“BROTHERS and sisters,” intoned Pope Leo XIV at his Palm Sunday homily, “this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”
In case Christians forgot, the Holy Father spelled out the obvious: Violence isn’t the way of the Messiah, who suffered scourging, thorning, nailing, spearing and dying rather than call on his Father in heaven to “provide me with more than twelve legions of angels” defending him, as the March 29 Mass Gospel reading from Saint Matthew recounts (Mt 26:14-27:66).
Yet Christian Zionists, especially American evangelicals backing President Donald Trump, have joined Zionist Jews in backing the United States-Israel war on Iran. It is claimed to be divinely prophesied and decreed in biblical passages said to reveal God’s will for His Chosen People, the Israelites, to dominate the Middle East and eventually undertake a conflict in which the Messiah or “Anointed One” will come down from heaven to subjugate Israel’s enemies and establish God’s Kingdom.
While most Jews believe this coming savior is not Jesus, Christian Zionists expect modern Israel’s rise to power to bring forth the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, the end-times climax prophesied in Christianity, including the Catholic creed recited every Sunday Mass: “He shall come to judge the living and the dead.”
Igniting Armageddon
This is the third kind of “bad faith” driving the US-Israel war on Iran, along with dubious US negotiations before surprise attacks as well as unholy motives hiding behind holier-than-thou ones, both covered in our March 19 column (https://tinyurl.com/3ubyvvfb).
Without labeling other faiths false, one must assert that Jesus Christ, Second Person of the divine Blessed Trinity, rejects violence. In the above-cited Palm Sunday Gospel reading, Jesus admonished a disciple to sheath his blade when he sought to defend our Lord from arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, “for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
The Solemnity of the Lord’s Supper, celebrated on April 2, further shows that Catholicism puts paramount value not on armed conquest of the world, but on sacramental communion with God. And as Jesus told Pontius Pilate before the Roman procurator decreed his crucifixion: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews” (Gospel of Saint John, 18:36).
That other-worldly reign, however, is lost on most Jews, ancient and modern, believing God’s promised messiah still has to come and bring Israel to military and political dominance. In our time, that age-old hope for future Jewish power spawned Zionist ideology, driving Israel’s reconstitution as a nation in 1948 in Palestine, allegedly oppressive, racist, and even genocidal policies and actions toward Palestinian Arabs, and the Jewish quest for regional military supremacy.
Zionism interprets certain Bible passages as prophesying not just Jewish supremacy, but also a grand battle between the forces of good and evil at the end of time. This Armageddon — from the Hebrew name of a mountain in Israel — would end with the coming of the Messiah from heaven.
Indeed, in 1990, a revered rabbi told then-Israel’s new United Nations envoy Benjamin Netanyahu: “The Messiah has not come. There are still a few hours left in the day, so try to bring him today.” For Zionists, the holy man was asking the future prime minister to spur events for the prophesied savior to come, including Armageddon.
This Biblical prophecy of the Messiah coming to win the final battle is also a convergence point between Jewish and Christian Zionists. And many in both camps consider the Iran war as leading to Armageddon and the Messiah’s coming.
Notably, more than 200 US servicemen in 50 military installations and all branches of the armed forces filed complaints with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation over commanders saying the Iran war was “biblically sanctioned” and “God’s divine plan” with Trump as “anointed by Jesus” to unleash Armageddon in Iran.
Like Jewish ones, Christian Zionists like Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee also profess that Israel is still God’s “Chosen People” with rights to the “Promised Land” stretching from the Nile River to the Euphrates.
If that’s the Zionist divine plan, the Iran war may well fulfill it. Not only could conflict crush the biggest challenge to Israel’s regional dominance. But devastating Iran’s petroleum, electricity and water infrastructure would drive Tehran to do the same in Israel and Arab states. And as one geopolitics video headline put it, quoting a respected expert, “Israel welcomes the destruction of Gulf wealth and power.”
All West Asia would be devastated — but Israel could most speedily recover with many billions of dollars in reconstruction aid from America and Jewish billionaires, including the founders of Google, Facebook and Oracle.
Professors Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and Yakov Rabkin of the University of Montreal are among Jewish thinkers criticizing Zionism and partly blaming it for the Iran war. Many analysts also point to the powerful Jewish lobby and Zionist contributors to Trump’s campaign, plus Prime Minister Netanyahu, considered a Zionist like his father.
Long propounded by Netanyahu, Trump adopted Israel’s view that Iran was close to having atomic warheads. Last year, Trump dismissed even the decades-long position of Washington’s intelligence community that Iran stopped developing nuclear weapons after then-supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, assassinated early in the current conflict, declared a fatwa or Islamic ban on nukes in 2003.
Trump also reportedly shared Israel’s mistaken belief that Iranians would topple the Islamic regime once Khamenei and other top leaders were eliminated. The war has instead turned nightmarish for the US, Israel and America’s Arab allies — all pummeled by Iranian missiles and drones after anti-missile projectiles and radar were degraded.
If the US-Israel war ends in global disaster, Zionism will lose adherents. And that may be one outcome God wants from this conflict. More next week.