mega-bestselling Left Behind series of books (80 million copies), video games, and movies.

Unfortunately for the Americans of a century ago, the Left Behind multimedia experience was unavailable. The Left Behind of 1909 was the Scofield Bible – in fact, the Scofield Bible is the 19th century Left Behind and the Christian version of Theodore Herzl’s 1896 book The Jewish State. It’s an important book.

Civil War Confederate veteran Cyrus Scofield was a Missouri lawyer after the war, then an elected Congressman in the Kansas House of Representatives, a corrupt US District Attorney for Kansas – forced to resign for stealing political contributions, forging signatures, and taking bribes, and a family man who abandoned his first wife and children. After his checkered career in public service, Scofield found religion and became a minister. In 1909 Oxford University Press published his Scofield Reference Bible with his own annotations, which explained the biblical passages in terms of Darby’s premillennial dispensationalist visions. The Scofield Bible sold millions of copies.

The previous generation had their own Left Behind series – another mega-bestseller (28 million copies) futurist geopolitical fiction mapping Darby’s doctrines on to the 1970s it was called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay. Lindsay’s genius was to update versions of the book as America’s enemies changed. In 1970, the threat to Israel came from Russia; by the 1990s, it was a joint Russia-Muslim operation; by 1999, China was in there too. “It is amazing, is it not”, wrote Lutheran critic of Christian Zionism Joseph Neuberger in his Master’s thesis, “that the great enemies of God’s people just happen to coincide with the national enemies of America at any given moment?” In the Christian Zionist reading of the bible, unlike non-Zionist Christian readings, “Israel” means the state of Israel – this is to be read literally. But Israel’s enemies in the bible are tribes (Canaanites, etc.) that don’t exist any more – these enemies have to be read figuratively and flexibly, which the Lindsay and the Left Behind authors do.

Befitting a story about Christian Zionism specifically, there’s a trinity of key Christian Zionists: Scofield, Darby, and William Blackstone, who believed that America had the special role of fulfilling the Zionist dream. Blackstone’s mega-bestseller was a pamphlet published in 1898 and called, simply, Jesus is Coming.

He was described by Justice Brandeis in 1916 as “the Father of Zionism, as your work antedates Herzl.” Addressing the Provisional Committee in 1916, Justice Brandeis called Blackstone “the “most important ally which Zionism has in America outside the Jewish rank”, reminding the audience that Blackstone had sent a petition 25 years before to the US president asking him to “use his influence to consider Jewish problems with a view to the giving of Palestine to the Jews.” Blackstone was honored again in 1918: deep in the post-Reconstruction nadir of the Jim Crow US, when lynchings and race riots occurred in impunity, a Zionist meeting in Los Angeles honored Blackstone, who explained his theological view to the assembled Zionists (quoted in Merkley, The Politics of Christian Zionism 1891-1948, pg. 62) :

“[There are] only three courses open to every Jew … The first is to become a true Christian, accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior, which brings not only forgiveness and regeneration, but ensures escape from the unequaled time of tribulation which is coming upon all the earth … Second – become a true Zionist and thus hold fast to the ancient hopes of the fathers, and the assured deliverance of Israel, through the coming of their Messiah, and complete national restoration and permanent settlement in the land which God has given them. It is true that this leads through unequaled sorrows, as prophesied notably by Jeremiah … [Third – there is the way of] the assimilants. They are the Jews who will not be either Christians or Zionists. They wish to remain in the various nations enjoying their social, political, and commercial advantages … Oh, my Jewish friends, which of these paths shall be yours? … God says that you are dear unto Him … He has put an overwhelming love in my heart for you all, and therefore I have spoken thus plainly. Study this wonderful Word of God … and see how plainly God Himself has revealed Israel’s pathway unto the perfect day.”

