There are several powder kegs around the world, among them the South China Sea where the Pentagon’s surface warships, surveillance submarines and electronic warfare aircraft try to provoke China to take action against their aggressive operations, to the Baltic and Black Seas in which U.S.-Nato armed forces confronting Russia have the same objective. But in the Middle East, the leaky powder keg that will soon attract an igniting flash is the State of Israel which indulges in equally provocative behaviour. In regard to Palestinians and the Iranian nation the government of Naftali Bennett has been every bit as inhumane, barbaric and confrontational as any of its predecessors.

The attitude of the western world to Israel’s excesses varies from the mildly critical to the entirely tolerant, and there is no question of any action being taken that might alter the Israeli government’s deep-seated determination to rid the country of the Palestinians to whom most of it belongs, and to destroy Iran, preferably by having the United States perform another Iraq-style blitzkrieg. In furtherance of its objectives, Israel continues to persecute Palestinians and carry out clandestine operations that will encourage U.S. action against Iran.

The voices of such as the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Tor Wennesland, are lost among the roar of bulldozers as they destroy Palestinian villages and olive tree plantations. His statement that “I am deeply concerned by continued Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. I reiterate that all settlements are illegal under international law, remain a substantial obstacle to peace, and must cease immediately” was a call to exert pressure on Tel Aviv to abide by what Mr Biden continually refers to as the “rules-based international order.”

But nobody took any action.

A recent example of Israel breaking international law with complete impunity was the announcement that 1,355 new Israeli houses are to be built in seven settlements in the West Bank area, adding to the 2,000 units announced in August. The housing minister, Zeev Elkin, declared that this vast amount of construction is necessary, because “strengthening Jewish presence is essential to the Zionist vision”.

The “Zionist vision” is alarming, and the Jewish Voice for Peace notes that it, as an organisation, is “guided by a vision of justice, equality and freedom for all people. We unequivocally oppose Zionism because it is counter to those ideals.” It continues that “Palestinian dispossession and occupation are by design. Zionism has meant profound trauma for generations, systematically separating Palestinians from their homes, land, and each other. Zionism, in practice, has resulted in massacres of Palestinian people, ancient villages and olive groves destroyed, families who live just a mile away from each other separated by checkpoints and walls…”

On October 29 the European Union voiced disapproval of Zionist settlement expansion, with foreign policy chief Josep Borrell declaring that “settlements are illegal under international law and constitute a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace between the parties.” And Tel Aviv’s Zionist plans for yet more settlements continue as if he had never said a word.

Recently there have been two incidents that define the attitude of the western world to Israel and its policies. In the first, as reported by Euronews, “Israeli police kick Palestinians out of the al-Yusufiye cemetery near the Lion’s Gate entrance to the Aqsa mosque compound in east Jerusalem as construction of the Jewish National Park continues. Many graves in the cemetery have been bulldozed, causing outrage. Palestinian mother Ola Nababteh whose son is buried in the cemetery says she ‘had to move bones around so that she could reach her son’s grave,’ a day after she was dragged away by Israeli police as she tried to cling to her son’s grave.” If there had been such disgusting behaviour by police in Cuba or Venezuela or China or Russia the headlines of the U.S. mainstream media would have been flashing with righteous indignation. Reports and comment pieces would have reached deluge point.

But a search for ‘Ola Nababteh’ in the New York Times or the Washington Post comes up with nothing at all. The dragging by Israeli police of a Palestinian mother from her son’s graveside is regarded as a non-event by western news-controllers.

On the other hand the media considered it important to place on record the fact that Israel’s Energy Minister was unable to attend some proceedings at the COP 26 gathering in Glasgow. As the New York Times reported, “Karine Elharrar, who has muscular dystrophy, arrived at one of the entrances to the event’s compound but her vehicle was not allowed to enter, and the remaining distance was too far for her to go in her wheelchair, she told Israeli media. She waited for two hours and was eventually offered a shuttle to the site, but the shuttle was not wheelchair accessible, she said.” Anyone who suffers from such a disability deserves our deepest sympathy, but this incident was a total charade, because “others in wheelchairs have successfully gained access to the conference facilities, which include elevators, ramps and accessible bathrooms, and Ms. Elharrar was in attendance on Tuesday.”

Ms Elharrar told the BBC that “we can talk about accessibility and the rights of people with disabilities, but in life we need to implement all the conventions and all the regulations and that was an experience that showed that we need to pay attention to all the details everywhere.” Quite so. It is indeed necessary to pay attention to details everywhere, including the sites of Palestinian graves that are being bulldozed to expand construction of the Jewish National Park.

The Glasgow photo-operation was widely covered and CNN reported the comment by Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, that “it is impossible to safeguard our future and address the climate crisis, without first and foremost caring for people, including ensuring accessibility for people with disabilities.” But while the Israeli government and the western media expressed righteous sympathy for a disabled rich Israeli whose motorised wheelchair could not access some ramps and lifts in a conference centre, there was scant expression of “care for people” following the killing by Israeli soldiers on November 5 of a thirteen year-old Palestinian boy, Mohammad Daadas, who had joined a protest against what the UN declares to be Israel’s illegal construction of settlements in the West Bank.

The Times of Israel carried a statement by Israeli Forces that “during the disturbance, rioters threw stones at Israeli soldiers. The troops responded with riot dispersal means and live fire.” There has not been one word of criticism in the western media of the fact that an Israeli soldier who had a stone thrown at him by a thirteen-year-old considered it his duty to shoot him in the stomach — and will not stand the remotest chance of facing action for murder.

In this period of illegal construction by Israel of yet more settlements on Palestinian land, the expansion of the Jewish National Park by bulldozing Palestinian graves and hauling away the mother of a buried son, the shooting to death of a Palestinian 13-year-old by an Israeli soldier, and a much-publicised problem with wheelchair ramps at a conference in Glasgow, there came news on November 2 in the U.S. military publication Stars and Stripes that a three-week exercise involving U.S. and Israeli military forces had begun with the intention of demonstrating the “long-standing relationship with Israel that is so vital to stability and security in the region.”

The sparks are moving inexorably towards the Israeli powder keg, encouraged by Washington’s casual acceptance of atrocities and continuing endorsement of its “long-standing relationship” with the nation that emphasises its “Zionist vision”. What is being ignored by the U.S. and Israel is that the refusal by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to talk with Palestinians opens doors to fundamentalist loonies to take direct action in the Middle East and even elsewhere — like New York or Florida or San Francisco. The Middle East powder keg will affect us all when that final spark ignites it.

The latest election, the third in less than a year, saw Benjamin Netanyahu surge past Benny Gantz, his slightly more moderate rightwing challenger. But otherwise it accomplished nothing since it still left Netanyahu’s coalition with just 58 seats, three shy of a majority. This was a slight improvement over the last election, which left him six short, but a step back from the election last April when he was able to assemble a hair-thin 61-seat majority – but which, in any event, fell apart after just a few weeks.

So Netanyahu is back where he started. No matter how many times Israelis go to the polls, they find that that a stable ruling majority is still out of reach.

Why? The problem, basically, is one of politics and demography. A growing portion of the population is either anti-Zionist, non-Zionist, or indifferent to the entire concept. Zionist parties must therefore battle for control of a Zionist hard core that is constantly shrinking in hopes of assembling a governing majority. The more the numbers turn against them, the more difficult the task becomes, which is why paralysis and incoherence are increasingly the norm.

This is especially the case the more politicians quarrel over what Zionism even means. Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu’s bellicose former minister of defense, shows how mind-bending the problem has become. His party, Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is Our Home”), saw its representation shrink from eight to seven seats in the latest round. But since he’s also far to the right, it should still be enough to put Netanyahu over the edge – if, that is, he agreed to join his coalition.

But he won’t. The reason is that Yisrael Beiteinu represents a million or so ex-Soviets who immigrated after 1989 only to fall victim to a curious contradiction in Israeli religious law. For purposes of immigration, Israel uses the old Nazi definition of a Jew as anyone with one or more Jewish grandparents. As strange as this may sound, Israel’s founders figured that anyone Jewish enough to suffer under Nazi oppression should be Jewish enough to find refuge in the Jewish state – and so the Nazi standard became law. But for purposes of family law and other domestic affairs, they adopted a different standard, that of the orthodox rabbinate, which holds that the only Jews who qualify are those born of a Jewish mother or who convert under orthodox supervision.

Some forty percent of Lieberman’s followers do not meet the rabbinic standard, which means that they are effectively reduced to second-class citizenship in terms of marriage, employment, and a host of other issues as well. But makes the issue especially explosive is the military draft, which affects ex-Soviets but not orthodox males who devote themselves full-time to religious studies. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, struck the deal back in 1948 when just a few hundred yeshiva students in Jerusalem were affected. Since then, however, the orthodox sector has expanded to twelve percent of the population, more than a million people in all. Soviet immigrants and their children must their lives at risk to protect orthodox Israelis who don’t even regard them as Jewish.

Lieberman has made it clear that he will not enter any government that allows such exemptions to continue. But it’s a demand that Netanyahu cannot possibly accommodate since he is dependent on the support of the religious parties for support. The impasse promises to continue without end.

But what makes it even more perplexing is that while Lieberman’s semi-Jewish supporters are pro-Zionist, orthodox Jews are not. To contrary, they believe that God exiled the Jews to punish them for their disobedience. Hence, he doesn’t want them returning to the Holy Land until he shows his forgiveness by sending a messiah to lead them back. By seeking to “hurry the messiah,” Zionism is therefore a deeply heretical movement that promotes an ingathering of the Jews in violation of God’s direct command. Jewish Zionists thus battle Palestinian anti-Zionists in the Occupied Territories in behalf of Jewish anti-Zionists in Jerusalem.

Add to this the 23 percent of Israeli society that is non-Jewish, and the anti-Zionist portion of the population rises to 35 percent. Toss in a few thousand supporters of the leftist Meretz Party who are heartily sick of the entire Zionist enterprise, and the number rises to 36 or 37. Finally, if you include the 4.4 million Palestionians who live in Gaza and the West Bank, then the anti-Zionist component of Greater Israel, which is to say the entire territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, rises to 76 percent, far too great for anything resembling democratic Zionist stability.

So the only thing that three Israeli elections in less than a year prove is that the country is at a crossroads. It can continue to be democratic or Zionist but not both. Netanyahu will undoubtedly try to scare an increasingly perplexed population into line by sending fanatical Jewish settlers into the West Bank to cut down olive trees, smash windows, or otherwise behave like Nazi stormtroopers. If a few Palestinians respond with violence, then so much the better since he’ll be able to make use of the resultant furor to extend his grip on power for a few months or more. But the more isolated Zionism becomes, the more difficult the task will grow.

