This is a warning: our new ambassador to Israel will be one-time presidential Republican candidate, Mike Huckabee, an avowed Christian Zionist, along with roughly 10 million other Americans. Once asked what he thought of an independent Palestinian state, his forthright answer? There is no such thing as a Palestinian, since their country never existed in the first place! It is not a stretch of the imagination to read between his lines: the world would be better off, not only without their existence, but also their very memory.
His take on a Christian brand of Zionism originated in evangelical circles in the early 1970s, fueled by the vastly popular, however much bizarre, prophecy of a certain Hal Lindsey, under the catchy title “The Late Great Planet Earth” (1970). By 1990, it had sold no less than 28 million copies. It is the bible of the CZs. No matter that he foretold the end of secular civilization and the concomitant Second Coming (of Christ) to be 40 years after the start of the occupation of Israel, 1948, which brought us to 1988, 36 years later and counting.
Notwithstanding this literalistic folly, CZs hold firmly to the conviction that the day of fulfillment is drawing nearer. What the sequence of events will be, needs a full length book, (don’t you know), but, in a nutshell, the shorter version is this:
First of all, Israel will come to have complete reign of what they describe as “Greater Israel”: Gaza, West Bank, and beyond. Only Jews will inhabit the land of Jesus’ birth. All others will have either left-and been rendered nomadic; or stayed and been annihilated.
This purified state will then trigger the heavens to prepare Jesus to return, first to Jerusalem, there to battle any and all opposed to his reign, beginning with the Jews themselves, never minding that he himself was a peasant Jew by birth! Now, for God to be fair, anyone who then sincerely converts will be “saved,” but only a predetermined percentage of Jews will qualify. Those who did not confess that “Jesus is Lord” will suffer the fate of all those deluded Palestinians, whom Israel had exiled.
Finally, this apocalypse will expand worldwide, with the true believers, CZs of course, and new believers, still standing, culminating in a new world order, under the returned reign of this eternal Jesus. What makes this sickeningly laughable is that Huckabee’s belief spells the extermination of the very people he now so lavishly praises. On the other hand, Jewish Zionists see an unguarded open gate to execute the genocide they have long hoped for, of Christians still left in Palestine, Muslims, et. al. (Note: there still are a few Samaritan villages to be erased).
Each side devoted to its own cause, passionately believing their measures to be just and necessary to achieve their version of world peace. As Bob Dylan’s anti-war song haunts us: “For you don’t count the dead, when God’s on your side.” Lord, deliver us from every Zionism!
After all is said and done, one of the most glaring omissions of Huckebee’s crusade is the clear as daylight vision of that prophet from the poorer hill town of Nazareth, whose life and execution, as well as his words, show that the one and only evidence of authentic belief in God, is that you “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Nothing matters more to God than the children God breathed into being, each a “royal soul,” as the remarkable, medieval mystic, Teresa of Avila, observed so brilliantly.
How diametrically opposed Ambassador Huckabee is to the life and world-saving insight shown in the image of a babe born in the animal shelter, we sing of as “away in a manger …”
The Rev.Peter Kakos, of Northampton, is co-founder of Leahy Fast For Palestine.