Christian Zionism in the Global South with Fathi Nimer

The transcript below has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Fathi Nimer 00:00

The struggle against Christian Zionism is also a struggle against colonial interests in the region. It’s not simply ideological because it has a reflection on the material reality. And people can be helped to understand this, but it requires renewed grassroots approach that focuses on shared histories of resistance to imperialism.

These are the same forces that have been oppressing us for so long. The fact that they’re trying to rebrand and have a new religious legitimacy sheen on it is something that has to be resisted in any way possible. We have to frame Palestine as part of the incomplete decolonization of the Global South.

Yara Hawari 00:41

From Al-Shabaka: the Palestinian Policy Network, I am Yara Hawari, and this is Rethinking Palestine.

Christian Zionism is a phenomenon that has been well documented in the US. Indeed, we know that it is one of the key driving forces behind the US’s support for the Israeli regime, and it was also one of the driving forces behind Britain’s championing of the establishment of a Jewish ethnostate in the land of Palestine.

But Christian Zionism is also taking hold in other parts of the world, namely in the Global South, areas that one would traditionally assume are strongholds of Palestinian solidarity. To unpack this phenomenon and understand it further, I’m joined by Fathi Nimer, Al-Shabaka’s Palestine policy fellow, who has recently been researching Christian Zionism in various countries in the Global South. And indeed, you can read his recent policy brief on Christian Zionism in South Africa on our website.

Fathi, thank you for joining me on this episode of Rethinking Palestine.

Fathi Nimer 01:43

Thank you, Yara. It’s good to be back.

Yara Hawari 01:49

First off, Fathi, let’s start with the basics. What is Christian Zionism?

Fathi Nimer 01:54

There’s no one unified definition of what Christian Zionism really is, but we can look at it in two ways. There is the theological position, which is rooted in 16th century Protestant interpretations of biblical passages that basically say that the presence of a Jewish population in Palestine is necessary as a precursor for the second coming of Jesus Christ, and the politics of Armageddon, the end of the world, and Judgment Day.

This is part of a prophecy that is not really going to move the British Empire, which is more pertinent to our discussion, its evolution into a political position, which is what set the trajectory of everything that’s happened in the last 200 years in Palestine. So although these calls for a Jewish settlement in Palestine can go back to the 16th century, it wasn’t until the late Victorian era that a certain Lord Shaftesbury, who was a Christian Zionist activist, lobbied and pleaded with the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, to settle the Jewish population in Palestine.

And of course, the British Empire is not really swayed by these kinds of arguments unless there is some kind of material benefit to their interests, and there were. So at the time, the British were interested in bolstering the Ottoman Empire, and they envisioned that a Jewish population in Palestine allied with the British would help bolster the Ottoman Empire.

Because at the time, if the Ottoman Empire were to collapse, at least in a chaotic and uncontrolled way, this would benefit the British rivals, being the French and the Russians in the area. So to kind of avoid that, they wanted to have a Jewish population in Palestine to have their own little polity that would support the British.

Of course, this kind of hybrid approach garnered a lot of support from their evangelical supporters and donors, and at the same time, it would put forward British interests in the region. So in a way, it’s almost like nudging prophecy ahead slightly while also expanding imperialist control of the region for the benefit of the British.

This translates today basically into unquestioning support for the modern state of Israel, which is being conflated with the biblical people of Israel. This translates into unwavering support in ways that cannot be dissuaded by considerations of human rights, international law. Scripture trumps everything, and that’s why it’s such a strong and potent weapon that is being harnessed all over the world in favor of the Israeli regime.

Yara Hawari 04:18

Thanks, Fathi. Um, and as I mentioned in the introduction, I think people are relatively familiar with this history of Zionism in the West and its contemporary manifestations, and in particular the US, because, as I said, it’s this huge driving force behind American support for Israel, and particularly in the current, uh, Trump administration.

But I think people might be less familiar with how it shows up in the Global South. Can you give us an introduction to that?

Fathi Nimer 04:46

We can’t separate them completely because they are connected to each other. Historically speaking, there has been resistance to normalizing relations with Israel in the Global South, and this is understandable because of long histories of solidarity and anti-colonial support for each other, especially with the PLO, which part of its policies in the ’60s and ’70s was to build as wide as an anti-colonial revolutionary force and alliances with the Global South all over the world.

But a key strategy of the Israeli regime has been to nurture Christian Zionism because it bypasses all of that history, and this is not something that is conjecture. In 2004, there was an official establishing of the Christian Allies Caucus in the Israeli Knesset. The whole reason why this caucus exists is to build direct lines of communication, coordination, and cooperation with Christian leaders worldwide to spread Christian Zionism.

