Can A Christian Support Israel?
For the last few decades, Christian evangelicals in America have had near unshakeable loyalty to the state of Israel. Zionism, the political project whose primary goal is the establishment of a Jewish majority state in Palestine, claims far more Christian adherents than Jewish ones, both in the United States and throughout the world. In the United States, for every one Jewish Zionist, there are 30 Christian Zionists.
One of the most powerful lobbies in Washington DC is Christians United for Israel (CUFI), run by Christian Zionists with the aim of ensuring continual support for the territorial expansion of Israel and the return of all Jews worldwide to the Promised Land. For Christian Zionists, the return of nearly all Jews to the nation of Israel will trigger a long chain of events culminating in the return of Jesus Christ to Earth. (In fact, many Christian evangelicals were shocked when the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 did not immediately initiate the second coming of Jesus Christ). Thus, Christian Zionists do everything in their power to encourage Jewish migration back to Palestine in order to start the aforementioned doomsday clock.
Jesus and Consequentialist Arguments
However, if we take the supposed doomsday prophecies to be accurate (and that is a big if), there still remains a significant problem. The entire worldwide Jewish population settling in the Biblical Promised Land would necessarily mean the displacement, immiseration, and death of nearly the entire Palestinian population. In simple terms, in order for the prophetic chain of events so dear for Christian Evangelicals to take place, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people would be a necessity. In order for the ultimate good to be achieved (the second coming of Jesus Christ) an unspeakable evil would have to come to pass (the genocide of the Palestinians).
Jesus never gave credence to these sorts of arguments. Any argument that presupposes the genocide of the Palestinians as a necessary sacrifice to bring about the end times is a consequentialist argument. Consequentialist arguments, or the kind of thinking that employs the idea that the ends justify the means, is anathema to his entire ministry. Frankly, there are few religious figures that come to mind that give support to the sort of thinking that elevates outcomes above all else.
For Jesus, it was not enough that wealthy Jewish elites gave to charity, he examined why they did so (to be seen by other people and praised for their generosity) (Matthew 6:1-4). For Jesus, it was not enough that someone prayed, he questioned what their intention was in doing so on a street corner (to be praised by passersby for their piety) (Matthew 6:5-6). For Jesus, it was not commendable to give to religious institutions if that meant taking care of your elderly parents was put aside (Mark 7:10-13). For Jesus, questions of the legality of divorce were less pressing than the need to curb lustful appetites (Matthew 5: 27-28). In everything Jesus talked about in his earthly ministry, he was constantly seeking to have his audience examine the purity of their motives, not the end result of their actions.
Christian Zionists would have their evangelical flocks believe it a moral imperative for them to support the government of Israel, no matter the level of human rights abuses or outright land seizures the Palestinians are subjected to on a daily basis. Christian Zionists would have the politicians they lobby supply an endless amount of deadly ordnance to Israel to continue their slaughter of the Palestinians in the hope that such violence will be a precursor to the second coming of Jesus Christ. Christian Zionists will gleefully choose a path of action that enflames regional tensions in the Middle East, drains American tax dollars, puts the lives of American soldiers at risk, and diminishes the global standing of the United States-all while gleefully hoping for the apocalypse.
In an era where the American empire is waning, Christian Zionism and its effects on the policy of the Middle East is its rotten fruit. This naturally leads to the question: can a follower of Jesus support Israel? The answer is an unequivocal no.
