Zionism, Dispensationalism, and the Gaza Hospital

On 17 October 2023, several hundred Palestinians died in Gaza's al-Ahli Hospital that was hit by either a bomb or missile. Israel blames Islamic Jihad which is another well known Islamist group within the spectrum of Palestinian Islamism.

The bulk of the world seems to accept that Israel was responsible and yet Tel Aviv insists that it was the Palestinians. And now the Biden administration has backed the Israeli line.

I see the Internet is abuzz with a simple question that has also been in my mind – do the Palestinians even possess rockets capable of such destruction? Most of their rockets are homemade and I'm not even sure the small number of Iranian and Syrian rockets would be powerful enough to generate that degree of destruction and death. It's a question that needs to be examined but instead it's mostly being ignored – at least in US media.

Israel for its part has already been caught lying and playing a game of deception. In war all sides lie, but the Israelis in particular exhibit a penchant for it. For its part, Al Jazeera is still bitter regarding the Israeli murder of one of its journalists – Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022. The pattern of deceit and denial on the part of Israel demonstrates a wanton disregard for truthfulness.

And even in recent days the Israelis have bombed refugee camps and continue to play a game of deceit with regard to evacuation orders. The IDF told Palestinians to move south as Israel was bombing in the north of Gaza – and then proceeded to bomb in the south.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken negotiated for the Egypt border crossing to be opened so people could flee and aid could get in to Gaza. Israel agreed – and then bombed the border crossing and has done so repeatedly.

It's hard not to be cynical with regard to Israeli statements. And these are only recent examples. The record and pattern extend for decades.

And as people protest Israel's multi-generational brutality and mass murder, such protestors are labeled as anti-Semitic and the campaign to shut down all dissidence has intensified. Indeed, Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (a child of Palestinian refugees) is now being targeted by the GOP for her denunciations of Israel.

The protests (generally speaking) are not anti-Semitic but express an outrage over not just Israel's brutality and policy of attrition but the terrible double-standard, the hypocrisy the flows from the Zionist state and its Western backers. If other nations behaved the same way it would not be tolerated but Israel gets a special pass and even its myriad war crimes are glossed over.

Consider this video (one of many such examples) – an Orthodox rabbi who declares he's a Jew but anti-Israel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2H-F0HVKDY

He even wears a badge with the Israeli flag crossed out. Note what he says – theologically, the Zionist state has no basis to claim that land. Their claims are not in accord with the Abrahamic Covenant. As Christians we would agree but for different reasons. In his case, it's simple. God took the land away from them, sent them to exile and apart from prophetic revelation they have no right to re-claim it. On a political level he rightly identifies Zionism as a nationalist movement that brutally conquered that land and has no legitimate claim to it.

We might add that while Zionism originally expressed a form of nationalism – which is always repugnant in every context, the Likud regime which has dominated Israeli politics for forty years is basically fascistic – the outgrowth of the Irgun and Lehi paramilitaries (or terrorists as the British reckoned them). Their policies are racially motivated and the members of these groups have been involved in massacres and assassination plots. Later respectable politicians, they have lived by a creed of consequentialism – the end justifies the means. For them the nationalist interests of the Zionist state are the ultimate good or end and thus it is permissible to do virtually anything in order to attain that goal.

As the rabbi would certainly argue – this is not Judaism, this is not submission to the will of God and his commands.

Judaism does not worship Jehovah the God of Scripture. He is only known through Christ and as such they worship a false god – a counterfeit. This does not mean we wish to persecute Jews. Christians only fell into that error with the advent of the Constantinian heresy. Today's Christian Zionism (usually motivated by Dispensational Theology) is no remedy, no corrective. It is the result of a Judaized hermeneutic and theological system that is close cousin to the errors condemned in books such as Galatians and Hebrews.

Christians should not stand with Zionist Israel. Knowing the history, we understand how and why it came about – but we don't support it. Neither do we support Hamas. We reject the false binaries imposed on us by the world and the various political factions vying for control of the narrative. We must condemn the slaughter committed by Hamas earlier this month but at the same time we can without reserve condemn the policies and specific actions of the Israeli state.

And we must condemn the Christians who would ally with it and sanctify its crimes.

As such, those Christians (especially in America) who would retain New Testament doctrine and ethics are (at this point in time) an extreme minority – even a remnant. There are others who back the Zionist state on the basis of political or liberal ideological motivations. We must also reject this thinking though it is not as immediately dangerous to the Church as is the Dispensational model which literally eggs on the radical Zionist elements, all but sanctifying their slaughter and proliferation of bloodshed.