An Old Wine in New Skins

Israel is not merely the Jew of nations, it is the Christ of all countries

By Michael Oren

My first encounter with antisemitism, when I was about nine years old and growing up as the lone Jewish kid in an entirely Catholic neighborhood, was being called by some bully a Christ-killer. I would go on to encounter many other stripes of Jew-hatred: Jews have too much money, power, and influence, Jews are devious, obnoxious, money-grubbing, and pushy, Jews are vengeful, dishonest, and, simply, evil. Yet it was the charge of deicide which, more than any other imprecation, stuck with me. What could be more damning, more irredeemable, than murdering God? The Jews not only rejected immanence—God’s physical presence on earth—we crucified it.

I was reminded of our alleged crime while reading Douglas Murray’s masterful new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. In it, Murray has reached the Keter plane of clarity, perceiving Israel’s war with Iran and its terrorist proxies for precisely what it is, an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. But in the book—and in his subsequent interview on Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast—Murray digs down deeper into the anti-Israel protests on Western campuses. A generation of students, he explains, has been taught that their own countries are klepto-states, stolen from their pure indigenous peoples by rapacious white settlers, slavers, and capitalists.

Unfortunately for them, their countries—the United States, Canada, France, and Australia—are too long-established, territorially large, and ethnically-cleansed to destroy. Not so Israel, though. A tiny country of a mere ten million inhabitants and only seventy-seven years old with an indigenous population still intact and under occupation, Israel can, conceivably, be eradicated. The urge to destroy Israel, then, Murray concludes, is in reality a purge, a way of expiating the students’ own guilt for their country’s crimes against humanity. Murray calls this pathology “projection.”

In doing so, he is expounding on an idea developed in a no less clear-eyed work, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, published last year by the dazzling Adam Kirsch. Settler Colonial Ideology (SCI), Kirsch maintains, drilled into students at the West’s preeminent universities, is the animating idea behind their anti-Zionism. Erase Israel, they have been taught to believe, and atone for your own society’s sins. Yet this creed, Kirsch understands, didn’t originate on Columbia’s campus. Its roots, rather, descend far deeper—to bedrock Christian theology.

In traditional Christian thought, Jewish homelessness represents divine punishment for their rejection of Christ. Martin Luther once purportedly quipped that if the Jews ever reestablished their state in the Holy Land, he would convert to Judaism. In Luther’s thinking, the recreation of the Jewish state poses a fundamental if not existential threat to Christianity. The only explanation is that Israel, rather than redeeming the Jews, represents the apotheosis of their sins. Joshua A. Brook sarcastically summarizes Kirsch’s thesis:

We in the West are steeped in sin — the original sin of settler colonisation — in which we are all complicit, and which is the sole source of all injustice in our society. Alas, America cannot be decolonised; for the wages of sin is death. But wait! All is not lost! There is one (Jewish) nation that can bear the sin of the world, and by its gruesome, bloody death bring redemption to us all. As a well-known Second Temple rabbi might have put it, this is (very) old wine poured into a new wineskin.

Reading Murray and Kirsch, I was transported back to being a nine-year-old condemned as a Christ-killer and experienced something close to an epiphany. The Jews didn’t kill Christ, I realized, the world did and was still avidly in the act. For Israel is not the Jew among nations, it is the Christ of countries which must die for all other nations’ sins. As such, Western anti-Zionists are embracing an ancient Christian idea and flipping it on its head. In calling for Israel’s annihilation, those protesters are seeking to redeem themselves. In accusing Israel of genocide, they are the real deicides.

Alas, for me, as an historian and statesperson, this revelation is of little efficacy. Theoretically, Israel could make a public diplomacy case that hatred of the Jewish state is, in effect, hatred of the Jew, Jesus Christ. That argument is utterly unnecessary when dealing with Evangelicals and other faith-based supporters of Israel, though it may have some impact on virulently atheist demonstrators. They would be shocked to learn that, in attacking Israel, they are defending classic Christian antisemitism. The charge that they are acting not out of some enlightened, secular, academic ideology but from a theology as old as the medieval church, might just give them pause.