By Kathleen Christison
Zionism has long been the stone tablet, the cast-in-concrete political and religious belief system, governing discourse in the United States and much of the West about Israel and Palestine. The Zionist credo—that the existence of a supremacist Jewish state in Palestine is both politically correct and a moral necessity—has become so deeply ingrained in popular thinking and political discourse over the decades that it has formed the solid foundation, the bedrock, of a theo-political values system all but indelibly imprinted in the Western mind. That so-called values system is part of what our national narrative tells us is, and what we unthinkingly accept as, the United States’ “Judeo-Christian” culture.
The phenomenon now commonly called Christian Zionism is a fundamental part of this unchanging narrative. Christian Zionism as a theology had its beginnings among British and American evangelical sects even before Jewish Zionism developed as a political ideology in Europe in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Conceived originally as a biblically literalist theology promoting the notion that Jews were divinely mandated to “return” to the land of their origins in Palestine, it has vastly expanded today to include millions of evangelicals, as well as mainline Christian, primarily Protestant, denominations that do not share evangelical theological beliefs but do accept by default the supposed “chosenness” of Jews and their supremacy in the land of Palestine—wholly at the expense of the Palestinian people.
The original theology of Christian Zionists, and still the belief of most evangelicals, is that God bestowed the entire land of Palestine on the Jews. These biblical literalists believe that, as recorded in Genesis, God promised to make Abraham “into a great nation” and to bless those who bless him (that is, Israel) and curse whoever curses him/Israel. This covenant with Abraham and the promise of blessings and curses (Genesis 12:2-3) have become the standard for fundamentalist Christian Zionists, who anticipate the second coming of Jesus when Palestine is populated solely by Jews. Palestinian Arabs clearly are outliers in this scenario, an alien people cursed because they are not Jews in this land divinely ordained to be for Jews alone. Ultimately, Jews are themselves believed to be destined either to convert to Christianity or be destroyed.
As a uniquely Christian and ultimately antisemitic theology, fundamentalist Christian Zionism differs markedly from the political Zionism that animates the Jewish Israeli state and also from the theological positions of mainline US Christianity. Nonetheless, the strong and vociferous support for Israel’s existence that Christian Zionists profess forms a critical arm of the US alliance with Israel—a support cynically and opportunistically accepted by Israel’s rightwing leadership. Moreover, Christian Zionism’s position in support of Israel is so similar on the surface to mainline Christianity’s support that it has become difficult to distinguish one Christian strain from the other.
Christian Zionism, in both its fundamentalist theological and its more politically mainstream varieties, is also different from, and generally opposed to, Christian Nationalism—except when it is occasionally convenient to espouse Christian Nationalism’s conservative viewpoints. But the convoluted allegiances involved with Christian Nationalism are so confused that this rightwing, sometimes antisemitic political creation cannot currently be considered relevant to Christian Zionism’s dedicated efforts to support Israel.
In practical political terms, there is no difference between the two varieties of Christian Zionism when adherence to each one plays out as total support for Jewish supremacy in Israel and the total overshadowing of the rights of Palestinians who are indigenous to the land and have been the victims of this Jewish supremacy. The perception that Palestinians have no rights in Palestine is shared to a greater or lesser extent both by strong Christian Zionists who actually believe Palestinians have been cursed and by mainline Christians who dismiss biblical curses but also have no concern for those whom others might single out as “cursed.”
The mainline’s ignorance and casual dismissal of the profound concern all Palestinians feel over being ethnically cleansed and existentially “disappeared” from their own homeland began in the Holocaust and post-Holocaust period, when Christian leaders came to recognize, and see the need to atone for, Christianity’s centuries of virulent antisemitism. Guilt for this antisemitism and sympathy for what Jews endured in the Holocaust led the institutional church and prominent Christian theologians to support Jewish statehood as both a political and a moral imperative. These efforts inevitably excluded Palestinians; the general thinking, often explicitly but often simply thoughtlessly, was that the needs of stateless Jews took precedence over any Palestinian needs.
It has been ever thus for Christian Zionists of all political and theological stripes: advocacy is always for Jewish over Palestinian needs, Jewish supremacy over Palestinian rights, Zionist objectives over all. For Palestinians, the impact of this thinking has been cataclysmic; Palestine is always overlooked in Christian political thought and theology—whether this is extreme Christian Zionism, or the hierarchies of major churches throughout the Western world, or individual national leaders who happen to be Christian. Churches have for the most part avoided dealing with the Palestinian issue altogether, failing to recognize Israel’s oppressive policies and rejecting criticism of those policies. Palestinians are denied legitimacy in their own land, and any reasonable explanation for their opposition to Israeli domination is disdained or ignored altogether. Remarkably, even the two years of Israel’s clear genocidal assault against Palestinians in Gaza are treated, in Christian thinking and generally in US political discourse, as if this paroxysm of killing and destruction is no different from any of the small, commonly occurring ethnic and military conflicts around the world.
This is despite countless Palestinian pleas for attention and help. Among many other overtures, nearly two decades ago, the entire Christian community of Palestine, including heads of Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches, pleaded with Western churches, in a major global appeal, Kairos Palestine*, to look at realities on the ground, witness the specter of Israel’s oppressive policies, and cease offering “a theological cover-up for the injustice we suffer for the sin of the occupation imposed upon us.” Most Western churches have responded tepidly if at all to this appeal and to several later formal Kairos Palestine reiterations of this desperate call for help. Even a genocide recognized as such by major international human rights organizations and the International Court of Justice has failed to turn the heads or open the hearts and minds of most Christians, whether evangelical Christian Zionists or US and other Western church leaders beholden to Zionism.
Despite a significant awakening at the grassroots level and at the congregational level in churches to Israel’s oppression and genocide, Zionism’s tight grip on policy, on public discourse, and on Christian hierarchies remains so strong, so normalized, that change is difficult to foresee.
Kathleen Christison is an American political analyst and author whose primary area of focus is Palestine and Israel. Her most recent book is Justice on the Cross: Palestinian Liberation Theology, the Struggle against Israeli Oppression, and the Church (Wipf and Stock, 2023).
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*Editor’s note: On November 14, 2025, Kairos Palestine launched its second major document: “A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide.” Of this new document, Kairos Palestine explains: “This new Kairos document provides a renewed theological and spiritual reading of the Palestinian and global reality. It describes our present as a time of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced displacement unfolding before the eyes of the world. It affirms that this moment demands a new stance—one of faith, truth, and responsibility.”
