Tag: Christian Zionism

Two New Publications Exposing the Many Failures of Christian Zionism and the State of Israel

The Rev. Dr. Stephen Sizer

The Rev. Dr. Stephen Sizer is an acquaintance of mine (I would call him a friend, yet we have only chatted on Facebook) who has written two very fine books about the dangers of Christian Zionism and the many injustices that Zionist Israel inflicts on the Palestinian people.

After receiving his MA in theology from Oxford University he became a long-time vicar in the Church of England at Christ Church, Virginia Water, in Surrey, England. He retired from parish ministry in 2017.

He is now the director of the charitable organization Peacemaker Trust.

Dr. Sizer’s two books are Zion’s Christian Soldiers? The Bible, Israel and the Church, and Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon?

Both books arise from Dr. Sizer’s doctoral research into the histories of dispensational theology (to which Christian Zionism has always been a favored handmaiden), the emergence of political Zionism in
Europe and Israel, and the relationships between the them.

I am very happy (and somewhat proud) of the fact that the publisher of my forthcoming book on Christian Zionism is also the publisher now reissuing both of Dr. Sizer’s important works.

Let me say again that I highly recommend them both!

Zion’s Christian Soldiers? is available for order HERE from the Wipf & Stock publications website. The second book, Christian Zionism Road-map to Armageddon?, will also become available from Wipf & Stock in the near future. So, keep your eyes open.

So why are Dr. Sizer’s books being reissued?

Both books were originally published by Inter-Varsity Press in the UK. Dr. Sizer quickly became public enemy #1 for the Israel Lobby and other pro-Israel, pro-Zionist apologists who immediately set their sites on him as their next target.

Consequently, he has been viciously slandered and attacked by people who care less about facts than they do about winning.

I suspect that the publisher, IVP-UK, came under great pressure to withdraw these books from their catalogue. I know that Dr. Sizer endured a tremendously savage campaign of pro-Zionist opposition, including all manner of slander and false accusations.

While I confess that I have not been privy to the details, I strongly suspect that, in the end, profit margins proved more important than principle to the publishing powers at IVP-UK.

Which now makes it all the more important that Dr. Sizer’s work is being reissued by Wipf & Stock in the USA. Hip hip hurrah!

As the voice of the Holy Spirit once said to St. Augustine, “take up and read.”

My New Book on Christian Zionism Can Now Be Ordered Online!

A prepublication ordering page is now available at the Wipf & Stock website for my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People.

I hope that you will check it out and seriously consider buying a copy so that you can inform your Christian friends, and others, about the serious mistake the American church makes by endorsing Israel’s behavior in the Middle East.

You can place your orders (because I understand that everyone will want to place multiple orders for friends and relatives. Ha!) by clicking HERE.

Unfortunately, the fellow in charge of cover design has been very ill for some time, but whatever he eventually comes up with will be inserted into the order page.

Below is the description I wrote for the publisher’s advertising purposes:

When Christians collude in crimes against humanity, they betray their citizenship in the kingdom of God, demonstrating that Christ’s Lordship does not rule over every area of their lives. The popular ideology known as Christian Zionism is a prime enabler of such widespread discipleship–failure in western Christianity. As the state of Israel continues to violate international law with colonial settlement in lands captured by warfare, legalized racial discrimination, and the creation of what many have called “the world’s largest open-air prison” in Gaza, Christian Zionists continue their unqualified support for Zionist Israel. Though Israel advertises itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” it is actually a rigid ethnocracy–its entire society built on the foundations of Jewish supremacy over a Palestinian underclass. History will eventually judge Christian Zionist support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians in the same way people of conscience now condemn the Christian church in the American South for its defense of slavery and hostility towards the civil rights movement. Just as the Southern Baptist church finally repudiated its pro-slavery past, so everyone genuinely devoted to Jesus Christ must repudiate both the ideology and the legacy of Christian Zionism.

Ethnic Cleansing Never Ends in Israel and the West Bank

The modern state of Israel was founded upon ethnic cleansing.

750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by a Jewish military that freely committed war crimes just as every invading army has violated civilian populations throughout history.

Below is a video telling the story of only one Palestinian family whose home was recently demolished in order to make way for Jewish settlers.

Zionist ethnic cleansing has never ceased, not since it began in 1947.

The Israeli government refers to the process as “Judaization,” that is the replacement of native Palestinians with Jewish settlers.

It is also referred to as “redeeming the land.” For political Zionism, redemption is not God’s business. It is Jewish Zionist business. And it is accomplished by ridding the land of the pollution created by Palestinians.

I could post several such videos and articles every day and never run out of new material exposing the ongoing injustices of Israeli political Zionism.

