Tensions have escalated. A “swirling array of conflicts are currently raging across Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Rarely in recent years has violence erupted in all of these places at the same time.” reports the BBC.
A week ago, the fear that Palestinians in east Jerusalem might be evicted to make way for Jewish settlers, coupled with repeated raids by Israeli security forces on the area surrounding Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, galvanised opinion among Israeli Arabs and triggered waves of rocket attacks by Hamas.
Paul Adams, BBC News Correspondent
Long-simmering resentments among Israel’s Arab minority exploded in several of the country’s mixed cities. Violent gangs, Jewish and Arab, exploited the tension.
By Friday, the violence had circled back to the West Bank where the death toll in clashes with the Israeli army has crept up.
Jerusalem, land rights, holy places and decades of unresolved conflict: this week’s spasm of violence has highlighted them all.
Another perspicacious reporter put it as such:
“Objective allies” generally don’t even talk to each other. They don’t have common values, their ultimate goals may be completely incompatible, they often hate each other. But they share some intermediate goal, and are clever enough to realise they can both get what they want by acting together in certain ways.
Gwynne Dyer, London-based independent journalist
Sometimes those ways may even involve shooting at each other, but if acting that way brings a result that serves their various purposes, they are still objective allies. So Benjamin Netanyahu, still prime minister of Israel despite his parlous political position, and Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian organisation that controls the Gaza Strip, are objective allies.
Her analysis is so spot-on:
Consider Netanyahu’s position. For the fourth time in a row, he has just failed to get an election outcome that will let him create and lead a coalition government. He is on trial on serious corruption charges, and may go to jail if he does not remain prime minister.
The opposition parties that want to see Netanyahu gone now have a month to try to make a different coalition that excludes him, but they have a problem. The electoral arithmetic means that their coalition must contain the United Arab List, or UAL, one of the parties that represent Israel’s 20 per cent minority of Arab citizens.
No Arab party has ever been part of an Israeli government before, so putting this coalition together was already quite tricky. Doing it while Israelis and Palestinians are killing each other is impossible. UAL chairman Mansour Abbas has already suspended the talks with his potential Jewish coalition partners.
If these Coalition talks fail, Israel will have to have another election (the fifth in 30 months) next autumn. Netanyahu will remain prime minister in the meantime, and will then have another, fifth chance to get a durable right-wing majority coalition that will pass legislation safeguarding him from further prosecution.
I can’t read Netanyahu’s mind, but if he were a ruthlessly self-serving politician he would certainly find this little war politically useful. How about his alleged “objective ally”, Hamas?
Hamas needs a war right now less than Netanyahu does, but it’s always up for one. Its business model is perpetual rejection of peace with Israel, in the expectation that divine intervention will one day deliver total victory and eliminate the Jewish state.
Hamas is therefore in permanent competition with Fatah, the rival Palestinian political movement that accepted the (now moribund) “two-state solution” which envisaged Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side. A little war with Israel now and then is good for Hamas’s image.
The Hamas-Netanyahu “objective alliance” is based on the fact that Netanyahu hates the idea of a two-state solution just as much as Hamas does. Indeed, they began by strangling that deal together in 1995-96, and most of the shooting since has been about keeping it dead.
The deal came out of the Oslo Accord of 1992, in which Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat agreed to move towards two parallel states living in peace.
Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish right-wing extremist, but everybody expected his successor, Shimon Peres, to win the 1996 election on a sympathy vote and go through with the Oslo deal. Instead, Hamas went on a terrorist spree, bombing buses in Israel to cause maximum casualties, in order to drive Israeli voters into the arms of the anti-Oslo Accords nationalist right instead.
It succeeded, and the right-wing candidate, ex-commando Binyamin Netanyahu, became prime minister instead and sabotaged the “peace process”. It was never very likely to succeed, but Hamas and Netanyahu both act as objective allies whenever the corpse of the two-state solution threatens to rise from its shallow grave.
What then, is the Reformed Christian view?
I found this solidly biblical article which I whole-heartedly agree with.
Christian Zionism is a political theology with 19th-century roots. It took on its full form following the birth of modern Israel in 1948. It is a political theology because modern Israel, in this view, is not like other countries: it is the outworking of God’s plan foretold in the Scriptures, and therefore modern Israel’s political fortunes have profound theological and spiritual consequences.
– By Rev Dr Prof Gary M. Burge. Burge joined the faculty of Calvin Theological Seminary in 2017 after teaching at Wheaton College for 25 years. .
The church in America today is awash with this sort of thinking. Books and sermons spin a dramatic picture of how the world is coming to an end, how God has a plan centered on modern Israel, and how God’s promises cannot be stopped despite what the nations think.
This interpretation means Christians have a spiritual obligation to pray for modern Israel and petition their governments to protect Israel; failure to support Israel’s political survival will incur divine judgment. Israel has taken on a mythological status. In the U.S., it is often linked with American prosperity, exceptionalism, and patriotism.
The spiritual root of Christian Zionism is dispensationalism, whose themes have fully permeated many American churches. Dispensationalism was born in the 1800s as an attempt to divide human history into a series of seven biblical categories (or dispensations) of time: the eras of Adam, of Noah, and others. Pro-Israel zealots today are known as Christian Zionists.
