Do you consider yourself woke? Do you relish the epithet “SJW” as a badge of honor? Do you see the situation in Palestine / Israel and feel sick? Do you wonder what the hell America has to do with it, why we fund Israel’s apartheid state? The answer is much weirder than you may have guessed. I know because I had a front row seat to it.

America is not a Christian nation, but try telling Christians that. They have always toiled in the background to make it so. I’m not going to even try to sum up the history of the church’s furious attempts to dissolve the line separating it from the state; it’s best if you just watch the docu-series The Family. There is a conspiracy puppeting the American government, but it isn’t some anti-Semitic caricature of a shadowy elite cabal. The NWO, the Illuminati, is just a few hundred pastors, sporting bad hair & cheap suits, telling watered-down sexist jokes about their wives and causing a scene praying gibberish over strangers. Doofy as they are, they’re an evil only a fool would scoff at. Just since Trump’s election in 2016, they were so swift to enact their agenda that America is now a litigiously dangerous place to have a miscarriage, racist police brutality is at an all-time high since the early days of slave-catching, and trans people are increasingly unable to live freely again. It’s impossible to say how long it will take to reverse the decades of progress that this cabal of pastors has undone in just 4 years. The entire Democratic party as a whole doesn’t seem to have the courage to stand up to them. Now, the Christian agenda has become national policy. You may think that’s giving the Evangelical right too much credit. Maybe all this reversal of progress is actually the will of some majority we just don’t hear from in mainstream news? No, America is truly kowtowing to the whims of a lunatic fringe. Nowhere is this clearer than in our relationship with Israel.

It’s an issue I went all my life without really questioning, but once I finally really thought about it, it completely takes my head: why do we give Israel so many billions in aid every year?? America has always been exceptionalist in its foreign policy. We don’t do pro bono, just quid pro quo. We might give a little here & there from time to time, but that’s so we don’t look like total assholes. Or else it’s to protect our material interests. Any time this country has ever intervened in a conflict, it’s to overthrow the will of the people and install whichever status quo-stan promises to honor our access to their resources most unquestioningly. Didn’t George Dubbayuh himself admit there were no weapons, it was all about the oil? America’s history on the world stage begs the question: what the hell does America get out of giving more to Israel than our own cities for infrastructure maintenance? I don’t think that land is well known for its natural resources, at least not more than Texas or even Pennsylvania, which I’ve watched fracking destroy… So what is it then? Are you ready for this? America’s relationship with Israel is 100% driven by lunatic Christians hell-bent on dominating the world with their religion. It’s completely nefarious, but they don’t think so, they see it as enacting God’s will. The endeavor is entirely extracurricular to the Gospel, the Great Commission, the whole of the law according to Jesus Himself. It’s the result of people getting fed up with God’s will, with its infuriating timing & seemingly counterproductive chess strategy, deciding to take matters into their own hands, and realizing the best way to do that is to infiltrate politics and gradually shift the Overton Window until America is begging to vote in a Christofascist theocracy. Again, watch The Family; it’s on Netflix. All of it is true. I can vouch because I was almost sucked into the machinery when I was coming of age.

Before proceeding, I have to drop a disclaimer to prematurely disarm the defensive arguments detractors try to use to write off anyone trying to call them out. Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Judaism does not equal Zionism. You do not become the best Judaist you can by adopting Zionism. Zionism isn’t an oppressed people taking pride in their history to protect themselves in the present. Zionism is nothing more than yet another niche form of jingoism & xenophobia. It’s not radical love, it’s cloistering hatred. It’s wounded people seeking to wound people. There is no defense of it, just like there is no defense of any other strain of supremacist belief. It’s funny, but it’s similar to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement: an extremist faction of an oppressed demographic using their historic persecution to try to leverage becoming oppressors. Both ideologies were founded to elevate an oppressed demographic into equality with the rest of the world, but both bitterly morphed into elevating adherents into supremacy. You don’t have to be a Zionist to support Judaism just like you don’t have to let Nation of Yahweh cultists harangue you to be a good anti-racist. Judaism is a rich & ancient tradition to be revered & preserved forever. Zionism is a relatively recent fringe movement to be thwarted. When folks criticize Israel, they aren’t condemning Judaism, they’re calling out Zionism. Jewish people wanting their own home is not the problem, trampling an entire other race of people to attain it is the problem. If anyone tries to call me anti-Semitic for this piece, I’ll know what they’re really trying to accomplish. If they can paint all criticism as the same bigotry that led to the Holocaust, they can shut down dissent under the guise of compassion. Really, they’re only doing themselves a disservice. The Holocaust was, of course, an unimaginable tragedy that should’ve been prevented. Israel’s wholesale genocide of Palestine is the same thing. Both are true. Anyone with a conscience can see that. If you try to dismiss Palestine’s plight, you spit on why the Holocaust is one of the most heinous atrocities this world has ever suffered. You neglect its lesson, the lesson humanity should never have had to learn. In that way, Zionism is anti-Semitic, not anti-Zionism. To overcompensate for your people’s oppression by trying to elevate your kin above other people on this Earth is to say the Nazis had the right idea, just about the wrong group of people. The Holocaust was a tragedy not because of who it was waged upon, but because it was waged on anyone at all. No one should ever have to endure oppression. We are all equal, we are all valuable. The moment you declare someone is lesser than you, you open yourself up for others to make that claim against you. We’re either all in this together, or war is the natural state of our species. Does Israel really want that, perpetual violent unrest? Does it want a peaceful home, or bloody supremacy? If the answer was peace, why is there a war still raging on, over a century later? I won’t accept answers in the form of propaganda blaming Hamas either. By how many years does the Balfour Declaration pre-date Hamas, is it something in the ballpark of 70? For Palestinians, any opposition to Zionism is self-defense, not anti-Semitism. For From River To Sea allies, anti-Zionism is beyond simple praxis, it’s merely being a good neighbor, a concerned humanist. Like a Scooby Doo villain, if we unmask Zionism to see its true nature, nothing will stare back at us but desperate excuses for imperialism, settler colonialism. Colonialism is never the good guy.
