Reflections From Chile: Day 3
Christian Zionism and Religious, Political and Economic
Fundmentalisms: A Palestinian-Latin American Conversation
November 7, 2022
As we moved deeper into the ways Christian Zionism impacts both Palestinians and Latin Americans, Mitri Raheb began our first session on “Christian Zionism and the Conservative Agenda.”
Because Christian Zionism comes in varying shades (for example, evangelicals think about it in ways that are different than how mainline denominations do), Raheb felt we need a different definition of Christian Zionism, one that equates Christian Zionism with the lobbies that are the driving force behind the commitment to Christian Zionism. For example, there are lobbies that support and push for Jewish settler colonialism on Palestinian land.
With this definition of Christian Zionism, it doesn’t look at what people believe (for example, the end times), but what they do with that believe, that is lobbying and gaining power for that belief. They see themselves as agents of a grand plan from which they read and interpret scripture and lobbying is the way to make it happen.
Following Raheb, Maria das Dores Campos Machado, Brazilian professor, researcher and author, continued the discussion by looking at Christian Zionism in Brazil as a case study. Internal factors leading to the rise of Christian Zionism included growth of Evangelicals in the Brazilian population; diffusion of Dispensationalism; and the growth of Evangelical representation in the Brazilian political sphere beginning in 1988.
External factors included political right-wing victory and growth, especially among Evangelicals; increase in American Evangelical missions and Christian Zionist organizations; the Netanyahu government’s promotion of Christian Zionism in Brazil and throughout Latin America; and growth of the right-wing in Israel, the election of Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Campos spoke about her two current research projects: analyzing books written by Evangelical authors and identifying contemporary Evangelical Zionist leaders in Brazil.
The final speaker this session, Yakov Rabkin, Jewish author, scholar and professor of Jewish History, reminded us that Christian Zionism is older than Zionism itself. And he told us that central to the concept of land is holiness, not the land itself. The “Jewish State,” and the “Land of Israel” are incorrect terms because they focus on the land rather than the holiness of the land.
Our concluding session for the day was entitled, “Scripture, Media and Politics.” The first speaker was Brazilian professor of communications and researcher, Magali da Cunha. Here research around fundamentalism and politics in Latin America identified key aspects of common ground between the two: class, race and gender. But the negative roll Christian Zionism takes especially focuses on women, giving them a secondary role. She added that in Brazil, Christian Zionism is especially bipolar, labeling the opposition as Communists and seeing the landscape as “us” versus “them,” because Christian Zionist see themselves as the elect, the chosen one.
Naderea Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s report focused on East Jerusalem, where she lives, and Silwan, just outside of the Old City. She described they ways that the Israeli government seizes land from Palestinians and gives it to settlers through discriminatory laws, seizure of trusts, sales without tender and questionable acquisitions. In Silwan itself there is more than seizures; sacralized violence is the dominant means of taking over land usually in the middle of the night when people are beaten, arrested and forcibly evicted from their homes.
Land zoning laws take lands away without explicit violence, with the zoning of East Jerusalem broken out this way:
35% expropriated for Israeli settlements
30% set aside as unplanned areas
22% green areas and public infrastructure
13% zoned for Palestinian construction
We finished this section listening to Hatem Bazian, Islamic scholar, professor of Islamic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder of American Muslims for Peace. He began by saying that there is another Zionism to be aware of: Muslim Zionism. He described Muslim Zionism as Muslims who are engaged in normalizing relations with Israel. There is no undergirding theology behind it. Central to Muslim Zionists is to blame the victims, Palestinians, as part of the justification for normalization.
