Sadi Barka, a lifelong gravedigger in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, moves like a shadow in the graveyard: “Every day I bury children… not even whole children—just body parts. When I leave the graveyard, I can’t sleep, haunted by the sight of dismembered children and women.” The land, suffocating under the weight of mass graves and relentless Zionist destruction, is saturated with the debris of thousands of tons of American bombs. Genocide unfolds in real-time, live-streamed for the world to see.
In response, former U.S. President Joe Biden— who proudly proclaims that “one need not be a Jew to be a Zionist”—chooses to question the toll of Palestinian lives. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” he says, as though the very act of counting the dead is a privilege not afforded to the colonized.
For over 15 months, Biden’s full-throated support for the genocide in Gaza, followed by Trump’s explicit embrace of ethnic cleansing as settler-colonial policy, exposes a Christian colonial logic. Like the Pope, once seen as the Vicar of Christ overseeing colonized souls, they claim the power to decide what is accurate, what is salvable, and what is expendable —souls saved even as bodies were destroyed.
The Western inability to recognize Palestinians as fully human is often attributed to Islamophobia, framed as a post-9/11 construct that portrays Muslim violence as a threat to the liberal West. However, this perspective remains superficial. To truly understand the roots of Western hatred, we must look deeper—beyond contemporary narratives—into the ideological foundations of Western thought.
There we will find that Christian Zionism, a theology that embeds the killing and erasure of the Arab body within its vision, continues to influence modern liberal ideologies and their engagement with Palestine.
The roots of the Zionism/Palestine antagonism can be found in Europe’s centuries-long engagement with the Arabs and Muslims, much before their “interventions” in what the West came to produce as “the Middle East.” Christianity, the foundation of European identity, originated in Palestine—outside Europe’s geographic and cultural boundaries. In this light, Islam can be understood as one of the conditions for the emergence of the contrasting identities Europeans claim as their own.[1]
This paradox became even more pronounced with the Arab conquests of the eighth century, which brought profound cultural, religious, and intellectual exchanges. These interactions were not merely occasional but fundamental to Europe’s intellectual and political development, centering both the Arab and the Jew in the formation of European identity.[2] Christian Europe racialized the Muslim as an existential foe and the Jew as an internal suspect. By the time of the Crusades, the papacy had constructed “the ideology of a unified Christendom at war with a unified Islam.”[3]
During the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation further complicated this relationship. The Reformers sought to reassert the role of the Hebrew Bible in Christian life, seeing in the Jews a potential fulfillment of prophecy. Christian Zionism emerged then as a reinterpretation of the Hebrew Bible, constructing Jews as a separate race and political body that ought to be “restored” to the Holy Land to fulfill Christian redemption.
Reformists would intensify theologies about “Jewish restoration” as the imperial potentiality gradually came to the foreground. This reinterpretation gave rise to a novel theo-political messianic vision whose importance for political life today cannot be overstated. By the time Napoleon Bonaparte made his first political statements about Zionism during his campaign in Palestine in the early 19th century, the ideological framework that had been built by Protestant Reformers for some four hundred years was already in full effect.
Figures like Agrippa d’Aubigné, a 16th century French poet and reformist, incorporated these themes of Jewish restoration and Arab degradation into their works, invoking not just religious but racialized imagery to depict the Arabs as obstacles to the divine plan for Jewish redemption.
D’Aubigné, in his epic poem Les Tragiques, metaphorically compares the Protestant struggle against the Catholic Church to the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, invoking themes of honor, sacrifice, fidelity, love, and salvation. Assuming a prophetic role, d’Aubigné seeks to enact divine will and “Raise the banner of Israel” (“relever l’enseigne d’Israël”), reigniting the Huguenots’ militant spirit for a symbolic “conquest of Canaan,” realized when Protestants unite as and with Israel (“O tribus d’Israël”), marching in ranks (“marcher de rang”) to reclaim Canaan.[4] In this metaphor, Protestants and Hebrews cross the Red Sea—and the sea of blood, intertwining into a single, bloody march the miraculous passage through the Red Sea with the later massacres of the Canaanites. For Zion to attain salvation required the destruction of the Arabs.