I hope I have made myself understood.

Zionism is planted in Christians from the beginning. I definitely fell into it, I even called myself a Zionist in my early teens. I actually looked into if it was possible to become a literal card-carrying member. My dad’s family descends from Ashkenazi who fled Germany just before the Night of the Long Knives. My mom’s family were Austrians who probably rode the same boat to America as my dad’s family. We were never culturally Orthodox in any way; my family apparently converted to Evangelical Christianity and shed any other traditions as a rite of assimilation into America. Still, I could commiserate with the Israelites as a kid. Every other Sunday school lesson seemed to touch on their trials, like an old serial story told over the course of several magazine issues. If you grew up in the church, you know the rhetoric around Israelites being God’s chosen people: how they constantly messed up but always repented, how God never gave up on them but opened up the club doors for everyone to join, how important the re-establishment of a new Jerusalem is to end times prophecies… I get it! After all the Old Testament stories, you root for Israel. If you’re told how its reestablishment ties into the aftermath of WWII, you gain a modernized appreciation for their struggle. But then I learned about *how* the land itself was claimed through wars, oppression, endless cycles of violence kicked off over a century ago by a single act of covetousness that could’ve been another cautionary Old Testament tale itself… I still feel conflicted about it in some deep part of me. How could the Israelites commit genocide? How could the God’s Chosen reconcile such a diabolical sin? In answering that question, I see now how dangerous the rhetoric around Israel in Evangelicalism can be in the outside world. I can’t unsee how the rhetoric has been used to justify atrocities Israel has committed. I can’t let the American church off the hook for funding, supporting, encouraging those atrocities. My Sunday school teachers never lacked an understanding of good narrative structure. If the lesson that week ended on a bitter note, it was only because there was a cautionary tale to be gleaned. Next time, the Israelites would remind us why God chose them as His people. They never disappointed whenever that next time was narratively necessary. They may have royally screwed up, but they historically endured and made amends. It was through that lens that we were desensitized to the genocide committed to protect our favorite gaggle of scruffy screwballs, God’s chosen schlemiels. For all their failings, the Israelites were ultimately good at heart. When they crushed their enemies, it was because those foes were the most godless degenerates possible. They sacrificed babies to demons, they cut themselves for blood rites, they were horrifying barbarians, they murdered casually and raped gleefully. It’s impossible for me not to see parallels between those descriptions & the way colonial settlers maligned the Indigenous people they trampled by westward expansion. The Indigenous were savages, unfit stewards for this God-given land. When this continent was seized by force, it was Manifest Destiny. When Israel eradicated their foes, that was Manifest Destiny too. The settlers redeemed the promised land, paved hell to create paradise. When Israel triumphed in battle, they had rid the Earth of a vile scourge. The parallels were startling. I felt a needle-prick of guilt I couldn’t quite verbalize when I saw it clearly for the 1st time. I had fallen for a double standard! When Israel’s disgusting Pagan antagonists partook in the spoils of war, it was more proof of how unfit they were to exist for another Sunday school lesson. When Israel indulged the same despicable acts, it was cathartic, a release of righteous indignation. God Himself sanctioned it, even punished the Israelites for not partaking in it once. I’ve never forgotten that. I’ve never forgotten the cheers of the class when the good guys won the story this week. It reminds me of the bluster after 9/11, the way it felt so gratifyingly patriotic to revel in homicidal racism. Never mind what America did to provoke the attack, how it was laid out plainly in Bin Laden’s manifesto like yet another hamfistedly written cautionary tale, we were the Israelites. Victory is God’s and God is on our side. I hope I never stop feeling viscerally ashamed when I think about how I went with the flow back then. The needle-prick of guilt blossomed into a belligerent acupuncture session. If I never felt that pain, maybe I never would have changed. Thank actual god, whoever that may really be, for that. Regret doesn’t render me a messy pile of tatters, though, because I know I can create a purpose from having experienced it. I was wrong, but because I know better now, I know how the mentality is kept alive, how it spreads. 

