In a few surreal minutes on camera in June, Senator Ted Cruz told Tucker Carlson that when God promised to “bless those who bless Israel” in the Biblical book of Genesis, he meant the modern state ruled by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Pressed by Carlson to clarify whether the ancient covenant applied to a contemporary government, Cruz said yes—without hesitation.

Chastising Carlson for challenging Cruz, the Jerusalem Post called him “the GOAT of replacement theology,” invoking an old and not entirely unfounded charge: that any Christian who doubts Israel’s ongoing divine mandate is guilty of supersessionism — the belief that the Church has replaced Israel as God’s chosen people.

But this tension is less about theology than epistemology. Christianity, in its relationship to Jews, often doesn’t want to be moral, just, or right. It wants to be true. 

And whether something is true or not is not a moral question.

A faith that refuses to see

In Gaza, 90 percent of buildings have been destroyed. Premature babies died when Israeli soldiers cut power to their incubators. In early July, Israeli soldiers shot 400 starving civilians waiting for food.

Medics and journalists were targeted as senior officials called to starve the population. Men carry photocopied ration cards soaked in dried blood. Children are killed by snipers while eating. Mothers no longer produce milk because they are themselves starving.

While all this is happening, Jerusalem’s church leaders have issued a few, mostly cautious statements, avoiding direct condemnation.

Theological nuance can’t hide this reality: to claim ignorance is impossible; to accept complicity, unbearable.

So, churches default to pre-approved lament templates, with words like “heartbreaking scenes,” “complex situation,” and “praying for all sides” floating above the facts like incense above stone. They never land.

When commitment needs to be proven right all along to be valid, the capacity to make meaning and recognise responsibility recedes—leaving many Christians unequipped to make sense of reality in moral terms at all.

Silence in stone sanctuaries

Sixty miles from Gaza, Christ Church Jerusalem swings open its oak doors for Wednesday Eucharist. Built in 1849 by the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews (CMJ), it served as a base for British diplomatic and missionary activities, and it was the Middle East's first Protestant chapel.

Its purpose was to prove prophecy by facilitating Jewish return. Alexander Keith, one of the founders, is sometimes credited with early use of the phrase “a land without a people for a people without a land,” though it later became a core Zionist slogan. The abolitionist William Wilberforce was among its prominent supporters.

David Pileggi, the church’s rector, does not identify as a prophecy-based Zionist. He frames support for Israel as fidelity to the biblical narrative itself: “God elects the people of Israel to be a blessing to the nations of the world. The nations should return that blessing and receive light from the Jews until the end of the age.”

Sitting in the shaded courtyard, he tells TRT World the devastation in Gaza “inevitably leads people to soul-searching.”

Some parishioners have asked questions. When I press him, he describes criticising Israel as akin to walking through a minefield. He does not condemn nor defend the war outright. He is careful. Measured. Reluctant to interpret responsibility in public. Perhaps ambivalent. 

Historian Yali Hashash learned of Christ Church while researching her dissertation on 19th-century poverty in Jerusalem’s Sephardic community.

She calls the church’s 19th-century mission a strategy of moral superiority: “They understood their key mission was to show the Jews—through charity and uplift—that Christianity was alive and true.”

That logic persists. Today, the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has supplanted UN aid with four “secure” food distribution hubs coordinated with the Israeli military—remote sites where Israeli forces have repeatedly shot starving civilians, with Human Rights Watch counting at least 859 killed between May 27 and July 31, 2025. 

Its first executive director resigned before launch, saying he could not meet basic humanitarian standards, and was replaced by Johnnie Moore, a US evangelical leader who has denied the shootings and cast the project as an act of compassion.

Hashash, now part of a collective of Israeli professionals and academics called Feminists Against Armageddon, argues that Christian Zionists wield more influence over Israeli society than most realise—power rooted in Christianity’s longstanding habit of treating Jews as living proof of its truth.

Prophecy over people

Christian hermeneutic dependency has deep historical roots. When Napoleon floated the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, it intensified British efforts to assert moral and religious authority in the region – culminating in the founding of CMJ and the construction of Christ Church.

The Napoleonic wars and the threat of secular nationalism forced European powers to compete not just for territory but for symbolic authority and moral legitimacy.

In the Holy Land, where Russia claimed protection of Orthodox Christians and France, Catholics, Britain, with no churches to protect, put in motion a new purpose: restoring Jews worldwide to Palestine to vindicate Biblical prophecy. 

The Crimean War accelerated the process. In 1853, Russia claimed the right to protect Eastern Christians in Ottoman Jerusalem. Britain sided with the Ottomans to halt Russian expansion and pushed for land reforms in return. The 1858 Ottoman Land Code introduced individual land registration, paving the way for foreign purchases a decade later.

At first, peasants did not object because the new landlords rarely interfered. But Zionist immigrants acquired deeds and enforced evictions. In 1886, the first recorded fatal clash occurred in Petach Tikva when Jewish settlers expelled Palestinian tenant farmers from seasonal land.