As you mentioned, people are more familiar with Christian Zionism in the Global North. We have gigantic organizations like Christians United for Israel that boasts millions of members, and they constitute a huge voting as well as donor block in support of the Israeli regime within the United States and the Western world in general.

These well-equipped and well-resourced organizations, they open offices all over the world. They support churches all over the world. They look at areas that don’t have coverage of water, for example, and they build a church to provide services that help support the population, but it comes bundled with this Christian Zionist theology that demands that they basically partake in this to receive any kind of benefit. Latin America in particular has been a huge target for this kind of organizing. Brazil, massive, massive Christian Zionist population that only grew over the last few decades really.

Historically speaking, Israel has played the role of a subjugator in the Global South. It’s aligned itself with authoritarian settler states. It has helped repress Indigenous movements all over the continents. In the case of Guatemala, for example, uh, the weapons of the Israeli regime, as well as their military training of officers and surveillance and information technology was used to help facilitate the genocide of the Maya in Guatemala, which is a role that’s still ongoing to today, supporting authoritarian regimes with all these kind of support. And this is not ancient history. This is until the ’80s.

So what happens is that through Christian Zionism, Israel can decouple itself from this anti-colonialist, materialist understanding of international relations and jump into the realm of theology, which bypasses all of this bloody history. So you have a country that up until a few decades was supporting the most brutal dictatorships and juntas in Latin America that help oppress people.

Suddenly it, it’s shown in a different light when you look at it through the lens of Christian Zionism. So it completely overrides this and replaces them. And we’re talking about living memory here. The people are still alive who remember all of these atrocities. This, coupled with a prosperity gospel, which is a gospel based on Genesis 12:3, that says that basically if you want to have a good life, if you want to be blessed, money, children, anything you desire, you have to bless Israel.

It is part of the same package. You cannot have a blessed life if you do not bless Israel. So this is very appealing for people in destitute villages or who are discriminated against because they see it as a kind of survival boat that they can latch onto. And this automatically, unfortunately, prejudices them against Palestinians and reflexively aligns them with Israeli interests in the region.

Yara Hawari 08:23

And we’ve heard that term before in the American Congress, haven’t we, Fathi? I know various Congress people have said, you know, those who bless Israel will be blessed.

Fathi Nimer 08:34

Yes, it’s a very widespread position among Christian Zionists, and there’s of course huge pushback against this from Palestinian theologians and other liberation theology scholars.

It basically conflates the ancient people of Israel with the Israelis today, and it’s a blank check to forcing you basically to bless Israel if you want to have any kind of life. And of course, the opposite is true. So if you curse Israel, God will curse you. So it’s a very strong motivator for people to, to align with the Israeli regime, and it’s taken verbatim without any kind of space for maneuvering, or dogmatism: no matter what Israel does, it has to be right. It has to be ordained by God because they’re the blessed people, and you have to bless them to be blessed in return. So you align automatically with the Israeli regime and whatever it does, because there is this conflation of the modern state of Israel with the biblical Israelites.

Yara Hawari 09:27

And there’s a certain amount of fearmongering as well that, you know, if you don’t bless Israel, you’ll be cursed.

Fathi Nimer 09:32

It goes without saying. I mean, at the end of the day, this is how Palestinians are framed, because if Israel is the project of God and prophecy, and then the Palestinians standing in its way are automatically against prophecy and against God.

This is a blank check to basically do whatever you want to do with Palestinians, remove them, ethnically cleanse them, colonize them. It doesn’t matter because they are the ones cursing Israel, and you cannot curse Israel if you want to have a good life. And if we’re standing in the way of prophecy, then we must be, you know, as one preacher once said, “We must be the allies of the devil.”

That’s openly what’s being said of, of Palestinians, because we’re seen as standing in the way of this project.

Yara Hawari 10:10

Fathi, I want to, to pause for a moment because we’ve been using the term “Global South” quite broadly, and I recognize that it’s a term that is bandied about quite freely. So I think it might be useful to define the parameters of the term, at least for this particular conversation.

You know, we know that the Global South has both territorial and political connotations. Territorially, the Global South has been used rather broadly as an alternative term to the so-called Third World, or to define the non-Western world, literally, you know, those south of the colonial centers of power. Um, a more politicized understanding of the term I think offers a more complete picture, and it’s one that encapsulates spaces and peoples, uh, that have had shared experiences of colonialism and subjugation of both historic and contemporary capitalist globalization.