An organization like Eagle’s Wings is central to it. They’re Zionists for the cause of Christian supremacy, world domination by one religion. I was drawn to their organization at first. They seemed to be arranging direct action in the heart of the conflict. I thought they were brave. The leader of the org, Robert Stearns, led a whirlwind guest service at my church one Sunday. The spectacle moved me, he was a consummate showman, but it was his depiction of God’s Chosen under siege from Biblical enemies in the present day that really spoke to me. We had the power to pitch in to help save the Israelites! The idea of taking part in a modern Bible story like the ones I grew up on sold me. I spoke to some of his staff afterward, and they urged me to get involved. A short while later, I got invited to a conference they were hosting in DC. It was an all expenses paid trip promising bougie room & board. Eventually, if it seemed we were a collaborative match, they’d pay my way to visit Jerusalem, the holy land I’d dreamt of all my life. It was a daydream come true, but something about the offer just didn’t sit right with me. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Was it the recruitment tactics from attractive young volunteers that reminded me vaguely of flirty fishing? The wizbang branding? The unanswered question of how to square Evangelicalism’s invasive mission with Judaism’s sharply-drawn personal boundaries against proselytizers? It all seemed a little too slick to me, like there was too much money behind it for it to really be the populist movement it portrayed itself as. I decided I had some digging to do. A friend of mine had already become involved and had a hell of a time untangling himself. He said that behind the front of trying to protect a marginalized group of humans, they were trying to use peace in the Middle East as a stepping stone for Christianity to supplant Islam. It sounded a bit farfetched to me, but I checked it out. I found someone who ran a blog trying to expose them in whatever capacity she could, and she verified what my friend said. Eagle’s Wings was basically a front for lobbyists and the most imperialist kind of missionaries. They had access to more money than they knew how to squander. Thanks to backdoor donors, they never had to ask plebeian Sunday tithers for another red cent, but they still did, regularly. There was a whole extra offering plate just for supporting Israel! I thought that was strange. Where did it all go? It appeared to exclusively bankroll lavish luncheons, extravagant conferences in posh hotels, a traveling U2-knockoff band with a multimedia stage show, accommodations for US students to visit the Wailing Wall. It was hard not to see how carefully crafted their image was. The impression they presented was urbane, even progressive! This was a typically conservative demographic delving into identity politics activism! Christians going out on a limb to practice what they preached, infiltrating the inner workings of government to influence the unfolding of history. I’d be lying if there wasn’t a twinge of romance about it, like the thrill of a spy novel. And it didn’t matter who you were, what branch of obscure beliefs your church’s congregation splintered off from, how you felt about Orthodox Judaism, Eagle’s Wings, Israel, needed your help. It was intoxicatingly empowering. I completely understood how my friend and this blogger were roped in. If you were like me, a “true believer”, you internalized the message of Keith Green’s “Jesus Commands Us To Go”. I was anxious to see action because all I heard for years were sermons about how it’s a weird kind of difficult to be a Christian in America, one of few places on Earth where the middle class lives in conditions comparable to royalty back when the Bible was written. We were spoiled, so our “straight & narrow road” was the “camel through the eye of a needle” path to heaven. The prospect of giving all of that up to preach the Gospel abroad was the ultimate test of our faith, a test the vast majority of us were happy to never take over the summer break for more than a couple week’s worth of guilt-assuaging bragging rights. I always wanted to be different. I wanted to prove I was a hardcore Jesus freak. Could this be my chance to walk the talk? Still, from the glossy hi-res pamphlet, it didn’t look like it’d be too drastic a sacrifice to skip college and join Eagle’s Wings. The accommodations were promised to be downright cushy. Kids already hooked into the student ambassador program spun me spiels about the best food they’d ever eaten, the most beautiful sights they’d ever seen, an unprecedented sense of purpose, breathtaking girls just dying for a beau to make them a stateside bride… I think if my friend hadn’t already blazed that trail from Bumblefuck, East PA to Jesus’s homeland, if I hadn’t stumbled upon that blog, I would’ve guilted myself into joining after a year of puttering around at a minimum wage job. I’m glad it never happened. I didn’t have to learn that lesson the hard way. Still, I got close enough to see the inner workings expose themselves, to hear the way the leadership talked about Christianity’s relation to Israel and what their words revealed about their motivations. I got a peek behind the veneer without having to extricate myself from inside it. Even the glimpse I caught spooked me away for good.

