This is an excerpt from a longer work in progress by Prof. Silvana Rabinovich. You can learn more about Prof. Rabinovich and her scholarship in this interview.
Through dangerous geopolitical anachronism, a purely literal reading of the Bible ignores complex traditional exegesis in order to support the Zionist colonial enterprise encouraged by British imperialism. Literal readings of the improbable biblical geography are performed in the manner of military strategists, with the map laid out on the desk. Literal readings are driven by deliberate anachronisms, for example, saying that the land promised to the patriarch Abraham—from the Euphrates to the Nile (Genesis 15:18)—belongs to the “Jewish people,” inviting the understanding that, as Walter Riggans puts it, “The State of Israel is only the beginning of what God is doing for and through the Jewish people.”
Not only does the Bible make no reference to a “State of Israel”—since the concept of the state is a modern political category foreign to the scriptural world—but it is also misleading to speak of a “people” in the modern sense. In the Hebrew Bible, the term ʿam denotes a collective defined by kinship and genealogy, articulated through families and clans.
The theological origins of Christian Zionism are linked to the Protestant Reformation which, through translation, encouraged renewed engagement with the Old Testament and gave rise to interpretations that associated the conversion of Jews in the Holy Land with the second coming of Christ. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, Christian Zionists in Great Britain, guided by literal hermeneutics and futuristic eschatology, claimed to recognize in their Jewish neighbors the descendants of Abraham, understood as the rightful beneficiaries of a restoration in the Promised Land. Thus, evangelical missionary societies were established and undertook pilgrimages to the Holy Land, while this theological impulse found a political counterpart in the idea of founding a Jewish state there. It was in this context—and in dialogue with members of the Jewish Zionist movement—that the Balfour Declaration was conceived, granting Jews the possibility of establishing a national home in Palestine.
The Scofield Reference Bible (1909) aimed to interpret the biblical text as the key to deciphering the future. It treated place names literally—Jerusalem, Zion, Israel—and it emphasized the reign of David and his descendants which, due to its messianic character, underscores the need to rebuild the Temple. This strand of dispensationalism, marked by a sharp distinction between Israel and the church, understands the founding of the State of Israel as the result of divine intervention, interprets the election of the Jewish people literally as a guarantee of their perpetual right to the land, and anticipates the imminent outcome in the battle of Armageddon. The construction of the Temple is necessary because, once desecrated by the Antichrist, it would bring about the second coming of Christ.
By reading prophecies as foreshadowing historical events—a warmongering anachronism—in the 1980s Hal Lindsey fashioned an apocalypticism that alternately targeted the USSR or Islam, according to the shifting enemy of “Western civilization.” Today, the God Bless the USA Bible (also known as the “Trump Bible”) intersperses passages from the King James Version with political texts associated with the civil religion of the United States.
In its spread throughout Latin America, Christian Zionism serves the interests of US hegemony. A conspicuous example of its effects is the replica of Solomon’s temple built in São Paulo in 2014 by Edir Macedo, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God’s bishop. It is an expensive, monumental project with capacity for ten thousand parishioners, covered with “Jerusalem stone” imported to Brazil from Hebron (where the tomb of the patriarch Abraham/Ibrahim is located).
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The practice of literal and futuristic hermeneutics in modern Hebrew has likewise built renewed momentum toward the reconstruction of the Temple. This interpretation does not hesitate to predict the destruction of the Dome of the Rock in order to begin the long-awaited “construction” as soon as possible. Once the Third Temple is established, the plan is to restore the priesthood and sacrifices in order to hasten the coming of the Messiah.
At present, the Jewish Return to the Mount (chozrim lahar) movement plans to begin animal sacrifice even prior to the Temple’s reconstruction. Since at least Passover 2022, its activists have attempted to sacrifice Passover lambs there. They advertise payments to those who are detained on the way to the sacrifice (500 shekels) and detained while carrying a lamb (1200 shekels). If they achieve the goal of sacrificing the lamb in the designated place, the reward rises to 20,000 shekels.
