The Middle East Center at The New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy is proud to initiate a special new podcast series, “Bridging the Gap: Conversations on Israel and Palestine.” This series, led by Rachel Nelson, an Analyst in the Middle East Center, provides nuanced, detailed, and on-the-ground perspectives on the situation in Israel and Palestine. In this episode, Rachel sits down with Destiny Magnett, the Programs and Outreach Manager at Churches for Middle East Peace, to discuss Christian Zionism, its current manifestations, and the work that Destiny and CMEP do to foster and advocate for peace in Israel and Palestine.
Rachel Nelson:
Hello everyone and welcome to Bridging the Gap: Conversations on Israel and Palestine, hosted by the Middle East Center at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. This podcast series, which seeks to engage a wide variety of perspectives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is guided by the principles of bringing about mutual understanding and promoting peace and equity for everyone between the river and the sea. On today’s episode, I have the pleasure of speaking to Destiny Magnett, a fellow alumni of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative program at the Harvard Divinity School and a good friend. Destiny is the programs and outreach manager at Churches for Middle East Peace or CMEP, where she serves as the primary liaison for church partners, collaboratively builds CMEP’s online and in-person programming, and co-leads the regional coordinator program. The topic of today’s focus is Christian Zionism and its current manifestations. Destiny, thank you for joining us. So great to have you here. I wanted to start off by giving you the opportunity to kind of explain what CMEP does and what it aims to do and what kind of dialogue it contributes to.
Destiny Magnett:
Totally. Thanks, Rachel. It’s great to be here. So, Churches for Middle East Peace, or CMEP for short, as you said, is a 501(c)(3) faith-based organization that works to promote a comprehensive resolution to all conflicts in the Middle East. But we have a particular interest and focus on Palestine and Israel. We were founded in 1984, so last year was our 40th anniversary. We’ve been doing this work for a long time and we were founded with the mission to be an alternative Christian voice to the kinds of voices that are typically seen in this space, which tends to be uncritically supportive of the State of Israel and its policies. And that’s something, the why we’ll get into a little bit later. But to do our work, we are really about mobilizing U.S. Christians to advocate for equality, human rights, security, and justice for Palestinians as well as Israelis and all people of the Middle East, believing that these values, the inherent rights and dignity of all people, are central to our Christian faith.
We are really grateful to be an explicitly and deeply ecumenical organization. So, our membership spans across 36 denominations and communions, which include Catholic and Orthodox groups, peace churches, which are like the Mennonites and the Quakers, the Church of the Brethren, several different flavors of mainline Protestants and all the way to the Unitarian Universalists and some evangelical communities.,
And so we have a lot of theological and political diversity within our membership, which is a real gift to have all of these groups using that diversity and using their differences to come together and say one of the things we can agree upon as followers of Jesus is that Palestinians, Israelis, people across the Middle East and really across the world ought to live in peace and with justice, which is central to our mission. So, we do that work in a lot of ways. Some of our work is more educational. I personally travel a lot, being with church communities on the ground, but we also do a lot around advocacy, our brick and mortar office in Washington, D.C., and are also committed to elevating the voices of peace builders from the Middle East alongside that as well.
Rachel Nelson:
So, you mentioned that there’s this kind of overarching idea that Christians in America are really unwaveringly supportive of the State of Israel, and I’m hoping you can kind of touch on what Christian Zionism is and kind of how it differs from traditional Zionism and what that means for Jewish individuals, especially because we are seeing all kinds of Christian Zionism manifest in the kinds of the Trump administration that we’re seeing today, albeit Mike Huckabee and his ideas about the West Bank, Judea, and Samaria, or the fact that Elise Stefanik said that she believes in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, which also refers to the West Bank or Judea and Samaria. And I’m kind of hoping that you can touch on what Christian Zionism is and the work that you’re doing to kind of unpack all of that.