To properly proceed, I have to back up for a preface. If you want a concrete, comprehensive retelling of how Zionism found root in Evangelicalism, it’s worth looking up “premillennial dispensationalism”. How did a movement with such a mouthful for a name ever catch on? Sadly, fearmongering is very effective in religion. The American doomsday prepper movement, TEOTWAWKI & the Y2K, all of that stems from premillennial dispensationalism. PD, I’ll call it for short hitherto, is the belief that the book of Revelation is an honest-to-goodness end times prophecy that’s a bit flowery in its language, but is still an accurate account of what we can expect to happen when Christ comes back and the Earth self-destructs. The rapture WILL happen, then the anti-Christ, the Tribulation, then ka-boom: new Heaven, new Earth. PD is the ideology behind all of the infamous final days predictions that’ve been spouted unfounded since the dawn of American pop culture. Or I should say, one of PD’s innumerable pseudopods… Like everything to do with religion, it was fractured by disagreements and splinters off into too many branches to keep track of. Some people believe that Christ comes back before the anti-Christ, some believe anyone who asks for salvation after the Rapture will be denied, some believe we won’t know the day or the hour, some believe we keep pushing it back, like a stayed execution or time off for good behavior. That’s just what happens when you base your ideology on the writings of an already unstable man tripping on food poisoning in prison a thousand years ago! It’s fun to make fun of, but it’s actually pretty goddamn terrifying. I try to keep an open mind and accept everyone’s sincere beliefs as possibly true, but the fact that adults believe this horseshit enough to choose it for their life’s work is as alarming as it is depressing. Turns out that an ancient text retranslated for thousands of years through unforeseeably drastic cultural upheavals leaves a lot to interpretation. Christians may all refer to themselves by the same title and claim to serve the same deity, but nobody can agree on anything much but beyond that. Are we saved by faith alone, or by works? Is faith without works dead? Is the whole of the law really just love, or do at least a couple of those Ten Commandments still apply? Answer a fool according to his folly lest he become wise in his own eyes, or answer not a fool according to his folly lest you become like him? These debates will continue to erupt like zits until Christ comes home to roost. I always thought it was fucking silly, but these detail devils mean everything to people. My family has trudged through the aftermath of a couple church splits; one extremely silly indeed, but the other so serious that a bad faith doctrinal misinterpretation by the head pastor resulted in him drunk-driving a van full of kids home after midnight. I kinda get the drama then; followers just wanna know they’re following correctly, and in the absence of their true leader, everyone is just a chain of followers, interpreting commands from eons ago. As much as I wished we could all just get along, it ain’t gonna happen. Not in my lifetime, I hope anyway… For all the Left Behind books I read, all the crazed prophecies that bent my ears over my tenure as a church kid, I never had a genuine inkling that we were living in the end of days. Everybody else wanted it so badly, though. Like they needed it. That never made sense to me. Wasn’t there more than enough work for us to bash our heads against for the rest of our lives? I know now that there’s never any such thing as a true believer. There exists in everyone the capacity for doubt. It’s always possible that some curveball will sideswipe you out of fervid belief into just calmly living your life like a normal person. What about the girl who devoted her teen years to missions work in distressingly inconvenient parts of Africa, much to the equal delight & despair of all the boys hoping to win her hand in marriage? She met a dude in Africa and flew right back home to settle immediately into the most vanilla life possible. What of the traveling musician couple I toured with for a short stint of my own young adulthood? They had kids and got dayjobs. They still play out occasionally, but they mostly raise their autistic son. I love that for them. I don’t wish the true believer life on anybody anymore. Ministry can be such a lonesome drag, a total bummer that takes you a world away from the affection & connection that’s supposed to be the point of organized religion. It doesn’t have to be an isolating slog, which is why another friend of mine left her boyfriend to go rescue kids from sex trafficking in Brazil and never came back to her safe life in the States, but her job itself isn’t really religious. It sounds more like social work than proselytizing. She probably talks to the kids about Jesus, but her role is to help them overcome trauma and live a healthy life. Her goal is very tangible, she’s essentially a direct-action activist. The goal of so much ministry is frustratingly intangible. What the hell does winning a soul really mean? Unless you devote part of every day to personally overseeing the personal development of someone you just prayed the salvation prayer with, how do you know the seed you planted really took? It’s a crapshoot, ultimately. You may have that person thank you in Heaven, or you may have Christ lambast you for letting them slip into the burning lake of fire. I was a guitarist for a worship band. How’s that for an abstract goal? How would I know if my ministry was effective, if that tasty lick I just peeled off during the bridge visibly moved anybody? Now imagine you’re not even in the ministry at