Netanyahu may seem like a strong and clever politician, but his back is against the wall. He may think he can ignore reality, but reality will eventually have its revenge.

Neither Kushner nor Trump felt it was necessary to have invited Palestinians to the January 28, 2020 White House ceremony unveiling the “peace plan.” Only Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been criminally charged in Israel for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, was invited to the White House ceremony. Netanyahu is so close to the Kushner family that he once slept in Jared Kushner’s bed when visiting the Kushner family in New Jersey.

Also present at the White House ceremony was major Trump campaign donor and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, an individual whose hatred for the Palestinians knows no bounds. Another key player in Trump’s lavish giveaway of the West Bank to the Israelis is David Friedman, Trump’s one-time bankruptcy lawyer and his ambassador to Israel. Friedman is on record advocating Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, which he and other expansionists call “Judea and Samaria,” place names drawn from a set of Biblical books of Hebrew mythology and folklore. Yet Kushner referred to previous serious Middle East peace plans, including the 1991 Madrid Conference and 1993 Oslo Accords as “fairy tales” and “tired old ideas.” In fact, ancient texts justifying slavery, misogyny, and fratricide – otherwise known as the Old Testament – represents true fairy tales and tired old ideas having no place in the 21^st century.

Jared Kushner’s ex-federal convict father, Charles Kushner, has been a lifelong friend of Netanyahu and a key officer in Israel’s political influence machine in the United States. It was therefore not surprising that Jared Kushner’s plan advocates a Palestinian non-contiguous entity on the West Bank subservient to Israel and connected to the open-air ghetto of Gaza by an underground tunnel. It was Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist dogma to equate Jews to rats and mice. Apparently, some of those, like Kushner and Netanyahu, who bemoan the loss of members of their families during the Holocaust, would relegate the Palestinians to human rodents scurrying underground beneath the ground between Gaza and the West Bank “reservations” allotted to the Palestinians.

Israel would annex a third of Palestinian territory, including the entire Jordan River valley, cutting Palestinian enclaves off from a common border with Jordan. The Kushner plan also deprived the Palestinians of a capital city in East Jerusalem. Kushner proposes the Palestinian capital be located in some slums in an eastern suburb of Jerusalem.

The only Arab ambassadors to Washington who were present at Kushner’s West Bank annexation plan for Israel were those from Bahrain – a virtual Saudi Arabian puppet state, Oman – which is still trying to get its diplomatic footing after the death of its leader, Sultan Qabus bin Said, and the United Arab Emirates, which an increasingly doddering Trump referred to in his remarks as the “United Arab Air Mattress.”

The Egyptian Secretary General of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, in condemning Kushner’s contrivance, said it would establish an “apartheid” system and relegate Palestinians to the status of second-class citizens. The Kushner plan came as yet another slap in the face of the Palestinians and Arab countries. Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and moved the US embassy there from Tel Aviv. Trump then formally recognized Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights. Trump further poisoned the water by closing down and expelling the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington and halting all US assistance to the United Nations relief agency for Palestine, UNRWA.

Kushner’s hatred for the Palestinian people was on full display in an interview with CNN. He claimed that the Palestinians were “going to screw up another opportunity like they’ve screwed up every opportunity that they’ve ever had in their existence.” Borrowing a page from his father-in-law’s insult manual, Kushner said of Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat: “In my business, when someone tries to do business for 20 years [a reference to Erekat] and fails, he is replaced by someone else.” Kushner’s main “business” has been as an apartment slum lord, relegating his renters in Maryland, New Jersey, and New York to lives of malfunctioning heating and air conditioning systems, rodents and insects, usurious rent hikes, and broken appliances. Kushner, an Orthodox Jew and supporter of the Zionist Chabad Lubavitch movement, apparently has the same slumlord vision in store for the 4.68 million people of the West Bank and Gaza.

Kushner appended his sales pitch to the Palestinians by further insulting them. He said “his vision was 100 percent workable if only the Palestinian leadership would stop being so “hysterical and stupid.” Kushner also said that “Palestinians have never done anything right in their sad, pathetic lives.” Kushner’s statements are those of a Zionist Jewish racist, pure and simple. Unfortunately, few Jewish organizations have been willing to condemn such blatantly racist and xenophobic statements from Mr. Trump’s son-in-law. Kushner is an important cog in a neo-fascist political machine that relegates those of African, Arab, or other nonwhite European heritage to second-class “untermensch” – a favorite term of the Nazis – status.

In a response to Kushner’s “deal of the century” and insulting comments, Erekat tweeted: “If Mr. Kushner says PM Netanyahu is allowed to annex Jerusalem, settlements, Jordan Valley, Dead Sea, have security control west of the Jordan river, control Palestinian airspace, territorial waters, no [harbors], refugees off the table. What is [there] to negotiate?” Indeed, why even invite the Palestinians to the negotiating table. Hitler never invited the Czechoslovakians to the Munich peace conference eve though he and Benito Mussolini, with the acquiescence of the British and French were carving up Czechoslovakia for Hitler’s annexation. Kushner and the Israelis have learned well from the architects of the Holocaust.

It has been argued, by at least one US historian, that the U.S. is no ordinary nation-state, but should be understood as a system leader, a ‘civilizational power’ – like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire. The ‘system leader’, historically, has always sought to embed its particular civilizational vision onto those distant ‘lands’ that serve, or abut, its empire: which is to say that the universalistic vision may be bound to one state, but is forcefully unfurled across the globe, as ‘our’ inevitable destiny.

It is not hard to see what we are talking about when it refers to America: politically it is liberal markets, liberal capitalism, individualism and laissez-faire politics – and the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity, too, if you like. For most Americans, their victory in the Cold War spectacularly affirmed the superiority of their civilizational vision, through the defeat and implosion of communism. It was not just a political defeat for the USSR, more significantly, it represented a triumph for America’s full cultural paradigm: It was a Civilisational ‘win’.

What has this to do with what happened in the East Room of the White House this Tuesday? Well, it gives us a better vantage point to perceive something less obvious than just the explicit politics to the spectacle. Something more often ‘felt’, than explicitly considered.

That is because Jewish Zionism, as expressed by Netanyahu this week, though ostensibly secular, is not just a political construct: It is, too, as it were, an Old Testament project. Laurent Guyénot observes, that when it is asserted that Zionism is biblical, that doesn’t necessarily mean it to be religious. It can, and does, serve as key leitmotiv for secular Jews too. For secular Zionists, the Bible is on the one hand, a ‘national narrative’, but on the other, a particular civilizational vision, bound around a modern state (Israel).

Ben-Gurion was not religious; he never went to the synagogue, and ate pork for breakfast, yet he could declare: “I believe in our moral and intellectual superiority, in our capacity to serve as a model for the redemption of the human race”. Dan Kurzman, in his biography (Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, 1983) writes that “[Ben Gurion] was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, a messiah, who felt he was destined to create an exemplary Jewish state, a ‘light unto the nations’ that would help to redeem all mankind”. This is the inner Universalist vision (tied to a state). These backstage, half acknowledged, convictions – of being ‘elect’, as an example – clearly do condition political actions, (such as disregarding legal norms).

Ben-Gurion was in no way a special case. His immersion in the Bible was shared by almost every Zionist leader of his generation, and the next. And the Israel of today, is no longer as secular as it once was, but rather, is in transit back towards Yahweyism — which is to say, away from the law of a secular state founded by the Zionists, towards traditional Hebraic law as revealed in the Tanakh (the Old Testament of the Christians). Netanyahu implicitly reverts to Hebraic tradition (from secular norms), when he states flatly that as ‘leader’, he should not be removed from power. In other words, Israel is becoming more, not less, ‘biblical’.

So, back to last Tuesday, when an Israeli leader speaks of Trump having secured Israel’s destiny, he is not just resorting to flowery flattery for the US President. The emphasis on ‘destiny’ is flagging something lurking in the background: “Zionism cannot be a nationalist movement like others”, Guyénot writes, “because it resonates with the destiny of Israel as outlined in the Bible … Israel is a very special nation indeed. And everyone can see that it has no intention of being an ordinary nation. Israel is destined to be an empire”.

An ‘empire’ – as in Isaiah, which describes the messianic times as a Pax Judaica, when “all the nations” will pay tribute “to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob”; when “the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem,” so that Yahweh will “judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples.”

Further on in the same book, we read: “The riches of the sea will flow to you, the wealth of the nations come to you” (60:5); “For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (60:12); “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (60:16); “You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (61:5-6). Pretty clear: this is not just run of the mill nationalism.

Aren’t such quotes just too historically arcane? What has this to do with last Tuesday? Well, a lot. Because these notions of election, of an exceptional mission and destiny are literally believed by many Americans, as well as by Jews. The point about last Tuesday – from this implicit vantage point – is that it then becomes evident that Trump’s “deal” is not about any two-state solution. Why would Trump encourage a rival state to emerge, or for that matter anything that would impede the path towards Israel’s becoming the dominant civilisational power in the Middle East? What Tuesday was about was firstly, conditioning the Palestinians – squeezing them – to accept that they have no alternative, but to offer their fealty to the regional ‘system leader’ (Israel). And secondly, as phase two, to assimilate subordinated Sunni components, under the regional Pax Judaica umbrella.

These old prophesies may not be uppermost in the daily consciousness of many contemporaries. But they are alive, and present in the Hebraic world. And they are wholly present in one key US constituency: Trump’s Evangelical base (one in every four Americans say they are Evangelists). They see the actualisation of Israel’s destiny as an eschatological necessity: It was they who insisted on the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem; they supported the Trump’s assertion of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan; they support the annexation of Israeli settlements; and they were behind the demand that the US scrap the JCPOA. The Evangelicals may be unlikely to switch to vote Democrat, but if enough simply sit on their hands and don’t vote Trump, it could tip ‘swing constituencies’ in the November US Presidential elections.

The Evangelicals were, of course, very happy with Tuesday’s outcome. Israel’s civilisational imperium is, they believe, now assured – at least between the west bank of the River Jordan and the sea. The actualisation of these prophesies has the effect of hastening the arrival of the Redeemer (for these Christian Zionists).