So, here again is a new, representative story I have selected out of many, many possibilities this week alone.

Watch it and ask yourself, as well as your elected representatives, is this why the US subsidizes Israel to the tune of nearly $4 billion each year????

So they can destroy more Palestinian lives?

Check Out My Recent Interview on the DetermineTruth Podcast

Dr. Rob Dalrymple and Vinnie Angelo both host the DetermineTruth podcast available at Patheos, an evangelical platform for a variety of religious blogs and websites.

Rob and Vinnie recently contacted me in order to interview me about my forthcoming book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionist Collaboration in the Suffering of the Palestinian People.

Dr. Rob Dalrymple

My interview is about 1 hour long. You can watch the video version of my discussion with Rob and Vinnie about Christian Zionism and my forthcoming book on YouTube here or you can listen to the audio-only version at the DetermineTruth website  here.

Pastor Vinnie Angelo

Rob and Vinnie also discuss their own eye-opening awakenings to the problems of Christian Zionism and the oppression of the Palestinian people in an introductory discussion here.

NEME Interview About My Forthcoming Book About Christian Zionism

My friends at the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East (NEME) interviewed me last month about my book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in the Oppression of the Palestinian People (Cascade, 2021).

I am told the book will be available for purchase around October 1st. I am waiting to hear about the possibility of pre-publication purchases.

My friend, Dr. Bruce Fisk, formerly a New Testament professor at Westmont College in California, asked me a number of questions about the book as well as my experiences living in Palestinian Occupied Territory of the West Bank.

The interview is about 1 hour long. I hope you will take the time to watch and learn more about the truth of Israel as an apartheid state.

Also, feel free to share the video’s web link with your friends. (I tried to download the video onto this post, but it is too large.)

Then buy my book and share its message with as many Christian Zionist friends as possible. The majority of the American evangelical church needs to learn the truth about Israel-Palestine.

I am also eager to speak with any groups interested in listening, whether large or small.  Please contact me for possible speaking engagements on the subjects covered in my book.  Thanks.

 

For Israel, the Murder of Innocent Palestinians Never Ends

US media regularly repeats Israeli talking points about “terrorist attacks” (the common description of unarmed civilians protesting in the streets) against Israel. Yet, these same outlets remain mute about Israel’s daily terrorist attacks against Palestinians.

It’s as if US corporate media is joined at the hip to the Israeli government propaganda department.

Israel may not be carpet-bombing Gaza at the moment — though bombing

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy

has continued fairly consistently throughout the summer — but killing Palestinians in the West Bank continues apace without interruption.

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy aptly labels the Israeli shooters as “death squads.”

Mr. Levy’s latest article in Haaretz newspaper describing the recent murders of 4 innocent, young men — stories you will never see covered by US corporate media — is entitled “The Media Yawns at the Israeli Army’s Death Squads.”

Israeli terror is at it again. The Israel Defense Forces’ death squads chalked up another successful week: four bodies of innocent Palestinians piled up between the two Fridays. There doesn’t seem to be a connection between the four incidents in which four sons were killed, but the link cannot be broken.

In all these cases, soldiers chose shooting to kill as the preferred option. In all four cases another way could have been chosen: Arrest them, aim for the legs, don’t do anything or simply don’t be there at all. But the soldiers chose to kill. It’s probably easier for them that way.

They come from different branches of the army with different backgrounds, but they share the incredible ease with which they kill, whether they have to or not.

They kill because they can. They kill because they’re convinced that this is how they’re expected to act. They kill because they know that nothing is cheaper than the life of a Palestinian. They kill because they know that the Israeli media will yawn and not report a thing. They kill because they know that no harm will come to them, so why not? Why not kill a Palestinian when possible?

They killed a 12-year-old boy and a 41-year-old plumber. They killed a 17-year-old youth and a 20-year-old young man attending a funeral, all in one week. An Israeli slogan during the 1948 war went “To arms, every good man,”

Israeli soldiers at the funeral of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Alami in the West Bank town of Beit Ummar Thursday. Credit Emil Salman

leading later to the concept of the IDF’s “purity of arms.” Four in one week, for no reason, with no hesitation, with no terrorist facing them. Four executions of young men with dreams, families, plans and loves.

None of the four endangered the soldiers, certainly not in a way that justified lethal fire. Thirteen bullets at a car driving by innocently, carrying a father and his three small children. Shooting a plumber holding a wrench and claiming that he was “moving rapidly toward the soldiers.” Three bullets at the stomach of a 17-year-old who was on his way to take his brother home.

All this can be called terror; there is no other definition. All this can be called the actions of death squads; there is no other description. It sounds horrible, but it really is horrific.

