The head of the largest Christian Zionist organization is no friend to Israel — he wants an apocalypse there
Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, speaks during the March For Israel Nov. 14 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Jay Michaelson April 16, 2024
News flash: The apocalyptic war of Gog and Magog has just begun.
Soon, as per prophecy, most of Israel will be destroyed, while some Jews will remain until the bitter end as witnesses to Jesus’ Second Coming, ushering in the messianic age in which faithful Christians will inherit the kingdom of God on earth.
All this according to the most influential Israel lobbyist in America, Pastor John Hagee.
“Prophetically, we are on the verge of the Gog-Magog war that Ezekiel described in chapters 38 and 39,” Hagee said on Sunday, after over 200 Iranian missiles were fired on Israel, 99% of which were intercepted and destroyed by regional missile defense systems.
And what does Hagee plan to do about this unprecedented attack? “We don’t need to de-escalate,” he said. Instead, Christians United For Israel — the Christian Zionist organization that Hagee founded in 2006 —held an “emergency fly-in” Monday to visit lawmakers in Washington, D.C., in order to “tell them to stop shuffling papers and do something to help Israel.”
Hagee is not some fringe religious wacko. For 20 years, he has built CUFI into the largest (at 8 million members), most-funded and most powerful “pro-Israel” organization in America — dwarfing AIPAC, J Street, and others. House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke to CUFI during the “fly-in.” (He has also fast-tracked the package of aid to Israel that he had previously stalled, though this is likely as much a response to Iran’s attack as to any lobbying effort.)
But CUFI has its own, unique agenda for Israel, which has little to do with the interests of Jews, religious or secular. (Indeed, many CUFI figures have made shockingly antisemitic statements.) It wants Jews to move to Israel to hasten the End Times and bring the Second Coming of Christ. Don’t take my word for it; Hagee wrote all of this in his bestselling 2005 book Jerusalem Countdown. As Abraham Foxman, then national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Forward in 2015, “It is for their own salvation, not for Jewish salvation; it’s so they will see the Second Coming of the Messiah. A campaign of Christians to send Jews to Israel is morally offensive.”
Nor is this merely some irrelevant theological position — it influences policy.
Christian Zionists bitterly opposed the Oslo Peace Process, and helped to sabotage it by supporting the Israeli right. They also opposed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the end of which has now made containing Iran harder than ever. They were central to former president Donald Trump’s decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem and his hard-right positions on Israel more generally: supporting settlements and opposing civil rights for Palestinians. They have long supported Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank as part of God’s plan for a Jewish return to Israel — part of the sequence of biblical prophecies that culminates in the Second Coming (and destruction of world Jewry).
Christian Zionists have also been longtime funders of Israel’s extreme far right. Between 2001 and 2015, the John Hagee Foundation donated over $58 million to far-right Israeli organizations, including settlements and Im Tirtzu, an extreme nationalist group that, at the time, literally demonized Israeli progressives (depicting Knesset member Naomi Chazan with horns), helped pass anti-NGO laws in Israel and led a yearslong campaign against the New Israel Fund.
Not only do Christian Zionists stoke regional flames in the Middle East to bring about their messianic ambitions; they are also Christian nationalists. At the same time as Hagee ascribed Iran’s missiles to God’s plan, he also ascribed them to “the weak and pathetic leadership of Joe Biden.” In the past, he has railed against immigration (in an article titled “The Coming Fourth Reich”) and has, numerous times, said that Christian morality and Christian prophecy should dictate the policies of the United States. Just as Israel is meant to play a role in history as the Jewish nation, America is meant to play a role in history as a Christian one.
Hagee has also said that that Hitler was “a half-breed Jew,” that “all Muslims have a mandate to kill Christians and Jews,” that “women are only meant to be mothers and bear children,” and that the Antichrist will be gay and half Jewish. This is the man with Trump’s (and former vice president Mike Pence’s, and Speaker Johnson’s) ear.
Sarah Posner, a longtime historian of the Christian right, wrote last fall that, “For many ‘Christian Zionists,’ and particularly for popular evangelists with significant clout within the Republican Party, their support for Israel is rooted in its role in the supposed end times: Jesus’ return to Earth, a bloody final battle at Armageddon, and Jesus ruling the world from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In this scenario, war is not something to be avoided, but something inevitable, desired by God, and celebratory.”
To be clear, this is not even what the Hebrew Bible says. Its prophecy regarding “Gog from the Land of Magog” (neither name is defined but Gog appears to be some kind of king or general, and Magog is the grandchild of Noah) is contained in Ezekiel 38-39, and concerns supernatural events signifying God’s intervention in history to defeat foreign armies. Says God in Ezekiel 38:20: “The fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the beasts of the field, all creeping things that move on the ground, and every human being on earth shall quake before Me. Mountains shall be overthrown, cliffs shall topple, and every wall shall crumble to the ground.”
Despite its original meaning, this passage has long been understood by Christians as prophesying the End of Days. Over the years, Christian Zionists have associated the Gog-Magog war with the Cold War, the Iraq Wars, and other past military conflicts, as well as Oct. 7 and this past week’s missile attack.
Obviously, Israel’s right doesn’t predict history will unfold this way, but that has not stopped them from enthusiastically welcoming Christian Zionist support. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in particular has, over the years, effusively praised Christian Zionists. “When I say we have no greater friends than Christian supporters of Israel, I know you’ve always stood with us,” Netanyahu told CUFI’s annual conference in 2017. “You stand with us because you stand with yourselves because we represent that common heritage of freedom that goes back thousands of years. America has no better friend than Israel and Israel has no better friend than America. And Israel has no better friend in America than you.”
Of course, Netanyahu knows that CUFI is not supporting Israel because of a “common heritage of freedom.” But he doesn’t care about their prophecies. What matters is that they support Israel in general, and the Israeli right in particular. And it’s not just Bibi. The Jewish National Fund has honored Christian Zionists as well. At the November 2023 March for Israel, sponsored by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and others, no rabbis were invited to speak, but Hagee was, despite his prior statements and his view that Jews are merely pawns in God’s plan for the Second Coming. Is this really the right person to speak in support of Israel?
At the very least, this marriage of convenience should trouble anyone who is troubled by the shocking rise of the Israeli far right, by the way in which messianic thinking animates the Christian right, and by Netanyahu’s own tendency to respond to attacks on Israel with militaristic rage rather than sober, strategic thinking.
I’ll put it this way: Christian Zionists want Israel to be caught in an apocalyptic war to end all wars. Do you?
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