Destiny Magnett:
Definitely. I think countering Christian Zionism is one of the most important pieces of our work at churches for Middle East peace and the ways that it manifests not only in policy spaces but in cultural spaces in our congregations working both passively and actively, which I can get into also in a bit. But I would define Christian Zionism most simply as Christian communities who are uncritically supportive of the State of Israel, its government, and its policies. And their support often comes with the idea that once all the Jewish people are in the State of Israel, Jesus can come again. The second coming of Christ can happen. And we have this apocalyptic end explained in the Book of Revelation. But the political roots of Christian Zionism and this Messianic ideology goes back much further than even the State of Israel does. And so, one of the things I talk about with communities a lot are the realities that Christian Zionism and the idea of Jewish people being in a particular place for these apocalyptic messianic ends actually emerged in Europe in the 19th and 20th century, some would say even earlier.
I think there are a lot of arguments that it could be even earlier, but at a time that predates even Jewish Zionism and the modern day kind of political project of the State of Israel. And I think that’s something really, really important to recognize is that Christian Zionism emerged in this climate of deep antisemitism of fear of Jewish people and rejection of Jewish culture and values in this European frame of mind.
And so today, when we’re looking at what Christian Zionism is in America, it often is existing in ways that are not explicitly aware of those roots and comes together after the creation of the State of Israel, conflating importantly and necessarily the Israel that’s mentioned in the Old Testament of the Bible with the modern-day nation-state of Israel. That’s one of the first disentanglements we have to make in talking with communities about Christian Zionism is differentiating the Old Testament Israel from the modern-day nation-state of Israel and thinking against the prosperity gospel and this idea that even if you do not prosper in this life, and this is something that a lot of these communities in the U.S. put forward, even if you do not prosper in this life, if you support the State of Israel, then God will bless you.
And so you can see the entanglements of culture and structure and politics all coming together into what is quite a complicated historical and modern-day phenomenon of Christian Zionism.
Rachel Nelson:
I’m glad you touched on the roots of Christian Zionism manifesting in the 20th century because we also know that in Europe during this time, blatant antisemitism is rampant. And I think myself being Jewish, I wasn’t even really aware of the kinds of antisemitic roots that a lot of Christian Zionism has, and I think it was really shocking for me personally to learn about some of the manifestations of what that means. But I’m hoping you can kind of touch on where we’re seeing Christian Zionism today and how it’s playing out, whether it’s in our government, whether it’s in the Israeli government all throughout Europe. And I hope that you can touch on the ways we’re seeing it manifest right now.
Destiny Magnett:
Yeah. And the European strain that we saw as really Christian communities, white Christian communities in particular, because I think ideas of coloniality and white supremacy are also quite present here, but those communities saying we don’t want Jewish people in our midst in late 19th and early 20th century Europe, which of course became the seeds of the kind of antisemitism that led to the Shoah, the Holocaust. And the expulsion of the Jews could be explained by this theological means and mechanism of the Second Coming. And I think we see fragments of this same kind of thinking at work on especially the right, but in other circles as well in the U.S. today where there are like antisemitism is absolutely on the rise and anti-Jewish hate is absolutely on the rise as is anti-Muslim and Islamophobic rhetoric, they rise proportionately to one another. And this is where we have the disentangling, and you and I have talked about this before of antisemitism and anti-Zionist or non-Zionist work.
And this Christian Zionist sector tends to be in this camp where they are deeply Zionist in that they’re supportive of the modern day nation-state of Israel, but also quite antisemitic and saying, we don’t want the Jewish people in our communities, we want them to go to Israel for our own benefit and our own ends of Jesus being able to come again, which of course happens with the sacrifice of almost all of the Jewish people if we are to literally interpret what we read in the book of Revelation. So, this is the theological side, but on the political side, we see these ideas starting to be parsed out in governments in some NGOs and some think tanks. I think a really great example as we’re looking at the Heritage Foundation, which is a think tank, quite conservative responsible for producing Project 2025 with the reelection of Donald Trump that people have been watching really closely.