And so I think that’s important, and I think it’s also important to recognize that people see, use the term global majority. To highlight the fact that this is indeed the experience of the large majority of the people in the world, and there’s this ongoing, you know, debate about whether or not we should be using Global South or Global Majority, and that’s a longer conversation and, and perhaps, uh, not for this particular discussion.

But I think it’s important also to recognize that the Global South is certainly not a hegemon. Um, and the way that we’re understanding it and talking about it in this discussion is more aligned, I think, with the, the political definition of Global South.

Fathi Nimer 11:35

We also need to keep in mind that the Global South is not a monolith, and that just that a country is within this description of a Global South, for example, a formerly colonized country, it does not mean that it’s going to automatically and inherently have an anti-colonial perspective today.

We have the example of India, for example, which was once the, the beating heart of the Non-Alignment Movement. Today, it’s a very reactionary state allied with the worst reactionary fascist states in the world, and itself having a fascist movement run it. So it’s important to keep in mind that we’re not talking about some kind of well-defined, unified bloc.

But it’s also a, a useful term, in my view, to look at, as you mentioned, the global majority, and the majority of the world has indeed been colonized. So in my view, there is a utility in using this term, even if we have to be careful of some of these caveats and nuances that govern it.

Yara Hawari 12:29

If you’re enjoying this podcast, please visit our website, al-shabaka.org, where you will find more Palestinian policy analysis and where you can join our mailing list and donate to support our work.

Moving on, Fathi, I want to turn to the research in your recent policy brief on Christian Zionism in South Africa. I think that might come as a surprise for people because South Africa has been at the forefront of solidarity with Palestine, both at a grassroots level but also at a diplomatic level. Um, but Christian Zionism is something that exists there, and it is growing.

Can you tell us a bit more about this?

Fathi Nimer 13:09

When I started doing some research about Christian Zionism in the Global South, I was looking for case studies across Latin America, Africa, even some influences in Asia. South Africa stood out. I was surprised that there was such an active Christian Zionist network in South Africa.

It makes sense because, as you mentioned, South Africa has had a long stance of solidarity with Palestinians in, in different ways, and I didn’t expect a country really that suffered from apartheid just a few decades ago to have somehow flipped and have a positive view- and I’m not talking officially, I’m talking about some of the population- to have a positive view of a country that aided, for all intents and purposes, its apartheid.

And I’m talking not just support ideologically, but also materially: sending officers and troops to help repress liberation movements all over Africa. So it’s kind of jarring to see that. But it kind of speaks to why Christian Zionism is such a strong weapon that is being deployed. Now, the, the, the Christian Zionism in South Africa that we found, it, it didn’t follow one specific form. There are different kinds and levels of Christian Zionism, and I tried to simplify it by distinguishing between active and passive.

Now, the active Christian Zionism is organized more through lobbying that work directly to try to influence public opinion in South Africa and to spread the Israeli and Zionist narrative. We have institutions like the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem. We have organizations like Bridges for Peace. It’s important to realize that these organizations are not local. They are branches of global movements, and they have their own offices in multiple different countries, and South Africa is one of these countries.

And they’re committed to supporting Israel in any way and every shape that means. We’re talking social movements, we’re talking theological movements, we’re talking political, economic aid, donations. All of this is very, very widespread through these organizations. And they organize with an organization called South African Friends of Israel, which is kind of like an umbrella organization for Zionist activism in South Africa.

And this works directly with the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs. And the fact that the Strategic Affairs Ministry is involved should tell you that the coordination for Christian Zionism is operating on the highest levels of Israeli government, not only in the legislative, in the Knesset, but also in the executive through this ministry.

And the South African Friends of Israel, in particular, is very invested in operating within the Black South African population, which is historically more resistant to normalizing relations with Israel. And this is part of an organized Campaign. And this was mentioned in Yotam Gidron’s book on Christian Zionism in, in Africa and how it functions, that the Israeli ministries really view South Africa as one of the major fronts for spreading Christian Zionism in Africa and one of the strongest points of entry into a community and a society that has been historically very resistant to normalizing ties with Israel.

On the passive level, it’s something less than active organizing. It could range from something like just a general prayer for Israel, for the IDF or what have you, to helping build settlements and gather money for settlements and donating to them. It’s a very wide range. This is especially the case with the prosperity gospel, the people.

And I imagine this is the biggest segment of Christian Zionists in South Africa. But this leads them to automatically kind of and reflexively identify with Israelis over Palestinians, regardless of what the facts on the ground say. And this is supported by major Christian media groups that have gigantic broadcasting networks all over the globe, GOtv and otherwise.

