24/04/2024
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in particular has, over the years, effusively praised Christian Zionists. ‘When I say we have no greater friends than Christian supporters of Israel, I know you’ve always stood with us,’ Netanyahu told CUFI’s annual conference in 2017. ‘You stand with us because you stand with yourselves because we represent that common heritage of freedom that goes back thousands of years. America has no better friend than Israel and Israel has no better friend than America. And Israel has no better friend in America than you.’”
https://forward.com/opinion/603310/john-hagee-christian-zionist-iran-israel/
I have a lot I am trying to write about the idea of a “Promised Land” and how problematic attaching concepts of property to the ideals of faith can be for every religion…
…as well as how “Israel” as a topic, for Jews, gets very complicated because it is an idea within the Jewish faith as much as it could ever represent any specific physical place, much less an increasingly authoritarian state…
…and almost no one in the world (including Netanyahu and his rightwing propaganda machine) is currently separating the existing “State of Israel” from the idea of “Israel as a promise of peace and safety” when discussing one of the most disgusting wars of annihilation we have recently seen (The IDF’s invasion of the Gaza Strip)…
…and how this results in sincere, honest protesters on US campuses chanting “F**k Israel,” meaning “F**k the IDF and Netanyahu’s sham, fraudulent government that deserves to collapse” and many Jewish Americans hearing “F**k you and your right to ever feel safe and protected in any land upon which you will ever find yourself”…
…and how the lack of a shared language to talk about these issue is a chisel that is currently being sharpened as much by groups like the Anti-Defamation League as it is by rightwing antisemites…
…BUT FOR REAL:
The extreme right of both the US and in the State of Israel are united and exploiting the ever-living-sh*t out of the muddied rhetoric that is making anti-war protesters look like storm troopers to many US citizens, especially Jewish ones, a rhetoric that is being eaten up by college administrations, big time donors to universities, and, very problematically, most US news agencies.
This is what Jews across the world will have to sit with this passover as well as how our fears and insecurities around the language of antisemitism (fears and insecurities built up over millennia of surviving violence and oppression) are letting us be used as rhetorical pawns in a war that is specifically killing more children (not to mention other civilians) than it is anyone’s vision of “enemy combatants.”
Christian Zionist Pastor John Hagee urged Israel not to 'de-escalate' with Iran, in an effort to provoke a holy war.