In its interpretation of both rabbinic and biblical literature, the movement understands the building of the Temple and the coming of the Messiah as “things created before the creation of the world.” This Jewish extremist group bases its obsession with the Temple on a literal reading of the midrash of Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 3:3: “Seven things were created before the world was created. They are: The Torah, Gehinnom, the Garden of Eden, the Throne of Glory, the Temple, Repentance, and the Name of the Messiah.” Reading a midrash literally is contradictory, to say the least, since midrashic interpretation is necessarily allegorical.
The discourse of the Return to the Mount movement reveals an apocalyptic political theology that selectively combines a literal and anachronistic reading of Deuteronomistic passages from the Hebrew Bible with elements drawn from rabbinic interpretation and liberal democracy. For example, in April 2023, this movement demanded the dismissal of Shmuel Rabinovitch, the rabbi in charge of the Western Wall and other holy sites, for prohibiting animals from entering. The request was rejected after Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, who warned that Halachah strictly forbids Jews from ascending the Temple Mount since the precise location of the Holy of Holies—the inner sanctuary reserved exclusively for the High Priest—is unknown.
Zechariah 6:15 resonates as a counterpoint: it is humble obedience to the precepts, rather than their arrogant transgression, that will build the Temple of God. Yet there is more at stake in the urgency to restore sacrifice. After the destruction of the Temple, sacrificial rites were replaced by prayer. This defiance of rabbinic authority thus seeks to abolish the prohibitions of halakhah, which recognize the symbolic and spiritual value of exile, in order to replace exile (galuth) with redemption (ge’ulah). Redemption, in this view, would be realized through the geographical gathering of all diasporas (kibbutz galuyot) in Zion. In this way, the aim is to replace rabbinical authority in order to restore that of the High Priest.
In political theology, incompatible discourses overlap. This is condensed in the story of a woman from Return to the Mount who was arrested while carrying a lamb under her clothes, pretending to be pregnant. In her defense, the movement invokes “freedom of worship under a democratic government.” This invocation lays bare the falseness of the initiative: it labels the provocation of Muslims at their sacred site, Haram al-Sharif (the Arabic name for the Temple Mount), as “freedom”; it designates the double desecration of a sacred space—both the mosques and the Holy of Holies—as “worship”; and it invokes a “democratic government” that it in fact despises, treating democracy as a concept foreign to Judaism.
Return to the Mount is not just a marginal extremist movement. The Israeli government holds the apocalyptic trigger. In an act of provocation, in August 2025, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir went to pray at Haram al-Sharif, leading 1,250 settlers in prayer. The perversity of this apocalyptic, colonial use of Jewish texts—and its effects on the Palestinian population, with particular cruelty toward Muslims—must be exposed by unraveling the Zionist theological-political tangle.
When Jews—now deafened by Zionism and by the buzzing of drones and planes—are once again able to “hear obediently” the voice of God, that is, to repent humbly and ask forgiveness for the dispossession and death they caused, and when they reclaim their Arab identity, they may again recognize one another as children of the same father, Abraham/Ibrahim, and together honor their father’s memory in Hebron/Al-Khalil. They may also renounce the “Abraham Accords,” which only worships the golden calf. But for this to be possible, they must repent of colonialist orientalism, stop the arms race, and understand that destruction never leads to construction, much less that of a temple. Then they will be able to understand the verse Zechariah 4:6, “‘Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ Says the LORD of hosts.”
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When we say that the current world order is disfigured by a barefaced colonialism since the genocide in Gaza, we must acknowledge that this is the continuation of that earlier “order”—established after World War II and now collapsing—which rested on the oppression and dispossession of majorities, impoverished by a rapacious minority that has now simply lost all restraint.