all, you’re just a working stiff who also happens to be a believer. If I felt phantom pressure just tickling a fretboard for Jesus, how would your subconscious assault you as a white collar job drone, a milquetoast suburban parent? The one itch Capitalism still has no idea how to scratch, the reason there’s an ongoing war on drugs as well as an establishment media-backed battle for the soul of the nation in the arena of pop culture Puritans can’t even stand, is the inherent human need for conflict, drama, push & pull, perpetual climaxes & resolutions. If you have no grand purpose to break your body every day for, especially if you hold these paradigm-shifting beliefs that get inflamed by a professional orator every Sunday yet you have no outlet for them, you’re gonna go a bit bonkers. I think that’s what happens, anyway. As somebody who’s contended with borderline or bipolar 2 or whatever, the doctors never reached a conclusive conclusion, I’ve had brushes with delusions of grandeur. For me, they weren’t merely a spontaneous shift in chemicals, they were a spontaneous shift in chemicals that acted like a toxic waste spill that granted my ongoing neuroses superpowers. The world of the mind interacts with the world of the brain in nigh unquantifiable ways. I could see how middle class ennui could be a pipeline to the kind of mania that gripped John the Baptist in that prison cell. Maybe the need for the end to be just around the corner, the compulsion to describe Christ coming back with the hair-raising phrase “like a thief in the night”, is like spiking the tapioca of your mundane existence, microdosing before attending that board meeting, driving under the influence. Cutting off your rationality to spite your mind-warpingly soporific routine. I’m just spitballin’. Whatever primed Americans to be such fertile soil for such a febrile seed, it blossomed like an epidemic. The PD crowd took endtimes mania as Gospel, even though it isn’t actual Gospel. Revelations is an impressionistic tone poem, like God was trying to end His book with a bang by doing His best impression of TS Elliott rewriting Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” for Hebrew kids trying to freak out their Pharisee parents. Millennialists escalated a cock-eyed analysis of prose all the way to mob madness. They started a whole movement around an insane idea, so it’s no wonder the way they acted on their beliefs was also deranged. If you’re a fellow 90’s kid, do you remember those late night TV spots, foaming at the mouth about the tribulation being upon us? Or maybe you’re vaguely aware of 50 years of some whacko demanding that the last whacko had it wrong, the end of the world is actually now, 1985. Maybe you saw the Left Behind movies and slid into your chair, eyes agape at the absolute lunacy they tried to film as gritty realism. Maybe you were like me and even had your own Rapture scares: you ran downstairs on a Sunday morning to find no sign of anyone, save for your grandma’s sweater draped over a chair as if she had just evaporated into thin air. The sheer idea of the Rapture terrified me. I remember making my mom paranoid behind the wheel of our car, pelting her with questions about how the Rapture’s supposed to happen without killing everybody driving at that exact moment. Jesus, take the wheel of everyone zooted up to Heaven in an instant? She had a killer answer that finally shut me up: God is omnipotent & omnipresent, so yeah, Jesus is really gonna take every wheel on Earth simultaneously. Boats & planes & submarines & even space shuttles too, don’t worry. That’s how pervasive PD has managed to be in the church, my accountant mom was even stumping for the ideology off the cuff to get a moment’s calm while driving. I was as satisfied with that answer as I was with the ideology as a whole. I took the bait, hook, line, & sinker. Was that what Christ meant by, “Be a fisher of men.”? Reel ‘em in, baby!

The PD movement has roots dating back to the 2nd Century, AD. It is not a new thing, unless you consider time itself to be a relatively recent development. It plays with my brain like putty to think of how long that idea survived. It sounds batshit crazy to me now. Sure, yeah, the world is going to end, not because the 99% couldn’t stop the 1% from polluting our planet into an uninhabitable cesspool, but because God’s looking at a Doomsday watch and the little hand is a few ticks off from “The jig is up!”. When His egg timer goes off, a few different types of hell will break loose, including famines, locusts, plagues, water turning to blood, and like, half the Earth’s population just dropping off. Then the really scary stuff happens when a guy called the anti-Christ appears, tries to create a one-world government that enforces atheism under threat of death, and everybody who gets this tattoo that says, “Suck my ass, God!”, shall be spared. Well, maybe. Maybe that anti-Christ dude shows up before the plagues & stuff, Idk… Anyway, before anything bad happens at all, all the believers are beamed up into Heaven like Heaven’s a mothership sucking Jesus Freaks up with tractor beams. Or maybe that happens after the bad stuff, but not before the bad guy… or maybe the bad guy is first, then the bad stuff, then “Beam me up, Goddy!”