The joy that today grips Hagee and his friends is further proof of the errors in the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu.
By Noa Landau
At a time when most Israelis are still recovering from the night of the Iranian attack and anxiously waiting for the dangerous escalation to stop, there are many who are watching from afar with religious ecstasy at these alarming events.
They are not the messianic warmongers here in Israel, but supporters of the Netanyahu government, the “friends of Israel,” evangelical Christians.
The day after the attack was thwarted, hundreds of evangelical leaders gathered on Capitol Hill in Washington to implore U.S. members of Congress not to act to prevent the situation from escalating.
Yes, you heard right, not to prevent an escalation. Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, the same group that, among other things, pressured Donald Trump to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, explained to his followers that the Iranian attack proved that “prophetically, we are on the verge of the Gog and Magog war that Ezekiel described in chapters 38 and 39.”
This is the same Hagee that often speaks in his sermons in this vein: “When Israel is involved in major warfare, pay attention… When you see these signs, lift up your heads and rejoice. Your redemption draweth nigh.” And so, in his thinking, the barrage of Iranian drones and missiles is a felicitous event.
The shared longing for apocalypse has now united religious fanatics in Tehran and Gaza with those in Jerusalem and Washington. When he wraps his words of “support” for Israel against Hamas and Iran, Hagee is actually saying that in order to bring Christian redemption closer, believers must support war in the Middle East, and – God forbid – do what is needed to frustrate the Biden administration’s efforts to de-escalate tensions.
The love affair between the Israeli right and the evangelical right goes back many years and is based on a kind of theological winking at one another. The Christian side believes it must support the policies of the Israeli right to bring about the prophetic “end of days” and the second coming of Christ.
Spoiler alert: That’s when all Jews convert to Christianity or are killed. The Jewish side welcomes the evangelicals’ political and financial support for the settlements and occupation because they do not believe in the Christian end-of-days prophecy.
This holy/unholy alliance has strengthened over the years to such an extent that Netanyahu confidant Ron Dermer once admitted that as the Israeli government’s ambassador to Washington he preferred to invest more time with evangelicals than American Jews who are mostly – what can we say – Democrats.
The joy that today grips Hagee and his friends is further proof of the errors in the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, whose right-wing governments brought us the disaster of October 7 and the growing threat coming from Iran.
Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that the Palestinian issue has fallen off the global agenda, that the Palestinian Authority should be undercut and Hamas rule in Gaza strengthened. He has sabotaged ties with American Jewry and the Democratic Party in favor of Hagee’s Gog and Magog peddlers. And after all this, the right still dares to say that it is the left that needs to sober up.
Israel doesn’t need dubious friends like Hagee who want us to burn in hellfire; Israel needs friends like U.S. President Joe Biden, who repeatedly extends an unprecedented umbrella of defense over us while standing before us with mirrors and brakes. Every sane Israeli should prefer the vision of calm, over the vision of Gog and Magog that Netanyahu offers us.
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