The last apocalyptic restraint was released on October 7, 2023: Hamas called its operation “al-Aqsa Flood,” in a clear demand to return freely and en masse to Al-Quds, the holy city, in which the al-Aqsa mosque is located. Although Israel initially called its response “Iron Swords,” this name was corrected to “Bereshit War,” deploying the first word of Genesis. But Genesis requires a prior ex nihilo: in secular terms, total annihilation; in biblical terms, Amalek.
On November 17, 2025, UN Security Council Resolution 2803 welcomed the US president’s “peace plan.” Two countries with veto power (China and Russia) abstained, thereby allowing a plan of colonization and dispossession to be implemented as a corollary to genocide. Apocalyptic seal: beginning after an induced big bang. A state of emergency was instituted as a rule. Global emergency, planetary Amalek: the sovereignties of Latin America and the global south are in the crosshairs of the apocalyptic plan that destroys in order to “rebuild.”
How can we reverse this state of emergency that seeks to normalize itself as “order” to prevent the collapse of an empire? Rabbi Binyamin (born Yehoshua Redler-Feldman, 1880–1957), emigrated in 1907 from his native Galicia to Palestine and chose to settle in Ajami, a neighborhood in Jaffa, in order to integrate into the indigenous society that welcomed him and to highlight the error of the Zionist leadership in promoting Tel Aviv as a city without Palestinians. An Ashkenazi rabbi critical of Zionist colonialism, he promoted pan-Semitism (as opposed to pan-Israelism in its apocalyptic colonial version), learned Arabic, and read the local and regional press in that language, spoken by the majority of the population. Opposing the colonial logic of “biblical Orientalism” which aimed to impose Hebrew on Arabic, Rabbi Binyamin sought, through his own example, to bring the two languages together and translate between them. One of the many paths he took in order to embrace the “justice of the other” was to lend his pen to a fictional character, the Palestinian peasant (falah) Ahmad Effendi, who wrote:
You did not, apparently, pay any attention, that you have indeed come to rob what is most precious to us and to steal what is most important to us. You are coming with aspirations of conquest. Indeed, a conquest through money, bills, and law […], but a conquest nevertheless. You are not coming to live amongst us, with us, and near us […]. You are coming with certain intentions, with intentions of distinction and segregation. […] You emphasize the distinction and the difference: Here is the Hebrew, here is the Arab [po ivri u-po aravi].
Rabbi Biyamin’s bilingual binationalism developed within the Kedma Mizracha movement, which oriented itself toward the “East,” and in 1955 he aligned himself with the African-Asian convention in Bandung, Indonesia. This rabbi understood the power of theology in the intricate chessboard of a bipolar world.
Despite certain differences, Kedma Mizracha—meaning “toward the East,” a name that itself carries an antidote to Orientalism—shared several points in common with the binational Brit Shalom movement. The latter was formed by European intellectuals, among them Gershom Scholem in its early years and Martin Buber throughout its existence; Shmuel Hugo Bergman and Hans Kohn were the figures closest to Rabbi Binyamin. The greatest similarity between the two movements is that they demanded a binational approach to Zionism, a position that was both anti-imperialist and anti-colonial. They also agreed on a humble attitude toward knowledge, which is a requirement of any anti-colonial stance in relation to God. However, the official Europeanizing discourse that dominated Zionism overshadowed these promises with blind arrogance based on the secularized fantasy of rebuilding the Temple. In this context, the extra-biblical festival of Hanukkah assumed a central role in the state’s political religion.
If Walter Benjamin articulated the need to “organize pessimism” in order to honor the tradition of the oppressed, Rabbi Binyamin traced (and practiced) a path for reversing the rule of the state of emergency—that is, the apocalyptic drive of secularized Zionism (a drive that, regrettably, another Binyamin, whose last name literally means God-given, is determined to carry to its ultimate consequences). From [Rabbi] Binyamin to [Walter] Benjamin: let us erect a barricade against Binyamin [Netanyahu]!