It could be less horrific if the Israeli media bothered to report on it, possibly shocking Israelis. It could be much less horrific if IDF commanders took the necessary steps given their army’s murderous recklessness. But most of the media believed that the killing of a child interests no one or is unimportant, or both, so this shocking incident wasn’t reported on.

If the soldiers had shot a dog – also a shocking act, of course – it would have attracted more attention. But a dead Palestinian child? What happened? Why should it interest anyone, why is it important?

“Are you working for the Arabs?” journalist Yinon Magal maliciously tweeted, addressing Haaretz’s Hagar Shezaf, virtually the only journalist who covered the boy’s funeral. This is the new journalistic ethos: Reporting the truth is tantamount to working for the Arabs.

Let’s leave aside the media of trivia and nonsense that was busy to the hilt with the modeling agent suspected of sexual misconduct and with lists of pedophiles – what does the media have to do with the killing of children? The question is: Where are the military commanders and the political leaders?

Their disgraceful silence leads to only one conclusion: They believe that this killing is acceptable. It’s exactly what they expect of soldiers: the killing of innocents. There is no other way to explain everyone’s silence without even a semblance of condemnation.

If the killers of the boy Mohammed al-Alami are still not in custody, then the IDF under Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi – a person known to speak in lofty terms about values – is saying that the soldiers acted correctly. If the paratroopers who killed Mohammed Tamimi by firing three bullets into his body from their armored jeep are still walking around freely in the West Bank, this means the army salutes them.

And if the IDF salutes them, we really are talking about death squads, just like in the most dreadful regimes.

Gideon Levy asks, “What would Israelis think of an ice cream company that boycotted South Africa?”

I am sure you have  heard about the Israeli ruckus occurring in the wake of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream company deciding to join the international BDS

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy

movement by no longer supplying ice cream to the illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank.

Certain US news outlets have gotten this wrong. Ben & Jerry’s is not boycotting the entire West Bank, only the Jewish settlements now housing some 700,000 Jewish colonizers occupying stolen Palestinian land.

Israeli politicians, as well as the citizens they represent, are up in arms over this latest “antisemitic” attack against the Jewish state.

There is so much propagandistic malarkey at play in this recent Israeli temper tantrum, it would be funny were it no so tragic.

Gideon Levy, columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, gives us the necessary perspective on this latest display of Zionist insanity. His article is titled “A Tempest in an Ice Cream Tub Revealed Some Truths to Israelis.” (All emphasis is mine):

If Ben & Jerry’s keeps to its word and pulls its product from the settlements in a year and a half (and there’s good reason to doubt it will, given the pressure expected from American Jews), I will start eating its ice cream. I will be able to enjoy a product that shows a little more caring, more involvement, more conscience and, above all, more decency.

Until then, one can only laugh at the summer frenzy that has broken out and will disappear when the next storm of vanity emerges. Do Israelis now need to boycott the ice cream to protest the company’s decision? Or should we buy more in a show of support for the patriotic local franchisee, who will continue selling in the settlements until its contract is up? Meanwhile, what we have is a tempest in a tub of ice cream that teaches us more about Israel than a thousand scholarly papers.

The Ben & Jerry’s affair has made Israelis happy. There aren’t a lot of things they love more than the appearance of an external threat. It brings us together, to wallow in the bitter fate that we of all peoples must face, to create a repulsive unity and groupthink, and to launch a bombastic counterattack, with the knee-jerk accusation of antisemitism for dessert.

When the franchisee of our beloved McDonald’s, Omri Padan, decided to boycott the territories, collective Israel shrieked a lot less. Why? Because Padan is a patriot who in no conceivable way can be tarred as an antisemite. He is untouchable. With an American company, it’s a lot easier.

Ice cream succeeded where the deaths of 67 children in Gaza failed – to remind Israelis of the occupation. Still, the madness remains: The occupation is a victim, the only victim. It boggles the mind that whenever someone dares remind Israelis that something is still wrong, the issue immediately becomes how Israel is the victim. Headlines, endless talk, and the only thing no one asks is – why?

Why would any reasonable person want to boycott Israel? Well, maybe because of the pressure exerted by BDS. Only because of such pressure. Otherwise, there’s no way an ice cream company might come to the conclusion on its own that it no longer wants to sweeten the lives of the settlers. There’s no chance of there being business people with values. It’s just the consequence of pressure. The mechanisms of repression and denial that Israeli society has developed won’t drink from the cup of Chubby Hubby. It’s society’s Iron Dome – it can’t be abandoned.

