By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez
In recent weeks, an alert was raised in Chiapas due to the presence of the Israeli group "Heroes for Life" in primary schools in Zinacantán. This group, comprised of young Israelis, offers activities such as English courses and school facility renovations, presenting itself as an "Israeli youth volunteer" experience with a smiling and friendly "humanitarian work" for vulnerable populations around the world. Apparently, many of them and their advisors are active or retired members of the Israeli army who have participated in various Zionist wars, as Herman Bellinghausen recently commented.
A few weeks earlier, the Israeli consul in Mexico, Hilla Burk, accompanied by Israeli security advisors, was received by the Secretary of "People's Security," Óscar Aparicio Avendaño, at his offices in the state government building in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. To this day, the public has not been fully informed about the agenda of that meeting, nor about the agreements reached. According to news reports, in other states such as Chihuahua and Querétaro, Israeli advisory contracts already exist with the current governments regarding strategic security, which include contracts for the sale of "state-of-the-art" technology and weaponry from the growing transnational military industry.
Adding to this Israeli activism in Mexico are the “healing retreats” organized by the Israeli organization Chabat in Cozumel and other Mexican Caribbean beaches, aimed at active and reserve members of the Israeli army who have participated in “the war to defend the State of Israel,” as reported by journalist Georgina Zerega. This is a euphemism to conceal their participation in the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the invasion of southern Lebanon with the Greater Israel project, which, as analyzed by thinker Silvana Rabinovich, includes the construction of the Third Temple in Jerusalem as the supreme symbol of this religious war narrative. In some countries, such as Chile, Ireland, and Spain, campaigns have been launched to denounce crimes against humanity committed by Israeli soldiers who are identified passing through these countries, and whom organized civil society and some governments are seeking to bring before national and international courts.
There is a plan for Israeli territorial expansion in Latin America beyond the Middle East, as investigative journalists have documented in Patagonia and Yucatán, strategic locations due to their natural resources such as water, minerals, and rare earth elements.
Behind that humanitarian and tourism facade, Zionism deploys a perverse religious ideology based on a misnamed political theology of election and the promise of the land, making the Bible a weapon of war.
Given this scenario, Christianity faces one of its greatest challenges amidst the civilizational crisis we are experiencing today: discerning the idolatries that supplant the name of God to bring about the death of peoples and the control of strategic territories. Judaism and Islam—in the critical expressions of their own spiritual traditions—will also have to discern the challenge of the Great Nakba, or Great Catastrophe of our time, as the Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls the civilizational crisis of the coloniality of techno-fascism.
Pope Leo XIV, for his part, has drawn attention to the “warlords” who control the war economy marked, from now on, by the abusive use of artificial intelligence for the benefit of an oligarchy of digital technocrats, among whom are the owners of the mega-companies of Silicon Valley in California.
But as pastor and teacher in the See of Peter, the transcultural Pope has also denounced the blasphemy of those who use God's name to wage war, without explicitly mentioning Zionism or Trumpism. Indeed, in his first Encyclical Letter, "Magnifica Humanitas," Leo XIV denounces "the ideologies of death" that cause suffering and wars due to the greed of the modern world in its "posthumanist" version, which prepares the way for a species superior to humankind, generated by algorithms, and "transhumanist" because it subordinates humanity to the system controlled by biotechnological devices. This is an apocalypse of humanity that Ivan Illich had already predicted six decades earlier.
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In this context, Christian communities throughout the world—in their diversity of traditions as collectives of believers, academics, and artists, together with social movements of prophetic and liberation inspiration—are called to understand and deactivate Zionism, both Jewish and evangelical, which lies at the root of Israeli territorial expansionism today, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, with the complicity of the extreme right that haunts political life in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States.
First and foremost, it is about honoring the name of God as divine Wisdom that guides our steps toward justice, peace, and mercy in a world at global war, or, as Silvana Rabinovich calls it, an ongoing “omnicide.” The name of God denotes both the unfathomable divine mystery and the inalienable dignity of creation as the work of His love, which no power in this world can supplant or control. Neither ancient demonology nor the hierarchies of today's necropower lords can replace the divine Glory that always transcends political power, as the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben has so astutely analyzed.
Secondly, it is important to dismantle the political-religious ideology (not political theology in the strict sense) that today turns the Bible into a weapon of war, especially against the Palestinian people and the Semitic peoples of Palestine, both Christian and of other religious traditions. In this regard, Mitri Raheb and Munther Isaac—Palestinian Lutheran theologians resisting the genocide of their people—constantly emphasize the importance of dismantling the Zionist ideology that has manipulated the theology of the land promise and divine election for the exclusive benefit of the Jewish people.
It is important to remember, as the Mexican-Lebanese intellectual Alfredo Jalife-Rahme points out, that the Zionist lobby in the United States and Great Britain created the Zionist ideology in the 19th century as an expression of the colonialism of the Jews of the Diaspora, who are not Semites but descendants of the Jewish presence in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th century. Zionism originated as a political ideology for the control of the territory of Palestine for the exclusive benefit of the Jewish people.
And third, we must remember that the Zionist expansionism that has reached Mexico, specifically Chiapas, requires critical monitoring by civil society, churches, and governments regarding its plans to control territories. This expansion is justified by the ideological narrative disseminated by the Israeli state under Netanyahu and his Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, with its brazenly promoted genocidal and expansionist logic of Greater Israel. The Zionist project is rooted in a powerful war industry that makes Jewish and Christian Zionism a threat to humanity and our common home.
Following the threads of decolonial theology, both Jewish and Christian, it is necessary to reread the Bible as the book of faith of the Semitic peoples in the promise of the living God, who is progressively opening himself to all nations of humanity as recipients of the messianic times that overcome fratricidal violence and establish a new humanity. This is a theology of “the meek who will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5), according to the poetic imagination of Jesus of Galilee, as Mitri Raheb reminds us, stemming from the God of life's preferential option for the poor and excluded of all times. It is a theology of the promise fulfilled in the event of the resurrection of Jesus, the Christ of God, which brings to its most radical expression the manifestation “not of a God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). Promise and choice that the Abba of Jesus always fulfills from those excluded from hegemonic systems of domination to summon all the peoples of the earth to the feast of desire, as proposed by the Mexican queer theologian Ángel Méndez.
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Once the civil society of Chiapas and Mexico discovers the threads woven today by Jewish and Christian Zionism, which is expanding throughout the world in complicity with techno-fascist companies and governments that promote discrimination against peoples and religions, it will be necessary to promote communities of encounter between diverse spiritual traditions, in mutual support, nurturing the resistance to evil with such diverse faces.
Caring for the children and youth of Chiapas in the face of the threat of Zionism today, together with the accountability of authorities at different levels of government in the financing and management of public security, will allow the creation of environments of unrestricted respect for human dignity, with special attention to the most marginalized and vulnerable people and communities.
Then we must promote the celebration of divine blessing for all nations, not only for the Jewish people who in their Zionist version are betraying their vocation to be witnesses of the Eternal, as described by André Neher, the great French Jewish thinker of the 20th century.
Let us not forget that messianic times come to all peoples - in the midst of the history of humanity threatened with death, but promised fullness by the God of Life - thanks to the righteous people of history who give their lives for the world that came from God, not from the powerful of this world.
San Cristóbal de Las Casas, June 20, 2026
