lEnthusiasm for the Republican candidate only grows on the eve of the presidential elections 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 Joe Biden in 2020. Former House tenant Blanche constantly insists that his Jewish compatriots “They should have their heads examined.” if they persist in not voting for him.
In fact, he 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 a speech before Republican Jews, even called Netanyahu “your prime minister”). But he has just toughened this type of attack by now stating that “Christians love Israel more than Jews.”
The long history of Christian Zionism
These “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 aims to turn the Jewish people into a nation against European anti-Semitism, Christian Zionism develops around a so-called “evangelical” reading of the Old Testament: the salvation of the Christian faithful depends, on this evangelical dogmatic, on the “restoration” of the Jewish people in “land of Israel”, “restoration” which is the prerequisite for the establishment of the kingdom of God.
Already in 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 of the evangelical movement similarly 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 that was under British mandate.
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 such an occupation as nothing less than the fulfillment of prophecies, while the Jewish community remains largely committed to a negotiated settlement based on the principle of “land for peace”.
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