Therefore, the situation demands nothing less than a real boycott of Israel, of all Israelis, everywhere – a painful, costly, destructive one. Not a boycott-lite on the ice cream sold at the Rami Levy supermarket at the Etzion Junction, but one that all of Israel will feel in its pocket. Only one that can relieve Israel of its blindness and expose the lie it has been feeding itself for so many years.

Equally amazing is all the unity and groupthink that the affair has created. Suddenly, it has become clear that we’re all settlers. The Green Line has long ceased to exist. The Ben & Jerry’s affair has revealed that there’s no difference between the radical right and the left. Everyone is for the settlements. Everyone opposes their being harmed, even if it’s minor harm to the contents of their freezers.

But is it really so sudden? Yair Lapid talks about antisemitism and Economy and Industry Minister Orna Barbivai acts if she dreams of being Miri Regev when she grows up. Meanwhile, we can ask ourselves why we deserve ridiculous politicians like these and why no one has mustered the courage to thank Ben & Jerry’s for acting in their small way.

In any case, the step the company took is artificial: It’s no longer possible to separate the settlers and the rest of Israel. The tempest in the tub proves that.

We should praise the ice cream makers from Vermont: They won’t end the occupation – that’s not their job – but on a hot summer day they revealed a few truths to Israelis. Only one question remains for all reasonable Israelis to ask themselves: What would they think of an ice cream company that boycotted South Africa?

Israel’s Two Day Old Government Breaks Cease Fire, Bombs Gaza, Again

The neighbor kids threw some firecrackers over the fence yesterday into my backyard. My dog was freaked out.

I had to teach them a lesson.

So, I fired up my oversized Hummer, with the extra-wide, off road, knobby

Israel’s new prime minister, Naftali Bennett

tires. I put it into overdrive and crashed through the side of their house at high speed. In the process I ran over their cat, clipped the mother making coffee, and popped out the sliding glass doors into their backyard.

That’ll learn ’em.

——————

It only took Israel’s new government two days to rain more terror down on the people of Gaza.

Jake Johnson has an article at CommonDreams updating us on Israel’s latest aggression against the people of Gaza. His piece in entitled, “After Far-Right Marchers Chant ‘Death to Arabs,’ New Israeli Government Bombs Gaza“:

“The problem is bigger than Netanyahu—it’s apartheid.”

Just hours after far-right marchers chanted “Death to Arabs!” during a demonstration in the streets of Jerusalem, Israeli war planes bombarded the occupied Gaza Strip early Wednesday morning in the first series of airstrikes launched by the new government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a former IDF officer who once boasted that he has “killed a lot of Arabs.”

While initial reports indicated that no Palestinians were killed in the new

The Israeli military said it launched airstrikes against Hamas forces in Gaza early Wednesday. Credit…Mahmud Hams Agence France-Presse. Getty Images

bombing campaign, the air raid intensified fears of a fresh wave of violence by the Israeli government just weeks after a tenuous cease-fire agreement paused Israel’s deadly 11-day assault on Gaza last month, which killed more than 240 people.

The Israeli military characterized the latest airstrikes as retaliation for “incendiary balloons” released into Israel from the Gaza Strip. The balloons reportedly caused at least ten fires in Israel.

“Homemade fire balloons versus U.S. bombs. Is there a better example of the disproportionate use of force?” asked Ariel Gold, national co-director of the anti-war organization CodePink.

Abu Malek, whom the Associated Press identified as “one of the young men launching the balloons,” said the incendiary objects were released into Israel in response to a far-right, government-sanctioned march through Jerusalem, where demonstrators rallied alongside several members of the Israeli Knesset and chanted “Death to Arabs!”

Israeli police fired rubber bullets at Palestinians who tried to disrupt the march, which reached the main entrance to the Old City’s Muslim quarter.

“This is a genocidal chant. Let’s call it what it is,” tweeted U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.). “I represent many within the Jewish community who disavow and condemn this hateful language. So why does only a small portion of our Congress?”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the first Palestinian-American woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress, said that “after racist and violent ‘death to Arabs’ marches earlier today in Jerusalem, children in Gaza are being woken by bombs in the middle of the night.”

“Israel’s government doesn’t value Palestinian lives,” Tlaib added. “It has managed a decades-long ethnic cleansing project, funded by the U.S.”

The Israeli airstrikes came just over 48 hours after the country’s parliament narrowly voted to replace former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Bennett, a change that defenders of Palestinian rights did not applaud given the latter’s record and policy stances, which include support for annexing the occupied West Bank in violation of international law.

“While being hailed by many as the opportunity for a fresh start, Naftali Bennett is at best a continuation of Netanyahu’s policies and at worst an ideologue whose positions are to the right of Netanyahu’s,” Gold of CodePink wrote for Common Dreams on Monday.

