By Barry Sheppard

On November 14, there was a large “March for Israel” in Washington, D.C., in support of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

Organizers claimed that 200,000 attended from across the country, with a big contingent from Christian white nationalist evangelicals.

Like other white nationalists, they play on the fears of many whites that they are being “replaced” by Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and others in movements financed behind the scenes by Jews.

The white Christian nationalists add their special viewpoint that Zionism is right, and Jews should leave America and “return” to Israel in order to fulfill biblical prophecy of the return of Jesus.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer was a featured speaker at the rally representing President Biden. Schumer reiterated to cheers that the whole U.S. government was completely backing Israel’s war.

Two days after the pro-Israeli war rally, Democracy Now discussed two other prominent people in addition to Schumer who spoke at the rally, the new Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and Christian Zionist pastor John Hagee.

Hagee once said, “God sent Hitler to help Jews reach the Promised Land.”

He didn’t repeat that or similar arguments at the rally, but things like “As Prime Minister Netanyahu says so, well, this is a fight between light and darkness, between civilization and barbarism.”

Sarah Posner, author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind, was on the Democracy Now program.

She explained that Hagee only talks about his total support for Israel to gatherings like the November 14 rally, but before churches he says “according to biblical prophecy, that one day Jesus will return and fight a very bloody battle [in Israel], which will result in Jews, and Muslim’s too, either converting to Christianity or dying” and Jesus will rule the world.

Democracy Now’s Juan Gonzalez asked her, “What does Israel and its staunchest defenders get from this alliance?”

She said, “What Israelis and American Jews who embrace Hagee’s support get is a huge movement, much larger than the number of Jewish Americans, that has the ear of the Republican Party, that is enmeshed in the Republican Party.

“Hagee’s organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI) — has juice on Capitol Hill …. It is more than that. It is common among [white] evangelicals, even if they are not members of CUFI, to share these ideas about Israel and Bible prophecy and the return of Jesus. What they do is they bring this huge constituency to Republicans, many of whom, like Speaker Johnson, believe all this themselves.

“They have morphed together this idea of supporting Israel with being a good American Christian. They believe that God has commanded America as a country, not just them as Americans, to support Israel.

“In their minds supporting Israel involves supporting the occupation, supporting the Israeli military no matter what it does. It doesn’t mean supporting Israel from the standpoint that some day, Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace. That is not part of the equation.”

Democracy Now’s host, Amy Goodman, then said “In 2008 John McCain [Republican candidate for President] rejected  John Hagee’s endorsement, after the pastor said God sent Hitler to help Jews get to Israel. This is a clip from Hagee’s sermon: ‘Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun, and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.’ ’’

Posner added that in more recent statements Hagee argues that “God has punished Jews throughout history as part of his plan to get them to return to Israel, which is a precondition of Jesus’ return.”

The Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, worked for an organization now called Alliance Defending Freedom. “It’s a major Christian right legal organization that sees itself as a Christian counterweight to the ACLU” Posner said. “It is behind many Supreme Court cases, including Dobbs, which overturned Roe v. Wade; Masterpiece Cakeshop, involving the anti-gay baker [who refused to serve same sex couples].”

Posner had interviewed Johnson in 2007, when “he laid out for me the organization’s ambition to eviscerate the separation of church and state at the Supreme Court and to create a legal framework in which conservative Christians could object to things like LGBTQ rights in the name of religious freedom.

“Everything he said to me back in 2007, ADF has pretty much done and accomplished or is well on its way to accomplishing — undermining church-state separation, elevating religious freedom to conservative Christians who oppose LGBTQ and reproductive rights….

“He also believes that God created civil government and that government should be run from what Christian nationalists would call a biblical worldview.”

Christian Zionists are both anti-Semitic and pro-Israel. They want Jews to get out of the United States, their anti-Semitism — and by going to Israel, their Zionism.

To better understand this connection, a brief overview of the history of the connection between Zionism and anti-Semitism helps. An article by Joseph Massad, Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History that appeared on Al Jazeera provides a sketch.

While there were some Zionists in Europe in the 19th century, Theodore Herzl is recognized as the founder and of what became modern Zionism, in reaction to anti-Semitism in the European Christian nations.

He led the creation of the Zionist Organization (now World Zionist Organisation) at a conference of European Zionist groups in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.

He and his followers insisted that it is the presence of Jews in these countries that caused anti-Semitism, and that the solution was for the Jews to leave Europe and form their own nation.

He said in his foundational pamphlet, written in 1896, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish state), “The governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.”

Herzl said in his Diaries that “the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

In its early years, Zionism would invoke, along with the Protestant millenarian Christians, that European Jews were linked historically to Palestine to which they should “return” to re-establish Biblical Israel.

The Zionists understood this could only be realized through a settler-colonial project, which could be achieved through an alliance with European colonial powers. The Arab people who already lived there would have to be driven out.

One of these colonial powers was Great Britain.

In 1905, there was a revolution in Russia. When it was defeated, there were mass pogroms against Jews organized by the Tsarist regime. At the time, Arthur Balfour, a well-known anti-Semite, was Prime Minister of Great Britain. He sponsored the Aliens Act that prevented Jews fleeing the pogroms from entering the country.

Balfour was the Foreign Secretary of the British government during the First World War. In 1917, as the war came to an end, Britain was set to take over Palestine from the defeated Ottoman Empire. The Balfour Declaration was issued by the British government. It advocated the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the Zionists embraced him.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, the Zionists, sharing Herzl’s understanding that an anti-Semitic state could become an ally of Zionism, were the only Jewish group that would collaborate with the Nazis — all other German Jews recognized the Nazis as the Jews’ bitterest enemy.

Zionists saw an opportunity to strengthen the colonization of Palestine. In 1933, Zionists signed the Transfer Agreement with the Nazis. Under it, Germany would compensate German Jews who emigrate to Palestine for their lost property by exporting German goods to the Zionists there.

Between 1933 and 1939, 60 percent of all capital invested for Jews in Palestine came from German Jewish money brought in under the Transfer Agreement.

In 1935, the German branch of Zionism supported the Nazi anti-Semitic and racist Nuremberg Laws, and was the only non-Nazi party still allowed to publish its own newspaper, the Rundschau.

Nazi officials visited Palestine as guests of the Zionists in 1934 and in 1937, including Adolf Eichmann, who became a major architect of the Holocaust. Eichmann was found and brought to Israel in 1961, where he was hung for his crimes.

In 1938, the Nazi’s organized a pogrom of Jews across Germany, known as Kristalnacht, Crystal Night — the “night of broken glass” for the destruction of Jewish property. All Jews, including the Zionists, were targeted, and the German Zionists were crushed.

The defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, and the horrors of the Holocaust, put an end to anti-Semitic regimes in Europe. But not an end to collaboration between Zionism and anti-Semites, as was seen on the stage of the pro-Israeli war mobilization in Washington November 14.

With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Britain ruled Palestine from 1918 until 1947. As one of the Western victors of the Second World War, Britain was instrumental in forming a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948. It was also backed by the other Western imperialist powers, including the United States.

Israel’s main initial backers were Britain and France. Later the United States took on that role. Western imperialism, led by the U.S., backed Israel economically and militarily in all its wars with the Arab countries and the Palestinians from 1948 until today, as a bulwark against the Arab anti-colonial struggle, and against the Soviet Union which supported that struggle.

Zionism, from its inception, could and can only achieve its goals by relying on imperialism, as Herzl understood.