Cracks in the Unholy Alliance: Christian Zionism, Israeli Supremacy, and the Collapse of Strategic Containment
Rima Najjar
activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
For decades, Israel’s most reliable
international ally has been the American right.
Evangelical Christians, conservative media figures, and
Republican lawmakers have offered
unwavering support — military, diplomatic, and cultural. This alliance has been framed as theological, strategic, and moral: a bulwark against terrorism, a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, and a defense of Western civilization.
But beneath this alliance lies a
contradiction too deep to ignore. The American right’s support for Israel has never been rooted in Jewish pluralism or historical accountability. It is an
unholy alliance — a convergence of Christian eschatology, nationalist militarism, and geopolitical convenience. Evangelicals support Israel not to protect Jewish life, but to advance a theological narrative in which Jewish return to the Holy Land precedes Christian redemption. As Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), declared:
“The coming of Jesus Christ is tied to the Jews returning to Israel.” For many evangelicals, Jewish survival is instrumental — not sacred. Their support for Israel is not a defense of Jewish dignity — it is a staging ground for Christian prophecy.
And Israel, in turn,
exploits this alliance with strategic precision. It welcomes
evangelical support, because it delivers political cover, financial aid, and ideological insulation. Israeli officials appear at CUFI summits,
echoing Christian Zionist language while advancing policies that erase Jewish dissent and criminalize Palestinian existence. The alliance is not mutual recognition — it is
mutual instrumentalization. Evangelicals use Israel to fulfill prophecy; Israel uses evangelicals to shield apartheid. The result is a coalition that sacralizes supremacy, not solidarity.
And beneath the theology lies something older and more dangerous: a logic of supremacist utility. The American
far right’s embrace of Israel is
not grounded in religious solidarity — it is grounded in a shared architecture of
power. The glorification of force, the myth of civilizational purity, the instrumentalization of Jewish life for nationalist ends — these are not theological convictions. They are ideological scaffolds. And while distinct from Nazism in form, they echo its emotional grammar: purity, prophecy, and militarized redemption.
White supremacists, including
neo–
Nazis, have long weaponized
antisemitism — yet many now paradoxically express admiration for Israel. Not for its Jewish character, but
for its ethnostate logic, its militarized borders, and its unapologetic use of force. They see in Israel a model of exclusion, not inclusion.
A state that defines belonging through blood,
land (albeit stolen land),
and religion — mirroring their own supremacist
fantasies. This is not solidarity. It is projection. And it reveals the alliance’s deepest fracture: the very coalition that
defends Israeli militarism is also reviving antisemitic tropes,
glorifying Nazi ideology, and threatening Jewish life in the countries to which thry belong.
And now, as antisemitic rhetoric re-emerges within the very coalition that claims to defend Israel, the
cost to Israel (and the US along with it) of its perverse and cynical strategy is becoming impossible to ignore.
And where are the Palestinians in all this? Erased. Managed. Recast as threat or obstacle. The alliance between Israel and the American right is not just built on theological fantasy or strategic convenience. It is built on Palestinian absence. Their dispossession is the silent premise of the alliance. Their erasure is the condition of its coherence.
In the Christian Zionist imagination, Palestine is not a homeland — it is a biblical stage set. The land is sacred, but the people on it are not. Palestinians are either invisible or cast as antagonists to prophecy. As Hagee declared,
“God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people forever. It belongs to them. Period.” There is no room in that sentence for a Palestinian child, a village, a memory. The theology demands disappearance.
In conservative American politics, Palestinians are framed not as a people with rights, but as a security threat. The language is clinical:
“terror tunnels,” “human shields,” “Hamas strongholds.” The humanity is stripped away. When Gaza is bombed, the alliance rallies — not to mourn the dead, but to defend the bombs.
Palestinian grief is not just ignored. It is preemptively discredited.
And in Israeli strategy, Palestinian existence is the problem to be managed. The alliance with the American right allows Israel to delay justice indefinitely. It provides cover for occupation, impunity for war crimes, and silence for apartheid.
The cost of that alliance is not just ideological. It is human. It is Palestinian.
This is the fracture that must be named. Not just the re-emergence of antisemitism among Israel’s defenders, but the foundational erasure of Palestinians that made the alliance possible in the first place.
The alliance is cracking — not because it has rediscovered moral clarity, but because its contradictions are no longer containable. And in that tremble, there is an opening.
Not for pity. For justice.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/chris...remacy-collapse-strategic-containment/5903784
(more in article)
Watching 3500 years of biblical prophecy unfold became more important than any lost morality kicking Palestinians out of their homes.