Israel-Palestine: For Human Values in the Absence of a Just Peace | Page 16

Israel-Palestine: For Human Values in the Absence of a Just Peace
the United States who had previously either neglected Jewish Zionist concerns and ideas
or had been antipathetic towards Jews and Judaism, read Israel's victory as a sign of the
coming of end times, even as they saw the Cold War as a war between forces of good and
evil. Finding touch points with their own millennialist interpretations of history within
right-shifting Israeli and U.S. political movements, these leaders promoted an apocalyptic
vision of a foul world in which conspiring global forces both within the U.S. and
internationally plotted against Israel and Bible-believers. In such a world, concerns about
justice, equity, diplomacy, and reconciliation between peoples (especially between
Christians and Muslims) were downplayed. Instead, they promoted their dualistic vision
of the world, shaped by narratives of persecution and adversarial, polarizing political
engagements and linked to American neo-conservatism.
Adopting a literalist approach to scripture and based on the notion that biblical
references pertain to contemporary and impending events, authors like Hal Lindsey and
Tim LaHaye and ministers like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and John Hagee called on
Christians to support Israel univocally, to encourage Jews from around the world to
"return" to Israel, and to fund Israel's expansion to the Jordan River and beyond. Some
even to pray for the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem and the re-institution of
sacrifices there, so that the Antichrist could come to desecrate it and therein help bring
about Jesus' return. Christian Zionists have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into
support for such projects—including support of Israeli settlements in the Occupied
Territories—ironically with the goal of helping to bring about the battle of Armageddon
in which most Jewish people would be killed except for a remnant that Christ saves at his
return.
While there are many faithful ways to support Israel and the Palestinians, the
heretical belief that Jews must return to and control Greater Israel in order to inaugurate
Jesus' return is not such a way. Based on flagrantly bad biblical exegesis and
dangerously corrupt theology, Christian Zionism denies the complexity of a land in
which the three Abrahamic faiths intersect, ignores the plight of hundreds of thousands of
persons of all three faiths, and ultimately treats Jews as instruments that God would use
and then, for the most part, discard. Along the way, it gives witness to a heartless and
capricious God, rather than the Christian God of love and justice who "did not send His
Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved
through him" (John 3:17).
American Christians who are concerned about the Holy Land must speak out
against this heresy no matter where we find it, especially if found in our own theologies.
When Christians insist that Jews must control Greater Israel in order to inaugurate Jesus
return, we must remind them that the gospel proclaims a God whose graceful actions
precede and shape our response rather than a God who is constrained to respond to
human actions (Romans 3-4). When Christians treat Jews (or anyone else) as a means
towards achieving our own goals, we must remind them that Christians are called to love
our neighbors as ourselves, not as instruments for our benefit (Mark 12:31). And when
Christians claim that salvation depends on the control of a particular place by a particular
people, we must remind them that Israel-Palestine, like all lands, do not belong to any
single group of people, for "[t]he earth is the Lord's and all that is in it" (Ps 24:1).xxviii

To apply the values described above, the Presbyterian Church can promote human
rights in the Middle East and work with other organizations that promote them.

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