THE ANTI-ZIONISM COCKTAIL
It sounds like the setup for one of those jokes: a Muslim cleric, a Christian priest, and a Columbia University professor walk into a bar. All three, who ostensibly have nothing else in common, order the same drink. Islam’s alcohol prohibition does not apply since the cocktail they share is purely ideological. It’s called Anti-Zionism.
There’s no punchline. It’s not a joke.
In a previous article Three Frogs, I distinguished between three related anti-Jewish agendas. Antisemitism, anti-Judaism, and anti-Zionism. Each one shares a lot of overlap with the others, but they are not identical. Antisemitism is a philosophy that demonizes the people of Israel; anti-Judaism rejects or supplants the scriptures of Israel (Old Testament), and anti-Zionism rejects the idea that the Jewish people have a historical, religious, and cultural connection to the holy land and any biblical or political right to national self-determination there.
Antisemitism: Against the people of Israel
Anti-Judaism: Against the scriptures of Israel
Anti-Zionism: Against the land of Israel
In this article, I want to focus on anti-Zionism and see if we can figure out the recipe for that popular cocktail.
Muslim Anti-Zionism
The Muslim worldview and Islam’s theological self-understanding assumes a posture of Anti-Zionism. It’s a deeply embedded assumption. The Muslim world possesses a firm conviction that Islamic land, once conquered, belongs to Allah forever. We can call it the Caliphate-eschatology. Picture a global Muslim Kingdom, ever-expanding, ever-growing, never diminishing, until it controls the entire world. It’s a striving toward the kingdom, albeit, a false version of the kingdom.
The Holy Land has been a central battlefield in that objective for over 1000 years. Secular Westerners maybe don’t remember this or see the connection, but the Muslim world (particularly Arab Islam) has never forgotten the crusades. It has never forgotten that control of the Holy Land was the point of contention between Islam and the Western World, going back to the first crusade which launched, in large measure, as a reaction to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and the desecration of the Tomb of Christ and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Islam’s war with the West and with Christianity has, ever since then, focused on this piece of land. Secular Westerners have no memory of this. They have bought into the idea that the current turmoil concerns only the status of Palestinian refugees and the sins of European Colonialism, but that’s a smokescreen. It’s a ruse. A distraction.
This current phase of the war began when the Ottomans lost Jerusalem in 1917. The subsequent formation of a Western Jewish Nation in the land of Israel (1948) added insult to injury. What’s even worse, the humiliating (and repeated) defeat of Allah’s armies at the hand of the Jewish state created an insult to dignity for which eastern honor culture demands recompense. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of control over the Holy Land to the Muslim consciousness today.
Muslim anti-Zionism is a matter of honor and shame, and it’s a matter of loyalty to Allah. It’s a cornerstone to the eschatology of Islam which envisions a universal caliphate, a new world order, united under the Koran. The existence of the Jewish state in the land of Israel defies the expectations of an ever-expanding kingdom of Allah.
Secular Anti-Zionism
During World War II, the Nazis tried to establish a 1000-year false kingdom as well: the Third Reich. The Middle East got involved. Iraq, Iran, and the Arabs living under British Mandate Palestine allied with the Nazis. They soaked up all that vitriolic Jew-hating Nazi propaganda, translated it to Arabic, and circulated it widely.
But the more insipid source of globalist anti-Zionism comes not from the Nazis but from the Cold War. The progressive globalist ideology of atheism, agnosticism, and secular-humanism all spring from the anti-God agenda advanced by Communist propaganda, particularly from the Soviet Union.
Israel was a problem for the Soviet dream of a global kingdom of communist comrades because Israel allied with the United States and created a beachhead of Westernism. After the failures of Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, the Soviets pivoted to a new strategy. Following standard procedure which had already proven effective elsewhere, the KGB launched a so-called “liberation organization” to destabilize the government: the Palestinian Liberation Organization. They poured enormous resources into controlling the UN on this issue (while former-Nazi, Kurt Waldheim held the position of Secretary General). Soviet propaganda demonized the term Zionism and seeded anti-Zionist propaganda into Western education. Those efforts bore fruit and, by the 1990s, began to dominate the international narrative. That’s how a terrorist, Yassir Arafat, received a Nobel Peace Prize.