This same language of conquest and purification would be adopted by European thinkers and politicians of the time who understood that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine could only be possible if the Arabs were relegated invisible.
From the Protestant reformation onward, then, we see that French, Irish, Dutch, British, German, Austrian etc. millenarians, poets, writers, artists and politicians wove together narratives of Protestant suffering and Jewish persecution, linking their fates in a theological and historical continuum of what came to be constructed as their shared “Judeo-Christian heritage” meant to transcend historical Christian Judeophobia.
The works of early Christian Zionists such as Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) also exemplify this racialized logic. In Le Rappel des Juifs (1643), La Peyrère extended Crusader messianism into Christian Zionism, claiming that restoring Jews to Palestine under a French monarchy was essential to reversing Jewish and territorial degeneration.[5] Arab presence, he says, had rendered the once-fertile “land of milk and honey” and its once-sacred Holy Temple into a space for the wicked and “a retreat of Arabs, the most infamous of all thieves in the world.”[6]
This racialization of Palestine’s Arabs framed them as symbols of the land’s degradation, justifying the need to “restore” both the Jews and Christian order—a process that ultimately demanded their eradication.
Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau redefined Jewish identity by framing Jews as le peuple Hébreu, situating them within emerging discourses of modern nationalism. At the same time, Voltaire portrayed the Muslim Prophet as an emblem of fanaticism and barbarism, reinforcing a dichotomy between Jewish assimilation into European nationhood and the denigration of Islam.[7] The French Revolution’s emancipation continued this tradition, redefining Jews as Israélites—a supposedly secular term that instead marked them as a distinct race and nation.
Abbé Grégoire, who sought to “regenerate” Jews during the French Revolution, drew influence from La Peyrère. Napoleon Bonaparte, too, relied on Le Rappel des Juifs when convening the Grand Sanhedrin and later issuing a coin showing himself giving the Ten Commandments to a kneeling Moses.[8]
What this process means overall is that Palestine was being gradually overwritten, replaced in Western biblical, literary, and political imagination by “Israel” as a battleground of salvation rather than a land of coexistence.
Through this lens, Palestine becomes both sacred and sacrificial—a geography where Palestinian suffering is either necessary or invisible in the eschatological vision of a restored Israel.
This racialized orientalist view of the Arabs, as documented by Edward Said, reinforced the ideological underpinnings of Christian Zionism, which did not fade with the decline of European colonialism in the Arab world.[9] Rather, it morphed into a more secular form, intertwined with liberal and democratic ideals, but still fundamentally shaped by the same theological and racialized logic.[10]
Christian Zionism is not merely about Israel; it is an extension of this centuries-old project—a modern iteration of Christian racial supremacy dressed in the language of prophecy. It does not simply justify violence; it sanctifies it, rendering the Arab invisible, their erasure not collateral but necessary, a fulfillment of a vision long in the making.
Post-WWII American imperialism repackaged this legacy into a liberal rhetoric of human rights, democracy, and progress—terms weaponized to justify relentless Western interventions in the Arab world, bombing it into “modernity” every few years. Liberalism, far from neutral, is rooted in Europe’s colonial past, sustaining its hegemony by framing Islam as its antithesis.[11]
As Sherene Razack argues, this framing enables the eviction of Muslims and Arabs from Western civilization and law.[12] George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” invoked crusading language, recasting military aggression as a mission to eradicate Islamic evil and impose Western civilization. Within this framework, Israel is upheld as the embodiment of “liberal values” in a region cast as degenerate, reinforcing an orientalist binary that legitimizes perpetual state violence.
Like settler-colonialism and its embedded white supremacy, these racist ideologies underpin the modern Western knowledge/power regime and its global expansion.[13] It is therefore no surprise that Trump would state that Palestinians should be ethnically cleansed from Gaza, suggesting that the U.S. would “take over the Gaza Strip” and implying that Palestinians have “no alternative” but to leave.
