How Christian Zionism is helping to crucify the birthplace of Christ

This weekend, in a rare occurrence, Christians of all denominations will be celebrating Easter at the same time as Eastern and Western Christian calendars coincide. Yet, as has become an undeniable reality for many Christian Palestinians, the only thing we share in common between our Easter and the Easter of many Christians in the West is the sheer coincidence that these celebrations are falling on the same date.

In fact, the gap between Christianity as Palestinians know it, and have known it for two thousand years, and how it is understood by many Christians in the West, has been widening since October 2023. It continues to grow with every day that passes without Western Christians speaking out against Israel’s genocide. This gap is even more striking in the United States with the presence of the Christian Zionist movement, and especially its influence in the Trump administration.

In January, Trump’s pick for the position of U.S. ambassador to the UN, Elise Stefanik, said in front of a congressional hearing that she shared the views of Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich that Israel “has a biblical right to all of the West Bank.”

Christian Zionism in the United States is mostly an evangelical phenomenon, but not exclusively. According to the Pew Research Center, 63% of white evangelicals in the U.S. believe that the state of Israel fulfilled a biblical prophecy. But Stefanik herself is Catholic. Pew shows that a quarter of white U.S. Catholics shared the same views. This indicates that Christian Zionism has its roots in an American, or probably a more widely Western, Christian narrative, rather than in a strictly evangelical tradition.

The foundational ideas upon which Christian Zionism is built are rooted in the Western colonial culture of white supremacy, not in Christian theology or faith. In fact, from a Palestinian perspective, Christian Zionism is not only anti-Palestinian, but one could even argue that it is so intellectually superficial that the only Christian thing it has is its name.

Christianity was born in Palestine. This is not a political statement. The land where the events of the gospel took place has been called Palestine for 4,000 years, and the culture in which Jesus lived and from which he drew his parables and vocabulary is the native culture of the countryside of Galilee and the central hills of Palestine. That culture is the rural culture of the people who today call themselves Palestinians. As a Christian Palestinian, I learned since my childhood that our culture, our folklore, and the way of life of our ancestors is the “fifth gospel,” and the living witness to the time and culture of Jesus himself.

No Palestinian, Christian or Muslim, would miss the meaning of Jesus’s words when he says that “No one who puts his hand on the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God,” in the gospel of Luke, because that is exactly the way we, Palestinians, speak today, about commitment to hard work. In fact, “plowing” is our local slang word for “hard work” and “commitment,” and it comes from the peasant roots of most of the local Palestinian accents.

No Palestinian would misunderstand the meaning of Jesus’ parable about the woman who lost a coin and turned her house upside down until she found it. That is because in our culture, a centuries-old tradition is that when a woman is married, she receives a special gift of gold or silver coins, which preserve their value. This is to guarantee her livelihood in case she becomes a widow or gets divorced, and that is how precious a lost soul is to God, according to Jesus.

Palestinians also understand perfectly why Jewish leaders were so nervous about Jesus raising the enthusiasm of the people of Jerusalem during Passover, and why that could provoke Roman authorities. That is because for centuries, until today, religious festivities in Jerusalem are occasions for the people to protest their oppression. That is why occupation authorities today are extremely alert and easily provoked during Ramadan, for example, restrict the entry of Palestinians to al-Aqsa mosque, and are ready to use force, which makes Palestinian religious and civil authorities nervous every year during religious festivities.

Palestinian understanding of Christianity is rooted in the material, inherited, living culture of the birthland of Christianity; their own culture. And although that is one way of understanding Christianity, it is the way of the oldest Christian community on earth, which gave Christianity to the rest of the world. Yet, Christian Zionism turns Palestine, its land, its culture, and its people into an abstract idea disconnected from its real existence. Something like a fantasy-world, a fairy-tale, or a mythology taking place in the clouds, and therefore necessarily erases Palestinians, starting with Christian Palestinians, from existence.

Instead, Christian Zionism argues that its support to the state of Israel is based on the idea that the state of Israel, which received its name, ‘Israel’, in May 1948, represents the historical continuity of the ancient people that the bible calls “Israel.” At the same time that Christian Zionism denies Palestinians’ existence, let alone their connection to their land and history, it connects a modern, Western, colonial project to the same land and history, three millennia deep.

But beyond the negation of Palestinians, Christian Zionism turns the entire point of the Christian message upside down, and it matters politically. The historical impact of the spread of the Christian message was the turning of the Abrahamic faith and god to universal ones, opening them to people from all races and social classes, based on the teachings of Jesus himself. This, among other philosophies and spiritual traditions, laid the grounds for modern secular humanism. This means that part of being Christian, especially in the modern era, is to recognize all humans, from all nationalities and origins, as part of God’s people. The political implication of this is that one can’t be Christian and racist, bigot, or exclusionist at the same time.

Christian Zionism turns Christianity into a tribalistic identity, separated from the rest of humanity along the lines of colonial white supremacy. This is why all of its scatologic beliefs involving Palestine and Jerusalem align perfectly with the Western imperialist agenda, and therefore, it needs to be fully supportive of Israel’s colonization and erasure of the Palestinian people.

But what Christian Zionists miss is that the Christian theology is no longer the monopoly of Western churches, and that the peoples of the colonized countries have developed their own understanding of Christianity, according to their context. For Palestinians, even those who don’t share the Christian faith, it is impossible not to see in the image of a Christ martyred at the hands of tyrants, and risen from the dead, at least a symbolic representation of their own suffering, and their hope of reclaiming their lives.

As a Palestinian, and as a member of a community with a centuries-old Christian tradition developed under empire and colonization, I can’t look at an image of a crucified Jesus without seeing Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and all destroyed homelands hanging on the cross. Otherwise, it would have no real meaning, no concrete relation with my living reality. And when an object of faith becomes a hollow symbol without any real-life content, it can be filled with a racist, colonialist ideology, and you can get something like Christian Zionism.

By the time these lines are written down, Palestinian Christians are preparing to commemorate the death of Jesus on Good Friday eve. In the Eastern tradition, at the end of the service, the priest recites the words “The people of Jerusalem returned to their homes to eat the Passover lamb, while the real lamb was hanging on the cross.” This year, in many churches around the world, where the cross carried by the people of Gaza will be absent from the minds of so many Christians, those words will have a literal meaning.

But some “Christians” will not just ignore the crucified people of Palestine, descendants of the first Christians. Many of those who call themselves Zionists and Christians at the same time will be praying for D-9 bulldozers to finish razing the rubble of Palestinian homes, clinics, and kindergartens, and uprooting the olives that our ancestors planted, hoping that some Hollywood-like white, long-haired Jesus would appear speaking American English. They will be literally hammering the nails themselves into the wrists of an entire people they have already dehumanized, ignoring Jesus’s warning: “It is to me that you did it.”