… Idk, nobody can say for sure, but a lot of people swear their version’s the right one, so they refer to themselves by a different 7-syllable word. Pre-millennialists, post-millennialists, a-millennialists… All amateurs compared to the premillennial dispensationalists. I don’t have to count all the syllables in that moniker to know it’s a seal of commitment. Almost like they’re just improvising all this shit to feel that first high of purpose again? They say you can never recapture the high of inviting Christ into your heart for the first time… PD’s try. Imagine being so gung-ho about one tiny detail of your ideology that you make it your whole personality. The PD party line is that vanilla-ass premillennialists got one thing wrong: “the church”, as a name for all Christians, is not the same as Israel. PD’s believe Israel isn’t God’s favorite anymore, that honor was passed on to the church. The church has taken the place of the Israelites of those Old Testament stories now. Israel is still vital to the cause, but Israelites are God’s bastard kids since they disowned Him. How you gonna come back for a 2nd round as somebody’s Messiah when they don’t believe you ever arrived in the 1st place? PD’s get indignant on behalf of Christ. Never mind that the Son of the God of love would be selfless as a rule, Christ has pride and can afford to have pride since He already bounced back from the downfall that cometh with the sin of esteeming yourself. Christ isn’t gonna debase Himself to leave His cozy throne in His personally-crafted paradise, just to invite the people who murdered Him over for, oh, the rest of forever! Nah, Christ is only coming back for His real friends, who He’ll carpool to the biggest house party ever to happen. Maybe I’m having a little too much fun paraphrasing these beliefs. I’m not really being too respectful, huh. It’s just that once you know where it all leads, the bit that dispensationalists find so important that they make it their whole steez, you kinda lose all respect for the idea of the Fairness Doctrine. I’m only giving these beliefs the time of day so you can know the depths of doltishness that is the American Christian Zionist movement. Are you ready for this big reveal? These Zionists are rabid anti-Semites. They’re Mel Gibson ranting about the Jews killing his Lord on the press tour for The Passion Of The Christ. At their core, they’re only slightly less virulent about it than any garden variety neo-Nazi, they just have to maintain a polite veneer of support for the Jews because the Jews are useful. See, while Christ may not be casting Himself like a pearl before swine to come save His Dad’s erstwhile chosen people, the book of Revelation still peskily mentions Israel, and that has to mean something, right? For Christ to come back, for the endtimes to launch like a SpaceX rocket, Israel has to be ratified into a bonafide state again. Like I did as a kid in Sunday school, these Christians need the Israelites to win again. They’re on their own once it happens, but it has to happen or Senpai will have ghosted His church for good. I think that’s what PD is, anyway. I’m not researching this part, just rappin’ off the top of my dome here, relaying PD as it was explained to me by my church’s elders when I asked. I could just paraphrase some investigative journalism on the topic, but I’m going the gonzo route here. There’s always a gulf between intent & action, so if my recounting of PD beliefs isn’t completely true to the core of the teachings, that’s because its believers have taken what they saw as necessary liberties in whispering it down the lane. Obviously, the anti-Semitic stuff is my own interpretation of what they told me, but if reading between the lines is good enough for them to start a movement, it’s good enough for me. There’s also the fact that they openly gave the game away in offhanded cracks at Jews as a monolith. That recording of Mel Gibson’s screed gave me deja vu; I’d heard those exact words from unassuming deacons, youth pastors, friends’ parents. Even friends of mine complained about the Jews. The “They killed our Lord” shit was the least of it. That’s like a prelude, or a bigot’s gateway drug. Really, the entire PD movement is a dogwhistle blown to recruit converts who understand the real goal implicitly. Jewish people aren’t whole people unto themselves, they’re the worst kind of fools: servants who refuse to recognize their master. Why don’t they believe in Jesus? I heard that question asked with anguish. It frustrated me as a church kid too. Here, God sent His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him would have eternal life. Not just eternal life, as if that deal already couldn’t get any sweeter, but they’d be spared from eternal damnation. Why willingly pick the stick over the carrot? Why would you choose eternal damnation when you could just say the guy was The Guy and then He would pull the lever that unfolds the ladder instead of the one that activates the trap door? To these Christians, Jews aren’t custodians of a rich culture that deserves preservation, they’re savages who need to be salvaged from their ignorance. Dispensationalists don’t completely shut the door on Jews; PD’s believe there’s still time for Jews to repent, and that the Jews who aren’t total fools will repent during the 7 years of tribulation. After they see Jesus, they’ll be sorry! That’s really just xenophobia disguised as ideological disagreement. None of the PD’s I talked to ever stopped to wonder why Judaism as a whole isn’t just the other half of Judeo-Christianity. Why don’t Jews accept Jesus as the Messiah? Is it because Jesus, as a character, was too convenient? As though His arch helped the Romans more than it helped the Hebrews? If the Romans wanted to quell a Hebrew uprising, they could’ve tried a million lousier ideas than co-opting Hebrew religion to preach radical pacifism that would metastasize into resignation, apathy… Maybe Jews feel like a Messiah that would universalize their identity’s underpinnings is no savior at all, but a provocateur trying to muddy the waters of sacred traditions for their oppressors’ gain. Maybe they expected a Messiah to lead them out of material oppression, back