Evangelical Socialists

Question: What do Evangelical Christians and socialists have in common?

Answer: They're true believers with a messianic obsession over Israel.

I use the term "messianic" purposefully. As for the Evangelicals, we all know the basic narrative of their beliefs: They're the "friends" of the Jews, paving the way for us all return to Zion, establish a Kingdom of God...then Jesus returns, we finally "wise up" and embrace him as the messiah--thus ushering in the End Times, the apocalypse (presumably, with lots of cool special effects), and then (phew) salvation for humanity.

As for the socialists, well they're our "friends" too. They want to "save us" from Zionism, which has corrupted the Jewish soul. As Sue Blackwell once declared: "Amongst Jews, there is a long and honourable alternative current to Zionism: namely, socialism...The socialist ideology of Marx, Trotsky and Luxemburg, of Abraham Leon and Marek Edelman, is an inclusive one, urging unity with non-Jews against the common enemy instead of either going meekly to one's death or running away to Israel. I recommend it to you." And, then there's Steve Cushion, a lecturer at London Metropolitan University (and a supporter of the academic boycott of Israel), who says: "A two state solution in Palestine institutionalises a racist divide in the region and is a bar to peace. The only possible solution is for a secular socialist state from the river to the sea."

Sometimes I wonder: If Blackwell and Cushion are so keen to see a modern socialist state, then why don't they devote their full-time energies to fomenting a workers' revolution in England as opposed to outsourcing their fervor to Israel? In part, I think it's because they smell opportunity. According to their beliefs, Israel is not a true country, but an anachronistic imperialist entity built upon religious identity (because nationalism is sooo 19th century). They see a country beseigned from without and rotting from within--A house of cards propped up by American patronage, just waiting for the workers' revolution to tap it over and knock it down.

But, there's also a messianic element to their beliefs -- like the Evangelicals, they believe that ushering in the "end times" for Zionism is the lynchpin to creating an era of peace. Consider this speech delivered earlier this summer by Joyce Chediac to the Workers World Party conference on socialism:

If we want to understand the people of the Middle East, we need to understand that the Palestinian struggle is the central cause of the Arab people. This is because Israel is an extension of the Pentagon in the Middle East and its guns are aimed at the entire Middle East. Israel stopped a revolutionary upsurge, it stopped oppressed countries in the region from seizing their own gas and oil resources and using them for development. This has stifled, stunted and warped any independent bourgeois development and left workers in the Middle East locked in poverty. As a Lebanese-American, I know that Lebanon can never be free until Palestine is free. The same can be said of all the countries and nationalities in the region. So the Palestinian struggle is held important not only by Arabs, but by other Middle Eastern peoples as well.

Similarly, the Socialist Worker informs us:

The collapse of a democratic, secular alternative--the socialist alternative--in the Middle East has left a vacuum filled by Hamas and other fundamentalist forces. But ultimately, peace in the Middle East can only be achieved if Palestinians win justice. And justice will only be won if a different kind of movement is built. That movement must try to link the heroic resistance of Palestinians to the struggles of Arab workers throughout the region to free themselves from U.S. domination and the forces--including their own Arab rulers, as well as Israel--that back it.

In other words: Get thee behind me Zionism, give thyself over to socialism--and only then will the Kingdom of Heaven (or the secular equivalent) finally reign in the Holy Land. Can I hear ya say, "Amen"?

So, there you go. We've got messianic Christian "friends" to the right of us, messianic socialist "friends" to the left of us. And all of them look at us as pieces on a gameboard, where the ultimate prize is salvation for everyone. Sometimes I think we've got too goddamn many "friends."