Lhe excitement of the Republican candidate is only growing in the run-up to the presidential election on November 5 in the United States. Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive rhetoric does not spare American Jews, who gave more than three-quarters of their votes to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to Joe Biden in 2020. The former tenant of the House Blanche consistently insists that her Jewish compatriots “should have their heads examined” if they persist in not voting for him.
He indeed considers that the gestures he made, during his mandate from 2017 to 2021, in favor of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, should earn him the unconditional support of American Jews (in 2019, during an intervention before Republican Jews, he even called Netanyahu “your prime minister”). But he has just toughened up this type of attack by now asserting that “Christians love Israel more than Jews.”
The long history of Christian Zionism
Ces “Christians” whose support for Israel is, according to Trump, stronger than that of Jews who participate in “Christian Zionism” appeared in Anglo-Saxon Protestantism around 1840-1850, half a century before specifically Jewish Zionism. While Jewish Zionism intends to build the Jewish people into a nation in the face of European anti-Semitism, Christian Zionism develops around a so-called “evangelical” reading of the Old Testament: the salvation of the Christian faithful depends, in this evangelical dogmatics, of the “restoration” of the Jewish people on the “land of Israel”, “restoration” which is the prerequisite for the establishment of the kingdom of God.
As early as 1890 – seven years before the founding congress of Jewish Zionism in Basel – Chicago hosted a conference whose organizer, an evangelical preacher, preached from “return Palestine to the Jews”. Elected officials from the evangelical movement equally supported the 1921-1924 restrictions on immigration, particularly Jewish, to the United States, and the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine which came under British mandate.
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This Christian Zionism, already galvanized by the founding of Israel in 1948, was even more so after the conquest by the Jewish state, in 1967, of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. American evangelicals see in such an occupation nothing less than the fulfillment of prophecies, while the Jewish community remains largely committed to a negotiated settlement on the basis of the principle of “land for peace”.
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