Russia already had a rich history of anti-Zionist conspiracy theories from the era of the Romanov dynasty, the era of the pogroms, and the antisemitism of the Orthodox Church. The anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was originally written and circulated in Czarist Russia. The Protocols falsely claimed to reveal a Jewish/Zionist plot for global domination through finance, media, revolution, and moral decay—essentially the blueprint for modern antisemitic conspiracy thinking. (Ironically, that’s the blueprint for communist efforts to destabilize foreign nations and bring about the Marxist dream of a new world order.)
Soviet influence, with its anti-Western dogmas, inserted an almost religious fervor into its anti-Zionism through its various spheres of influence. It’s no coincidence that wherever anti-Western ideology now flourishes, so does anti-Zionism.
That propaganda outlived the Soviet Union. It still exists as a self-replicating virus, now funded by the deep pockets of wealthy Arab nations that finance universities and set the agenda in classrooms, curriculum, and student movements. (It also dominates online discourse through means of deliberate manipulation.) This means that almost everyone who received a four-year degree in the last two generations has been indoctrinated with anti-Zionism. That includes the teachers, the media, the politicians, and the thought leaders.
So anti-Zionism is a Globalist issue, originally spawned by Russian propaganda, now fueled on Middle East oil and self-replication. It’s become part of the eschatology of liberal progressivism and the anti-God agenda of a new world order (a false kingdom), united under collectivism, secularism, and atheism.
Christian Anti-Zionism
Anti-Zionism is also part of the broad theological consensus the church shares regarding Supersessionism and Replacement Theology. This hardly needs stating. Supersessionism and replacement theology teach that the Jewish exile from the land of Israel proves that God has superseded the old covenant and replaced Israel.
From the perspective of replacement theology, the land of Israel foreshadowed the church but no longer plays a role in heaven’s economy. The Bible’s many promises about the restoration of Jewish sovereignty and a Davidic kingdom are not meant literally. There is no future restoration of the land or the nation. God’s covenant promises with Israel have been superseded by the new covenant. The Jewish people have been replaced by the Christians. The land of Israel has been replaced by the church (or just by going to heaven).
The return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel challenges that interpretive paradigm. Having a real Israel back in the land of Israel is enormously problematic for “Spiritual Israel” and replacement theology. So outside of some Evangelicals and Dispensationalists, the world’s one billion Christians are not too keen on the idea of Jews being back in the promised land.
Anti-Zionism finds a familiar home in the church because a Jew-free promised land is central to the eschatology of amillennialism, to the spiritualization of God’s promises, and to the fundamental narrative of replacement theology. A literal Jewish presence in the land of Israel destabilizes the idea that the church is the real kingdom.
The Recipe for the Cocktail
Here’s a very simple recipe for popular cocktail everyone seems to be ordering: one shot supersessionism, two shots replacement theology thoroughly mixed with aspirations for global domination and served with the blood of the martyrs.
Consider the relationship between Muslim anti-Zionism, Secular anti-Zionism, and Christian anti-Zionism. On the surface, all three seem independent and unrelated. They are competing ideas. But all three share one common origin in replacement theology.
Islam originally entered the world as an apostate offshoot of a Byzantine Era sect of Christianity. It inherited Byzantine Christian replacement theology as a baseline assumption.
Atheist Soviet propaganda repurposed the anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism espoused by the Orthodox Church and circulated in the tumultuous Romanov Era.
Christian anti-Zionism results from the natural and logical conclusion of the theological consensus that the church replaces Israel as the new people of God and the conviction that the church is the kingdom.
It’s really about the coming kingdom. Whether we are talking about the Church’s amillennialism and realized eschatology, Islam’s aspirations toward a universal Caliphate, Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year Nazi Reich, or the Marxist utopia under a new world order, everyone is trying to establish a competing version of the kingdom. The return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel threatens all those fantasies with the real possibility that the God of Israel is still in business and intends to bring about his version of the kingdom after all.
Enjoy the drinks boys. It’s almost time to pay the tab.
Daniel Thomas Lancaster is a writer, teacher, and the Director of Education for the Messianic ministry First Fruits of Zion (www.ffoz.org), an international organization bringing Messianic Jewish teaching to Christians and Jews. He is the author of several books about the Jewish roots of Christianity, the Jewishness of the New Testament, and he is the author of the Torah Club Bible study program (www.torahclub.org). He also serves as the teaching pastor at Beth Immanuel (www.bethimmanuel.org), a Messianic Jewish synagogue in Hudson, Wisconsin.