 

Israel is Worried About Young Evangelicals Opening Their Eyes to Its Crimes

I recently posted about Israel’s dependence on Christian Zionist support in this country.

The Brookings Institute (a conservative think tank) has also released a study examining Israel’s dependence on American evangelicals. The study also identified Israel’s new cause for concern — young evangelicals are

Israel bombs the offices of several news outlets in Gaza

turning away from their parent’s traditional pro-Israel politics.

Frankly, this article brings joy to my heart! I hope this new generation of evangelical young people will read my next book.

The article is entitled “As Israel increasingly relies on US evangelicals for support, younger ones are walking away: what polls show.”

Here is an excerpt:

As the recent eruption in Israel/Palestine brought attention to shifting Democratic attitudes toward Israel, including among younger Jewish Americans, Israel’s focus on the evangelical right as a cornerstone of U.S. support for the Jewish state has proven increasingly important. As our University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll research has shown, evangelical attitudes toward Israel account for most of the Republican Party’s support for Israel; without evangelicals, Republican attitudes on Israel do not substantially deviate from the rest of America.

These trends in American politics may explain the recent statement by former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer that Israel should spend more of its energy reaching out to “passionate” American evangelicals than to Jews, who are “disproportionately among our critics.” Criticizing Dermer,

Jewish settlers take over a Palestinian home in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah  April 16, 2021. (Photo by Emmanuel DUNAND / AFP)

Israel’s former consul general in New York, Dani Dayan, added that “our embassy in the United States capital has invested most of its energy in the relationship with conservatives, Republicans, evangelicals, and a certain type of Jews only.”

But a new survey commissioned by University for North Carolina at Pembroke researchers, carried out by Barna Group, has exposed what we have been finding for some time: younger evangelicals are much less supportive of Israel than older evangelicals, by a widening margin. The poll found a dramatic shift in attitudes between 2018 and 2021: support for Israel among young evangelicals dropped from 75% to 34%. This raises questions about the sustainability of the strong evangelical support for Israel that the Israeli right has cultivated for years and that proved reliable during the Trump administration.

Read the entire story here.

The Title of My Forthcoming Book on Christian Zionism

Often times, authors are not allowed to pick the title for their books. The publisher typically makes that decision.

I recently learned, however, that Wipf and Stock Publishers has decided to use the title I proposed for my next book. I am letting you know about this so you can keep your eyes open for it once it becomes available (perhaps in the fall).

The title will be Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “Christian Zionism” (CZ) refers to a large segment of the Christian church who believe that the modern state of Israel is God’s chosen nation, now preparing the way for Christ’s second coming.

May of these folks will talk about reading “the signs of the times” anticipating various beasts, the antichrist, and the final battle of Armageddon, all occurring in the land of Israel.

My argument with Christian Zionism takes a three-pronged approach.

First, I dissect the basic problems with CZ Bible-reading, showing why and how their approach to scripture is wrong. Bad methods can only produce bad results. CZ has no Biblical foundation.

Second, I trace the history of political Zionism — the branch of Zionism that gave birth to the Jewish nation-state — and its abusive treatment of the indigenous Palestinians.

Israel’s establishment was the last venture of western, settler colonialism. The goal was to create a Jewish supremacist state (yes, go ahead and make the

Illegal Jewish-only settlements & related programs funded by Christian donations from the US

implied comparison to white supremacy in this country), where Jews alone claimed all the rights and privileges of citizenship. The natives were displaced, replaced, and excluded by European, Jewish settlers who built a society only for themselves.

Third, I tell a number of eyewitness accounts detailing the unrelenting brutality of Israel’s military occupation in the West Bank. Captured by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, Israel continues to violate international law by annexing large portions of this territory and building Jewish-only settlements on stolen Palestinian land.

The United States is Israel’s largest source of foreign aid, to the tune of nearly $4 billion each year.

Christian Zionists are the largest pro-Israel lobbying group in this country.

The logic is self-evident.

Israel will not change its behavior until the USA stops financing their military. The US government will not cut Israel’s foreign aid budget without consistent, long-term pressure to this end from American citizens.

Here is the logic  that led me to write Like Birds in a Cage.

My prayers and my hopes are focused on educating American evangelicals, convincing them that not only does Israel not deserve the church’s support, but that Israel is a rogue state built on ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

No Christian, no congregation, no denomination, no non-profit organization, no country can ever support a nation like Israel with a clear conscience.

I hope you will look for my book and buy copies for you and your friends when it comes out. My Palestinian friends need your help.