Decolonizing Palestine

July 24, 2023
In this thought-provoking analysis, pastor Raheb (The Politics of Persecution) unpacks the American Christian right’s use and misuse of biblical notions to justify Israel’s “settler colonization” of Palestine. Reaching back to the Second Great Awakening in the U.S. and Europe, Raheb explains that 19th-century evangelicals who believed Christ’s return was imminent displayed a “renewed interest” in the Jews, as their return to Israel was a biblical prerequisite for Christ’s second coming. And in the 1960s, the “Zionist political narrative of ‘unity of God, land, and people’ ” was popularized in American “Anglo-Saxon churches” and espoused by the likes of Christian theologian Karl Barth, who viewed Israel’s new statehood as a “sign of God’s faithfulness to the seeds of Abraham.” Decades later, Zionism was embraced by such conservative politicians as Mike Pence and Donald Trump, whose kinship with Israeli leaders is rooted in the country’s appeal to an evangelical base and in America’s own colonial history (Raheb points out that both the U.S. and Israel “are settler nations who occupied the lands of native peoples and pushed those people into small reservations”). Though he fails to adequately account for antisemitism on the American right, Raheb skillfully illuminates links between Christian Zionism, American exceptionalism, and “biblical concepts like ‘God’s chosen people’ and ‘land promise,’ ” showing how the boundaries between theology, politics, and identity have been muddied and continually renegotiated. This is sure to spark conversation.