And they have this component called Project Esther, which is designed to be a strategy for combating antisemitism, but their strategy for combating antisemitism, the multifaceted is essentially support for the State of Israel and its policies. And so you can see how this starts to get tied up, these phenomena. You’ll hear people talk about Christian nationalism and Christian Zionism is like one side of that same coin. And you mentioned Mike Huckabee, I think he’s a prime example. He’s spoken out very brazenly about his support for annexation of the West Bank. He’s expected to be confirmed as the next ambassador to Israel. You also see outspoken Christians like Tom Cotton from Arkansas introducing legislation that would change the language that we use to talk about the land of Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories. Instead of saying the West Bank or the occupied territories, he wants to change the language to be Judea and Samaria to this biblical language, which is reinforcing this mythology of entangling the Old Testament and book of Revelation with this modern-day State of Israel and its project of essentially colonization.
And so all of this comes together in, again, deep entanglement between politics and religion and culture. And I always talk about that we can look at violence on multiple levels. So, you have direct violence, which if we look at things like settler attacks, which I know that New Lines Institute, you, just authored this fantastic report that’s looking at increases in settler violence in the West Bank and how it is impacting U.S. policies. And so we see that kind of direct violence. But then on the structural side, you have Christian philanthropic endeavors that are funneling millions and millions of dollars into these illegal settlements, allowing and enabling and empowering them to do that kind of work. And so that’s where we see organizations like John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, which is a multimillion dollar, thousands and thousands of constituents and people reached endeavor that is explicitly Christian support for the State of Israel with the subtext of these kind of apocalyptic and quite antisemitic ends.
Another organization that we see really prevalent both in the lobbying space, the funding space, a lot of political clout in D.C. and really internationally, is the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. I know we both have seen the film ‘Til Kingdom Come that follows this group and is interrogating. It has a Jewish filmmaker, Maya Zinshtein I believe is her name, but it’s really interrogating these entanglements of antisemitism within Christian Zionist communities, but the political leverage that they have enabling them in these structures to go forward. And then finally on the cultural level, which is maybe the most widespread, this is what you see in a day-to-day church or congregation. By and large, and I speak from my work with Churches from Middle East Peace, by and large most grassroots congregations aren’t as explicitly and actively Christian Zionists as a group like Christians United for Israel would be. Those churches certainly exist, especially in particular pockets of the evangelical, they’re not only evangelical worlds, but most congregations are just not doing the deeper interrogative work of disentangling their theologies from modern day politics.
And so they’re not necessarily the ones lobbying on Capitol Hill, but they’re also not asking the questions about why do we see the Biblical Israel and the modern day nation state as one and the same? And those are the kinds of people that I think are the most swayable, but also represent the idea of cultural violence and how these ideas are prevalent and robust. And Mitri Raheb, who’s a Palestinian theologian and academic, always says Christian Zionism is a theology that is very, very widespread but not very deep. And I think that that’s really true for the bulk of these communities that are engaging in these kinds of theologies. You have the extremes, but the movable middle are the people that are changeable and through just a little bit of critical work and engagement can disentangle that and start to move forward in more positive directions.
Rachel Nelson:
Destiny, I was just going to bring up that movie ‘Til Kingdom Come. I know that I personally found it deeply troubling learning that a lot of Jewish organizations are willing to work with these Christian Zionist organizations that are really spreading a lot of antisemitic subtext in their messages. But I’m really wanting to get into the kinds of work that you are doing. And so I’m wondering, it seems like some of this ideology of Christian Zionism has really entrenched itself into Christian communities here in America and abroad. And I’m wondering, I know that you go to Christian communities and you talk to them and I’m wondering how do you kind of combat some of this more dangerous thinking that not only has antisemitic subtext but kind of dehumanizes Palestinians in the process. And I’m wondering how you deal with some of that. How do you grapple with it and unpack it, and how do you work towards solutions that move forward in a more positive direction?
