Zionism: Christian Zionism
by David Krusch
Excerpts from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/christian-zionism
Christian support for Israel is not a recent development. Its politcal roots reach as far back to the 1880s, when a man named William Hechler formed a committee of Christian Zionists to help move
Russian Jewish refugees to Palestine after a series of pogroms. In 1884, Hechler wrote a pamphlet called “The Restoration of Jews to Palestine According to the Prophets.” A few years later, he befriended
Theodor Herzl after reading Herzl’s book
The Jewish State, and joined Herzl to drum up support for
Zionism. Hechler even arranged a meeting between Herzl and Kaiser Wilhelm II to discuss Herzl’s proposal to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. The two men remained close friends up until Herzl’s death in 1904.
An important milestone in the history of Christian Zionism occurred in 1979, almost a century after William Hechler approached
Herzl and offered to mobilize Christian support for a Jewish state: the founding of the Moral Majority. Founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority was an organization made up of conservative Christian political action committees that succeeded in mobilizing like-minded individuals to register and vote for conservative candidates. With nearly six million members, it became a powerful voting bloc during the 1980s and was credited for giving
Ronald Reagan the winning edge in the 1980 elections. One of the Moral Majority’s four founding principles was “support for Israel and Jewish people everywhere.”
Christian Zionists, through their volunteer work, political support, and financial assistance to Israel and Jewish causes, have shown that they are stalwart friends of Israel. They have donated large sums of money to support Israel, including to charities that pay the costs of bringing
Jews from the former Soviet Union and
Ethiopia to Israel.
Despite their support for Israel, many Jews however, are uncomfortable with Christian Zionists. This discomfort is fed by
Christian anti-Semitism, Christian replacement theology, evangelical proselytizing, and and disagreements over domestic and political issues.
Dispensationalist Christianity, an interpretive or narrative framework for understanding the overall flow of the
Bible, teaches that Christianity did not replace
Judaism, but that it restored lost elements of it. The dispensationalist view of the
Bible is that the
Old Testament is foreshadowing for what will occur in the
New Testament and, at the end,
Jesus returns to reign on Earth after an epic battle between good and evil. Israel plays a central role in the dispensationalist view of the end of the world. The
establishment of Israel in 1948 was seen as a milestone to many dispensationalists on the path toward Jesus’ return. In their minds, now that the Jews again had regained their homeland, all Jews were able to return to Israel, just as had been prophesied in the Bible. As described in the
Book of Revelation, there is an epic battle that will take place in Israel after it is reestablished —
Armaggedon — in which it is prophesied that good will finally triumph over evil. However, in the process, two-thirds of the Jews in Israel die and the other third are converted to Christianity. Jesus then returns to Earth to rule for 1,000 years as king.
Aside from anti-Semitism and Christian replacement theology, many Jews are wary of the fact that many evangelical Christians simply want to convert them to Christianity or speed up the Second Coming of Christ.
Christian Zionists say Jews have no reason to distrust their motives for supporting Israel because they do not believe they can speed up the Second Coming of Christ. In the
Gospel of Matthew, it is written that Jesus said about his return, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only.”
Christian Zionists are also more conservative on Israel than many Jews. They favor Israel maintaining all of its
settlements in the
West Bank, and were opposed to the Israeli
disengagement from the
Gaza Strip. Some prominent Christian Zionists have been highly critical of Israeli government policy of giving over parts of Israel to the Palestinian people. Christian Zionists, like followers of the Israeli Right, believe that Israel should never cede any section of Israel to the Palestinians because Israel was given to the Jews by God. After former Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon implemented the disengagement plan from the
Gaza Strip and then fell ill a few months later, Pat Robertson claimed that his illness was divine retribution for giving up part of biblical Israel. When asked about Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert’s convergence plan to evacuate
settlements in the
West Bank, Robertson said, “It’s an absolute disaster...I don't think the holy God is going to be happy about someone giving up his land.”