And here again, our vantage point helps to understand a wider paradigm, which centres around the term ‘Judeo-Christianity’. American leaders today increasingly refer to the US as having a Judeo-Christian culture. Might the term not seem something of an oxymoron: Wasn’t Christianity supposed to represent a fundamental break with Jewish textual law? Certainly, Saint Paul proclaimed Christianity was exactly that. The question is: does this Judeo-Christian self-labelling imply some subtle change: That some American élites are becoming unconsciously more Hebraic? In which direction is the core cultural ‘vision’ travelling? Israel originally was viewed as a recipient outpost for western Christian ‘values’ (in the days when Zionism largely was secular). Tuesday’s events suggests that the travel of values may be reversing.

But why this ‘Judeo-Christianity’ nomenclature in the first place? What is going on here? After the fall of Rome, circa 800, the leaders of the Frankish church precisely turned to the Old Testament as the basis to legitimise cultural war on Orthodox (Eastern) Christianity, which the Franks then labelled (pejoratively) as ‘Greek’ – with its clear connotation of eastern ‘paganism’ and apostasy. And they further leveraged the Old Testament in order to reign Dei Gratia: as divine sovereignty, whether as Popes or Emperors (i.e. Charlemagne), demanding the unreserved fealty and discipline of their subjects. This Frankish ‘turn’ towards a ‘Judeo-Christianity’ gave Europe its feudalism; resulted in the obliteration of the Cathars as an exemplar punishment for ill-discipline; and saw the imposition of its Civilisational model (Judeo-Christianity) on the Middle East, via militarised Crusades. West Christianity was infused with the Hebraic textual tradition, then – and again, of course, with the rise of Protestantism. East Christianity (Orthodox Christianity) never was. The two Churches were split asunder at the Great Schism (1054).

This is the point: The Israeli civilisational vision may not be exactly the same as America’s, but America’s archetypal cultural stories – Abraham commanded to sacrifice his son – come from the Hebrew Bible. In short, the American exercise of power has never been more ‘Frankish’, as it were. And the exercise of it, increasingly is justified in terms of Israeli language – viz the targeted assassination of Qasem Soleimani.

This is the principal message to Tuesday’s events: When those on the American Right (such as Steve Bannon) speak incessantly of the need to sustainAmerica’s Judeo-Christian heritage, they almost certainly would see an Israeli project to spread its Pax Judaica right across the Middle East as a clear civilisational ‘win’ for America too. Trump may not be prepared to go to war for Israel, but others in the US Establishment view America ‘winning again’ in the wider civilisational war, as an existential issue for America.

And this latter understanding perhaps offers yet another vantage point onto today’s politics. Why are American Evangelists so hostile to Iran? Because Iran presents the greatest obstacle to Israel’s Pax Judaica hegemony; or, is it more the case that the demise or implosion of the Islamic Republic, would constitute a civilisational ‘win’ for America and Israel, almost on a par with America’s Cold War ‘win’ over Communism? Is that what the withdrawal from the JCPOA – for the Evangelists, at least – was all about? A step on the way towards America, starting to ‘win again’ – towards Judeo-Christianity maintaining ‘system leadership?

Just to state clearly off the bat, I am not a fan of the ADL, the Rothschild banking dynasty, the younger Warburg dynasty, Mossad-affiliated pedophiles or George Soros. I do not condone the B’nai Brith’s Freemasonic intrigues, nor do I approve of the “Greater Israel” logic of Jabotinzky-ite loving Zionists who tend to believe that the entire Middle East from Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran belongs rightfully to them.

I do however believe that there is something profoundly beautiful in the Jewish cultural matrix that stems from Platonic humanist thinkers as Rabbi Philo of Alexandria (20 B.C.-50 A.D.) to Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) to the great scholar Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) whose amazing contributions to human knowledge birthed Germany’s incredible renaissance movement of the 18-19^th century. The rise of such modern Jewish artists who led the Yiddish Renaissance as I.L. Peretz, and Shalom Aleichem nourished their souls on such ecumenical inspiration at the turn of the 20^th century. The rise of modern Zionism, as we shall see was designed explicitly to destroy this positive spiritual tradition within Judaism reducing it to a “blood and soil cult”.

While radical Zionists tend to be shaped by their elitist self-image as God’s “chosen people” (putting them dangerously close to Nietsche’s ubermenschen concept which inspired a young Hitler), Jewish humanists from Philo to Mendelssohn fought to define the Old Testament concept of “chosen people” as chosen to be first in morality, wisdom and love. With this mandate to love all our fellow creatures since we are made in the image of the creator, Mendelsohn explains in his powerful book Jerusalem (1782) “you can’t hesitate to regard love as being at least as sublime a pre-eminence as power, to credit the supreme being with being not only all-powerful but also all-good, and to recognize the God of might also as the God of love.” (1)

Within these Jewish texts, one finds the cure not only for the failures of Zionism, but all of ideological ills of our present Hobbesian age.

Trump’s Zionist Paradox

With this general framework established, I would like to deal with my principal theme in the form of a paradox.

Trump is the first American president in over 50 years who has posed a serious threat to the deep state, resulting in a three year effort by the highest echelons of the Anglo-American oligarchy to lead an evidence- free impeachment campaign. Even the British House of Lords has stated irrevocably that Trump’s re-election is an intolerable scenario for the empire. YET… Trump supports Zionists and Zionists by and large support Trump.

Some influential alternative media outlets have gone so far as to conclude that Obama was a far superior leader to Trump simply because such Jabotinskyites as Benjamin Netanyahu hated him for speaking out occasionally against Israeli offensives against Palestine and not supporting Israel’s claim to Jerusalem. Of course, Trump’s pro-Israeli policy has run counter to Obama on many points, but does that make him a Zionist shill deserving of impeachment as many of his detractors claim?

Well, if Israel truly was a causal agency in world affairs, one might say “yes”. However, from the 19^th century creation of Zionism within the bowels of Britain’s Foreign Office by the Earl of Shaftesbury and the Palestinian Exploration Fund of 1865 to the Anglo-French Sykes Pikot Agreement of 1916, to the Lord Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the Round Table-steered Versailles Treaty that put Palestine under British control in 1919, Zionism was always a reactive agency of the British Empire and never causal as a top down process. Even the powerful B’nai Brith was created by British Freemasonic organizations in America hosting a Grand Master, degrees of initiation, and masonic symbolism from its 1875 founding to the present.

It isn’t just Zionism

British manipulation of radical ideologies across the Middle East doesn’t end with Zionism, but connects right to the heart of Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood, both of which were the fruits of British Imperial intrigues at the onset of the 20^th century. Don’t believe me? Well would you be surprised to find out that the Muslim Brotherhood which has played such a major role in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism was created by British Freemasons? Because it was. Or would you be surprised to discover that Saudi Arabia is a nation not even ready to celebrate its 80^th birthday whose very name merely derives from a family of warlords that Britain decided to place atop a new kingdom in 1930? Some of that story was even told in the 1963 film Laurence of Arabia… but only some of it. The rise of Islamic terrorism that such geopoliticians as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sir Henry Kissinger and Sir Bernard Lewis unleashed as a weapon against the Soviet Union was tied deeply into this British-created dynamic… and these Anglophile sociopaths knew it.

The fact that Israel hated such anti-nation state Wellsian technocrats as Barack Obama should not be a mystery, nor should their support of Trump’s pro-nationalist presidency be a mystery either. The total change in Turkey’s own Modus Operandi towards a pro-Russia/China program since Putin transformed the “rules of the regime-change game” in the Middle East in 2015 should also not be a mystery. Neither should the 17 Arab Nations which have signed onto China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or Saudi Arabia’s tendency to move away from acting as a total stooge for the London-centered globalists.

All of these seemingly opposing power structures were promised certain managerial powers of major jurisdictions of the world after the collapse of the western neo-liberal order on the condition that they just acted according to certain commands, and did the dirty work of their masters. Drug money laundering? Black ops? Terrorist financing? Oil price manipulation? Covert assassination? Every dirty game necessary to undermine sovereign nation states was on the table in those turbulent post-WWII years and these British-controlled power structures were messy, loud, and effective.

Even in the “developed sector”, certain nefarious 20^th century power structures were assigned to take private control of vast sectors of the economy including energy, agriculture, medicine, banking, communications, and pharmaceuticals. These networks interfaced closely with organized crime networks giving birth to such North American dirty operations as the Bronfman Family, Mayer Lansky and even such weird politicos as Roy Cohn who went onto endorse a young Donald Trump entering politics in the 1980s. Even though many of these western criminal syndicates were also heavily connected to Zionism, it would be wrong to conclude that the Jews are running the world. It just means that one layer of organized crime influenced lower levels of organized crime. Each layer being promised vast rewards as long as they willingly accepted the fact that when the system they parasitically fed upon collapsed, they would adapt to that depopulated order accordingly. British cut out (and Soros mirror image) Maurice Strong laid out this agenda in an infamous 1990 interview with West Magazine asking “hypothetically”:

“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no’. The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

Sacrificed on the Altar of Gaia… or Make Money with the BRI?

Maurice Strong was an early architect of a program that has come to be known today as “The Green New Deal” which was designed to accomplish the mandate set forth by H.G. Welles decades earlier in the 1928 opus The Open Conspiracy: Blueprint for a World Revolution where the Fabian Society leader called for One World Government, depopulation and thought control saying:

“The Open Conspiracy rests upon a disrespect for nationality, and there is no reason why it should tolerate noxious or obstructive governments because they hold their own in this or that patch of human territory.”

With the exception of a few hiccups now and then, things had gone very much according to the plan… until 2013 hit. What happened in 2013? Just as Obama and his masters were preparing to celebrate a new world order seeing no viable opposition to this end-of-history doctrine from any corner of the world, China’s Xi Jinping threw a big wrench into the machine by announcing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In 2015, the BRI was united officially with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and since then over 135 nations have signed onto this new operating framework, recognizing that no other “game in town” offered a guarantee of survival to its participants.

So, here is my point: If there was no strategic partnership for survival between Russia, China and all the other nations’ jumping on board that new paradigm, Trump would not have come to power and nationalism would have not had the ability to rise to the surface throughout any of the NATO-dominated nations of the western alliance.

As I stated many times in my writings, these Zionist groups are not causal, but reactive and adaptive to the broader BRI framework which will very likely become global as the only viable alternative when the banking system collapses under $1.5 quadrillion derivatives time bomb. That is why the British Empire has put all of its resources towards his impeachment. It isn’t because they are afraid of Trump per se but rather his willingness to adapt (like Quebec’s Power Corporation/Chretien faction which has unseated Freeland recently) to the new anti-entropic rules of the game which are being set by Russia and China. If this adaption is not sabotaged, then such oligarchs who see themselves as the rightful masters of the world, know that the better historic nature of Constitutional America which they believed to have been killed with JFK, MLK and RFK may yet be awakened.

