Christian or Zionist: You Cannot Be Both
In an interview with Conservative talk show host and podcaster, Tucker Carlson, the Republican Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz was asked to what extent the US state is influenced by foreign governments. The question was rhetorical as Carlson did not pause for an answer, arguing that he could name several foreign governments that have had influence over US policy, including China and the UK. He then got to the gist of his question, stating that there was only one for which you get called an antisemite for criticising it. This was an extraordinarily rare and provocative barb from someone who is a household name in America as well as a staunch Trump supporter for the best part of a decade, oft quoted, lampooned, reviled or revered. For Cruz, a veteran Republican for whom the prospect of a Trump presidency was once anathema, the question of foreign government influence was not directed at him alone, but by extension towards the President, whose decision to attack Iran, coupled with his staunch backing for Israel, was a stark reminder that American foreign policy was reverting from spurious isolationism to blatant interventionism. Trump’s 2024 campaign pledge to end endless wars had seismically drifted, his prospects of a Nobel Peace Prize dimming to a darkening glimmer on an ever-receding horizon over which the fog of war is drawing its bleak and ominous shadow. His about turn on Ukraine represents a similar shift, but the decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities while Israeli warplanes simultaneously struck military and civilian targets was by far the most overt reversion to hawkishness, mirroring the very Neocons MAGA had sought to replace. Talk of regime change was back in parlance, and this time it was Israel leading the charge, brazenly opening another front in what was in truth just a continuation of the endless ‘war on terror’ that began after, if not before, 911.
Cruz, peeved by Carlson’s impish presumption, went on to explain why he considered himself “the leading defender of Israel.” His reasoning he said, was not simply political but personal, grounded in his religious convictions as a Christian who went to Sunday school. He proceeded to paraphrase the Bible, saying “those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed” (the actual words being I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonours you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Gen 12-3). Seizing his moment to interject, Carlson asked Cruz whether he was referring specifically to the government of Israel. Cruz replied that it was not the government but the nation of Israel. Carlson proceeded to interrogate further, asking him where in the Bible he had read it. Cruz, despite his deep-seated faith and Christian upbringing, could not name the book from which the quote was taken. Caught on the backfoot, he explained that “as a Christian, growing up at Sunday School with the Bible, we [as if speaking for all Christians] are Biblically commanded to support Israel.” Carlson once again interjected and asked Cruz to define what he meant by Israel, as this was important in a “majority Christian country.” Cruz went on to state that “nations exist and He [God] is discussing a nation.” Carlson persisted, seeking clarity on whether Cruz was referring to ancient or modern Israel. Cruz replied that he was referring to the one that has existed for thousands of years, immediately qualifying his statement by conceding that there was a time when “Israel was not Israel” and then became Israel again. This same Israel, inherited from its ancient antecedent, is, Cruz contended, still the same “nation of Israel”, in other words that there is no intrinsic difference between the ancient and modern, the Biblical and the secular Israel. His loyalty is to both as they are essentially one and the same, the blessed land that if cursed will bring curses upon the curser. This idiosyncratically simplified version of history is not unique to Cruz but informs the policy and morality of both major political parties, a mindset that is deeply rooted in America’s own Biblical identity as God’s country, as a “city on the hill and a beacon unto the nations.” (Matthew 5:14-16).
There are multiple definitions of what Israel represents in both the Old And New Testaments. The first reference to Israel has nothing to do with a land, a nation, or a people. It occurs in Genesis, but relates to Jacob who, after wrestling with an angel in the form of a man, is considered worthy of the name.
Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”
Jacob, the son of Isaac and thus the grandchild of Abraham, inherited the name of Israel, meaning “one that struggled with the divine” and was blessed for his fortitude, courage and persistence. Thus, it is man blessed of God who first acquires the name long before it is assigned to the people of Israel, let alone to their land, which in the Biblical account was not originally called Israel but Canaan and whose inhabitants preceded the Israelites as the indigenous people of that region. The Israelites were migrants, exiled from Egypt, their covenant sealed in the desert and carried over to Canaan as the putative Promised Land.
In Deuteronomy 1:1, it is Moses who speaks of Israel, again not as a land, but of a people or tribe.
These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side of Jordan in the wilderness.
Moses himself never crossed into Canaan so the name refers to those he had gathered, the faithful people of the covenant. It is in Kings 15-1-2 that a reference to a monarch of Israel is made
In the twenty-seventh year of Jeroboam king of Israel, Azariah son of Amaziah king of Judah began to reign.
