Myths of Christian Zionism Exploded By Daniel Hummel – The Forward
▻https://forward.com/culture/430251/why-everything-you-think-you-know-about-christian-zionism-is-wrong
Très intéressant compte-rendu d’un livre (dont l’auteur s’appelle Daniel Hummel) qui affirme que les chrétiens sionistes ne sont pas du tout des antisémites comme présentés traditionnellement (notamment par des « juifs libéraux »), et sont des sionistes convaincus. Ils partagent avec leurs homologues juifs sionistes leur #ultra-nationalisme, leur #racisme anti-arabe et leur #islamophobie ; ces derniers attributs, affirme l’auteur du compte-rendu, sont probablement les raisons pour lesquelles les « juifs libéraux » préfèrent les présenter comme des chrétiens d’extrême-droite pseudo sionistes et antisémites.
Hagee and Falwell are no longer the most important Christian Zionist leaders. The center of the movement has shifted overseas. When Hummel visited the “International Christian Embassy’s Feast of Tabernacles celebration,” he heard a Nigerian preacher addressing an international audience, with only a muted American presence. The global movement emphasizes Jewish-Christian “reconciliation” and a shared biblical inheritance, often rejecting end-times prophecies. They also associate Israel with far-right, ultra-nationalist politics, as when the Brazilian Pentacostalist Rene Terra Nova “administered a mass baptism in the Jordan river to a group of Brazilian tourists before leading a chant in support” of fascist leader Jair Bolsanaro — a gathering that reached large Brazilian audiences through social media.
Hummel has written a masterful, very readable book that manages at once to mount a surprising argument and tell compelling narrative history. Nor is he an apologist for Christian Zionism: he emphasizes repeatedly the “dark underside of reconciliation” between Jews and Christian Zionists in “the erasure of concern for Arab Christians and… Palestinians.” That critique is inescapable and damning, though of course it applies to Graham, Falwell, and Hagee not because they are Christians, but because they are Zionists.
Reading Hummel, I realized that liberal Jews prefer to imagine Christian Zionists as anti-Jewish because we find it painful to confront the sincerity and integrity of their Zionism. We would prefer to think of their Islamophobia and imperialism as “Christian” and quarantine the American right from Jewish concerns and interests. We would prefer not to reckon with the fact that Israel has become the central symbolic cause of the world’s political right. We would prefer to deny what Christian Zionists announce loudly and repeatedly — that they reject Christian anti-Semitism and love Jews — because we are ashamed to be loved by such people. Progressive Jews caricature Christian Zionism only partly because we so poorly understand evangelicalism. More deeply, we do so because we would rather not understand why Zionism is so attractive to the Christian Right, for to do so would prompt too many questions about our own Zionism .