Christian Zionism's Grip on U.S. Policy Erasing Palestinians
By Amb. Patrick N. Theros and Marika P. Theros, PhD - May 17, 2025
When
Israeli forces bombed Christianity’s third oldest church in Gaza,
killing civilians sheltering inside, most American evangelical leaders
didn’t say a word. No outrage. No grief. Just silence. That silence
highlights one of the most toxic political bargains in the modern Middle
East: Israel’s strategic alliance with Christian Zionists – a pact
David Rosenberg, editor of Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has called a “deal
with the devil.” It’s easy to see why. In exchange for unwavering
political and financial support from millions of American evangelicals,
Israel has embraced a movement whose ultimate aim is not Israel’s
survival, but its scripted annihilation in a blood-soaked End of Days
fantasy.
This is not an alliance of shared values. It is a
political deal with a movement that supports Israel not out of concern
for Jewish safety but to advance its own apocalyptic prophesy. By the
1980s, leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had made Israel
central to the religious right, but Christian Zionism gained real
political force in the 2000s, after John Hagee founded Christians United
for Israel and mobilized millions of evangelicals into a potent
political bloc. Israeli leaders facing declining support from younger
American Jews, saw this bloc as a political asset, offering access,
influence, and funding. For example, Ron Dermer, an American politician
serving as Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, has argued it’s more
effective to appeal to evangelicals for U.S. support because they wield
more power than the American Jewish community. Israeli leaders may have
convinced themselves they can harness this fire without being consumed
by it. But that delusion has already exacted heavy costs – on American
policy and Israel’s moral compass.
For Palestinian Christians,
Christian Zionism offers not solidarity but erasure. It turns their
homeland into a stage for prophecy, reducing them and their churches,
communities, and history to obstacles. It justifies the bulldozing of
Palestinian homes, the confiscation of land, the destruction of ancient
churches, and the erasure of a people whose presence predates
Christianity itself. The roots of its theology lie not in empathy or
covenant, but in 19th-century British imperialism – where Protestant
theologians declared that Jewish “return” would hasten Christ’s second
coming.
Some American evangelicals later weaponized this theology
alongside Cold War geopolitics, locking U.S. foreign policy into an
apocalyptic framework that has no room for justice, let alone peace in
the Middle East. This lens flattens Palestinian realities and renders
them acceptable casualties in a narrative centered on Israeli
fulfillment and evangelical salvation. In doing so, it helped transform a
once- fringe movement within evangelicalism into a mainstream force
shaping American policy and public opinion both subtly and blatantly.
A
2013 Pew survey found that twice as many American evangelicals as
American Jews believe God promised the land to the Jewish people.
Catering to this base, politicians from both parties have cited
scripture to justify military interventions, foreign policy decisions,
and billions in aid to Israel. As vice president, Mike Pence repeatedly
invoked biblical language to defend Israeli settlements and the
relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, framing these moves not as
strategy but as prophecy fulfilled.
By the end of the 20th
century, Christian Zionism had become a political juggernaut – rewriting
Scripture into a geopolitical blueprint and underwriting the ethnic
cleansing of the very land in which Jesus lived. Indigenous peoples of
the Holy Land – Muslims and Christians alike – were swept away as
obstacles to divinely scripted destiny. Among those most silenced are
Palestinian Christians – Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, Catholic – the
living descendants of the earliest churches. To Christian Zionists,
their very existence disrupts the myth of return and restoration. Their
erasure makes it easier to frame the conflict as civilizational and
religious, normalizing the dehumanization of Palestinian Muslims. This
marginalization isn’t incidental; it reinforces violence and sustains
occupation rooted in anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim ideologies.
Leaders like John Hagee, regularly frame resistance to Israel’s violent
displacement of Palestinians as antisemitism, recasting political
protest as a broader religious or existential threat to Israel.
Reverend
Mitri Raheb of Bethlehem put it bluntly, Christian Zionism is
“crucifying the Living Church.” The churches that still chant hymns in
Jesus’s own language, that cling to their land and heritage under
occupation, are being erased. In Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Gaza,
Palestinian Christians watch as Western churches flood the region with
tours yet remain deaf to their cries for justice. That silence turned to
betrayal when U.S. officials said nothing after the bombing of a Greek
Orthodox church in Gaza and when snipers targeted women seeking refuge
in Gaza’s Catholic church. Has U.S. foreign policy become so captured by
evangelical interests that it lacks mercy for the oldest Christian
communities, those of the Holy Land?
This theology does not
merely ignore violence – it sanctifies it. Settler expansion becomes a
holy mandate. Bombs on Gaza are seen not as tragedy or crime, but as
foreshadowing.
Even some Israeli leaders have warned against this
alliance, aware that the affection it brings has an expiration date. In
Christian Zionism’s end-times narrative, Jewish people are ultimately
expected to convert or perish. Yet the immediate short-term benefits
have kept the alliance intact despite repeated warnings. Avraham Burg, a
former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and vocal critic of Israel’s ties
to Christian Zionists, argues that such alliances threaten Israel’s
democratic character and Jewish identity.
In the U.S., Christian
Zionism channels the same spiritual logic that once justified
colonialism, apartheid, and slavery – a theology of conquest
masquerading as care. It does not ask what is right; it asks what serves
the script.
And its cost is not abstract. It is measured not
only in land, but in lives, lost histories, entire family lineages
erased, priests blocked from churches, and olive trees razed beside
vandalized monasteries. Its influence on U.S. politics has helped
sustain ongoing military support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza
– a campaign Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has openly
described as seeking the ‘total destruction’ of the territory and the
mass displacement of its population, invoking the biblical command to
“blot out Amalek.”
No theology should justify cruelty. If faith
is to mean anything in this world – anything worthy of moral authority –
it must choose people over power, human dignity over political
expediency. That begins with listening to the Palestinians living in the
land – and protecting them.
The Holy Land is not a symbol or a
stage for someone’s apocalyptic agendas. It is home – sacred, wounded,
and alive. No theology, however powerful politically or popular, should
be allowed to tear this land from its people in the name of God.