Even more importantly, the oligarchy knows that the forgotten renaissance traditions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity may easily be re-awoken under the positive cultural climate that such a multi-polar alliance would unleash.

The author can be reached at canadianpatriot1776@tutanota.com

(1) Firmly establishing himself in the greatest philosophical traditions of Plato, Augustine and Cusa, Mendelsohn defined the two states of existence (divine and material) saying: “Just as according to Plato there is an earthly and also a heavenly love, there is also an earthly and a heavenly politics, so to speak… Just as the ‘lover’ knows nothing of love but the satisfaction of common lust, the politician discusses statesmanship purely in terms of power, liquidity, trade, the balance of power, and population; and religion is to him the lawgiver’s means for keeping the unruly man in check, and the priest’s means to suck him dry and consume his marrow.”

Since they’re designed to pull in different directions, that rarely happens and stalemate is the norm. But Israel is different. It has no bicameral legislature, no separately-elected president, no Supreme Court as Americans understand the term, and no ancient relic like the Electoral College to gum up the works even more. All it has is a Knesset with 120 seats awarded on the basis of strict proportional representation. Politics may be rough and tumble, but putting together a government should be smooth as silk.

Yet it’s headed for its third election in less than a year. What’s going on?

The answer can be summed up in a single word: Jew. It’s a term that everyone recognizes but no one can adequately explain. Because no one knows what it means, no one knows what a Jewish state means either. The structure is disintegrating, consequently, under the weight of seventy-plus years of incomprehensibility.

The “who’s a Jew” question has bedeviled Israel from the start. Jews are not a religion because most are non-practicing. (David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was more comfortable in a Buddhist temple than in a synagogue.) They’re not an ethnic group because European, Persian, or North African Jews have nothing in common in terms of language, cuisine, or other such markers. They’re not a race because they’re actually more genetically diverse than most of their neighbors. And contrary to all those anti-Semites out there, they’re not a conspiracy either because the political breakdown wouldn’t be so advanced if they were.

Israeli politics reflect this fundamental confusion. Each major party bases itself on a different concept of Jewishness. Netanyahu’s Likud represents a strain of militant Jewish nationalism going back to pre-war Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who was more than a bit cozy with the Italian fascisti. Labor sees itself as part of the European social-democratic tradition and hence appeals to those who think that Jewishness somehow implies a progressive world view. The United Torah Party, which has seven Knesset seats, is orthodox through and through and therefore defines Jewishness exclusively in terms of divine law.

Then there’s Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is our home”), which jumped from five to eight Knesset seats in the last election and which traditionally appeals to immigrants from the former Soviet Union. (Lieberman himself was born in the old Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.) With little to offer in terms of positive ideology, Yisrael Beiteinu defines itself chiefly in terms of what it hates. Members hate Palestinians because they remember all too well when a Hamas supporter blew himself up at the seaside Dolphinarium disco in Tel Aviv in June 2001, killing twenty-one people, most of them teenagers from the former USSR. But they hate orthodox rabbis too because they insist on classifying most of them as non-Jews.

A bit of history is needed to understand how this strange situation arose. Because Israel defines itself as a refuge for victims of anti-Semitism, its founders decided in 1948 that if a single Jewish forbear was enough to get you sent to Auschwitz, then it was enough to enter the Jewish state. Internally, however, they gave the orthodox rabbinate a monopoly on how to define Jewishness, which means you weren’t Jewish unless your mother was Jewish, the only standard the rabbis regard as valid.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this means that hundreds of thousands of people who have immigrated fit one definition but not the other. This is no small matter in a state in which in which civil marriage doesn’t exist and rabbis will not marry anyone whose lineage is not impeccable and in which job discrimination in favor of Jews is wide open.

But things get even stranger where the military is concerned. Ex-Soviets are subject to the draft, but orthodox Jews are not because Ben-Gurion thought it was somehow good for the Jewish that they continue studying the Talmud. Despite such privileges, many orthodox Jews oppose the Jewish state because they regard it as a deeply heretical effort to undo God’s work by throwing the Diaspora into reverse and organizing a return to the Holy Land.

So Israeli soldiers from the former Soviet Union, history’s first atheist state, battle anti-Zionists in the Occupied Territories on behalf of anti-Zionists at home who don’t regard them as Jewish and despise everything they stand for.

Lieberman won’t join a coalition with Netanyahu until he eliminates such exemptions, something Netanyahu absolutely cannot do because he relies on the religious parties for support – not just United Torah but Shas, the Sephardic orthodox party, and Yamina, the party of the fascistic Ayelet Shaked. But he won’t join with Benny Gantz’s more centrist Blue and White coalition because it depends on at least tacit support from the Arab Joint list, the Knesset’s third largest bloc. With roughly 25 percent of the electorate hostile to Zionism either from an ultra-orthodox or pro-Palestinian perspective, Lieberman is a king-maker with no one to anoint.

The upshot is deepening paralysis. Israel is an artificial state that would have fallen apart years ago if it weren’t for the hostility of its neighbors. This is why whenever Hamas or Islamic Jihad fires off a rocket in Israel’s direction, they’re doing what Israeli leaders could never accomplish on their own, which is to bind together an otherwise fractious Jewish state. They are Zionism’s best friend and the Palestinians’ worst enemy.

Whitney WEBB

he largest pro-Israel organization in the United States is not composed of Jews, but of Christian evangelicals, with a total membership of 7 million, more than 2 million more members than the entirety of the American Jewish community.

Members of this organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), met in Washington on Monday, attracting thousands of attendees and featuring speeches from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, and National Security Advisor John Bolton. CUFI’s leader, controversial evangelical preacher John Hagee, has met with President Donald Trump several times and was recently part of an exclusive White House meeting in March on the administration’s upcoming “peace plan” for Israel and Palestine.

CUFI is but one of many organizations throughout American history that have promoted the state of Israel and Zionism on the grounds that a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine is a requirement for the fulfillment of end-times prophecy and necessary for Jesus Christ to return to Earth — an event Christians often refer to as “the Second Coming.”

While organizations like CUFI and its predecessors have long seen the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the later Israeli victory and conquest of Jerusalem in 1967, as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, there is one prophecy that this sect of evangelical Christians believes is the only thing standing between them and the Second Coming. There are estimated to be more than 20 million of these Christians, often referred to as Christian Zionists, in the United States and they are a key voting bloc and source of political donations for the Republican Party.

As was explored in previous installments of this series, these Christian Zionists, much like religious Zionist extremists in Israel, believe that the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock must be replaced with a Third Jewish Temple in order to usher in the end times.

These two groups of different faiths, since the 19th century, have repeatedly formed an opportunistic alliance in order to ensure the fulfillment of their respective prophecies, despite the fact that members of the other faith are rarely if ever on the same page in their interpretations of what occurs after the temple’s construction.

This alliance, based on a mutual obsession with hastening the coming of the Apocalypse, continues to this day and now, more than at any other time in history, these groups have reached the heights of power in both Israel and the United States. Parts I and II of this exclusive series explored how this branch of religious Zionism has come to dominate the current right-wing government of Israel and has led Israel’s current government to take definitive steps towards the destruction of the Al Aqsa mosque and the imminent construction of a Third Temple.

Now this installment (Part III) will show how this movement’s Christian counterpart in the United States, Christian Zionism, has likewise become a dominant force in American politics, particularly following the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, where this apocalyptic vision is a major driver behind his administration’s Middle East policy.

Yet, this fire-and-brimstone vision of the end times has long been a guide for prominent figures in American history and the American elite, even predating Zionism’s founding as a political movement. Thus, Christian Zionism’s influence on Trump administration policy is merely the latest of a long list of examples where prophecy and politics have mixed in American history, often with world-altering results.

Puritans, Prophecy and Palestine

Accounts of the role of European and North American Christians in the creation of the state of Israel often begin with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, but the efforts of certain Christian groups in England and the United States to create a Jewish state in Palestine actually date back centuries earlier and significantly predate Zionism’s official founding by Theodore Herzl.

Among the first advocates for the physical immigration of European Jews to Palestine were the Puritans, an offshoot of Christian Protestantism that emerged in the late 16th century and became influential in England and, later, in the American colonies. Influential Puritans devoted considerable interest to the role of Jews in eschatology, or end-times theology, with many — such as John Owen, a 17th-century theologian, member of parliament, and administrator at Oxford — believing that the physical return of Jews to Palestine was necessary for the fulfillment of end-time prophecy.

While the Puritan roots of what would later become known as Christian Zionism are often overlooked in modern accounts of where and why American evangelical support for Israel began, its adherents still clearly acknowledge its legacy. For instance, on Monday at the CUFI conference, Pompeo, himself a Christian Zionist known for his obsession with the end times, told the group the following:

Christian support in America for Zion — for a Jewish homeland — runs back to the early Puritan settlers, and it has endured for centuries. Indeed, our second president [John Adams], a couple years back, said… ‘I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.’

These Puritan beliefs, which persist today and have only grown in popularity, became more entrenched in England and colonial America with time, especially among the monied political class, and led to a variety of interpretations regarding exactly what the Bible says about the end times. Among the most influential was the development of Christian “dispensationalism,” an interpretive framework that uses the Bible to divide history into different periods of “dispensations” and sees the Bible’s prophetic references to “Israel” as signifying an ethnically Jewish nation established in Palestine.

Dispensationalism was largely developed by English-Irish preacher John Nelson Darby, who believed that the God-ordained fates of Israel and the Christian church were completely separate, with the latter to be physically removed from the Earth by God prior to a foretold period of earthly suffering known as the Tribulation.

In Darby’s view, the Tribulation would begin following the construction of a Third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This belief in the physical removal of Christians from the Earth prior to the Tribulation, widely known as “the rapture,” was invented by Darby in the 1820s and its lack of scriptural support has been widely noted by theologians of various denominations as well as biblical scholars. However, it is important to point that there are differences among dispensationalist Christians as to whether the rapture will occur before, during or after the Tribulation period.

Yet, despite its relatively short existence as an idea and lack of support in the Bible, the rapture was enthusiastically adopted by some churches in England and the United States, particularly the latter. This was largely thanks to the work of highly controversial theologian Cyrus Scofield.

