By Christian Noakes
The expectation that Christians care for the most marginalized and oppressed in society is complicated in the context of the United States, where Christianity is the dominant religion. As an integral part of the US empire, Christians are thus often among the most ardent supporters of state violence. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Christian Zionists, who often rely heavily on a particular interpretation of scripture to justify uncritical, and often fanatical, support for the modern state of Israel. Such uses of scripture embellish some – mostly cosmetic – aspects and ignore contradictory lessons one might learn from reading Biblical texts.
That Christian Zionists conflate ancient Israel with the modern nation state founded in 1948 reflects an extreme disregard of geographic and historic knowledge. Moreover, in regard to theology, Christian Zionists ignore the centrality of praxis within biblical teachings, often forgetting the role of the Prophets. While Israelites and Israelis constitute two very different groups of people in two dramatically different periods of time, the Bible provides insightful passages related not so much to static and ahistorical rights of appropriation (the central assumption for religious Zionists) but to the apostasy of Israelite authorities following their liberation from Egyptian oppression. Contrary to assumptions of inherent superiority or divine right that today afford the Zionist state of Israel the international support necessary to continue its genocide against Palestinians, God becomes enraged with the ossified and inequitable theocracy of ancient Israel. This judgement is informed by the unjust actions of authorities wherein the once oppressed become oppressors.
The seeds of ancient Israel’s apostasy and eventual undoing were sown in its political structure. The choice to construct a state around royalty and idolatry of earthly wealth becomes a burden that leads to the demise of ancient Israel (Hosea 8). In the Book of Samuel, God warns the Israelites of the perils of building a traditional kingdom. The Israelites ignore this warning, choosing instead to model their state after earthly empires:
Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots, and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves and the best of your cattle and donkeys and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And on that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you on that day.” But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, “No! We are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.” (1 Samuel 10-20)
One can draw a parallel between the insistence of having a traditionally structured kingdom and the insistence of Zionists to establish a modern nation state in line with dominant oppressive modes of governance – a project many Jewish people find antithetical to the prophetic tradition within Judaism.
Indeed, equating ancient Israel with the modern apartheid state suggests an extreme ignorance of the prophetic in both Biblical and modern times.¹ The colonization of Palestine relies heavily on a system of apartheid that includes the enforcement of a pass system and restrictions on exclusively Jewish spaces and routes that control the movement of non-Jewish people, making many at best second-class citizens in their own land.² Such realities are in stark contrast to the luxuries of settlers, who are given full rights over non-Jewish indigenous peoples solely on the basis of their ethnoreligious identity.
The continued dispossession of Palestinians calls to mind the prophet Michah’s denunciation of Judah’s elite:
Woe to them that devise iniquity, and work evil upon their beds! when the morning is light, they practice it, because it is in the power of their hand. And they covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage. (Micah 2:1-2)
Elsewhere, God calls upon the Israelites to repent for straying from the path of righteousness after their liberation from bondage (Hosea 8, Jerimiah 2). Reflecting on how the horrors of the Holocaust have been invoked as justification for Palestinian oppression, Palestinian pastor and liberation theologian Naim Stifan Ateek states,
people too easily forget what it was like to be powerless and oppressed. They remember their suffering – constantly remind (sic) the world of it – but it does not seem to affect for good the way they themselves exercise power over another people. Their mistreatment and oppression of the powerless within their power seems to be a basic denial of their past suffering, a stark unfaithfulness to their own past.³
The scandal of the once oppressed becoming oppressors is a core component of the Jewish prophetic tradition that should be instructive for Jews, Christians, and indeed anyone committed to liberation and the betterment of life for all.
Within God’s judgment one can see a principled commitment to the poor and oppressed that is overlooked in nationalist narratives of an eternal and exclusive “chosen people” unrestrained by biblical standards of justice.
Your iniquities have turned these away, and your sins have deprived you of good. For the wicked are found among my people. They lie in wait like hunters; destroyers, they catch humans. Like a cage full of birds, their houses are full of treachery; therefore they have become great and rich; they have grown fat and sleek. They know no limits in deeds of wickedness; they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy. Shall I not punish them for these things? says the Lord, and shall I not bring retribution on a nation such as this? (Jerimiah 5:25-29)
Ancient Israelite authorities were not held above ethical standards, nor was their tenure on the land inherent and absolute. Quite the contrary, God abandoned them to the destruction brought on by their unjust actions. In contrast to the assumption of exclusive and unconditional sanctity, God’s relation to people is informed by the latter’s commitment to the principle of justice via a preferential option for the oppressed. As God states plainly in Deuteronomy: Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue, so that you may live and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you. (Deuteronomy 16:20) Through the Prophets God calls on the end of structural injustice as a basis of the land’s sacredness:
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.”
For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave to your ancestors forever and ever. (Jerimiah 7:3-7)
The oppressive character of ancient Israel was a barrier to its communion with God – a profaning of the Holy Land. Applying these standards today (something routinely overlooked by religious Zionists who use scripture to justify colonization) would suggest that Israel makes the land unholy through its oppressive behavior – from the day-to-day system of apartheid to mass murder of Palestinians, the indigenous people made the alien Other in the land to which they belong.
Christian Zionism is a core component of Palestinian ethnic cleansing, centered at the heart of the very empire the apartheid state serves. In stark contrast to imperial readings, which often call quite openly for the extinction of the Palestinians, the Hebrew Bible can provide insight to guide both Jewish and Christian praxis toward advocating for the oppressed Palestinian people. It is therefore a question of prior commitment that determines our orientation for reading the Bible.
To quote the prolific Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb, “Like the bazaar in the Old City of Jerusalem, one can find many different ingredients in the Bible. There are texts that sanction colonization and texts that promote liberation. What we discover says more about us and what we are searching for as readers than about the Bible itself.” As Raheb points out, Christian Zionism goes well beyond conservative fundamentalists to include far wider forces of empire. Scripture can be invoked or holstered when not sufficient to legitimize the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. As such, it cannot be effectively combatted by simply providing a biblical counterargument as if people merely lacked the “right” understanding of the Bible – a source of legitimation that isn’t itself the basis of Zionist or western imperialism. Christian Zionism is not merely the result of an honest misunderstanding; it serves a very real function within a system that must therefore be opposed on a material level. As a part of the larger international commitment of people of good will, Christians seeking a more just world should be inspired by the Bible and moved by the Holy Spirit to act in solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters. The gospel calls believers to confront the Israeli state and the empire it serves. Its good news to the poor and oppressed is a source of sumud (steadfastness) in the ongoing fight against the imperial goliath.
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- Marc H. Ellis, Future of the Prophetic: Ancient Israel’s Ancient Wisdom Re-presented (Fortress Press, 2014). Ellis, Judaism Does Not Equal Israel (The New Press, 2009).
- United Nations, “Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian Territory is ‘Apartheid’: UN Rights Expert,” https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/03/1114702. Amnesty International, “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity,” February 1, 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/.
- Naim Stifan Ateek, Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books, 1996), 116.
- Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, the Bible (Orbis Books, 2023), 85.
Image: Rembrandt, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, c. 1630.