Destiny Magnett:
Totally. I would say education and encounter, which happened through storytelling. And I always see this as you mentioned, these kind of thinking dehumanizes Palestinians, which is absolutely true. And so I see a lot of our work as a project of humanizing Palestinian communities. And I am always floored when I visit churches how often it is that people don’t even realize that there are Palestinian Christians. And of course Palestinian Christians have been in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, for thousands of years. And so it’s always really exciting for me when you see that kind of light bulb moment happen and you see the phenomenon in which someone here in the U.S. begins to see their Palestinian sibling as equal to them or as someone that they could know or could be their neighbor or their friend or their mother, and recognizing that common human experience and common humanity.
My most recent trip to the Holy Land in which was in November of 2024, again, I’ll quote Mitri again because he’s on my mind today, but he said that Palestinians to the American church or to the West more broadly are only seen as either victims or as terrorists. And he said, “We just want to be seen as people.” And I thought that that was quite profound and is really at the heart of what we’re trying to do. So, it’s very often that we bring Palestinians and especially Palestinian Christians from Palestine, often the West Bank here to the United States to meet with churches and have that encounter firsthand. And when people are able to meet and break bread together and laugh together and cry together and share their stories and their struggles, that’s when we start to see real progress being made. And I think that that work is really, really deeply critical, especially in our current political moment where the powers that be are trying to divide us, make us go into our own in-groups and just talk to people who already agree with what we say.
I’ve been preaching a lot that the powers that be want us to only be around people who look like us and worship like us and believe what we believe. And there’s a lot of growth that can happen when we move beyond those kind of more binary or normative thinking and try to expand horizons. And that’s the bulk of our educational work and our work to elevate the voices of peacemakers is on that front and works in that way. I also challenge churches to not respond with mere silence. I think we live in a time where silence is complicity. In the Palestinian church, Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac has been a tremendous prophetic voice in this time, particularly in his 2023 sermon around Christmastime called Christ is in the Rubble – A Liturgy of Sumud.
He really, along with the church, has called Western Christians out for being silent and saying, “Why has the church abandoned us? Why are we not human enough for you to speak out for us, just for our basic human rights, for the killing to stop, for the war to stop, and for us to be treated with dignity and to have basic human right.” So, all of these phenomenons that I’ve been talking about have been exacerbated by the atrocities taking place in Gaza, and you and I both know very, very well that this didn’t start on October 7th, but for so many of the communities that we’re visiting and speaking with, the first time they turned their eyes to Palestine or to Israel was October 7th. And so in starting there, I think uplifting the cry of the Palestinian people, and because we’re a Christian organization, the Palestinian Church is one way for people to really start this journey of learning, of unlearning, of growing and understanding and in evaluating critically the theologies and history and politics that got us to the point that we’re at now.
Rachel Nelson:
So, when you take these delegation trips to Israel and Palestine, I’m wondering what has been the most recent kinds of developments you’ve seen over there? And then also we’ve talked a lot about engaging with Palestinians in the Palestinian Church, but are you also engaging with Israeli peacemakers, Israeli faith leaders, Jewish faith leaders? Kind of wondering how that all ties in, given that a lot of the work you do is to make peace for everyone between the river and the sea.
Destiny Magnett:
Yeah. I started my work with Churches for Middle East Peace as a Middle East fellow, and you and I spent a lot of time together in the West Bank and in Israel, and my portfolio during that time was working with Israeli civil society organizations calling for peace. And almost all of them were calling for an end to the occupation. And I think those communities are doing incredible work. We’re also at CMEP deeply committed to uplifting their work and their voices. I’m thinking about groups like B’Tselem, which has been incredibly vocal well before October 7th and continue to be vocal after. Also, organizations like Ir Amim and Yesh Din who are providing legal aid for Palestinians in the midst of what is a really, really difficult and unjust legal system, as well as groups like Rabbis for Human Rights who are getting arrested at the Gaza border, trying to bring bread to the people of Gaza in an incredible symbolic action to showcase their own Jewish faith in the ways that it also aligns with the values of human rights and dignity for all people.