Hal Lindsay was also a televangelist, and the super-popular Christian Zionist televangelists Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and of course John Hagee also keep the spirit of Christian Zionism alive through daily sermons. Hagee — who said Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on Americans for supporting Israel’s 2005 abandonment of the Gaza settlements — uses his pulpit to preach to Americans not to allow any Israel to make any negotiations or compromises (quoted in Neuberger): “God says when you divide up my land, or cause it to be divided up, I will bring you into judgment. And right now the peace process that we call the Road Map to Peace is forcing Israel to divide up the land that God has given to the Jewish people. And God’s response is ‘I am going to bring judgment on the nation that does this.’ I am going to say this without blinking. If America continues to force Israel to give up land to the enemies of Israel, the judgment of God will come to America in unprecedented portions.”

Hagee’s declarations are not unique for Christian Zionism. Theology professor Brad Harper in a 2011 article “Apocalypse Soon? Premillenarianism and Popular Responses to Zionism: A Brief History” quotes the final declaration of an Israel-sponsored Christian Zionist conference in Switzerland 1996.

“According to God’s distribution of nations, the Land of Israel has been given to the Jewish People by God as an everlasting possession by an eternal covenant. The Jewish People have the absolute right to possess and dwell in the Land, including Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan.

“Because of the sovereign purposes of God for the city, Jerusalem must remain undivided, under Israeli sovereignty, open to all peoples, the capital of Israel only and all nations should so concur and place their embassies there.

It would be an error for the nations to recognize a Palestinian state in any part of Eretz Israel.”

It is apparent that God’s will coincides perfectly with joint US/Israel geopolitical ambitions.

Brad Harper’s article, “Apocalypse Soon?” concludes by noting some passages of the bible that the Christian Zionists don’t seem to cling to as closely: “The same passages that speak of God’s future blessings to Israel also speak of his blessings upon Egypt and Assyria… in the biblical story of creation, we are told that all people are valuable because they were created in the image of God— and, in the New Testament story of salvation, we are told that God sent Jesus Christ into the world not just for Israel, but for the whole world.”

Now. What, in all this, is anti-Jewish?

(Beyond trying to bring about the end of the world, which would be anti-Jewish because Jews are part of the world?)

(Beyond blocking any negotiated peace options, which would save lives including Jewish lives, by invoking God’s will?)

(And beyond Blackstone’s notion that Jews should either follow the hopeless dead-end of assimilation, or the productive roads of Zionism or conversion to Christianity?)

Beyond these three points there is a specific element of this theology that states that when Jesus does return to earth, the Jews that are here will either convert to Christianity en masse or die as sinners.

So, while Christian Zionists believe that America has a divine mandate to protect the State of Israel, their end goal is the end of the world and the mass conversion or death of all Jews. Israel’s cynical statesmen play along because to them the bible and the fools who believe in it are mere tools. The Christian Zionists, meanwhile, understand Israel to be their tool – in bringing about the Apocalypse.

Christian Zionism is the original type of Zionism and is an anti-Jewish doctrine. 

Now some news notes in case you missed them – images from the past few days – one point of no return after another.

The United Nations, whose utter uselessness has been exposed through this conflict, unable to name the perpetrator as Israel mocks the organization, murders its personnel, bombs its safe zones and sites, just had a Security Council ceasefire resolution vetoed by the US.

The financial times and the Guardian have noted that Israel’s bombing is the most intense bombing in human history and kills the highest proportion of civilians (the Guardian: “The ratio is significantly higher than the average civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world during the 20th century”).

Speaking of historical precedents, Israel is staging stripped and humiliated photos of men they round up and claim they are Hamas – including marking them with numbers and torturing them.

They have been using snipers to kill pregnant women and an elderly woman, Hadiya Nassar, who’d given an interview saying she was older than the State of Israel.

The murder of literature teacher Refaat Alareer, the target had been put on his back by social media figure Bari Weiss (Refaat had said, after the death threats started pouring in, that if he died he held Weiss responsible), looks like it was a targeted assassination. He had apparently “received an anonymous phone call from someone who identified himself as an Israeli officer and threatened Refaat that they knew precisely the school where he was located and were about to get to his location with the advancement of Israeli ground troops.”

