Trump’s Christian Fascists and the War on Palestine

Christian extremists in America bond with Jewish extremists in Israel not over religion but a shared fascism.

Murder the Meek - by Mr. Fish

Christian Nationalists who form the bedrock of support for Donald Trump — 80 percent voted for Trump in the last election according to a voter survey by the Associated Press — have mounted a concerted campaign calling on the White House to back Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and Gaza.

This campaign includes visits to Israel by prominent leaders, including Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins and Mario Bramnick, petitioning the White House, lobbying Congress and calls for annexation at Christian conferences, including a resolution of support for Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank adopted at the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference. The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) Convention in Dallas, in March, gathered over 200 signatures from pastors and right-wing religious leaders from across the United States calling for the annexation of “Judea and Samaria” — the purported biblical name for the West Bank —and declaring the two state solution “a failed experiment.”

American Christian Leaders for Israel, which says it represents a network of “over 3,000 organizational leaders from across the nation, including the National Religious Broadcasters,” endorsed the NRB resolution and sent it to Trump. Congresswoman Claudia Tenney and five other members of the congressional “Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus,” sent a letter to Trump asking to “recognize the right of Israel” to declare sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territories, arguing that it will advance “the Judeo-Christian heritage on which our nation was founded.”

Trump, who rescinded a Biden administration executive order that sanctioned Jewish colonists in the West Bank for human rights violations, promised, on Feb. 4, to make an announcement in the “next four weeks,” about possible annexation of the West Bank. This follows Trump’s call for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and death threats to the Palestinians unless they release Israeli hostages. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump said of Gaza while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One.

The agenda of Zionist extremists and Christian fascists, who hold senior positions throughout the Trump administration, have long converged. The language, iconography and symbolism used by the Christian and Jewish fascists is biblical. But the bonds are political, not religious.

I detail the history and ideology of our homegrown fascism and its kinship with Jewish fascism in my book, “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a Baptist minister, has been nominated by Trump to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee has said there is “no such thing as a Palestinian” and asserted that Palestinian identity is “a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.” He proposes that any Palestinian state should be created outside of Israel in neighboring countries such as Egypt, Syria or Jordan. He dismisses the two-state solution as “irrational and unworkable.”

“I believe the scripture. Genesis 12: Those who bless Israel will be blessed; those who curse Israel will be cursed. I want to be on the blessing side, not the curse side,” Huckabee says.

John Ratcliffe, appointed by Trump to run the Central Intelligence Agency, advocates assisting Israel in what he described as its “foot-on-their-throat” approach against Iran.

Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — who argues that “Zionism and Americanism are the front-lines of Western civilization and freedom in our world today” — pedals the usual absurdity that the Hebrew Bible, written 4,000 years ago, can be used to draw contemporary national borders.

He told Fox News last November: “Open up your Bible. God granted Abraham this land. The twelve tribes of Israel established a constitutional monarchy in 1000 BC. King David was their second king and established Jerusalem as the capital. Jews were fighting foreign occupiers for centuries, ultimately maintaining a presence there. And right now, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, are trying to erase the Jewish ties to Jerusalem, as we speak. I’ve been there multiple times. They’re trying to make it look like Jews were never there. The most important aspect of this is the international community granted sovereignty to the Jews, to the Jewish state, after World War II, and Israel has had to fight defensive war after defensive war, with every country coming to crush it, ever since then just to exist.”

The televangelist Paula White-Cain, a militant Christian Zionist, who says that defying Trump is akin to "fighting against the hand of God," is a senior advisor in the newly created White House Faith Office.

Universities in the United States were slandered by Zionists as allies of Hamas immediately after the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel, weeks before there were any campus protests. These colleges and universities, in response to criticism and the creation of student encampments, banned protests and shut down free speech. They have disciplined, suspended or expelled student activists. They have also fired or placed on probation faculty and administrators who spoke against the genocide.

The witch hunt saw the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT endure a McCarthyite inquisition in Congressional hearings spearheaded by Rep. Elise Stefanik. The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, because they did not grovel enough, were eventually forced to step down. Stefanik, who rejoiced in the firings of the Ivy League presidents, issued a statement promising to “continue to move forward to expose the rot in our most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions and deliver accountability to the American people.”