And just like we want to caution groups against homogenizing Palestinians as seeing them all as only one thing, I think it’s also absolutely critical, especially in this time of rising antisemitism, that we also don’t homogenize Israeli groups and uplift the voices of those. And there are many who have been calling for peace and for justice and for an end to the violence and for coexistence and people to live together with dignity. The last time I was on the ground a few months ago, my delegation met with both Israeli peace builders and Palestinian groups, which is typical of our trips. We always want to give this holistic perspective of full picture, as full as you can get in a week or two long trip, of the diversity of Israeli and Palestinian civil society culture and beyond. So, I was especially moved by our time with Jeff Halper, who leads the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, both in occupied east Jerusalem and the West Bank have been on the rise.
And that group of Israelis who do their best to prevent home demolitions, to show up and do sit-ins and call off the bulldozers are doing truly, truly incredible work and are also monitoring and investigating settlement expansions in the West Bank. And I think it’s remarkable and courageous the work that so many Israeli peace activists have continued to do in the face of what’s really mounting pressure on them and their freedom of expression and their risk of being suppressed at best or arrested at worse, and highlighting those voices and the risks they’re willing to take in the name of dignity and safety for Israelis and Palestinians alike is incredibly admirable and absolutely stories that we should be sharing and uplifting. In terms of our delegations we really design our trips around the groups that we’re traveling with, and there are always some combination of the political education and encounter meeting with activists both Palestinian and Israeli, and doing some of the pilgrimage and spiritual formation work that comes together.
So, I think of it just as we’ve talked about the harms of Christian Zionism being theology and spirituality and politics kind of all entangled. I think the disentangling for those communities has to do the same sort of process. So, we include, my favorite pilgrimage stop is Dominus Flevit, which is on the Mount of Olives. It’s the place where Jesus wept over Jerusalem. And I tell groups when I visit that spot that as long as there continues to be violence in this land, that Jesus continues to weep over Jerusalem today. And that’s an example of where we can bring spiritual formation, the experience of pilgrimage, which is so powerful. I think everyone should go at least to Jerusalem and ideally across Israel and Palestine at least once in their life, regardless of their faith, just to experience the specialness of the place and also do the work of building relationships, meeting people, hearing their stories.
And the work of the trip does not end when we leave as you know, I mean, we spent time there together and we hear over and over again, “Just please go back and tell them what you saw.” And we hear this from Israeli peace activists as well as Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim, to go back and share their stories because the U.S. is so deeply, deeply entangled, complicit, actively enabling. We could use all sorts of adjectives and adverbs, but the ongoing occupation and the violence taking place in Israel and Palestine today. And so even though we may feel far away, our tax dollars are engagement, culture even as we’ve talked about, is deeply responsible in many ways for the plight of both Palestinians living under occupation and Israelis today.
Rachel Nelson:
Yeah, I need to get on your next delegation trip because the picture you paint of it is really beautiful and sounds really, really special. To kind of wrap up here, I have two questions that I think kind of fit together really well. The first is I hear a lot of people say that when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, religion really shouldn’t play a part at all. And I know that personally, that was something I used to feel, I felt like religion hindered the work that we could do to foster peace just because religion to me originally was seen as kind of divisive. And so I’m wondering where you feel like religion plays a really positive part in peacemaking, especially for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And then I’m wondering, what do you think is going to help foster peace in the region and what kind of role do you think that you and CMEP plays in it?