Notably, Darby’s brand of Christian eschatology coincides with similar developments in Jewish eschatology, namely the ideas of Rabbi Zvi Hirsh Kalisher and the creation of a new branch of Jewish messianism that believed that Jews must proactively work to hasten the coming of their messiah by immigrating to Israel and building a Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Darby’s beliefs, and those he inspired promoted something similar in the sense that Christians could hasten the coming of the rapture and the Tribulation by promoting the immigration of Jews to Israel as well as the construction of a Third Jewish Temple.

Christian Zionists pave the way for Theodore Herzl

Darby traveled to North America and several other countries to popularize his ideas, meeting several influential pastors throughout the English speaking world, including James Brookes, the future mentor of Cyrus Scofield. His travels and the spread of his written works popularized his eschatological views among certain circles of American and English Christians during the religious revival of the 19th century. Darby’s beliefs were particularly attractive to the elite of both countries, with some English noblemen placing newspaper advertisements urging Jews to immigrate to Palestine as early as the 1840s.

Another prominent figure influenced by Darby’s end-times doctrine was the American preacher Charles Taze Russell, whose church later gave rise to several different churches, including the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Decades before the founding of modern political Zionism, Russell began preaching — not just to Christians, but to Jews in the United States and elsewhere — about the need for mass Jewish immigration to Palestine.

As Rabbi Kalisher had done a few decades prior, Russell penned a letter in 1891 to a wealthy member of the Rothschild banking family, Edmond de Rothschild, as well as Maurice von Hirsch, a wealthy German financier, about his plan for the Jewish settlement of Palestine. Russell described his plan as follows:

My suggestion is that the wealthy Hebrews purchase from Turkey, at a fair valuation, all of her property interest in these lands: i.e., all of the Government lands (lands not held by private owners), under the provision that Syria and Palestine shall be constituted a free state.”

The same plan was to resurface a few years later in arguably the most influential Zionist book of all time, Theodore Herzl’s The Jewish State, which was published in 1896.

Russell addresses an audience of American Jews in New York in 1910. Photo | Public Domain

It is unknown whether Rothschild or Hirsch was influenced at all by Russell’s letter, though Russell’s ideas did have a lasting impact on some prominent American Jews and American Christians with regard to his promotion of Jewish immigration to Palestine.

The same year that Russell wrote his letter to de Rothschild and von Hirsch, another influential dispensationalist preacher wrote another document that is often overlooked in exploring the role of American Christians in the development and popularization of Zionism. William E. Blackstone, an American preacher who was greatly influenced by Darby and other dispensationalists of the era, had spent decades promoting with great fervor the immigration of Jews to Palestine as a means of fulfilling Biblical prophecy.

The culmination of Blackstone’s efforts came in the form of the Blackstone Memorial, a petition that pleaded that then-President of the United States Benjamin Harrison and his secretary of state, James Blaine, take action “in favor of the restoration of Palestine to the Jews.” The largely forgotten petition asked Harrison and Blaine to use their influence to “secure the holding at an early date, of an international conference to consider the condition of the Israelites and their claims to Palestine as their ancient home, and to promote, in all other just and proper ways, the alleviation of their suffering condition.”

As with Russell’s letter to de Rothschild and von Hirsch, it is unknown exactly how influential the Blackstone Memorial was in influencing the views or policies of Harrison or Blaine. However, the Blackstone Memorial petition is highly significant because of its signatories, which included the most influential and wealthiest Americans of the era, the majority of whom were Christians.

Signatories of the Blackstone Memorial included J.D. Rockefeller, the country’s first billionaire; J.P. Morgan, the wealthy banker; William McKinley, future president of the United States; Thomas Brackett Reed, then speaker of the House; Melville Fuller, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; the mayors of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston and Chicago; the editors of the Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, among others; and numerous other members of Congress, as well as influential businessmen and clergymen. Though some rabbis were included as signatories, the petition’s content was opposed by most American Jewish communities. In other words, the primary goal of Zionism, before it even became a movement, was widely supported by the American Christian elite, but opposed by American Jews.

The Blackstone Memorial would later attract the attention of Louis Brandeis, one of the most prominent American Jewish Zionists, who would later refer to Blackstone as the real “founding father of Zionism,” according to Brandeis’ close friend Nathan Straus. Brandeis would eventually succeed in convincing an elderly Blackstone to petition then-President Woodrow Wilson with a second Blackstone Memorial in 1916 that was presented in private to Wilson nearly a year later.

Instead of gathering signatures from prominent members of America’s elite class, Blackstone this time focused on shoring up support from Protestant organizations, namely the Presbyterian Church, in keeping with Wilson’s Presbyterian faith. According to historian Jerry Klinger, president of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, this change in focus had been Brandeis’, not Blackstone’s, idea.

Alison Weir, author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, described Brandeis as “one of the most influential” American Zionists and a key figure in the efforts to push Wilson to support the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine, of which Blackstone’s second petition was part. However, Weir asserted that Blackstone’s second petition was secondary to a so-called “gentleman’s agreement” whereby English officials promised to support a Jewish state in Palestine if American Zionists, led by Brandeis, were able to secure the United States’ entry into World War I.

Wilson ultimately supported Blackstone’s new document, which was never presented publicly to the president, but privately by Rabbi Stephen Wise. This second Blackstone Memorial was a key component of the Brandeis-led campaign that eventually guaranteed American support — i.e., private support — for the Balfour Declaration, which established British intentions to support a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine. Notably, the Balfour Declaration is named for the then-English Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, himself a Christian dispensationalist, though Weir told MintPress that Balfour was more likely influenced by political imperatives than religious motives. The only person in the British cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration was its only Jewish member, Edwin Montagu.

The Balfour Declaration was addressed to a member of the Rothschild banking family, Lionel Walter Rothschild, the last in a series of letters written to members of the Rothschild family urging them to use their wealth and political influence to favor the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine: from Rabbi Kalisher, who wrote to Baron Amschel Rothschild in 1836; to Charles Taze Russell, who wrote to Edmond de Rothschild in 1891; and finally to the Balfour Declaration, written to Lionel Walter Rothschild in 1917.

Weir told MintPress that the Rothschilds figure so prominently in these early efforts to establish a Jewish state in Palestine owing to “their wealth and the power that goes with it,” making them very sought after by those who felt that a Jewish state could be formed in Palestine by the purchase of the territory by wealthy European Jews, as both Kalisher and Russell had proposed. However, the Balfour Declaration was addressed to the Rothschilds because, at that time, members of the Rothschild family, Edmond de Rothschild in particular, had become among the strongest supporters of the Zionist cause.

Though the declaration carries his name, it is unclear whether Balfour himself actually authored the document. Some historians — such as Michael Rubinstein, former president of the Jewish Historical Society of England — have made the case that the declaration itself was written by Leopold Amery, then-political secretary of England’s War Cabinet and a Zionist who, despite his commitment to the Zionist cause, obfuscated his Jewish roots for much of his career for reasons that are still the source of speculation.

As shown by the Balfour Declaration and the lobbying efforts that led to its creation, support for what would soon become known as Zionism among the nobility of England and the United States was already formidable before Herzl even began work on The Jewish State. It is worth considering that the power and influence of this religiously-motivated class of Christian elites had an influence on Herzl and his ideas, particularly given the fact that dispensationalist Christians had been promoting a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine at a time when the idea was unpopular among many prominent Jews in Europe and the United States.

Furthermore, the role of Christian Zionists, as they would later become known, continued well after Herzl began his Zionist activities, and resulted in many of the most influential acts that led to the establishment of the State of Israel, including the Balfour Declaration.

Notably, Herzl’s own success in promoting his views following the publication of The Jewish State was largely due to English dispensationalist pastor William Hechler. Hechler, while serving as chaplain at the British Embassy in Vienna,forged an alliance and later close friendship with Herzl and was critical to negotiating meetings between Herzl and prominent members of the German government, including Kaiser Wilhelm II, which lent necessary political legitimacy to Herzl’s Zionist movement.

A largely overlooked figure in the rise of Zionism, Hechler is mentioned in Herzl’s diary more than any other person and passionately felt that the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would bring about the end times. Hechler is also known to have been extremely interested in the construction of a Third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, having devotedconsiderable time to creating models of that Temple, some of which he prominently displayed in his office and showed to Herzl with great enthusiasm during their first meeting.

Herzl gives Kaiser Wilhelm II a tour of an early Jewish settlement near Jaffa, Palestine in 1898. Photo | Israel GPO

The Hechler-Herzl alliance is one early example of how Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists each used the motivations of the other for political gain despite the fact that Christian Zionists often hold anti-Semitic views and secular Zionists, as well as religious Zionists, do not hold Christianity in high regard. This opportunism on the parts of both Christian and Jewish Zionists has been a key feature in the rise of Zionism, particularly in the United States, and the case of Cyrus Scofield, the man more responsible than any for popularizing Christian Zionism among American evangelicals, offers another important example.

The surprising story of Cyrus Scofield

There is perhaps no other book that has been more influential in the dissemination of Christian Zionism in the United States than the Scofield Reference Bible, a version of the King James Bible whose annotations were written by Cyrus Scofield. Scofield — who had no formal theological training, though he later claimed to have a D.D. (doctor of divinity degree) — originally worked as a lawyer and political operative in the state of Kansas and eventually became the district attorney of that state.

Soon after his appointment to the position, he was forced to resign as a result of numerous allegations of corruption, including bribery, forging signatures on banknotes and stealing political donations from then-Senator of Kansas James Ingalls. During this time, Scofield abandoned his wife and two daughters, an action since blamed on the burgeoning scandals he was facing as well as his self-admitted heavy drinking habits.

Amid this backdrop, Scofield is said to have become an evangelical around the year 1879 and soon became associated with prominent dispensationalist preachers of the era, including Dwight Moody and James Brookes. Local papers at the time, such as the Atchison Patriot, regarded Scofield’s conversion and career change with great skepticism, referring to Scofield as the “late lawyer, politician and shyster generally” who had disgraced himself by committing “many malicious acts.”

Scofield went on to pastor relatively small churches, moving from Kansas to Dallas, Texas, and later Massachusetts. Yet, despite his lack of renown and  his troubled history, by 1901 Scofield had managed to gain entrance to an exclusive men’s club in New York, the Lotos Club, whose members at the time included steel magnate and multi-millionaire Andrew Carnegie, members of the Vanderbilt family, and famous American writer Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain.

