In an article published yesterday, Sunday, Le Monde newspaper considered that the Republican candidate for the US presidential elections Donald Trump He changed his behavior and began to believe that Christians loved Israel more than the Jews themselves.
Professor at the universities of political science in France, Jean-Pierre Filho, said in an article in the newspaper that Trump has escalated his wave of accusations against his Jewish citizens of weak “loyalty” towards Israel and towards the Republican camp.
As his enthusiasm increased with the approach of the presidential elections scheduled for the fifth of next month, the hostility escalated in Trump’s speech, which did not exclude American Jews, saying that “they must undergo a mental examination” if they continued not to vote for him.
According to the article, more than three-quarters of American Jews cast their votes for the former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton In 2016 and for the current Democratic president joe biden In 2020.
Trump considers that what he did during his term from 2017 to 2021 was for the benefit of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahumust win him the unconditional support of American Jews.
Philo recalled an incident in 2019, when Trump called Netanyahu during a speech to Jewish Republicans the term “your prime minister,” but today he backed down from this enthusiasm, considering that “Christians love Israel more than the Jews.”
The long history of Christian Zionism
According to Trump, these “Christians” who support Israel, more than the Jews, participate in “Christian Zionism” that emerged in Anglo-Saxon Protestantism between 1840 and 1850, that is, half a century before true Jewish Zionism.
While Jewish Zionism seeks to build the Jewish people as a nation in the face of European anti-Semitism, Christian Zionism develops based on a so-called “evangelical” reading of the Old Testament, which is salvation for Christian believers, and depends, in this evangelical belief, on the “recovery” of the Jewish people, “the Land of Israel.” It is a “restoration” that constitutes a precondition for establishing the Kingdom of God, according to their belief.
The writer said that the city of Chicago hosted in 1890, 7 years before the founding conference of Jewish Zionism in Basel, a conference organized by an evangelical preacher calling for “returning Palestine to the Jews.”
Elected members of the evangelical movement support with the same enthusiasm the restrictions imposed between 1921 and 1924 on immigration, especially Jewish immigration, to the United States, and the establishment of a “national homeland for the Jewish people” in Palestine, which was under the British Mandate.
Philo believes that this Christian Zionism, which had already been strengthened by the creation of Israel in 1948, became more powerful after Israel's 1967 occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
American evangelicals see this occupation as a fulfillment of prophecies, while the Jewish community often remains committed to a negotiated settlement based on the principle of “land for peace.”
In contrast, Christian Zionists strongly reject any territorial concession, which in 1995 prompted Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli Prime Minister, engaged in a peace process with the Palestine Liberation Organization, to condemn “pressure in the US Congress against the democratically elected Israeli government.”
Shortly after, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish and Israeli extremist, and John Hagee, founder of the Christians United for Israel movement in Texas, considered him “an accelerant of biblical prophecy.”
Increasing violations of anti-Semitism
Netanyahu – who was in power in Israel from 1996 to 1999, then from 2009 to 2021, and again for nearly two years – relied in the United States on Christian Zionists rather than the Jewish community, which he considered very progressive and critical. In contrast, evangelical conservatives give him unconditional support because he is based on faith, not logic.
Such alliances culminated under the presidency of Trump, who between 2018 and 2019 implemented a series of steps that harmed international legitimacy in the region, but that were greatly appreciated by Netanyahu, namely:
- Moving the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (a measure followed only by Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea).
- The United States withdrew from the international agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, which effectively invalidated it.
- Suspending US funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
- Recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, occupied since 1967.
- Netanyahu named a new settlement in the Golan after “Trump.”
Since Trump left the White House in 2021, he has not stopped enhancing his conspiratorial rhetoric, to the point of making his Jewish compatriots responsible for his potential defeat in the upcoming elections, according to Filho.
However, the author adds, such serious deviations should not be surprising when we know the fate assigned to the Jews at the end of time according to the Christian Zionists (two-thirds of the Jews will be exterminated and only one third will be able to survive thanks to their conversion to Christianity).
Philo concludes his article by saying that these American fundamentalists literally see “Armageddon“The (final) apocalyptic confrontation in Megiddo, northwest of the Palestinian city of Jenin (northern Israel). Such prophecies therefore resonate in a particularly ominous manner in these times of electoral bidding in the United States and unbridled escalation in the region.