Debating Christian Zionism: A Dialogue Between Friends
AB: If I remember correctly, you do not consider the nation of Israel to be God’s people today. However, based on Jeremiah 31:35-37, the Bible tells me that they still are His people. I follow with great interest what is happening in and around Israel today.
JEA: No, I do not see the nation of Israel as God’s chosen people. Many biblical references support this conclusion, and the early church held the same view. The scholarship on this topic is extensive. Christian Zionism began to identify the nation of Israel as God’s people only after the establishment of Israel in 1948. Even Israeli historians, such as Benny Morris, have acknowledged that Israel had to expel the Palestinians for the Israeli nation to exist. Based on archival evidence, Morris wrote the following:
“A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.”
Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest?: An Interview with Benny Morris,” Counterpunch, January 16, 2004.
For scholarly materials, see the following studies:
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1998 (New York: Random House, 2011)
Norman Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into Martyrdom (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021); Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008)
Zeev Sternhell and David Maisel, The Founding Myths of Israel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)
Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008)
Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (New York: Random House, 2018)
Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2003)
Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Gershon Shafir, A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017)
Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012)
Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Marco Allegra and Ariel Handel (eds.), Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).
I went over these issues in the second volume of Christianity & Rabbinic Judaism.
https://youtu.be/yXuQeKiG188