home to the promised land. If that’s true, I don’t blame them for sitting out on Jesus. I’ve heard a litany of different answers to the PD’s favorite “Gotcha!” which all make sense, but ultimately, the only answer that matters is that Jews have free will too. They aren’t just minions in a theocracy’s ascendance. If Christ died, He died for them too, and whether they acknowledge that or not, they deserve their right to decide for themselves what they believe and how they’ll live their beliefs out. If there’s one thing you can say about the Christian God, He wanted people to have a choice. They’re free to make the wrong choice, but He sent His Son as a convoluted loophole around deciding for people. What does that say about His character, and what does it say about His followers that they won’t embody that same respect of personal boundaries? Stowed away inside PD’s embrace of Israel as a necessity for their dogma’s future history is a smug superiority complex. Ever hear that Bible verse, “Every knee shall bow, every tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord.”? PD’s want that from Jews so badly. It’s almost like they think hearing this group they consider so close to getting it finally concede will rid them of their own doubts, once & for all. PD’s want Christ to return so they can say, “Toldja so!”. I hate that shit so much. Know what it really is? Colonial imperialism by proxy. The days when you could be a conquistador are long gone, but your God can be your Christopher Columbus! When I was a Christian, I was inflicted with this sense of how my inability to win souls for Christ was a reflection on me, it was my personal failure if I didn’t lead everyone I talked to into accepting Christ on the spot. I was always ashamed that I viewed preaching the Good News that way, but almost everyone I knew (who wasn’t this one insufferable extrovert who became a televangelist) admitted they felt that way. The way Evangelicalism inculcates you with this twisted sense of responsibility is insidious. Kinder, more progressive mentors tried to tell me, “It’s Him, not you.”, but even in that mentality that’s supposed to relieve you they hide the implication that you have to do a good job getting out of God’s way so He can do His job through you. I know that single complex has swelled into a mass neurosis for the Evangelical church. It’s like the ascetic version of a grindset, hustle culture. That mindset is settler colonialism. There’s a reason Christianity was present for every jackbooted step of America’s progress. It’s a mind virus whose sole goal is to spread itself. You better believe it plays an enormous role in all the ideologies that justify Palestine’s oppression. It’s what convinces Americans to vote for the politicians who’ll send Israel another heap of aid & weapons. It’s the undergirding principle for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. The true motive for Israel trying to pave over Palestine to build a promised land is just bog standard greed, but the PR spin that justifies it, the loud part that conceals the quiet part Israel can only imply, is that Palestians are godless heathens. Religious piety & righteous vengeance are the rhetorical tranquilizers that allow Israel to move with open impunity. Hamas are terrorists, they won’t stop until Islam has devoured Judaism. Israel is just acting in self defense! Israelites are battling persecution again, just like in those Old Testament stories. Evangelical rhetoric enables Zionist violence. Evangelicalism & Zionism are co-conspirators, even if they’re uneasy bedfellows.

The condescension PD’s show Jews is disgusting, and the utter disregard PD’s show Palestinians is even worse, but worst of all to me somehow is how Israel accepts all PD’s backhanded support. Of course PD’s are casually racist, and of course a majority-Caucasian religious movement is genocidally dismissive of Muslim Middle Easterners, but Israel happily partnering with the fanatics who just want to use them is just a new level of dismay to me. It’s pathetic to watch colonizers pander to a group who wants them to suffer the Tribulation at best, burn in Hell forever for not accepting their take on the doctrine at worst. It’s such a shameless betrayal of everything sacred. It shows me that for Israel, religion, tradition, honor, empathy, morality, everything of true value is worth casting aside for material gain. Israel is a nation of hypocrites. Genocide is always hypocrisy, because it’s never justified, but genocide is the lowest form of hypocrisy. I’m a hypocrite if I advocate for recycling and then never separate the recyclables from the trash, but my hypocrisy is on such a minuscule scale. It only really hurts my reputation in the grand scheme of things, but I’m sure most people who know me wouldn’t care if I didn’t recycle. Israel’s hypocrisy is devastating on a mass scale. The number of Palestinians murdered since October alone knocks the wind out of me every time the tally is added to. Hypocrisy itself isn’t the worst evil, but Israel’s hypocrisy is the worst evil I’ve seen play out in my lifetime. Their hypocrisy is a compound evil. Enabling a deranged death cult’s apocalypse fantasies is just one facet of that evil. Even the act of slaughtering Palestinians itself is only another facet of Israel’s evil. The spread of propaganda, the flagrant political wheeling & dealing, the flippant poker face slips to openly give away the game because they’re so self-assured that they’ll get away with it… All just facets of a greater evil. It shocks me because, well, how could genocide not be the sole evil? And yet, as I watch these atrocities unfold, I know the taking of innumerable human lives is just a portion of evil in a