As a Reformed theologian, I am at odds with this sort of thinking. Reformed theology has generally understood humanity’s calling to be one of transforming the world, not separating from it, and bringing God’s good things to bear on the things of this world.
The Reformed tradition has always resisted the call of Christian Zionism, and with today’s pressure to wed your spirituality to your politics, it is increasingly important to know what to believe. Let me outline a few differences between Reformed theology and Christian Zionism.
Christian Zionism takes the land promises of God in Genesis 12, 15, and 17 and applies them to the modern state of Israel. To Christian Zionists, this promise of land inheritance is permanent and unconditional. Therefore, despite Israel’s own declared intention of being a secular state (and despite Israelis’ low religious participation), modern Israel still benefits from a 4,000-year-old promise. For Zionists, the Abrahamic covenant is still active regardless of whether Israelis believe in God or not. In the Christian Zionist view—and this is key—the covenant of Christ does not replace or supplant the Jewish covenants.
Reformed theologians believe something decisive happened in Christ. His covenant affected not simply the covenant of Moses, making a new and timeless form of salvation, but also every other Jewish covenant, including Abraham’s covenant. Christ fulfills the expectations of Jewish covenant life and renews the people of God rooted in the Old Testament and Judaism. Thus, Jesus is the new temple, the new Israel. Christ is the locus of the promise of land! The promises to Abraham have been realized in Christ. He holds everything Judaism desired, and knowing him gains access to such promises.
More details from Dr Gary Burge as below:
Israel, Prophecy, and Nationhood
In Christian Zionism, 1948 is not simply a political marker in history. It is a theological marker. Israel has been restored to the land in fulfillment of prophecy, Zionists say. Therefore, the establishment of modern Israel is a theologically ordained event deserving of profound Christian respect and awe.
Reformed theologians also affirm Israel’s right to exist, but they are skeptical about Israel’s theological claim to own the Holy Land. They point to countless times when Christians used ancient prophetic texts to interpret contemporary times with bad results. They also note that any biblical claim to nationhood must also incorporate biblical expectations of nation-building—expectations that aren’t now being met.
The promise of land always comes with covenant expectations for religious life and for justice, themes echoed regularly by the prophets. Modern Israel began as a secular state. It does not reflect ancient Israel’s religious or moral national aspirations as described in Scripture, and it has made choices regarding the Palestinians living within its borders that would inspire harsh criticism from Old Testament prophets such as Amos or Isaiah.
For all these reasons, Reformed theologians do not see commitment to Israel as a spiritual imperative. They are moved more by ethics than eschatology when considering any country, because no one country now enjoys a preferential place in God’s economy.
History Is Coming to Its Close
Christian Zionists think Israel’s national birth is the key prophetic fulfillment in counting down the end of history. They believe Israel’s return fits with what else is happening in the world: moral values are in decline, an ecological crisis is looming with our oil-based economy in peril, and most importantly, there is war in the Middle East, all leading to widespread agreement among Zionists that history is reaching its end. All of this, they claim, was prophesied in Scripture.
Reformed theologians are not so catastrophic, not so sure these pronouncements are true, and they have always called for sober judgment. They worry Christian Zionists have let their zeal for prophecy and history’s end drown out other, more primary Christian values.
Our chief complaint is how a desire for the end times has shaped the ethics of Christian Zionists. Building the kingdom of God has become secondary to building the kingdom of Israel. Passion for seeing Christ’s second coming now comes before a passion for justice and fairness. When presented with the remarkable suffering of 4 million Palestinians living under harsh military occupation, Zionists typically stand unmoved. Negotiations that might return land to Palestinian owners are deemed to be against God’s will. Some Zionist pastors have even written that natural disasters hitting the United States and killing thousands are God’s punishment for political pressure put on Israel. It is this sort of theological confusion that stuns Reformed theologians.
Jesus’ Second Coming
This is the crown jewel of Christian Zionism. The birth of Israel has set the stage for the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ. Therefore, Zionists claim, any national agenda that would impede God’s plan, any peace plan that weakens Israel’s hold on the land, or any decision that stands in the way of this dramatic stage-setting is not a plan blessed by God.
Reformed theologians believe in the second coming too. But the chief difference is that Reformed theologians make profound investments in the world. We are not sectarian. We devote ourselves to promoting Christ’s commitments here and now. We do not despair about the course of the world, and we refuse to abandon it. We still build schools and hospitals and speak to injustice and poverty.
This is my ultimate concern: Christian Zionists believe in Jesus, but I wonder if they have lost the gospel. They have uncritically wed our faith to the politics of one nation, and this, as the church has learned so many times, is a prescription for disaster.
My Personal Thoughts
There has been so much evil committed by the secular state of Israel and its military that it would be foolish at best and wicked at worst to align our prayers with it. Instead, as Christians, we pray for and work towards justice and peace (that in all fairness will only come perfectly on the final day when Christ returns). Of course, the systemically disenfranchised Palestinians and their rebel military fighting back is a second wrong that does not add up to a right, but to align ourselves as Christians to political Israel today is to be utterly misguided.
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