"Discovering Palestine"

Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, in the MorungExpress, here

"...I’VE TRIED TO REMEMBER when I first learned that there were Christians living in Palestine and then met them. I know how strange that sounds. But the assumptions of evangelical Zionism that infused my Christian upbringing made me predisposed as a young person to believe that Israel was on the right side of any conflict. I didn’t know the stories of Palestinians—and ironically, I didn’t really know the stories of the Jews, but only the version of Jewish settlement in Israel interpreted through the lens of Christian Zionism. As I learned the histories of these peoples, and navigated the domestic U.S. politics of the Middle East conflict, I was struck by the contortions of much evangelical theology as it was applied to these realities. I saw with alarm Israeli political leaders co-opting evangelicals into religious sanction of territorial aggression...."