Reflections from Chile: Day 4
Christian Zionism and Religious, Political and Economic Fundmentalisms: A Palestinian-Latin American Conversation
November 8, 2022
by Joe Roos
Today we concluded our exploration of Christian Zionism’s impact on both Palestine and Latin America with three sessions. Tomorrow will be devoted to strategies to challenge Christian Zionism and to end the oppression structures.
The first session, “The Weaponization of Sacred Texts,” examined the ways biblical texts have been used and abused by Zionists and Christian Zionists. Swiss Brazilian systematic theologian, author and postgraduate overseer of human rights and public policy, Rudof von Sinner, described the many ways biblical texts justified atrocities against marginalized people, both historically and contemporaneously, emphasizing how both Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro used religion to attack immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community.
Silvana Rabinovich, Mexican Jewish professor, author and biblical scholar, challenged the ways the Hebrew scriptures have been used by Israel to rationalize the war on Gaza, brutality against Palestinians, assassination of enemies, seizure of land and settler colonialism. As she put it, Israel has made “the Hebrew Bible a weapon of war where any text is a pretext.”
The second session, “The Weaponization of Anti-Semitism: a Critique of the IHRA Definition,” Yakov Rabkin and Gabriel Sivinian, Argentinian professor of sociology. Each traced anti-semitism down through the ages and agreed that the late 19th century into the early 20th century saw a resurgence. This revival was accompanied by the deepening of Eurocentrism, nationalism, colonialism and imperialism. With the increasing intensity of anti-semitism in the 1930s, especially in France and Germany and its culmination in the Holocaust, there needed to be a fundamental rejection of anti-semitism. But the recent IHRA definition of anti-semitism that includes any criticism of the Israel government is to be rejected as well. To criticize a country’s apartheid policies is very different than criticizing its religion or people as a whole.
The final session, “Arms and Surveillance Industry,” was moderated by Luciano Kovacs and led by Jude Lal Fernando, Sri Lankan theology professor at Trinity College in Scotland and Isabel Rikkers, Colombian anti-war worker with the BDS movement in that country.
Fenando laid political and conceptual groundwork by positioning Israel as a settler outpost for the Empire in the Arab world. The land is seen as a geopolitical location and military outpost. Latin American dictatorships and liberal democracies are seen in service of capitalist accumulation of resources and land is seen as an economic commodity, a banana plantation.
Theologically, Israel is seen as the Promised Land and the Empire as the Deliverer of God’s promise. In Latin America it is the will of God to develop the economy. The Israel’s occupy Palestinian land through militarization and turns its economy into a military industrial complex by which Israel lives. Israel field-tests the weapons it develops on the people of Palestine and sells them to Latin American countries, helping to train their militaries on tactics and uses for the weapons.
Rikkers expanded on the role of Israel’s cyber security technology and repression of the people of Latin America. Surveillance technology developed by Pegasus can even read cell phones and hack into them for the sake of so-called national security. The challenge is to confront the tools of militarism and cyber technology brought into Latin America by Israel. The BDS movement has created a campaign to do just that. The campaign can be found at https://bdsmovement.net/military-embargo.