Friends like these

 Recently, Barbara Kay published an opinion piece praising the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, calling the organization a "true friend of Israel". 

Israel does have friends, and quite possibly many supporters of the International Christian Embassy have the best possible intentions for Israel, Israeli citizens, and the wider Jewish community. However, by no means do all so-called "Christian" "Zionists" have the best interests of Israel in mind.

A significant fraction of the Christian supporters of Israel believe in a specific theology of the end of humanity and the second coming of Christ, developed mostly in Protestant sects since the seventeenth century. This doctrine argues believers who interpret the prophecies in the Bible correctly can predict the second coming, despite Jesus's plain statement about the impossibility of doing so. Although they do not always say so, the advocacy of so-called "Christian Zionists" who hold these views go further in practice: what they attempt to understand and predict, they also make an effort to control. They take various actions in an attempt to hasten the apocalypse, including supporting specific expansionist Israeli policies.

Needless to say, the end times these Christian Zionists anticipate take place according to Christian scriptures, and the Jewish community fares no better at the second coming of Jesus than in the Islamic end times envisioned by Hamas. In the end envisioned by believers in the specific interpretation of prophesy affirmed by the evangelical "end times" movement, the Jewish people end up consigned to the fire with all other unsaved people, aside from a few rescued by prompt conversion.

Religious Jews who see the expansion of Israel to the whole of the West Bank in spiritual terms, have no reason for concern about Christian predictions or illusions. Indeed, what self proclaimed Christian prophets have to say need not concern believers in Judaism unless Jewish people, or the state of Israel, form friendships based on these predictions. A relationship in which each party uses the other seems a strange and toxic substitute for true friendship. In the partnership between the members of the Jewish community and end-times Christians, each expects the other will suffer disappointment, if not disaster.

In fact, the people of Israel do not have a truly symmetrical relationship with the evangelical end times movement. The expansion and land seizure policies the evangelicals promote in order to fulfill their particular interpretation of scripture carry real costs. The heaviest of these costs: lives, moral injury, alienation from their neighbours, fall on Israeli Jews. 

The Jewish people can do better for friends than this.