platter of evils, that’s how evil Israel’s actions are. The overarching evil, the driving evil, is that Israel is resuscitating colonialism and dragging the world back into crueler times. Colonialism never truly died, it just lay dormant in most world powers, and rumblings of it have rippled through recent history like tectonic plate shifts that only those on the shifting plate notice. It has had to go incognito, move underground. It most often takes the form of foreign meddling over resources, like the War On Terror being a front for seizing control of oil in the Middle East. Or how slavery was repurposed as prison labor. It was no longer as socially acceptable after the 1st world war, so like white supremacy, it has recently had to operate under euphemisms & excuses and launder its atrocities. With Israel’s refusal to take the October 7th Hamas attack as a cue to stand down and work toward real peace, though, colonialism is openly back and bad as ever. As much as possible, anyway; Israel still has to verbally dance around it in public, but nobody’s fooled. South Africa filed a suit against Israel with the International Court of Justice. Protests have erupted all over the world, calling for a ceasefire. All over America, college students have occupied their campuses and staged demonstrations to get the board to stop funding Israel. For all the conscience that people are displaying, the powers that be are responding heinously. Instead of meeting the students’ very reasonable demands, college boards sic the police on them in echoes of Kent State. A memo was leaked admitting the New York Times had a moratorium on reporting on the genocide with the word “genocide”. In almost all the reporting I see, the genocide is framed as “the conflict”, or worse yet, “the Israel / Hamas war”. The whitewashing of our very eyes is taken up as a gauntlet by Zionist celebrities too. Bret Gelman, the actor who played the asshole brother-in-law in Fleabag, uses his platform on Instagram to help dox New Yorkers who get filmed ripping down Zionist propaganda posters. He’s not alone, I’ve seen many other comedians & actors joining in and I didn’t even go looking too hard. I’ve even argued with Zionist college kids in comments sections on posts about student protests; it’s horrifying how eager they are to straight-up lie about historical events that are so easy to fact check. It isn’t difficult to see where they get it from, though. Even though fact checking is easier than ever, there’s currently a mainstream media blackout on the plain truth about the situation, with all the coverage of the genocide deploying the euphemisms & excuses that’ve long been par for the colonialist course. The alarmism that plagues American media took Israel’s side immediately on October 7th, which has led to all manner of bizarre defensiveness. The Anti-Defamation League reported that upticks in anti-Semitic incidents increased by several hundredfold since that day, but when asked what the ADL’s criteria for anti-Semitic incidents were, they hemmed & hawed and ultimately shuffled their feet coyly around admitting they counted all support of Palestine as individual anti-Semitic attacks. It’s all so thinly veiled, and everybody sees it, but people are having their lives ruined for speaking out about it. America’s crackdown on its own citizens has reached villain-caricature levels. It’s so demented that a school lunch bill was struck down and the money went to Israel instead. It’s looking like there won’t be a viable presidential candidate who won’t enable the genocide for another 4 years. Instead, our politicians are making deals with resort developers to turn Gaza into beachside vacation property. Our collective conscience is given no recourse in America. We can only watch in horror as our tax dollars fund more massacres while our kids are beaten with batons for daring to try to do something about it. I’ve been racking my mind ever since October, but I’m only a musician, writer, and music gear tech. I don’t know much about effective civil unrest, much less how to topple a corrupt government with UFO military technology. All I can think to do is join in the protests and write.

The scariest part about Israel’s primary evil is that it’s setting a precedent. If Israel gets away with effacing Palestine, we’re not just facing down the loss of Palestinians. It’s enraging to the point of derealization that there’s more at stake than Palestinian lives, but there is. A victory for Israel is a victory for premillennial dispensationalists is a victory for all religious extremism. If Israel is finally formally established as a state, the Evangelicals are watching their prophecies unfold in real time. I’d hope that would be a pacifier for them, that they could then just sit back and wait for Jesus, but they pushed this rock up the hill. If it doesn’t roll back down and crush them under it, they did the impossible. They’ll have made God’s will happen. Do you think they’ll be content to stop there? They won’t be content ‘til they force Jesus’s hand. Until Christ Himself rides down from the sky on a cloud, they’ll be restless. They’re chafing at the bit of fate so hard that they successfully installed a network in our government to ensure their interests are taken care of on the world stage. Israel was just a pawn. The game wasn’t ever about forcing the end, nobody really wants the end of all things, it was always about sending the nonbelievers to their chosen final destination. If we don’t curtail it now, they won’t be able to help themselves. It’s an unfortunate paradox of reality that peace has to constantly be fought for. If you have any ideas, hit me up, even if only to talk. I’m ready to take action, I just don’t know what to do.