Since October 7, 2023, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have killed nearly 22,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children. The death toll includes teachers, health workers, humanitarian aid workers, artists and more than 90 journalists.
In the same period, the IDF has wounded more than 50,000 people in Gaza, also mostly women and children.
The IDF has dropped more bombs on Gaza, an area about the size of Washington, D.C., than the United States dropped in a year during its war in Afghanistan. Houses of worship, schools, universities, hospitals and United Nations refugee camps have been decimated.
The United States supplied the bombs, artillery shells, and other materials used by the IDF in Gaza. The United States vetoed resolutions introduced in the United Nations Security Council that called for a bilateral ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Pro-Zionist Jewish and Christian congregations and religious leaders have cheered the Israeli war effort in Gaza, calling it necessary to avenge the almost 1,300 Israelis killed on October 7 by Hamas fighters from Gaza.
U.S. media outlets questioned casualty assessments by humanitarian organizations in Gaza, including reports issued by United Nations relief groups, but broadcast Israeli assessments about casualties without scrutiny.
The world is not fooled.
The world has watched Israel engage in a deliberate strategy to depopulate Gaza of its indigenous population. For almost three months, the world has seen IDF warplanes destroy places where civilians huddled for shelter across Gaza.
IDF tanks have attacked unarmed civilians. Its snipers have murdered women and children as they left religious services. IDF soldiers have murdered Israeli hostages who waved white flags in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Forces have joined Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank to attack Palestinian homes, farms and neighborhoods. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed.
A more significant number have been detained without charges. Homes have been demolished. Palestinian olive growers and shepherds have been attacked.
These developments are the latest grim results of more than a century of Zionist ideology in the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Theodor Herzl’s vision in 1897 was to establish a homeland where Jews would be safe from antisemitism.
Several decades after Herzl died in 1904, his vision was embraced by Jewish survivors of European pogroms, ghettos, physical, social, political, religious and economic discrimination and the murderous Nazi regime.
However, the Jewish survivors of antisemitism in Europe and the Holocaust—who migrated to Palestine— violently rejected the notion that Jews should co-exist as part of an inclusive, egalitarian community with Arabs and people from other ethnic and religious groups. Instead, they pressed Britain, which administered the League of Nations Mandate over Palestine, to create a Jewish separatist nation in Palestine.
After the British Mandate over Palestine ended, the separatist Zionist faction unilaterally renamed Palestine “Israel” on May 15, 1948, declaring it a Jewish state in deliberate disregard of the Arab majority. Ironically, U.S. President Harry Truman, a Baptist from Missouri who ended racial segregation within the U.S. military services by executive order, recognized the separatist nation of Israel only ten minutes after Zionists announced its creation.
Zionists drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, neighborhoods and farms. Those displaced Palestinians fled to Gaza. Following Israel’s preemptive Six-Day War of 1967, Israel began its military occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, supported by U.S. and British military and commercial power.
From the creation of the State of Israel until now, Zionist ideology falsely characterized Palestinians as aliens in the land their ancestors lived in—alongside a Jewish minority—for centuries before Jews fleeing European antisemitism settled in Palestine.
Over the ensuing generations, Zionist ideology, bolstered by U.S. and British military, intelligence and corporate media operations, has powered Israeli-U.S. propaganda that falsely depicts Palestinians as aliens, unhealthy, and dangerous to Jews.
Israel is not the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid because Palestinians pose a threat to Jews. It is the largest recipient of U.S. aid because Zionists turned Theodor Herzl’s 1897 vision of a Jewish homeland into a white ethnic quasi-religious empire. Benjamin Netanyahu and every other Israeli Prime Minister is a Zionist. Joe Biden and every other U.S. President, beginning with Harry Truman, is a Zionist.
Until now, prophetic discernment regarding the history and impact of pro-Zionist ideology has been hindered by post-Holocaust guilt. This guilt revolves around the U.S. and Western European refusal to grant asylum to Jews who suffered antisemitism, population displacement and genocide during the first third of the 20th century.
Zionist Christian notions of theology, “chosen-ness,” evangelism and sacralized manifest destiny, combined with post-Holocaust guilt, have blinded the eyes, closed the ears and silenced the tongues of leaders who should have been speaking out against Israeli-U.S. tyranny toward Palestinians.
But the Zionist propaganda campaign is failing.
Arab journalists are risking their lives to show unarmed Palestinians being massacred by the IDF, the fourth largest military in the world, with weapons furnished and funded by the U.S., the largest arms dealer in the world. The propaganda is overwhelmed by the prophetic impact of live footage of the atrocities being committed.
The world now knows that Israel is the genocidal result of Zionist ideology. Its murderous, land-stealing, settler-colonization and anti-Palestinian racism mimic apartheid regimes in South Africa and the United States.
More people realize that equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism (hatred of Jews) is a sham. Denouncing Zionism, like denouncing Ku Klux Klan ideology, is a sign of moral, intellectual, and rhetorical clarity and candor. The racism and white supremacy that permeates the 75-year history of Israeli-Zionist manifest destiny, settler colonialism and imperialism merits condemnation, not protection. It certainly shouldn’t be praised.
Israeli and U.S. propaganda only works when people cannot see and know the truth. At last—no thanks to mainstream media, politicians, theologians, and other thought leaders—the world knows that Israel and the U.S. are liars about the Israeli regime’s Zionist bigotry against Palestinians.
Let’s join Arab journalists and pro-Palestinian activists and summon the courage, will, and decency to stop the Zionist-inspired apartheid, lies, genocide, land theft, settler colonizing, terrorism and other crimes against our suffering Palestinian neighbors.
Pastor at New Millennium Church in Little Rock, Arkansas, a retired state court trial judge, a trustee of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, author of two books and three blogs, a consultant on cultural competency and inclusion, and a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
