Are Evangelicals Selling Their Souls for Israel?

With this in mind, it’s hard to believe the numbers are exaggerated. In fact, the situation could be much more dire.

The question Evangelicals must answer is this, “Can Christians continue to support Israel’s wholesale slaughter of civilians without losing their soul?” The question should be answered with all haste because a genocide is taking place right before our evangelical eyes. Evangelicals need to come to terms with the reality that the modern nation state of Israel in not biblical Israel. Zionist Israel is a secular political entity unrelated to biblical Judaism.

The October 7 attack on Israel was brutal, barbaric, and criminal. On that tragic day, world opinion was squarely behind Israel. That Israel had the right to defend itself after Hamas’s appalling attack was scarcely challenged by anyone. However, it has become increasingly difficult to characterize Israel’s actions since October 7 as self-defense. Over 13,300 civilians have been killed. And alarmingly, 5,600 of those fatalities are children, 3,550 are women, with another 6,000 people listed as missing.

Some Christians want to argue that you can’t trust these figures since they come from the Hamas Ministry of Health. However, by Israel’s own admission they’ve dropped almost 30,000 tons of bombs on Gaza which is one of the most densely populated urban areas on earth.  That’s equivalent to two atomic bombs the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima.

Dr Ahmed Sabra, A British cardiologist stuck in Gaza right now while waiting to exit via the Rafah border crossing said in an interview with The Gaurdian, “How can anyone be so heartless as to say the number dead is not accurate. I think the number is understated.” Dr. Sabra, is not alone in his assessment. Many humanitarian workers are making the same claim.

With this in mind, it’s hard to believe the numbers are exaggerated. In fact, the situation could be much more dire.

The question Evangelicals must answer is this, “Can Christians continue to support Israel’s wholesale slaughter of civilians without losing their soul?” The question should be answered with all haste because a genocide is taking place right before our evangelical eyes.

Evangelicals need to come to terms with the reality that the modern nation state of Israel in not biblical Israel. Zionist Israel is a secular political entity unrelated to biblical Judaism.

Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, was a 19^th century Jew of Eastern European descent who was fully entrenched in the rationalistic philosophy of the Enlightenment.  While political Zionists often cloak their nationalistic ideas in religious and biblical language, their own writings demonstrate that they were uninterested in the religious aspects of Judaism. Herzl, along with the other early Zionists who helped to found the nation of Israel, were wholly committed to political Zionism over against Judaism.

As James Gelvin observes, in the minds of the Zionists, one of the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment was that it freed Judaism from the grip of rabbinic dominance. So, Zionism was not primarily a form of religious nationalism. Rather, it was part and parcel of the secular nationalistic fervor that was sweeping across the world in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Those who think of Zionism as primarily a religious movement in which the Jews believed it was their right and duty to return to their biblical lands are misinformed. In actuality, the early Zionists considered many places in addition to Palestine to form their new homeland including: Argentina, Uganda, and the Mid-Western United States.

Palestine, was not chosen because the Zionists believed that Jews had a biblical right to resettle the land. Rather, it was chosen because the Jewish history in the land would make it easier to recruit other Jews to the Zionist cause. Recruitment was the most formidable challenge that early Zionists had to confront. And that challenge was substantial.

The Ashkenazi (European) Jews had to resort to deception and violence to convince the Sephardi Jews from Spain and Portugal, and Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa to immigrate to Palestine. They used bribery, forgery of documents, and even terrorism to accomplish their ends.

Most of these Jews actually desired to stay in their own countries rather than immigrate to Palestine. However, the Zionists put tremendous political pressure on them to immigrate even using the Israeli Underground to destabilize their communities, and create a climate of fear in their own countries. The Zionists did this knowing that many of these Jews would ultimately lose all their wealth, and all of their assets once they immigrated.

These tactics were deemed necessary by the Zionists so they could establish a critical population mass in Palestine in order for the project to succeed. However, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews were severely discriminated against by the supremacist European Ashkenazi Jews. Even to this day Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews are treated as second and third class citizens in Israel. As a result, they are also more likely to identify and sympathize with the Palestinian people.

It should be obvious that, on the whole, most Jews at that time were not at all persuaded of the necessity of a Jewish state, and many ardently opposed the Zionist project.

In fact, in the early days of Zionism, a group of Rabbis in Munich rejected the idea of a Jewish state altogether on biblical and religious grounds stating that, “The efforts of the so-called Zionists to create a Jewish National State in Palestine are antagonistic to the messianic promises of Judaism as contained in Holy Writ and in later religious sources. Judaism obliges its followers to serve the country to which they belong with the utmost devotion, and to further its interest with their whole heart and all their strength.” Similar statements were made by many Orthodox Jews from all around the world. Indeed, this was the sentiment, not only of Orthodox Jews, but of most Jews at that time.

While not widely reported, Orthodox or Torah Jews still oppose Zionism and call for the peaceful dismantling of the state of Israel. So, it’s important to realize that Zionism, as originally conceived, and as currently practiced, is not primarily a religious project, but a secular nationalistic program. Moreover, it is a militant project.

During the 1930s and 1940s Zionists had three “Hamas-type” terrorists groups: the Haganah group, Irun, and the Lehi group (also known as the Stern gang). These groups committed serial acts of terrorism against the British occupiers, and the indigenous Arab population. They razed villages, bombed markets, hotels, and government buildings killing innocent civilians.

Immediately after receiving its legitimacy from the United Nations in 1947, and after declaring its independence in 1948, Zionist Israel forcibly removed 750,000 indigenous people from their homes and lands. This event is called the Nakba or catastrophe in Arabic.

Forget, for a moment, whether these people are Palestinians or Arabs. We don’t have to go back to biblical times to judge who originally dwelt in this land to determine who has a legitimate right to it by way of inheritance. The people that lived there prior to 1948 were the legal residents of the land under both the Ottoman Empire, and British Mandate Palestine, and they had been the legal residents of that land for multiple generations.

With this in mind, you don’t have to be a biblical or legal scholar to understand that a great injustice occurred in 1948 against the people of Palestine. This process was again repeated in 1967 when 350,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes and land. It seems that nearly every decade since 1948 has had its own Nakba for the Palestinian people, and today 2.5 million Palestinians are confined in an open air prison called the Gaza Strip. Only now, Israel is turning Gaza into a “death camp.”

It’s easy, if not lazy, to accept the official Israeli narrative which says that because Hamas has governed Gaza since 2005 then all Palestinians are responsible for the events on October 7. But upon further inspection, this line of reasoning simply doesn’t add up.

Hamas does not control the ports, the airspace, the fishing rights off the coast, the imports and exports, permitting, small business applications, the influx of food and potable water, the utilities, the boarders, or the checkpoints in Gaza. Israel controls all of these things. Indeed, Israel even controls the collection of rain water in many rural Palestinian territories. So, Hamas cannot be said to govern Gaza in any meaningful way? Gaza, and the Westbank for that matter, are in reality governed by Israel.

Moreover, the civilians in these territories are not only governed by Israel, they are being destroyed by Israel, and Evangelicals in America should be mindful that Christians are dying in Palestine, too.

So, to paraphrase Jesus, “For what shall it profit Evangelicals, if they shall gain the whole of Israel, and lose their own souls?

Jim Fitzgerald is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and a missionary in the Middle East and North Africa. His articles have appeared in American Greatness, American Thinker, Antiwar.com, and The Aquila Report.