The Christian roots of Israel's genocide in Gaza

Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, has had multiple opportunities to make grandiose and over-the-top presentations at that august body in recent months. Those presentations have been wildly theatrical and generally devoid of any content that would in any conventional sense be considered diplomatic. Which leads me to ponder who might be the target audience of his absurdities. Surely he knows nobody in Israel, outside the most fervent true believers in the settlements, takes him seriously, nor does anyone in the world at large, so what’s the point? The point, I concluded, is that he’s talking not to Israelis, and not to the world at large, but to the “Christian Zionists” in America. I’ve read various estimates of their numbers, which range from 10 to 30 million. That’s one hell of a voting block in US politics. That’s a voting block well worth pandering to if your goal is to keep Uncle Sam’s chequebook open no matter what atrocities you are committing in Gaza. I’d always assumed that Theodore Herzl was the progenitor of Zionism, and that “Christian Zionism” emerged only after evangelical fundamentalist Christians latched onto Herzl’s teachings because they jibed with their own interpretation of the Bible. Turns out I was wrong. In the course of researching Christian Zionism I ran across the name “William Hechler.” Turns out that twelve years before Herzl published “The Jewish State,” Hechler had published “The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine.” Hechler was a German-born Anglican clergyman with extensive connections to the royal families of Europe. It was he who introduced Herzl into that milieu. The concept of a Jewish state in Palestine originated not with Herzl, but within post-Reformation Protestantism. By the late 1800s, Hechler was just another in a long line of Christian advocates for a Jewish state in Palestine. That’s why Zionism finds fertile ground in America today. While Joe Biden is neither an evangelical nor a fundamentalist, he, a Catholic, nevertheless proudly proclaims himself a Zionist. That’s why he’s programmed to look the other way when the Chosen People are annihilating the seed of Amalek, as Bibi has framed it. That’s why at least 30 million Christian Zionists in America will continue to support the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Blame Christianity!