Destiny Magnett:
Talking about religion, violence, and peace, this is at the heart of my academic work, and I always use the term which comes I believe first, but it could have been someone else first. But I know it from Peter Mandaville, who’s at George Mason University. He talks about the idea of right sizing religion, which I think is critical and what right sizing religion asks us to do and calls us toward is acknowledging the powerful role that religion plays in people’s lives and their formation of particular ideologies, of understandings of history, of understandings of the world around them. But also on the flip side, not using religion as a catch all to explain political phenomenon, violence, peace, etc.
And I think this is true of conflicts across the world, but especially the long history of Israel and Palestine, there’s been a tendency to do one or the other. To either say, this is all about religion. There have been holy wars fought in this land forever. There will never be peace. And I think that’s really harmful and really oversimplifying what is a deeply complex political phenomenon, but also on the flip side saying that this has nothing to do with religion is just not the most accurate picture that we can paint of this place and what’s going on there.
And when you have the phenomenon of Christian Zionism, we see really explicitly how theology is being instrumentalized in service of particular political ends. And so we can address those theologies, especially for the communities for whom they are not as deeply held. To go back to what Mitri said about the widespread but not deep nature of a lot of Christian Zionist theology, but also it gives us some common language to meet people where they’re at. So, talking about Christian Zionism or Zionism more broadly because Jewish Zionism, which could be a whole other episode, we have strains that are quite religious. We have strains that are more secular in also really interesting ways.
And so that’s what I would say to that particular part of this work is it’s an ongoing conversation about where religion shows up, what opportunities religion brings to have transformative power. And I always call for transformative power towards a just peace and where it’s being used as an easy answer to a hard question. And I think that that is happening more and more often in the kinds of conversations that we see in the broad sphere. In terms of Churches for Middle East Peace and our work, we are working on all angles of this.
So, some of the events I do, I mentioned how diverse our membership is and the ecumenical nature of it. And because of that, some of the work and workshops I do, we spend a lot of time talking about the Bible and talking about the Scriptures, and we’ll do some of the disentangling work of the Old Testament, but we’ll also look at the life of Jesus as told by the Gospels and the New Testament, and really think about the ways that we as followers of Christ, as believers in Christ, can live into the values of Jesus and the idea that Christ would be in the most broken places of the world.
And that can mean under the rubble in Gaza, it can mean with Israeli families mourning the deaths of their loved ones on October 7th. And it can mean villagers whose homes have been destroyed in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank. And all of that can be true that our empathy does not have to be a finite resource, and we don’t have to have empathy for one group at the expense of another, that we can hold multiple things at one time. And as a Christian organization, the spiritual component is a vehicle through which we can express that. On the flip side, we are also, we were created, as I mentioned, to be an alternative Christian voice in the political sphere to groups like Christians United for Israel, to groups like the Fellowship of Christians and Jews. And so we continue to live into that through our policy work by advocating for legislation like the restoration of UNRWA funding or bringing our constituents.
Last year we had a number of ELCA bishops, for example, who joined us on Capitol Hill to meet with their representatives to express that alternative Christian voice, so that at the very least Congress people in their staffers are hearing that and knowing that it exists. And at the very best seeing bits of themselves if they are themselves Christian or bits of their constituencies represented in a way that might create change. So, I think that the faith-based constituency is one important part of this longer and more robust movement for justice for all people, as you said, between the river and the sea.
Rachel Nelson:
Destiny, it was such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Destiny Magnett:
Thank you so much for having me. And I’ll end by inviting anyone who’s interested in learning more about Churches for Middle East Peace to visit our website, which is just cmep.org very easy. But we would love to be in touch if that is of interest. And thank you so much for having me, Rachel, and for all your work at New Lines.
Rachel Nelson:
Thank you all for joining us and for listening today. If you liked this episode, remember to subscribe to New Lines on SoundCloud, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts. Visit www.newlinesinstitute.org if you’d like to hear more from our team of experts on all sorts of important topics in global affairs. We’ll see you on the next episode. Goodbye.