Max Blumenthal writes: “According to EuroMed’s report, he then returned to his sister’s apartment to avoid endangering others in the school/shelter. There, he was killed by a “surgical” strike by the Israeli military.” Refaat Alareer’s murder was celebrated online by many pro-Israel people, “publicly, under their own names celebrating and cheering the killing of Refaat Alareer and his family which includes children”, as one tweeter noted. His poem, “If I must die”, is being translated into many of the languages of the earth in this twitter thread.

Israel’s military is besieging another school, the Khalifa school in Beit Lahiya (in the north).

And planting the Israeli flag in the ruins.

On one of the telegram channels where Israelis watch the carnage, one poster expressed concern about how the glee would be seen from the outside.

“It’s fun to watch and all,” wrote ben, “but these videos reach social media and portray us as psychopaths who commit genocide while smiling and laughing. I don’t know if it’s wise or not, but I’ve come across a lot of posts like this that are used by the enemy.”

[On the very last page of Siegebreakers I wrote: “If this book has sparked a further interest in Israel/Palestine or in Gaza in particular, the reader might find fiction from young Gaza writers to be of particular interest. Atef Abu Saif’s edited collection The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction, and Refaat Alareer’s collection Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, are full of beautiful short stories. The Israelis just murdered Refaat and his family in their home. He never knew me but I knew him. This was his course on poetry And his last poem: “If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale”. I can’t be worthy of Refaat but like him my only weapons are words. So we carry on.]

Zionists revoke anti-genocide Jewish membership and declare them “un-Jews” and herem

A month into Israel’s genocidal campaign, after nearly 10,000 had been killed including around 4,000 children, Zionist writer Avi Mayer, wrote a column in the Jerusalem Post in November announcing the expulsion of non-Zionist Jews from the community. 

Meyer in turn quotes his former employer Dan Elbaum of the Jewish Agency for Israel in North America, advocating the same: “As much as I would not like to give up on a single Jew, I have given up on them. For me, they are deserving of herem (formal exclusion from the Jewish people).” Meyer mentions another column by Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy, which argues that anti-Zionism is incompatible with being Jewish: 

“The anti-Zionists know exactly what they are doing, and what they are undoing. They are trying to disentangle Judaism from Jewish nationalism, the sense of Jewish peoplehood, while undoing decades of identity-building.”

“We call these critics ‘un-Jews’ because they believe the only way to fulfill the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is to undo the ways most actual Jews do Jewishness,” Sharansky and Troy wrote. “They are not ex-Jews or non-Jews, because many of them are and remain deeply involved Jewishly, despite their harsh dissent… For many of these un-Jews, the public and communal staging of their anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist beliefs appears to be the badge of a superior form of Judaism, stripped of its unsavory and unethical ‘ethnocentric’ and ‘colonialist’ baggage.”

And to Sharansky and Troy, the quintessential “un-Jew” was of course a leftist, Rosa Luxemberg. They quote Red Rosa saying: “I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering,” she raged. “Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles? I feel closer to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations of Putumayo or the Negroes in Africa… I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto.”

Meyer’s column ends with a call to action: 

“The time has come to regard these individuals and groups as having separated themselves from the Jewish community and the Jewish people. As we at the Post wrote in an editorial on the subject this week, “anti-Zionist Jews are not representative of the Jewish community and they don’t speak in its name. They are as Jewish as the Westboro Baptist Church is Christian.” While they may still technically be Jewish due to their parentage or conversion, while they may lead superficially Jewish lives, we can no longer consider them part of Klal Yisrael.”

For those Jewish people targeted by the Jerusalem Post column, the cry of “Not in Our Name!” is no longer the point. They aren’t doing it in the name of these Jewish people: Zionists have declared that anti-Zionists have not merely deviated – they are no longer Jews at all.

Being declared “un-Jews” has consequences. In the Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem, protesting orthodox Jews were beaten by police in dramatic scenes on November 1.

