By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez
The State of Israel began this week a new phase of the strategy of control of the territory of Palestine (Israel approves controversial West Bank settlement project). Israeli settler settlements in the West Bank will expand to divide the territory, which was the result of the 1993 Oslo Accords to relocate Palestinian residents into two isolated groups, leaving only one outlet to the Jordan River on the Jericho side.
Christ at the Checkpoint, August 21, 2025
The ultimate goal is the creation of Greater Israel, once the possibility of a Palestinian state has been destroyed because, as Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said this week, “there is nothing to recognize, and no one to recognize” (Israel approves illegal settlement plan that would split occupied West Bank) once the genocide of the Palestinian people has been consummated.
This plan of contemporary Israeli expansionism "after Gaza" suggests at least two main objectives: the first is the isolation of Palestinians in apartheid zones, in addition to the invasion of the Gaza Strip, with the goal of their expulsion or subsequent extermination; and the second is the control of the Jordan River as a strategic source of water resources for times of global scarcity.
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But this is not merely the military strategy of a rampaging Zionist state supported by global capitalism, particularly the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom. The ongoing Zionist plan demonstrates the perversity of an ideology of genocide that manipulates the Bible to justify the supremacy of one state over others, subordinating peoples of diverse ethnic and religious origins to a selective process of annihilation in the name of a supposed divine promise.
Both Jewish and Christian Zionism, in fact, are the modern version of the manipulation of the biblical promises recounted by the saga of Abraham and Sarah as ancestors of the believers of the three monotheistic religions. The biblical account, in fact, tells us that God the Eternal promised the primordial couple offspring "as numerous as the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore" (Gen 22:17). Hebrew Talmudic and ancient Christian commentaries saw in this double metaphor of the heavens and the earth the proclamation of the universality of the promise: the stars of the sky evoking the daughters and sons of Israel, and the sand on the seashore representing all the nations of the earth.
The ideology of the “chosen people” was later developed in the Bible by a religious movement that perverted the announcement of the promise of the land, focusing it on the conquest of a territory as an exclusive monopoly of one people over other Semitic peoples. This “political theology” was devised by an interpretation of messianism in a Davidic key, present in the Bible since the time of the judges of Israel, which is called the “Joshua factor” by the Palestinian Lutheran theologian Mitri Raheb (Imperial Theology, Colonization, Settler Colonialism, and the Struggle for Decolonization: A Review Essay) as a source of the theology of empire.
But the prophets of Israel, from Moses to John the Baptist—and Jesus of Nazareth and his community who were part of that lineage—were always critical of the powers that be, which have sought to supplant divine glory under various masks. Theology prophetic It is found at the origin of the Abrahamic faith as a universal vision of the promise and the land that includes all peoples. As the French Dominican biblical scholar Philippe Lefebvre (Conference: Jésus et le pouvoir – P. Lefebvre), prophetic messianism is present like an underground river throughout the Bible, from the book of Genesis to its fulfillment in the Passover of Jesus of Nazareth.
And the Jesus movement in Galilee takes up this prophetic vein to radicalize it with the innovation of a messianism scatological, as another Dominican, José Luis Espinel, commented a few decades ago in Salamanca (Eschatological Messianism of Jesus from his prophetic actions). A prophetic tradition that announces the fulfillment of the promise for all peoples as a call to the universal love that flows from the wounds of a crucified Messiah.
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Palestinian Christians, as the Palestinian Lutheran theologian Munther Isaac (Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza) call us today to decolonize the Bible, which has become the weapon of war of Israeli and Christian Zionism against the Palestinian people. There is no chosen people to conquer a land in the name of God, stealing it from its original inhabitants, from the ancient Canaanites and Jebusites to the Palestinians of today. Nor is there a promise of the land that justifies, in the name of God, an Israeli state imposed by war on territories inhabited by Semitic peoples for millennia.
Christian churches of all denominations, as well as universities and political movements that appeal to the Bible as their source, face a grave dilemma: either continue to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people in the name of the God of Israel, or decolonize the Bible to recover the messianic and prophetic spirit of the divine and human word that frees all peoples from the slavery of earthly powers that supplant divine glory, with their current avatars, such as Trump and Netanyahu, or Milei and Bolsonaro, who are today's false messiahs.
The promise of the land that Abraham and Sarah received in that story of origins when they left Ur in Sumeria in search of the Eternal One – as the Jewish thinker from Strasbourg André Neher says in his book The essence of prophecy – is only fulfilled in the silence symbolized by the desert as a land of incessant search for the Covenant.
Hence, Christianity drinks from that source of original Hebrew prophecy to announce the arrival of “the new heavens and the new earth,” as the book of Revelation (21: 1) said in the context of the devastation of the old, idolatrous Roman imperial world and the Temple religion that perverted the divine promise.
This radical critique of all imperial theology stemming from a prophetic and eschatological messianism that heralds the end of the corrupt world has been rejected by both old and new earthly powers that seek to continue domesticating the divine promise.
But from the rubble of Gaza, the promise of the land emerges today, with renewed vigor, summoning all peoples of humanity and compelling all spiritual traditions to care for the lives of the innocent victims and their survivors. It calls us to continue searching for the promised land as a utopia in the midst of dystopia. It invites us to cultivate hope as a promise of life that emerges amid the threat of imminent death, like that experienced by Gazans today and other peoples threatened by necropower.
The Bible is not a weapon of war but “the house of the people,” as Carlos Mesters said in Brazil in his beautiful and powerful parable (The parable of the house of the people of God). A house we are invited to inhabit, to recognize in our own stories the spring of life that emerges like living water gifted by God from the ruins of the power that kills.
Let us reread and inhabit these messianic and prophetic testimonies of the promise of the land and the choice of divine love for all peoples, so that we may be inspired by the consolation that comes from God to the victims and their survivors, as a moving promise that is happening in the silence of the desert.
Mexico City, August 24, 2025
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