Pastor Scofield, center, with the Deacons of the First Congregational Church of Dallas, circa 1880s

Scofield’s membership in this exclusive club — as well as the club’s patronage of his activities, which granted him lodging and financing to produce what would become the Scofield Reference Bible — has been the subject of considerable speculation. Indeed, many have noted that the presence of a fundamentalist, dispensationalist small-town preacher with a disgraced political past in a club stuffed with some of the country’s most elite academics, writers and robber barons just doesn’t add up.

Joseph M. Canfield, in his book The Incredible Scofield and his Book, asserted that “the admission of Scofield to the Lotus Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C.I. Scofield.”

Canfield puts forth the theory in his book that the person “directing” Scofield’s career was connected to New York lawyer and Zionist activist Samuel Untermeyer, who was on the club’s executive committee and was a close associate of Louis Brandeis and influential in the administration of Woodrow Wilson. He then notes that Scofield’s annotated bible was later “most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international interest in one of Untermeyer’s pet projects — the Zionist Movement.”

Other scholars, such as David Lutz, have been more explicit than Canfield in linking Untermeyer’s Zionist activism to his role in financially backing Scofield and his work on his annotated Bible. Ultimately, like the Blackstone Memorial before it, the Lotos Club’s patronage of Scofield’s work again reveals the interest of the American elite of the era, Christian and Jewish alike, in promoting Christian Zionism.

Untermeyer and the Lotos Club notably also funded Scofield’s numerous travels to Europe, including one fateful trip to England where Scofield met with Henry Frowde, publisher of Oxford University Press. Frowde was taken with Scofield’s work, largely owing to the fact that Frowde was a member of the “Exclusive Brethren,” a religious group founded by John Nelson Darby, the father of dispensationalism. Oxford University Press subsequently published the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. Twenty years after its publication, it became the first-ever Oxford publication to generate over a million dollars in sales.

Scofield’s Bible became spectacularly popular among American fundamentalists soon after its publication, partly because it was the first annotated bible that sought to interpret the text for the reader as well as because it became the central text of several influential seminaries that were set up after its 1909 publication. Among Scofield’s many annotations are claims that have since become central to Christian Zionism, such as Scofield’s annotation of Genesis 12:3 that those who curse Israel (interpreted by Christian Zionists to mean the state of Israel since its founding in 1948) will be cursed by God and those that bless Israel will similarly be blessed.

Modern Christian Zionists, like Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), have frequently cited this interpretation that originated with Scofield in defending extreme pro-Israel stances. For instance, Hagee made the following statement in 2014:

You have to go back to basics, with the fact that in Genesis (chapter 1), God created the world and made a very solemn promise (brought in Gen. 12:3), ‘I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who curse you.’ From that moment on, every nation that ever blessed Israel has been blessed by God. And every nation that has ever persecuted the Jewish people, God crushed. And so He will continue.”

Falwell and Likud: a friendship or something else?

Despite the widespread dissemination of the Scofield Reference Bible and its popularization among American evangelical churches and seminaries, the public influence of dispensationalist eschatology and Christian Zionism on American politics was relatively limited for much of the 20th century. However, the private influence of Christian dispensationalists was nonetheless present, as seen through the role of dispensationalist preacher and Third Temple advocate Billy Graham and his close relationships to several presidents including Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Then the political power of dispensationalist theology dramatically moved from the private quarters of the halls of power into the mainstream American political discourse with the founding of the Moral Majority by evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell in 1979.

In the early 1970s, Falwell’s growing ministry was bringing in millions of dollars annually, especially his nationally broadcast program “The Old Time Gospel Hour,” which ran on several major cable networks at the time. Despite — or perhaps because of — the spike in donations, Falwell was soon targeted by the federal government, specifically the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), for “fraud and deceit” and “gross insolvency” in the financial management of his ministry, particularly the ministry’s sale of $6.6 million in church bonds. The SEC lawsuit was eventually settled when a group of businessmen in Lynchburg, Virginia — where Falwell’s ministry was based — took over the ministry’s finances for the next several years, until 1977. Falwell blamed his ministry’s financial problems on his “financial ignorance.”

Jerry Falwell travels with his son Jonathan, right, aboard his private jet in 2004. Todd Hunley | Thomas Road Baptist Church

One year after his ministry appeared to be on a better financial footing, Falwell received an invitation to visit the state of Israel and was personally invited on the all-expenses-paid trip by Menachem Begin, then the prime minister of Israel and leader of the Likud Party. The trip would mark the beginning of a long friendship and close relationship between Falwell and Begin and, more broadly, a relationship between American evangelical leaders and Israel’s Likud Party. As Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg notes in his book The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, the Begin administration “was the first to tap evangelical enthusiasm for Israel and turn it into political and economic support.”

Soon after returning from Israel, Falwell’s finances again came under federal scrutiny after a federal investigation found that Falwell had transferred the health insurance policies of his employees to an unlicensed shell company with just $128 in assets and hundreds of thousands in dollars in unpaid claims. Just as Falwell’s financial troubles began to mount yet again, he received a generous gift from none other than Begin in the form of a private Learjet valued at $4 million. Shortly thereafter, Falwell went on to found the Moral Majority organization, “after consultations with theologians and political strategists.”

The Moral Majority is widely credited with turning the Christian evangelical right into a major political force in the United States, promoting extremely pro-Israel policies, increased defense spending, a Reaganite approach to the challenges of the Cold War, as well as conservative domestic policies. Falwell frequently utilized his gift from Begin in traveling and promoting the new organization, as well as himself as a major public figure.

The Moral Majority marks a clear turning point in the Israel-U.S. evangelical relationship, as it made fervent support for Israel an area of major importance to evangelical voters and also led many evangelical voters to pay closer attention to events going on in the Middle East. Yet, given Falwell’s strong promotion of Christian Zionism, many evangelicals who became increasingly politically active following the organization’s founding not only supported Israel’s policies of the era but also supported many of the future ambitions of Begin and the Likud Party. This support was solidified by the beginning of the Israeli Ministry of Tourism’s ongoing practice of offering U.S. evangelical leaders free “familiarization” tours to Israel in the early 1980s.

Begin’s vision of “Greater Israel” — the complete annexation of Palestine as well as large parts of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt by Israel — was also shared and promoted by Falwell. In 1983, Falwell stated that “Begin will quickly tell you, ‘We don’t have all the land yet we’re going to have,’” and further predicted that Israel would never relinquish control over the occupied West Bank because Begin was determined to keep the land “which has been delivered to them (the Israelis).”

Falwell framed Begin’s expansionist ambitions as a religious belief in “the inerrancy of the Old Testament,” a sentiment Falwell shared. Falwell also pushed for a U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and felt that construction of a Third Temple on the Temple Mount was necessary to usher in the end times and the second coming of Christ.

As Falwell helped turn Christian Zionism into a major political force in the United States, he also made himself a key political figure in the Reagan era and an important go-between for U.S.-Israel relations. In 1981 Begin informed Falwell of his plans to bomb an Iraqi nuclear facility before he informed the Reagan administration with the hopes that Falwell would “explain to the Christian public the reasons for the bombing.” According to Canadian academic David S. New, Begin told Falwell during that phone call: “Get to work for me.”

In addition, Falwell frequently met with Begin, whom he later called a personal friend, and these meetings often overlapped with Begin’s official meetings with Reagan. A year later, Begin gave Falwell Israel’s Jabotinsky award, making Falwell the first non-Jew to receive the honor for his advocacy on behalf of Israel and, more specifically, Likud policies and ambitions.

Though the Moral Majority officially shuttered its doors in 1989, its political legacy persisted long after, as did Falwell’s political clout. Indeed, following Begin’s model, Benjamin Netanyahu, during his first term as prime minister, also made a habit of visiting Falwell, meeting with the controversial pastor even before he met with political officials in his visits to Washington.

Netanyahu, left, meets Falwell at a hotel in Washington, Jan. 19, 1998. Greg Gibson | AP

During one trip to D.C. in 1998, Netanyahu’s first visit was to an event co-hosted by Falwell, where the pastor praised Netanyahu as “the Ronald Reagan of Israel.” The New York Times described the purpose of Netanyahu’s U.S. visit not as a visit aimed at meeting with government officials, but rather one intended “to shore up his base of traditional support in the United States. Conservative Christian groups have long been ardent supporters of Israel because of its religious importance to Christianity.”

However, this relationship between Christian Zionists like Falwell and prominent right-wing Israeli politicians has not been without its controversy, especially given that pro-Israel evangelicals like Falwell have a history of making anti-semitic statements.

For example, during a 1999 sermon, Falwell discussed his interpretation of end-times prophecy, widely shared by Christian Zionist evangelicals, that the Second Coming would follow not just the creation of the state of Israel but the construction of a Third Temple on the Temple Mount, from which a figure known to Christians as the “Antichrist” would reign. In responding to his own rhetorical question as to whether the Antichrist is “alive and well today,” Falwell stated that “Probably because when he appears during the tribulation period he will be a full-grown counterfeit of Christ. Of course, he’ll be Jewish.”

Falwell’s comments were immediately condemned by a variety of Jewish groups, including the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Rabbi Leon Klenicki, then-director of interfaith affairs for the ADL, noted that Falwell’s view is a “common theological position” among American evangelicals and that Falwell was “an influential voice among evangelical and charismatic Christians” who “only supports Israel for his own Christological ends.” “He sees us only as the ones who prepare the coming of Jesus,” Klenicki stated at the time. “It is a great disappointment after more than 30 years of dialogue; he’s still in the Middle Ages.”

Another prominent dispensationalist with great political and literary influence is Hal Lindsey, the author and co-author of several books, including The Late Great Planet Earth. Lindsey’s work greatly influenced many prominent U.S. politicians like Ronald Reagan, who was so moved by Lindsey’s books that he invited Lindsey to address a National Security Council meeting on nuclear war plans and helped make Lindsey an influential consultant with several members of Congress and the Pentagon.

As noted by Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg, Lindsey sees Jews as serving “two central roles” in Christian dispensationalist eschatology:

[T]he first — despite his insistence of love for Jews — is the classic one of Christian anti-Jewish polemic: They are ‘the Jewish people who crucified Jesus’ and the archetype of those who ignore the truth of prophecy. The second role is to fulfill prophecy despite themselves.”

Gorenberg further notes that Lindsey believes that Jews have fulfilled two of the three crucial prophecies that will usher in the end times, with the first being the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the second being the Israeli conquest and occupation of Jerusalem after the Six Day War in 1967. According to Lindsey: “There remains but one more event to completely set the stage for Israel’s part in the last great act of her historical drama. That is to rebuild the ancient Temple…”

As Falwell’s and Lindsey’s comments reveal, the eschatological views of dispensationalism frequently perceive the Jewish people as little more than pawns that must fulfill certain requirements — e.g., establishing the state of Israel, conquering Jerusalem, building a Third Temple — in order to hasten the salvation and “rapture” of evangelical Christians. Meanwhile, Jews in Israel who do not convert to Christianity are expected to die horrible deaths, though some Christian Zionists in recent years, as will be seen shortly, have sought to adjust this still common theological position.