Whether this is indeed the land of Israel or simply the kingdom of Israel is debatable, and as the history of the kingdom unfolds, it becomes apparent that there were actually two kingdoms, that of Israel and that of Judah, the former being in the north (known also as Samaria), the latter in the south where Jerusalem is. Thus, even in the earliest known period of Israel’s existence, the conflation and concatenation of land, people, kingdom, nation and covenant is blurred, leaving the essence of what Israel is open to interpretation. When God blesses or curses Israel, it is certainly not simply as a nation, not even as a people, but of those who bear the ark of the covenant, those who live up to or fall foul of God’s grace and the spirit of the law. The tension and conflict between God and his Chosen is a persistent theme throughout the Old Testament. There is never a guarantee of power, security, or even of a homeland. The Israelites are punished for their sins as much as they are rewarded for their fealty, and sometimes faith alone is not enough. God’s ways are mysterious and often condemns the innocent while rewarding the wicked, if only in a worldly sense. The relative brevity of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah compared to the two thousand year exile are what make the yearning for the return to Jerusalem not just a characteristic of Judaism, but a quintessential element that is central to its doctrine. Yet the meaning of the exile and how it is meant to end is once again open to interpretation and, as a consequence, to distortion, fabrication and gross error and misinterpretation.
Exile is a form of nostalgia, and nostalgia is a form of spiritualised suffering, but if the exile lasts more than a thousand years, it becomes a kind of alternative homeland, a place where yearning feeds back on itself and creates a permanent state of aspiration coupled with a lachrymose legacy of despair that each generation inherits from the last. It replicates and relives the wandering in the wilderness, the Babylonian exile, the destruction of two temples, the tribulations of conquest, slavery and persecution. Yet out of that epic narrative, a certain constancy is created and what constitutes exile is really a kind of homemaking, the ghettos and shtetls of Europe where the Yiddish language and culture emerged and thrived, despite the fluctuations and vagaries of Jewish fortune. Identity, culture, language, music, poetry, prayer and Biblical exegesis all flourished within the cities, towns and villages where a folk community dwelt side by side with their hosts, albeit in a protracted tension that compounded the problem of mutual suspicion and periodic persecution. The Israeli writer, Shlomo Sand, who questions the very existence of an historical exile of the Jews given the lack of evidence and the rate of conversions, nonetheless describes the Yiddish-speaking culture of Europe as the true and authentic Jewish culture, far removed from its ancient Israelite origins yet retaining something of its spirit, and it is in the spiritual realm that there is something enduring and transcendent, portable and persistent beyond the transience of migration and of history itself. Tradition is both time-bound and time-defying, cutting along the grain of history to adapt, persist and transform itself. It does not need to return to a physical homeland to verify its validity. While such a return is prophesised in the teachings along with the apparition of a Messiah, that homecoming is primarily a spiritual revelation that in no way anticipates or demands a reconquest of territory. It is a passive response to a call from God’s messenger to regather and await God’s command. In the meantime, according to Orthodoxy, there can be no end to the exile. Israel, the people of the Covenant, are instructed to remain where they are, come what may. In some cases, as in the teachings of the Lurianic Kabbalah, God Himself is exiled from the world and, as in Gnosticism, utterly transcendent and separated from Creation. This is where Judaism and Christianity have much in common, despite critical differences in the understanding of the nature of the Messiah. But as a messianic figure, Jesus, or someone like him, is prefigured in the Old Testament as the suffering servant, the voice in the wilderness “despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah. 53:3). The rupture in the continuum between Old and New Testaments leads to the idea that Israel is not a single chosen people, born of a certain land, and united by an exclusive covenant, but of all the descendants of Abraham, who are not the biological, ethnic seed of Abraham but his spiritual descendants in whom the second Covenant with Christ is seen as a consummation, not a rejection, of the first.
It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. (Romans 9:6-8).
In other words, it is not the children by physical descent who are God’s children, but the kindred of the spirit who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring. To conflate this with a physical place, however sacred, is to mistake the letter for the law and the law for the spirit. Israel is therefore Jacob transfigured into the spiritual athlete, the man who wrestled with God and ascended the angelic ladder. Zionism, a modern, secular, atheist and nationalist movement with socialist and fascist characteristics is the absolute antithesis of this Israel. It hijacked elements of the Biblical narrative to justify its ethno-national colonial project, a project that began with settlement and rapidly led to war, displacement, internment, and finally to genocide.
Perhaps there is a cautionary tale to be told, one that connects this new Israel not to Jerusalem but to Salem, that other Israel settled by those other Israelites, the breakaway pilgrims who fled their Babylonian persecution in England to seek God’s country and establish a new covenant in a savage wilderness that had to be either converted or conquered. When Ted Cruz invokes his Sunday school teachings to justify his political convictions, a peculiar brand of Evangelism is wedded to a peculiar brand of Christian nationalism, a coupling that when wedded with Zionism enables a most peculiar form of self-delusion, the belief that God’s chosen is not just the people of Israel, but the people of the United States. It is a peculiar brand of exceptionalism that makes it possible to justify the worst of crimes under the veil of faith, a very peculiar faith in a very peculiar Judeo-Christian civilisation that makes of America an Israel and of Israel an America, preaching liberty with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, conflating Christ with Mammon while hellbent on the total elimination and extermination of the barbarians and savages in its midst. The mirror when reflected multiplies an image for eternity. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Yesterday it was Sitting Bull. Today it is Amalek. Tomorrow it could be you, your brother, or your neighbour.
Praise Jesus and Israel, and pass the ammunition!