In this episode, we have a conversation about Christian Zionism and its impact on Zionism, Israel, and the support of Western powers for the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the annexation of historic Palestine to the apartheid state.
Over the past month Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has continued to intensify even as it drops from the headlines of most of the mainstream or state-sanctioned media. Lately, the criminal state’s foreign minister Israel Katz openly declared its intent to create a concentration camp for over half a million Palestinians in Rafah, on the Egyptian border. Since October 7 2023, the current Israeli government has made no secret of its intent to empty Gaza of its Palestinian population and to declare Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. But we should be under no illusion that this plan is of recent date: Zionism has always promulgated the supremacy of the Jewish state and its settler population over the indigenous Palestinians, building an apartheid regime as a prelude to further expulsions under the euphemism of “transfer”, voluntary or involuntary. The ongoing genocide is the brutal extension of that logic, intrinsic to Zionism’s racial formation and political ideology, and only the latest if most vicious iteration of Palestine’s eighty-year long Nakba.
What does continue to cause perplexity is the ongoing resistance of the Western powers, who have long touted the international legal order and humanitarian and civil rights as the pretext for their maintenance of global economic and political hegemony, to taking any steps to end the genocide or effectively cut the zionist’s state’s ability to kill, disposses, and destroy. On the contrary, Zionism has become the pretext for exceptional degrees of repression of dissent, from the assault on the universities in the United States to the criminalization of non-violent protest in Europe. In the face of Israel’s bare-faced criminality, what explains this unbending materials and ideological support for Israel and the willingness of states to sacrifice the rights of their own populations to defend and resupply the means to go on committing genocide?
Christian Zionism, according to the ecumenical organization Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA), “is a political and theological ideology that misuses Christian texts to support the modern nation-state of Israel out of the belief that Israel has a cosmic purpose in bringing about the ‘End Times’ which will culminate in the second coming of Jesus and the end of the world”. But it has a long history that predates its current manifestations and even laid the groundwork for the political Zionism’s emergence in the late nineteenth-century. In this show, we discuss with our guest, Professor Atalia Omer, both the history and the influence of Christian Zionism on right-wing support for Israel.
Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Professor Omer is the author of Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Professor Omer's article, In the Ruins of the Modern, mentioned in the show, can be found here: https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/theorizing-modernities/in-the-ruins-of-the-modern/