Despite the anti-semitic motivations underlying evangelical support for the state of Israel and the Likud-supported vision of “Greater Israel,” the politically active Christian Zionist movement that Falwell helped create translated into a strong support base for Israel and right-wing Likud policy that has made it crucial to prominent Israeli politicians.

For instance, significantly more American Christians (55 percent) than American Jews (40 percent) believe that God gave Israel to the Jews while that sentiment is shared by only 19 percent of Israeli Christians. In addition, with regards to the Trump administration’s pro-Israel policies, only 15 percent of evangelical Christians believe that President Trump favors Israel too strongly while 42 percent of American Jews hold the view that Trump is biased in favor of Israel.

In a video recorded in the early 2000s — later broadcast on Israeli TV —  Netanyahu, speaking to a family of Jewish settlers, described the mass support among Americans, particularly evangelicals, for Israel as “absurd,” saying:

America is something that can be easily moved. Moved in the right direction. They won’t get in our way; 80 percent of the Americans supprt us. It’s absurd.”

In a 2017 speech to the Christian Zionist group CUFI, Netanyahu made it clear that much of this “absurd” support came from American evangelicals, stating that “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.”

Richard Silverstein — an academic and journalist whose work has been published in Haaretz and MintPress, among other outlets — has argued that Israeli politicians, particularly Netanyahu, have sought out support from evangelical groups despite their anti-Semitic undertones and the fact they the act out of self-interest in pursuing their political objectives.

In a 2017 article, Silverstein stated that for Israel’s nationalist right-wing:

Judaism is not a spiritual value, it is a physical manifestation of power in the world. These Israelis understand that not all Jews are their “brothers.” Some Jews are too effete, too liberal, too humane, too universalist. These Jews are the detritus which will be washed away by the tide of history. Israeli nationalists need to replace these traditional Jewish allies and have done so by finding new ones: Christian evangelicals, African dictators, European neo-Nazis. Zionism as they define it is less a movement dedicated to ethics and more one dedicated to self-interest.”

A “vital part of Israel’s national security”

As Falwell began to fade from public view in the early 2000s, his legacy has largely fallen to a handful of preachers now at the forefront of Christian Zionism and Christian Zionist political activism, with Falwell’s son, Jerry Falwell Jr., ranking prominently among them. However, of the preachers that followed in Falwell’s footsteps, one stands out: John Hagee.

Hagee is the pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, which has an active membership of over 22,000. A charismatic Christian who believes in dispensationalist eschatology and thinks that Christians are biblically required to support Israel, Hagee has long been a major advocate for Israel within evangelical and charismatic Christianity circles and has raised over $80 million for Israel since he first began hosting “A Night to Honor Israel” events in the early 1980s.

In 2006, Hagee sought to create the “Christian AIPAC” and revived a then-defunct organization previously founded in 1975 known as Christians United for Israel, or CUFI, mentioned at the beginning of this installment. Since its re-founding, CUFI has grown exponentially, now counting 7 million members, a figure that exceeds the Jewish population of the United States, which stands at around 5.7 million. Hagee chairs its executive board, which included Jerry Falwell up until Falwell’s death in 2007.

Vice President Pence, left, greets Hagee at CUFI’s annual summit, July 8, 2019, in Washington. Patrick Semansky | AP

CUFI is exempt from paying U.S. taxes and from publicly disclosing its finances because it is officially registered as a church, though it is often likened to an arm of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States and actively promotes and funds illegal West Bank settlements. CUFI also advocates for Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount and the construction of a Third Temple.

Much has been written about CUFI’s influence in the Republican Party, which began under the George W. Bush administration soon after its founding. As journalist Max Blumenthal noted in a 2006 article for The Nation: “Over the past months, the White House has convened a series of off-the-record meetings about its policies in the Middle East with leaders of Christians United for Israel (CUFI).”

As a result of these meetings, CUFI aligned itself tightly with the neoconservatives that were well represented in the Bush administration, even appointing neoconservative and Christian Zionist Gary Bauer to its board and naming Bauer the first director of its lobbying arm, the CUFI Action Fund. Bauer is a founding member of the highly controversial and now-defunct neoconservative group, Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and has also served on the executive board of the neoconservative group Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).

CUFI has since won powerful allies and counts neoconservative Elliott Abrams; former CIA director James Woosley; neoconservative archon Bill Kristol; former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee; Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ted Cruz (R-TX); Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence among its staunchest supporters. At a CUFI summit last year, Netanyahu described CUFI as a “vital part of Israel’s national security.”

In addition, CUFI has close ties to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the top donor to President Trump and the entire Republican Party. Adelson even received a special award from Hagee at a 2014 CUFI event. “I’ve never had a greater warm feeling than being honored by Pastor Hagee,” said a beaming Sheldon Adelson at the time.

At the most recent CUFI summit, held on Monday, the Trump administration sent Pence, Pompeo, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Assistant to the President and Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt, and National Security Advisor John Bolton, all of whom spoke at the summit.

CUFI’s 2019 Washington Summit is days away and includes speakers @VP @Mike_Pence, @SecPompeo, @USAmbIsrael David Friedman, NSA @AmbJohnBolton, Assistant to President Trump @JdGreenblatt45, @DennisPrager, and @PastorJohnHagee.

Register at https://t.co/q1hsRMLNnA. pic.twitter.com/EO1Bi11llR

— Pastor John Hagee (@PastorJohnHagee) 4 июля 2019 г.

In addition to its own influence as an organization, the group has made Hagee himself a major political player. In 2007, then-Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) compared Hagee to Moses, stating:

I want to take to opportunity to describe Pastor Hagee in the terms the Torah used to describe Moses. He is an Ish Elohim. A man of God. And those words really do fit him. And I have something else. Like Moses, he’s become the leader of a mighty multitude. Even greater than the multitude that Moses led from Egypt to the Promised Land.”

Efforts by prominent politicians to court Hagee were once numerous, until evidence of Hagee making remarks about the Holocaust that were widely considered anti-semitic surfaced during the 2008 presidential campaign. In those remarks, Hagee asserted that Adolf Hitler had been sent by God to act as a “hunter,” and force Jews by means of the Holocaust to resettle in Palestine as a means of fulfilling Biblical prophecy. Then-Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who had aggressively courted Hagee’s endorsement, was forced to distance himself from Hagee after those comments resurfaced.

Yet, the stigma around Hagee has since worn off and his influence is again on the rise following Trump’s election to the presidency, as evidenced by the attendance of numerous top Trump officials to the 2019 CUFI Washington Summit earlier this week.

Though he was not included on the official board of Trump’s evangelical advisers early in Trump’s presidency, several slightly less controversial allies and associates of Hagee were, including Tom Mullins, Jerry Falwell Jr., and Kenneth Copeland. Then, a few months after Trump’s inauguration, Hagee “dropped by” the White House unannounced and met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss U.S. support for Israel. He also met with Trump a few weeks before Trump announced plans to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a meeting at which Trump had reportedly promisedHagee that the embassy would soon be moved and told the pastor “I will not disappoint you.” Hagee described Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem as having “biblical timing of absolute precision.”

More recently, Hagee was part of an exclusive group of evangelical leaders who met with White House officials this past March prior to the partial release of the so-called “Deal of the Century,” aimed at bringing “peace” to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is widely viewed as greatly favoring Israel and is expected to be rejected outright by Palestinian leadership.

After the meeting, Hagee issued an urgent prayer request. ”Our topic of discussion was discussing the forthcoming peace plan concerning Israel. Israel and the Jewish people need our prayers and our advocacy like never before,” Hagee said in a video posted to the CUFI Twitter page soon after the meeting. “The Bible gives the command, ‘For Zion’s sake, I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake, I will not keep my peace.’ I urge you tonight to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.”

As the final installment of this series will show, the shared apocalyptic visions of extremist religious Zionists and Christian Zionists regarding a Third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount is a major driver behind the Deal of the Century and was also a major factor in the Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, despite Palestinian hopes that East Jerusalem would serve as the capital of their future state. Notably, Christian Zionists believe that Palestinians must be expelled from the state of Israel. In addition, these end-times beliefs are also a factor in the administration’s push for war with Iran, which Christian Zionists like Hagee and Pompeo believe is also a requisite for the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.

While Hagee’s influence and the influence of his organization CUFI are stronger than ever with Trump in the White House, his political clout with the Trump administration is, at least partially, due to the presence of staunch Christian Zionists in two of the top offices in the executive branch: vice president and secretary of state.

Pence and Pompeo push “holy war”

Though several Trump officials spoke at the recent CUFI summit, two stand out — not just for their high-ranking positions but also for their open admissions that their Christian Zionist beliefs guide their policies. These officials are Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

After Trump chose his running mate, Pence’s religious fervor came under media scrutiny, with several outlets noting that he was known to be an ardent Christian Zionist. Pence’s faith gained particular attention owing to his past statements on Israel, which he has often described in prophetic terms.

Though raised Catholic, Pence gradually transitioned to an “evangelical Catholic” and then to an evangelical Protestant and has since become a key political figure representing the fundamentalist Christian movement that promotes “dominionism,” an ideology that varies in its interpretations but ultimately seeks to see the secular nature of the U.S. government shift towards one governed by “Biblical law.” Pence’s association with this movement has led prominent voices in the media to accuse him of supporting a theocratic form of government.

Though many of the initial concerns about Pence revolved around his likely effects on domestic policy, much of his influence has instead been seen in foreign policy, including the administration’s Middle East policy. His public identification as a Christian Zionist and his speech to the 2017 CUFI summit, the first vice president to ever speak at the annual event, have led some to worry that the Christian Zionist view of prophecy is guiding Pence’s political actions.

Pence visits the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site in Jerusalem’s Old City, Jan. 23, 2018. Oded Balilty | AP

Following Pence’s first speech at CUFI, Daniel Hummel, a scholar and fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told the Washington Post:

Christian Zionism has a long history in American politics, but it has never captured the bully pulpit of the White House. Past administrations often used general biblical language in reference to Israel, but never has the evangelical theology of Christian Zionism been so close to the policymaking apparatus of the executive branch.

