American Zionism and the Silencing of Palestine
Part 1: Messianic Myths and Colonial Ambitions
In the United States, no political commitment is more absolute, more bipartisan, or more immune to the constraints of law, evidence, and human cost than support for Israel—and none is more nakedly theological. Biden met Israel’s war cabinet in October 2023, weeks into the bombing of Gaza, and declared himself a Zionist. Blinken, in Tel Aviv the same week, introduced himself as a Jew, not as Secretary of State. Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in his first term, recognizing it as Israel’s capital—his second term will only accelerate the settlement project, advance annexation, and extend the Greater Israel project.
Those commitments rest on doctrine. Christian Zionism—a dispensationalist reading of scripture that demands Jewish control over all of historic Palestine as a precondition for Christ’s Second Coming—is the dominant eschatology of American evangelical Christianity, the largest single voting bloc in the United States. It is the ideological foundation of Washington’s unconditional support for Israel.
The doctrine that now justifies Palestinian dispossession runs through the American project from its origins. Puritan settlers wielded the Old Testament as their warrant. They were the new Israelites; New England was their promised land; the people they found there were Amalekites—the scriptural enemy marked for total destruction. The biblical command was unsparing: “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant.” These settlers read it as genocidal mandate and acted on it as colonial entitlement.
Manifest Destiny extended the Puritan project from New England to a continent. God, they declared, had ordained American expansion westward, and the people already living there stood, as the Amalekites had stood, between a chosen people and their promised land. The slaughter of Native Americans was celebrated as fulfillment of divine will—the same genocidal logic, the same scriptural warrant, applied from coast to coast.
The Protestant Reformation turned the Old Testament into a colonial instrument. While Catholic and Orthodox traditions read it through Christ—its promises fulfilled, its commands absorbed into a new covenant—Martin Luther’s translation of the New Testament into vernacular German in 1522 placed scripture directly in the hands of ordinary believers, stripping away the interpretive authority of the Church. The conquest narratives, the chosen people, the promised land, the command to destroy Amalek: settlers across the colonial world inherited them as live instructions—and indigenous peoples across four continents bore the consequences.
Before Luther, before the Puritans, before Manifest Destiny, there was Columbus. Sailing in 1492, he crossed the Atlantic to find a western route to the East—to fund a crusade to retake Jerusalem from Muslim rule. He documented these intentions in his diaries, his letters to the Spanish crown, and in his Book of Prophecies (1502), in which he declared himself divinely appointed to hasten the end of days and fund Christianity’s final battle for the Holy City. What he found instead became the means to that end—and the Americas entered history as collateral for a holy war.
That holy war has never ended. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of Defense who now commands the most powerful military on earth, carries “Deus Vult” tattooed on his chest—the battle cry Pope Urban II used in 1095 to launch the First Crusade.
Christian Zionism is that colonial doctrine’s contemporary form—five centuries of scriptural conquest logic translated into American foreign policy. It underwrites Israeli settlements, funds evangelical lobbying in Washington, and provides the moral vocabulary through which American politicians justify unconditional support for a state engaged in the genocide of the Palestinian people. It is why Congress rose to applaud Netanyahu—a man overseeing that genocide—as though allegiance to Israel were a condition of American political life. The same creed that sanctified the destruction of indigenous peoples across four continents now targets Palestine.
Christian Zionism condemns the Jews it supports—to conversion or damnation at the moment of Christ’s return. The alliance between Jewish and Christian Zionists rests on a paradox neither side names. Jewish Zionists accept evangelical money, political support, and diplomatic cover while fully aware that their Christian benefactors expect them to convert or face divine judgment. Christian Zionists back Israeli expansionism and fund Israeli settlements while believing that the Jews they support are destined for damnation unless they convert. Palestinian destruction is the alliance’s only honest purpose.
Palestinian Christians are what that alliance most needs to disappear. We have inhabited this land since Christianity’s origins—our communities uninterrupted, predating the Crusades and every colonial project that has sought to organize the land around our absence. Our existence refutes the claim that Palestine was empty, waiting, divinely reserved for another people’s return—and for Christian Zionism, that refutation is intolerable.
That intolerance has met its answer. The Jerusalem Declaration of 2006, signed by Palestinian Christian leaders from across denominations, condemned Christian Zionism as false teaching that perverts Christianity to serve imperial interests. Archbishop Atallah Hanna was more direct, “Those who call themselves ‘Christian Zionists’ are not Christians at all. Their ideology and rhetoric have no connection to Christian values. A true Christian stands with the oppressed, not the oppressor.” Hanna also refused the sectarian division it imposes, “We, Christians and Muslims of the Levant, will remain one united Ummah, with Al-Quds as our compass and Palestine as our cause.”
Behind that declaration lies a presence no colonial project has been able to erase. American Zionism required Palestinian division—between Christian and Muslim, between those who resist and those who administer, between those who carry the memory and those Israel demands forget. The demand for our division is the demand for our disappearance. We predate the Zionist claim to this land, the Crusader claim, the Roman claim—descended from the same Jewish and Canaanite communities the Bible describes, communities that accepted Christ and never left. The oldest Christian communities in the world are Palestinian. How does a Christian Zionist doctrine that demands our elimination reconcile with that?
Brilliant as always! Can't wait for the remaining parts.
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