In this logic of Christian vindication, faith is less an interpretive commitment and more a demand for empirical confirmation.

David Parsons, spokesman for the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, told me by phone that current events are “reminiscent of the darkest periods of Jewish history” but ultimately are “birth pangs of the coming age of peace.”

In his reading, Palestinian suffering is a prelude, a necessary step in the script’s final act. Not an independent reality. 

Inside Christ Church, Wednesday Eucharist proceeds as if nothing outside the stone walls matters. Congregants stand at attention, their accents European. They pray for Israeli soldiers, for Holocaust survivors, for the endurance of Israel. By chance, I visited on Israeli Memorial Day.

Sirens wail through the sanctuary, and an F-35 shrieks overhead. The jet may have bombed Gaza days earlier, but here it is part of a liturgy: faith, power, nation fused. 

I duck into the guesthouse for coffee. A burly man with a Cockney accent argues theology at a nearby table: “I’ve never found any biblical support for the idea the Antichrist will be Jewish,” he insists, loud enough to echo. The debate is earnest, but the stakes feel hollow. 

From its beginning, Christian identity has been entangled with how it interprets and positions Jews, typically as living evidence to authenticate the truth of Christianity itself

For St. Augustine, the 5th-century theologian, Jews were a “witness people”—spared, humiliated, and scattered to prove the truth of Christianity.

In the Greek Church, their continued existence was a divine utility, preserving Scripture even in unbelief.

In the Latin Church, they were cast as “Antichrist”—a 2nd-century literary figment meant to contrast with the true church.

Then, the Protestant reformers recast the Latin church itself as the antichrist, often cutting and pasting Catholic texts that had previously been about Jews.

“For the Protestants, there were only the Jews as the way in (to the Holy Land),” Hashash tells TRT World. “In fact, it was forbidden to convert Muslims. They had no previous churches here, no foreign consulates. They entered through minority figures who belonged to them and wanted them to enter. Russia protected the Orthodox Christians; France was protecting the Catholics. And the British had no one to protect. That’s how this connection between the English imperialism and the English missionaries gained strength from each other.”

In England, literalism fused with Puritanism. Cromwell had envisioned Britain as a Protestant Israel tasked with fulfilling prophecy in order to prove that Protestant reformers, not Catholics, were the true Church.

When Napoleon threatened to outmaneuver Britain by endorsing a Jewish homeland, London accelerated its own project. CMJ was founded. Christ Church rose. Queen Victoria commissioned the Palestine Exploration Fund to excavate — although in some cases it invented — a modern, biblical, sacred geography for Palestine. 

As historian William Vance Trollinger notes, 19th-century Protestant pilgrims often ignored Arab Christian communities, treating local Arabs largely as part of a biblical backdrop.

In contrast, Jews in Palestine were cast as key prophetic actors whose settlement would help hasten the millennium, reflecting a theology that privileged Jewish continuity in an eschatological frame.

Pileggi downplays the importance of prophecy. He prefers to talk about faithfulness. But when I ask whether Christian institutions have any duty to speak about Gaza, he becomes guarded.

He acknowledges the questions but describes criticism as dangerous, risky, and easily prone to misunderstanding. No statement. No position. Only a fear of consequence.

David and Goliath

In the 1970s, the Moral Majority framed Israel as a moral cause using a David and Goliath script. With a US-backed nuclear power cast as the weak David, Palestinians disappeared. Responsibility vanished. What mattered was preserving the idea that Christianity is true because history aligns with the text.

This is not faith. It is vindication, and its cost is moral discernment itself. When belief requires the world to enact a predetermined script without ambiguity, nothing — least of all something unplanned — can be recognised on its own terms. Hermeneutic space collapses. Nothing can be questioned, no meaning can evolve. 

Christians remain trapped in a closed system where negation is proof of destiny. Pileggi wants to talk about faith. I want to talk about Gaza. His first words—“we are here to be complicated”—turn out to be the most direct thing he says, and I am left reading between the lines.

He feels trapped by outside attacks, but history will not stay inside stone walls. It spills into Gaza, where no one argues whether the Bible is true or has the luxury to be irresponsible.

Evening limps into Gaza on sand-coloured crutches. A muezzin’s call collides with a church-bell sample ripped from the internet—its bronze twin lies shattered in a crater. As bells ring in Jerusalem, the Evangelical Friends of Zion Museum lobby sells books with titles like “Persia: the final jihad,” translated into Hebrew.

In one exhibit, Benjamin Netanyahu’s prerecorded baritone rings out: “I do not think there would be a Zionism, or a state of Israel, without Christian Zionism.”

A special, darkened room, which the guide says “illustrates that lights of humanity and compassion can shine, even in the darkest time,” is dedicated to Christians who suffered during the Nazi holocaust. 

“Answering the call to help, these people said ‘yes’ even at great cost,” the guide says. 

Where are Christians now, to say “no?”

This piece was published in collaboration with Egab.