By identifying with Christian Zionism while in office, Pence risks the Trump administration’s ongoing search for an ‘ultimate deal’ to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and erodes the U.S.’ claim that it can be an ‘honest broker’ in the Middle East.”

Concerns that the U.S. is under the influence of extremist religious Zionism and Christian Zionism that would prevent the country from acting as an “honest broker” in the Israel-Palestine conflict have, unsurprisingly, been proven true. In fact, Pence’s religious beliefs are believed to have been a major factor in Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the U.S. Embassy to the contested city.

Though Mike Pence is the highest-ranking member of the Trump administration who is openly a Christian Zionist, it is Pompeo that is the most overt and open about how his religious beliefs regarding the end times guide his decision-making as head of the U.S. State Department.

For uch of his political career, Pompeo has framed U.S. counterterrorism policy as a “holy war” between Christianity and Islam, which he believes is the earthly equivalent of a cosmic battle between good and evil. In 2017, as CIA director, Pompeo claimed:

Radical Islamic terror [will] continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior [and] truly the only solution for our world.”

That same year, Pompeo created a new CIA “mission center” targeting Iran headed by Michael D’Andrea, whose CIA nickname is “The Prince of Darkness.” Pompeo, like many Christian Zionists, believes that war between the United States and Iran is part of the end times, a belief that is outright alarming given his prior control over CIA covert operations and his focus on Iran, as well as his current role as the U.S.’ chief diplomat, in which he has also been laser-focused on promoting an aggressive policy towards Iran.

In addition to his views on “holy war,” Pompeo also frequently discussed his views on the rapture while serving as CIA director. TYT reported last year that Pompeo had spoken about the rapture so frequently that it had reportedly frightened top CIA officials.

According to Michael Weinstein — founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group on issues of religious freedom in the military and intelligence community — who was quoted in the TYT report:

He [Pompeo] is intolerant of anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist Christian. The people that worked under him at the CIA that came to us were never confused — they never had time to be confused. They were shocked and then they were scared shitless.”

A 2015 video of Pompeo that surfaced while he was CIA director also shows the former congressman describing politicsas “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.”

More recently, a New York Times article published in March again brought Pompeo’s obsession with the end times back into public view. Titled “The Rapture and the Real World: Mike Pompeo Blends Beliefs and Policy,” the article detailed how Pompeo has made it standard operating procedure to mix his Christian Zionist views with his approach to foreign policy. That article also referenced the statement Pompeo made earlier this year, in which he opined that it was “certainly possible” that President Trump had been sent by God to “save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace.”

Pompeo made those statements during an official trip to Jerusalem that was also controversial for other reasons. Indeed, in a state department video shared on social media and meant to publicize Pompeo’s trip, footage of a model of the Third Jewish Temple was included while footage of the Al Aqsa mosque was notably excluded, despite it being the most iconic building in Jerusalem.

Given that Pompeo had also visited the tunnels that have worn away the historic mosque’s foundations, many Palestinians took the video as a sign that the Trump administration was colluding with the Temple Activist movement in Israel, which was discussed in detail in Part II of this series.

Joining forces to target Jerusalem

Well before Theodore Herzl founded political Zionism and published The Jewish State, Christian Zionists in the United States and England were already seeking to direct and influence the foreign policy of both nations in service of a religious obsession with ushering in the end times. The historical record clearly shows how Christian Zionists have influenced events throughout history, particularly in regard to the founding of the state of Israel and subsequent developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In the pursuit of these dispensationalist end-times prophecies, Christian Zionists have forged alliances with Jewish Zionists and each has opportunistically used the other in order to usher in the common events that are believed to facilitate the coming of their respective apocalypses or to aid more secular, political goals. From Hechler and Herzl, to Scofield and Untermeyer, to Begin and Falwell, these alliances have shaped the policy of Western governments, particularly the U.S. and England, for over a century.

Today, only one such prophecy has yet to be fulfilled, the construction of a Third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, which is currently occupied by the Al Aqsa mosque compound. Now, more than ever before, Israel’s government, as shown in Part II, is filled with high-ranking officials who openly call for Al Aqsa’s destruction and seek to hastily construct a Third Temple. Similarly, as this report has shown, the Trump administration is greatly influenced by Christian Zionists who also seek the mosque’s destruction, in hopes that the Third Temple will soon be built.

Yet, the Trump administration’s ties to this apocalyptic ideology go even deeper than has been discussed in this article, as many other influential members in the Trump administration — especially top Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman — also share and actively promote this extremist religious Zionist ideology that seeks to rebuild a Third Temple. As will be seen in the next installment of this series, this ideology is also a driving factor for top Trump and Republican Party donors such as Sheldon Adelson.

The end result is that the hold of this apocalyptic ideology on both the governments of Israel and the United States appears to be stronger now than ever, meaning that the danger currently facing Al Aqsa mosque, and with it world peace, looms large.

mintpressnews.com

Christian Zionism is not a religion per se, but rather a set of beliefs based on interpretations of specific parts of the Bible – notably the book of Revelations and parts of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Isaiah – that has made the return of the Jews to the Holy Land a precondition for the Second Coming of Christ. The belief that Israel is essential to the process has led to the fusion of Christianity with Zionism, hence the name of the movement. The political significance of this viewpoint is enormous, meaning that a large block of Christians promotes and votes for a non-reality based foreign policy based on a controversial interpretation of the Bible that it embraces with considerable passion.

It would be a mistake to dismiss CUFI as just another group of bible-thumpers whose brains have long since ceased to function when the subject is Israel. It claims to have seven million members and it serves as a mechanism for uniting evangelicals around the issue of Israel. Given its numbers alone and concentration is certain states, it therefore constitutes a formidable voting bloc that can be counted on to cast its ballots nearly 100% Republican, as long as the Republican in question is reliably pro-Israel. Beyond that, there are an estimated 60 million evangelical voters throughout the country and they will likely follow the lead of groups like CUFI and vote reflecting their religious beliefs, to include Trump’s highly visible support for the Jewish state.

Trump’s reelection campaign is reported to be already “…developing an aggressive, state-by-state plan to mobilize even more evangelical voters than supported him last time.” This will include, “voter registration drives at churches in battleground states such as Ohio, Nevada and Florida.” Without overwhelming evangelical support, Trump reelection in 2020 is unlikely, hence the dispatch of all available White House heavyweights to CUFI’s annual summit at the Washington Convention Center.

Though it is an organization that defines itself as Christian, CUFI makes no effort to support surviving Christian communities in the Middle East as most of them are hostile to Israel. The group also supports war against Iran as a precursor to total global conflict. Hagee has explained that “The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West… a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ.”

CUFI operates out of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio Texas. It was founded at the church in 2006 and is headed by John Hagee, a leading evangelical who has been courted both by the Trump Administration and by Israel itself, which presented him with a a Lear business yet complete with a crew so he would be able to do his proselytizing in some comfort. He frequently appears at commemorations in Israel, is a regular at the annual AIPAC meeting and has been a guest at the White House. He was present at the Trump administration’s ceremony last year when it moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem and gave a speech. He has said that “there has never been a more pro-Israeli president than Donald Trump.”

Present at the CUFI summit were Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and US negotiator in the Middle East Jason Greenblatt. Lest there be any confusion, the White House was represented by two Christian Zionists, two Jewish Zionists and John Bolton, who has been variously described. All five have been urging a military response against Iran for its alleged “aggression” in the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister also addressed the conference via videolink, with his similar “analysis” of the Iranian threat. There were also a number of Republican Senators present, to include Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Roy Blunt and Tim Scott.

The speeches were all pretty much the same but perhaps the most suggestive was the 2,000 word plus exhortation delivered by Pompeo. His presentation was entitled “The US and Israel: a Friendship for Freedom.” He asked, in a speech full of religious metaphors and biblical references, his audience to “compare Israel’s reverence for liberty with the restrictions on religious freedom facing Christians and people of all faiths throughout the rest of the Middle East,” where “if a Muslim leaves Islam it is considered an apostasy, and it is punishable indeed by death.”

Pompeo was more interested in stirring up his audience than he was in historical fact. He said “In Iraq, Syria, and other countries in the region, the last remnants of ancient Christian communities are at near-extinction because of persecution from ISIS and other malign actors. And just one example: before 2003, there were an estimated 1.5 million Christians living in Iraq. Today, sadly, almost a quarter of a million.”

Pompeo, whose grasp of current events appears to be a bit shaky, did not mention two of the principal reasons that Christianity has been declining in the region. First and foremost is the Iraq War, started by the United States for no good reason, which unleashed forces that led to the destruction of religious minorities. Second, he did not note the constant punishment delivered by Israel on the Palestinians, which has led to the departure of many Christians in that community. Nor did he say anything about the reverse of the coin, Syria, where Christians are well integrated and protected by the al-Assad government which Pompeo and Bolton are seeking to destroy to benefit Israel.

The Secretary of State also delivered the expected pitch for four more years of Donald Trump, saying “But thank God. Thank God we have a leader in President Trump – an immovable friend of Israel. His commitment, his commitment – President Trump’s commitment is the strongest in history, and it’s been one of the best parts of my job to turn that commitment into real action.”

But it has to be Pompeo’s conclusion that perhaps should be regarded as a joke, though it appears that no one in the audience was laughing. He said “Our country is intended to do all it can, in cooperating with other nations, to help create peace and preserve peace [throughout] the world. It is given to defend the spiritual values – the moral code – against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them.”

It was a reiteration of Pompeo’s earlier “America is a force for good” speech delivered in Cairo in January. Nobody believed it then and nobody believes it now, given what has been actually occurring over the past 18 years. It would be interesting to know if Pompeo himself actually thinks it to be true. If he does, he should be selling hot dogs from a food truck rather than presiding as Secretary of State.

So, the bottom line is that the Trump Administration pandering to Hagee and company is shameful. Christian Zionist involvement in American politics on behalf of the Washington’s relationship with Israel does not serve any conceivable US national interests unless one assumes that Israel and the United States are essentially the same polity, which is unsustainable. On the contrary, the Christian Zionist politicizing has been a major element in supporting the generally obtuse US foreign policy in the Middle East region and vis-à-vis other Muslim countries, a policy that has contributed to at least four wars while making the world a more dangerous place for all Americans. Christian Zionist promoted foreign policy serves a particularly narrowly construed parochial interest that, ironically, is intended to do whatever it takes to bring about the end of the world, possibly a victory for gentlemen like Pastor John Hagee if his interpretation of the bible is correct, but undeniably a disaster for the rest of us.