The Precariousness of Christian Zionism

Fr Portella points out that Christian Zionists' thinking that somehow Israel will bring about the Second Coming of Christ is absolute bollocks.

From Crisis

By Fr Mario Alexis Portella

Christian Zionism's hope that Zionism will bring about the Parousia is theologically empty.

United States Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a noted Christian Zionist, speaking on The Tucker Carlson Show last Friday, said Israel would be “fine” to take control of territory stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. Huckabee was pressed repeatedly on the biblical boundaries he cited as divinely promised to the Jewish people as the host asked him “what land” specifically he was talking about, noting the remit in the biblical book of Genesis is greater than the borders of modern-day Israel.

Such a border is alluded to in the expansionist idea of a “Greater Israel,” an ambition understood by some to encompass land across several modern states, including parts of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, as well as Palestinian territories.

On January 17, 2026, the Patriarchs and the heads of the Churches in the Holy Land published a statement criticizing those who “advance damaging ideologies, such as Christian Zionism, mislead the public, sow confusion, and harm the unity of our flock.”

A few days later, Huckabee pushed back, saying that “Christians are followers of Christ and a Zionist simply accepts that the Jewish people have a right to live in their ancient, indigenous, and Biblical homeland.”

Many of those who identify themselves as Christian Zionists—primarily fundamentalists and certain Catholics and mainstream Protestants—for ostensibly religious motives, vehemently uphold that the territories of what is the present-day State of Israel, which includes the Palestinian Territories, belong exclusively to the Jewish people. As a result, they characterize Palestinians who live in the Holy Land as “non-Jews” who must submit to Israeli rule and privilege, accepting discrimination, occupation, and even deportation. 

Furthermore, many Christian Zionists see Jewish control of the Holy Land as part of a divine plan linked to the end times, which will lead to the second coming of Christ. They also hold that once the Jews are gathered back into their biblical homeland, they will eventually come to accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah.

Zionism, today, refers to the largely secular political movement that began in the late 1800s and led to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, which displaced about 750,000 Palestinians—an event they refer to as the Nakba (or “catastrophe”). Therefore, the term “Christian Zionism” tends to be an oxymoron since it links a religious association with a secular movement. 

The term was first used in 1897 at the First Zionist Congress by the Hungarian-born iconic Zionist leader Theodor Herzl. As the father of the Zionist Movement, he utilized the term when acknowledging the presence of several Christians among the Congress attendees. One of those Christian Zionists was the founder of the Red Cross, Jean Henri Dunant. 

The reasoning behind Christian Zionism is fundamentally flawed due to its lack of biblical interpretation and historical understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures and Christianity, a view echoed by Holocaust survivor Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, who argues that Zionist claims misrepresent the Jewish faith, for “we are forbidden since the destruction of the Temple, [which was destroyed when the Romans leveled Jerusalem in A.D. 70]…to re-establish a Jewish state.”

Referring to scriptural texts, primarily from the Old Testament, Christian Zionists point to the fact that today’s Israelis are the inheritors of the land God had promised to the biblical people of Israel. 

On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said: “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates— the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.” (Genesis 15:18-21)

Aside from that, God is the proprietor of these lands, not the Israelites—“The land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Leviticus 25:23). Zionism is not only incompatible with Judaism, according to Rabbi Weiss, it is also irreconcilable with Christianity. 

This is due to Christian Zionists’ use of biblical passages and religious jargon that was created thousands of years ago to defend the Israeli state and its institutions’ current deprivation of the Palestinian people of their lives, freedom, property, and country. This is completely at odds with what Christ taught in the Gospel since, as Dr. Matthew A. Tsakanikas previously demonstrated, “in no way can the establishment of a modern State of Israel be confused with the fulfillment of the promises given to Abraham because Jesus is the true fulfillment of those promises.”

“The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed.” Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ” (Galatians 3:16).

The biblical Jews’ possession of the land was conditional on their faithfulness to their covenant that  God established with them, as former superior at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem Fr. David Neuhaus, S.J., says. Any transgression of this alliance results ipso facto in the loss of the land, which is what happened because of their faithlessness. “Indeed, Jerusalem and Judah so angered the Lord that he expelled them from his presence” (2 Kings 24:20)

According to Fr. Neuhaus, Christian Zionists use writings concerning God’s homecoming of the Jewish exiles to justify the current state of Israel as a fulfillment of these texts since it is true that God leads the Jewish exiles back to the Holy Land. The books that mention a return to the land, however, are completely rejected by them. These texts are based on historical events that occurred in the sixth century B.C., when King Cyrus of Persia allowed the Babylonian exiles to rebuild Jerusalem. Furthermore, as stated by Pope Benedict XVI in Jesus of Nazareth, “the gradual universalization of the land on the basis of a theology of hope…The land of the king of peace is not a nation state—it stretches from ‘sea to sea’ (Zechariah 9:10).”

Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament. He is the New Covenant, which established the new Jerusalem, the Church, at the cost of His own blood, which does not seek to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, let alone advocate a Zionist political state.

The promise of the land was always inseparable from the Temple: “you are to seek the place the Lord your God will choose from among all your tribes to put his Name there for his dwelling. To that place you must go” (Deuteronomy 12:5). Since an earthly Temple is no longer wanted by God, for Christ Himself is the Temple—“Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days” (John 2:19)—the religious reasons Christian Zionists hold that a physical land is necessary are obsolete since the Messiah became the Temple and sign of the land.