An article that I recently wrote for my congregation's newsletter:

"My educated guess is that, when you listen to the news and hear about violence in the Holy Land, you will have an image in your mind of a democratic, pro-western State of Israel, a pre-dominantly Jewish state, that is surrounded on three sides by hostile, savage Arab nations, nations that have made it their first and foremost political goal to kill all Jews and destroy the Jewish state. This image would not be surprising, given that that is what the press keeps suggesting to us.

I also suspect that you may feel emotionally and culturally closer to the Jewish citizens of Israel than to their Arab neighbors, for our culture seems to have a deep-rooted image of Arabs and Muslims as intolerant fanatics, polygamist, anti-western, and anti-feminist. These feelings would not be surprising, since they are fairly widespread in US society and culture.
I further suspect that you may see the state of Israel and the natural ally of the United States in the Middle East, a bulwark against both Islamic terrorism and anti-democratic monarchies. This view of the State of Israel would be not surprising either, since it is strongly promoted by the U.S. press and by the pro-Israel lobby.

Finally, you may also share the view that the Jews deserve the State of Israel — not only as a safe-haven after the horror of the holocaust — but also because God has given the “land of milk and honey” as a promised land to the persecuted descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Jews. If you, indeed, believe this, you are not alone, for this view is shared by about one third of Americans.

This month, from November 6 through 22, I will be travelling to the Holy Land, to study the political situation on the ground first-hand. My tour guides, however, will not be regular official Jewish tourism guides supplied by the Jewish state, but a group of Christian Palestinians who have founded an educational theological institute by the name of Sabeel (Arabic for “the way”).

For me, this tour will be a re-visit to a place that I once knew very well, at least so I believed. In 1985-86, I had the opportunity to study for one year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem as part of an exchange program for German students of Protestant theology. At that time, I was nearly completely immersed into Jewish culture: I communicated speaking Hebrew, I lived in a Jewish student dorm, later in a nearby apartment which I shared with two Jewish Israeli students. I attended synagogue services on Friday night or Saturday morning (in addition to worship services at the Lutheran Church in Jerusalem on Sundays). I went on hikes with fellow Jewish students, bought groceries in Jewish supermarkets, and went out to watch movies in Hebrew-language movie theaters. Needless to say, I shared many of the implicit political assumptions and cultural stereotypes of my fellow Jewish students —assumptions such as that there is no Palestinian people, that the Jewish settlers cultivates a barren, swampy, deserted land, and that the Israelis were forced to defend themselves against a brutal gang of terrorists.

It has taken me many years to challenge these views that I once shared. I have begun to see them as elements of a racist and self-serving ideology of a land-hungry Israeli state.

The State of Israel, indeed, started out as a relatively powerless refuge for Holocaust survivors. But the first Jewish settlers did not come to a barren, empty land. They came to an area that had been populated by a native people that had settled there for many, many centuries. Often, Palestinian families are able to trace their roots back to the time of the crusaders and beyond. Whatever its small, powerless beginnings were, today the Jewish state is a powerful state, and nuclear power, a state that has tremendous scientific, monetary, and military resources at its disposal.

In 1968, the State of Israel made the mistake to conquer large swats of Palestinian-populated land and not to return that land after the initial conquest. Instead, in the forty years that have since passed, Jewish settlers have stolen more and more swats of land from their rightful Palestinian owners. Instead of returning the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, the State of Israel has annexed more and more lands—all under the pretext of safety, security, and protection from terrorism.

True, there are Palestinian suicide terrorists that have entered Jewish areas and blown up themselves and innocent bystanders. But would this violence be so attractive to young Palestinians, if they actually were allowed to govern their own affairs in their own land? Would young people resort to terrorism, if they State of Israel had been willing to return the property that they had confiscated in 1948 or the territories it had stolen in 1968?

And why is it that we — the most powerful nation on earth — so actively support the Jewish state? Part of the answer lies in the rise of a particular brand of Christian fundamentalism called “Christian Zionism.” This brand of apocalyptic theology is very wide-spread among U.S. fundamentalists; and those fundamentalist do not object when their theology is used by U.S. politicians to further their political agenda. Politicians have learnt that they can easily mobilize Christian Zionists as a powerful voting bloc.

Christian Zionists believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible. They believe that the promises given to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, have lost none of their validity, even after the coming of Jesus.

Two Old Testament verses, in particular, are often quoted by Christian Zionists: Joel 3:2 (“I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the valley of Jehoshaphat, and I will enter into judgment with them there, on account of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations. They have divided my land.”) and Genesis 12:3 (“I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”).

Christian Zionists interpret these two verses to mean that we Christians will perish in God’s final judgment, if we do not actively seek to aid God’s chosen people, the Jews, if we do not actively seek to help them return to Zion, that is, the Jewish State of Israel.

This interpretation is a heresy in the mind of most Lutheran theologians, including many of our bishops. As Lutherans, we read the entire Bible through the lens of the Bible’s central event, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We believe that, at the end of time, God will be all-in-all. Christian Zionists, on the other hand, believe in several “dispensations,” i.e. eras of world history. First, they say, God created the era of Israel, then came the era of the Christian church (to bring all nations to God), but in the end, the church will be replaced by the era of Israel again. Once all Jews will have returned to Zion, there won’t be any need anymore for Jesus Christ and the Christian Church.

Again, in the mind of many respectable theologians, this kind of theology is heretic; it stands contrary to everything that we believe in and confess.
To us, Jesus is the source of salvation, the Savior, for all who believe in him, not a military general who will lead the armies of the end-time in a bloody battle at Armageddon. Jesus is the prince of peace, not the promoter of endless blood-shed. As Lutheran bishop Mounib Younan said so pointedly, “My Jesus is never the Jesus of the sword. My Jesus is the Jesus of the cross.”

Martin Luther’s chief insight was that Christian faith is founded on the love of God in Christ Jesus, rather than on the fear of God’s curse. Luther once, wrote “A theologian of glory calls evil good, and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.” When we encounter a theological system that does not care about the lives of real people living in the Holy Land, one that treats all of them — Jews, Christians, Muslims — as pawns in an end-times drama, it needs to be called what it is. Christian Zionism is a theology of glory that anticipates the destruction of all people who do not adhere to its ideology. Christian Zionism is not a vision of hope, but a vision of injustice.

I hope that this introduction to Christian Zionism was not too long or too abstract for your taste. I decided to write this article, because I believe that as Lutherans we have to know what is driving so many of our fundamentalist American Christian brothers and sisters and why they so ardently and uncritically support the settlement policies of the State of Israel and why they so vehemently oppose efforts at peace and reconciliation in the Middle East.

Please keep me in your thoughts and prayers while I am travelling and visiting sites of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948 by Israeli soldiers, Palestinian refuge camps in the occupied West Bank territories, as well as sites of Jesus’ ministry.

Peace, Shalom, Salaam
Pr. Gabriele"