U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It was just a matter of time.

Too bad we don’t have televangelist Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell around anymore to remind us so we can run stories making fun of them.

Give Mike Johnson, the new Louisiana Christian conservative Speaker of the House, time. He will likely remind us soon.

Even without the sensational quote, the Bloomberg wire service reported that some “evangelical” Christian Zionists in the United States see the war between Hamas in Gaza and Israel as a harbinger of “armageddon” or the final war before the end of the world, or the alleged “Second Coming” of Jesus Christ to Earth.

Conservative Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will likely not put the kabash on such talk, since he has courted the support of the Christian Right in the U.S. since the 1990s. As Bloomberg reports, when Netanyahu first became prime minister in 1996, he arranged for a contingent of Christian Zionists from the U.S. to visit Israel, “forging a close connection that has only grown in the intervening years, with evangelicals increasingly steadfast in their support of Israel.”

Israel first became central to evangelical eschatology four centuries ago, Bloomberg reports, “when Protestant theologians, especially those of a millenarian bent, seized upon very specific passages about the end times.”

In one example, the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament predicted that God “shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the Earth.”

“Exegetes (promoters) took this to mean that the return of Christ would take place once the Jewish diaspora returned to Palestine. Eager to put God’s plan in motion, these Christian Zionists — not an oxymoron — began to push their governments to take active steps to get Jews back to Palestine.”

Christian Zionism is now defined as an ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. It holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with Bible prophecy.

In 1891, the Christian Zionist William Blackstone drafted a petition to President Benjamin Harrison, signed by hundreds of prominent Americans, including J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Written against the backdrop of pogroms or attacks on the Jews in Russia, the letter declared: “Let us now restore to [the Jews] the land of which they were so cruelly despoiled by our Roman ancestors.”

Though Harrison didn’t get involved to help, the Christian Zionists continued to monitor the news for any sign that God’s plan was in motion. When the British government released the Balfour Declaration in 1917, supporting the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, they did so for geopolitical reasons. Evangelicals, though, interpreted the move as divine dispensation.

The following year, one writer concluded: “If we read Scripture aright, this restoration of the Jews to Palestine is going to hasten that day foretold in both the Old and New Testaments, when the Lord Jesus will manifest Himself again to the sons of men.”

These beliefs remained alive and well throughout the interwar years, and when the modern state of Israel came into being after the horrors of the Holocaust, and evangelicals celebrated.

The televangelist Jerry Falwell would later claim that, outside of the day of Christ’s birth, “the most important date we should remember is May 14, 1948” — the day Israel came into existence.

As the new nation prospered and later triumphed in the Six-Day War in 1967, defeating three of its powerful neighbors and consolidating its borders, evangelicals felt increasingly confident that “God’s timepiece” — Israel itself — was registering the final countdown. All that remained was for Israel to secure a final victory over its enemies and rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem.

And then, if the prophets were right, some pretty unpleasant things would happen: A false messiah known as the Antichrist would take over Jerusalem and install himself as the savior before inaugurating the Tribulation, a seven-year period of death and destruction, with most Jews perishing. Finally, Jesus would return to earth, overthrowing the pretender and inaugurating a thousand-year reign of peace on Earth.

By the 1970s and 1980s, a growing number of prominent evangelicals, including Falwell, made trips to Israel, eager to get in on the ground floor of the coming apocalypse. At first, the Israelis paid them little mind, but Prime Minister Menachem Begin quickly realized that the religious right had become increasingly influential in Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party. Begin and other prominent Israelis now reached out to the evangelicals, attending prayer meetings and other religious events in the U.S.

By the end of Reagan’s presidency, the two groups had become, as the journalist Victoria Clark quipped, “allies for Armageddon,” united by a shared ambition to see Israel conquer its enemies.

It didn’t hurt that it helped boost tourism and the economy of the new state of Israel. The chamber of commerce would certainly not object.

“Politics makes for odd bedfellows, but this alliance was odder than most,” Bloomberg reports. “The Israelis had practical aims, hoping that American support would preserve their embattled nation. The evangelicals, by contrast, prayed that aid would trigger the apocalypse and set the stage for the coming of Christ.”

For those primed to map current events onto biblical prophecies, Bloomberg reports, “the horrific violence is an unpleasant but essential means to an end — the end of the world as we know it.”

In this era of fake news when hogwash passes for knowledge over the internet, no doubt the AI bots will start repeating this as fact soon over Alexa, leading to more news stories and fodder for right-wing propaganda to be spread by Republicans seeking war with Iran and other Muslim Arab nations, including the Palestinians.

No wonder this is leading to clashes between protesters on college campuses around the U.S.

American economic and military support for Israel is not universally supported by all the people all the time.

And by the way, if there are any nominations for the next candidate for AntiChrist, please post in the comments.

NAJ graphic by Glynn Wilson

Now I’m not necessarily a big fan of Dave Chappelle, and certainly not Kanye West or Ye. But I did find Chappelle’s recent Monologue on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” interesting.