Stefanik is Trump’s nominee to be the ambassador to the United Nations. She believes “Israel has a biblical right to the entire West Bank.”

Columbia University, four months before the protest encampment was set up on campus, banned the school’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. Once an encampment was established in the center of the university, it authorized three police raids with over 100 student arrests. Last week, it expelled four students, three from Barnard College and one from Columbia. It has forced out professors and administrators.

The Trump administration, despite the draconian measures imposed by Columbia’s administrators, canceled approximately $400 million in federal grants to the university due to what it calls the “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

The campaign mounted against colleges and universities has nothing to do with combating antisemitism. Columbia and other unversities can never placate their critics. The campaign is about criminalizing dissent and forcing educational institutions to adhere to the ideological dictates of the far right and Christian fascists. Antisemitism is the excuse.

Christian fascists distort Christianity to sacralize white supremacy, the U.S. empire and capitalism, as well as demonizing those who oppose them as satanic. These heretics — I speak as a dvinity school graduate — deform the Gospels in the same way Jewish fascists deform the Torah. In fact, according to the eschatology of the Christian fascists, Jews in Israel in the “End Times” will be converted to Christianity or exterminated, which exposes their deep antisemitic roots and open embrace of Nazi theorists such as Carl Schmidt and sympathizers such as Rousas John Rushdoony.

Israel routinely violates diplomatic and ethical norms. It ignores humanitarian law and international law, carrying out genocide in violation of the United Nations’s 1948 Genocide Convention. It mocks the concept of the open, democratic society, creating second class citizens and a system of apartheid dominated by those of predominantly European descent. It employs indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those branded as human “contaminants,” “human animals.”

Jewish supremacy, like the supremacy of the Christian fascists, is, these fanatics claim, sanctified by God. The slaughter of the Palestinians, who Benjamin Netanyahu compared to the biblical Amalekites, are the incarnate of evil and deserve to be massacred. Euro-Americans in the American colonies used the same biblical passage to justify the genocide of Native Americans. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those inside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism or Christian nationalism speak.

Jewish fascism is what the Christian fascists seek to emulate. They too yearn to “cleanse” American society of its human “contaminants” the way Israel is ethnically cleansing itself of the Palestinians. Israel’s Basic Law: The Nation State of the Jewish People, passed by the Knesset in 2018, declares that the right to self-determination in Israel is “exclusive to the Jewish People.” This legal discrimination is one American fascists plan to emulate on behalf of white Christians. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, people of color, undocumented workers, Muslims, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, pacifists and the poor — will, as in Israel, be targets.

The judiciary will be a tool for repressing dissidents and protecting the rich. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be persecuted, evidenced by the State Department’s AI-powered “Catch and Revoke” effort to “cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups.”

On March 8, Federal immigration authorities detained Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, who is of Palestinian descent, although he is a legal permanent resident. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said that Khalil had been arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”

The seizure and possible deportation of someone who is a legal permanent resident is ominous.

Fascism has different iterations, but its core attributes are the same. This is why Christian fascists are so energetically working on Israel’s behalf. Fascism thrives off a sense of grievance. Messianic redemption will take place in Israel once the Palestinians, who are condemned as embodying evil, are expelled. Messianic redemption will take place once America returns absolute power to a white, Christianized ethnonationalist state, one that rolls back civil rights legislation — the 1965 Voting Rights Act has already been gutted by the Supreme Court — and slashes social services that “coddle” the poor, especially poor people of color.

The tides are against us. The old alliances are giving way to worldwide authoritarianism whether in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Narendra Modi’s India or Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, all of which use laws and militarized police to silence dissidents, journalists, students and professors, including at their most elite universities such as India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. The far-right is on the rise across Europe, especially in France and Germany. The radical left and the labor movement have been broken. We have few defenses. We will not be protected by a corporate-indentured and supine Democratic Party or liberal insitutions such as Columbia University.

Fascism can only be defeated with a rival militancy — a militancy communists, anarchists and socialists in the 1930s exhibited — one that offers an alternative vision and does not compromise with despotic power. This rival militancy accepts the inevitability of brutal state repression and the need for self-sacrifice. It does not seek accommodation or appeasement. We will resurrect this militancy and battle back through sustained acts of civil disobedience — including strikes — against these despotic forces, or be reduced to vassals.