This process ultimately turned some of Europe’s Jews into colonizing settlers carrying the seeds of Western Christian anti-semitism, orientalism, and islamophobia into Palestine, illuminating the complicities, identifications, and dehumanization that linked both the European Jew and the Arab to the West’s religious, political and colonial history in Arab lands.
The Western Zionist, relocated to Palestine, becomes both the subject and the agent of a Christian Zionist vision that extends its orientalist and Islamophobic discourses into the Arab land of Palestine. This framing enables the spectacle of obliteration, a full exercise in necropolitics—the assertion of power through the management of death.
How else can one explain the ease with which Western powers ship thousands of tons of explosives, knowing they will wipe out newborns in NICU wards? How else does one justify the systematic erasure of Palestinian civilians—women, children, entire families? Just as centuries of savage Western colonial violence was justified through the rhetoric of conversion and civilization, Palestine is made into a space where the genocide in Gaza is sanctified within a higher eschatological order—an order rooted in the theological and racialized foundations of “Western “civilization.” By understanding these dynamics, we understand that European and American Christian Zionism is a significant force in the colonization and ongoing devastation of both the Jew and the Palestinian on colonized and terrorized Palestinian lands.
[1] Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism, (Chicago University Press, 2016).
[2] Norman Daniel, The Arabs and Medieval Europe (London; New York: Longman, 1979); David Levering Lewis, God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215 New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
[3] Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (Columbia University Press, 2007), 9.
[4] “Qui voudra se sauver de l’Egypte infidelle, Conquerir Canaan et habiter en elle,
O tribus d’Israel, il faut marcher de rang Dedans le golfe rouge et dans la mer de sang”
“Who would want to escape from infidel Egypt, Conquer Canaan and live in it,
O tribes of Israel, close your ranks and march, Into the red gulf and into the sea of blood” (D’Aubigné, “Fers,” 521–28, my translation.)
[5] “Ils sont affligez de toutes sortes de maladies, et subjets à mille infirmitez, qui font que leur conversation est naturellement odieuse à tous les hommes, et que tous les hommes les fuyent, ou les persecutent avec mespris et aversion.” (ibid., p. 72).
[6] “La Terre Saincte a esté maudite en leur malediction. La ville de Jerusalem en est devenue le repaire de Dragons et des Esprits immondes. Et le sainct lieu où estoit le sainct Temple, et qui estoit jadis le concours de tous de gens de Dieu, n’est-ce pas aujourd’huy l’asile des meschans, le refuge des coquins, et une retraitte d’Arabes, les plus infames de tous les voleurs du monde?”
La Peyrère, Du Rappel des Juifs, 71. (The Holy Land has been cursed by their damning. The city of Jerusalem has become a den of dragons and hexed spirits).
[7] Voltaire, Mahomet ou le Fanatisme, tragédie en cinq actes (1741)
[8] Richard Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (New York: E. J. Brill. 1987), 109; see also 94–114.
[9] The racialized construction of Jews and Arabs as distinct and opposing categories continued into the 19th and 20th centuries. French writers such as stateman François Chateaubriand, after visiting Palestine in 1806-1807, concluded that the Arab was nothing more than a primitive savage: “Tout indique chez l’Arabe l’homme civilisé retombé dans l’état sauvage.” These ideas were echoed by Swiss Calvinist missionary, a friend of Theodor Herzl and Red Cross founder Henri Dunant (1828–1910), whose biblical belief in Christ’s return to Palestine led him to advocate for the conquest of Arab lands by Western “civilization.” See François-René de Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem et de Jérusalem à Paris (Paris: Le Normant, 1811), 3 vols., édition critique parEmile Malakis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1946), 2 vols., (II, 85)
[10] Gil Anidjar, The Jew and the Arab, (Stanford University Press, 2003).
[11] Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago University Press, 2014)
[12] Sherene H. R Razack, Nothing Has to Make Sense: Upholding White Supremacy through Anti-Muslim Racism (University of Minnesota Press, 2022)
[13] Rouhana NN, Shalhoub-Kevorkian N, eds. When Politics Are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press; 2021).
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