Scenes of Jews protesting in New York’s Grand Central Station and in Oakland, among other places – the kinds of acts that have led to their apparent expulsion from Jewishness by Zionists – have also led to scenes of mass arrests of Jews by police:

Oakland

New York

The other Abrahamic religions have been through sectarian splits: Sunni and Shia in Islam; Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant in Christianity; if, as some tongue-in-cheek socialist writers have argued, that communism too is a form of Abrahamic religion, then Trotskyism and Stalinism could also be considered sects, products of doctrinal split or schism. 

With the rise of the Islamic State (“ISIS”) after 2015, Middle Eastern analysts labeled as “takfiri” the ISIS declaration that Shia, Alawi and other sects to be non-Muslim. The outcome of this analogous “herem” effort by Zionists to expel anti-Zionists will not likely be a successful expulsion, but it could lead to a split, with both sides laying claim to the Jewish identity. 

Herem. Recall that Elbaum, quoted by Meyer, suggested that anti-Zionists were worthy of herem. The concept of herem has connotations well beyond “formal exclusion from the Jewish people”. Baylor University religion professor Philip Jenkins writes about “herem warfare” in the 2014 book Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore The Bible’s Violent Verses.

From Chapter 1:

“Herem, usually interpreted as “utter destruction,” is the single most frightening term in the whole Bible…The noun herem represents a “ban,” but translators use different forms when describing how a city is given this status: it is “devoted” or “accursed” to God, or “set apart for YHWH under a ban.” Few Bible translations accurately give the full connotations of the language, generally using a phrase such as “destroy utterly,” but the meaning is clear. Every living thing in the doomed city must be destroyed wholly. Any valuables, any gold or silver, must be consecrated to God and given to the priestly caste, to be reserved for ritual use…”

“…In practical terms, this kind of warfare is unconditional, in that defeated inhabitants have literally no chance, no way out, no option to surrender. Once banned, once devoted to God, they cannot win their lives by offering to convert to the faith of the conquerors, to raise an altar to YHWH. They cannot agree to hand over all their possessions, to abandon the land forever. They can’t even voluntarily accept the most degrading form of slavery or sexual submission. They are pledged to death. As the story of King Saul demonstrates, God left no room for waverers or fainthearts. Far from being marginal or incidental to the biblical tradition, this type of genocidal warfare was associated with some of Israel’s greatest heroes, including Moses, Samuel, and Joshua.”

Whatever Elbaum was signaling by using the word, the full implications of herem are terrifying. The influence of the concept on US and Israeli conduct of war is clearly revealed in John Grenier’s book The First Way of War, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s an Indigenous People’s History of the United States, and Israel’s current warfare on Gaza. Jenkins elaborates on its influence:

“While mainstream thinkers constructed well-thought-out ideas of “just war,” placing appropriate limitations on military conduct, extremists sought to restore the ruthless practices of herem and biblical holy war, war without mercy… Christians put their beliefs into practice, basing their actions explicitly on scripture. The resulting violence was at its peak in Europe during the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when each faction labeled its (Christian) opponents as Amalekites fit only for slaughter. To take just one example of many, after Scottish Protestants defeated an Irish Royalist army in 1646, their clergy advisers ordered a complete massacre of prisoners. Scots soldiers drowned eighty women and children, while “again and again were the conquerors told that the curses which befell those who spared the enemies of God would fall upon him who suffered one Amalekite [Catholic] to escape.” Everyone is an Amalekite or a Canaanite to somebody.”

In her book The Joshua Generation: Israeli Occupation and the Bible, scholar Rachel Havrelock talks about herem as well.

Havrelock writes that “The specific tactic of Joshua’s holy war is the ḥērem, the ban on goods confiscated from the enemy that also implies total destruction of life (Josh 6:17–19).”

What this boils down to is that leading Zionist intellectuals in important journals are willing to cast out those Jews who have a different political standpoint – cast them out into the status of herem, worthy of ‘unconditional warfare’ of the type that Israel is currently waging on Gaza. The Zionist stance on dissenting Jews is notably not “right or wrong, these are our people”; it is not Voltaire’s “I despise what you say but I will defend your right to say it”; it is “you are hereby declared herem.” The declaration offers another moment to reflect on the anti-Jewish nature of Zionist ideology.