And this is also supported by the growth of the Pentecostal movement and the charismatic movement in South Africa, which also aligns with Christian Zionism. It has Christian Zionism as part of its theology. So this is less of a formal and coordinated network and more of a kind of passive path-dependent network.

But its main influence, in my view, is not that it actively kind of brings people out in the streets to support Israel, but rather it kind of disengages them from solidarity with Palestinians. It kind of strips the human kind of face of Palestinians and reduces them to just obstacles in the face of prophecy that need to be dealt with one way or another.

We stop being human, we stop having suffering, we stop being occupied or colonized. We start being a nuisance. And that reflexively puts people on the side of Israel and dehumanizes Palestinians in a way that’s very, very unfortunately effective and very silencing of issues relating to human and Palestinian rights.

Yara Hawari 17:55

Fathi, are any of these, these groups having an influence on South African politics?

Fathi Nimer 18:01

I think a central aspect of the behavior of these groups is that they don’t want to be traced back to Israel. And the Israeli ministries don’t like to appear like they’re interfering in politics, but they are. Through our research, we found it almost impossible to separate Christian Zionist organizing and Christian Zionist networks from official pro-Israel lobbying and pro-Israel groups.

Uh, it’s not that the networks are so intermingled, it’s that networks are, in some cases, one and the same. The overlap is just, it’s just massive. For example, we have a political party in South Africa called the African Christian Democratic Party. It bills itself as a Christian party that puts God first, and one of its main platforms is support for Israel and reestablishing ties with Israel.

Its founder, Kenneth Meshoe, he’s part of the Israel Allies Foundation, which is a Christian Zionist network to connect Christian Zionists all the way around the world. We have, for example, the founder of the Africa for Israel Christian Coalition. It’s working with the South African Friends of Israel, and now leads Stand With Us Israel South Africa chapter.

So it’s, these are the same people that are rotating from Christian Zionist lobbying to pro-Israel lobbying. It’s indistinguishable at this point. And they’re all coordinating with the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, but they are trying to keep it on the down low. There was one incident where a Christian Zionist organization that’s based in the US but also has an office in South Africa, it’s called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations.

By the way, this is designated as a hate, an anti-Muslim hate group in the United States. It’s just to keep in mind how these alliances form and how Islamophobia and Christian Zionism and anti-Indigenous positions are all peas in a pod. It received direct funding from the Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs.

And this was only revealed because there was a Freedom of Information Act in the Israeli Knesset that revealed that this group directly received funds to have Christian Zionist events in support of Israel in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Of course, the Israelis deny this, and the organization itself denies this.

But this was one of the few cases where a direct link and a direct money trail was found. But usually, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs works through these entities on proxy organizations, donations internationally to kind of obscure these networks and how a lot of them are being supported and aided by Israel, and this is by design.

So what happens when little parties like the African Christian Democratic Party and other parties that are very pro-Israel receive funding and aid from Israel and lobby on Israel? It’s significant because the ANC is slowly and steadily losing its parliamentary majority, which means that it’s slowly becoming more and more reliant on coalition politics. Sometimes when you need to pass something in such a situation, you need two, three votes, five votes, six votes.

So even small parties that barely have four or five seats in parliament, they can wield disproportionate influence. They’re considered kingmakers, and this is actually something that we saw also in the Israeli Knesset a lot because it’s also reliant on coalition politics to form a government. So if you have a small group of Christian Zionist parties that have 15 to 17 seats, they can have a disproportionate influence on the voting process.

So this gives them a lot of leeway to, to kind of push their policies through. Now, this is so far mostly under control, but as the ANC slowly erodes in its support and its parliamentary majority gets smaller and smaller, we can see that this might directly affect or water down policy relating to Palestine.

Because for it to pass, you need more votes, and even parties that are not explicitly pro-Israel, they could consider themselves neutral, as the Inkatha Freedom Party says officially, that they’re neutral on Palestine-Israel. Uh, they’re just not interested in voting on things that are blatantly pro-Palestinian, for example, like cutting diplomatic ties.

Or they could try to leverage their vote for this in return for concessions elsewhere, which could also weaken the position of the ANC and other allied parties. So the fact that these parties are becoming larger and they have more seats and the ANC’s losing seats could spell some problems for pro-Palestinian legislation in the future.

This is not also to talk about all the theologians and politicians visiting Israel on these sponsored trips where they take them on these propaganda tours of whatever Israel wants to show them and show them what a wonderful society they were and Palestinians are just talking slander and libel. They come back and lobby on behalf of the Israeli governments, and they ask the ANC to soften its stance or reestablish diplomatic relations.

So this is also a very active avenue of Israeli policy in Israel, and we see all the time about these religious delegations going to Israel and going to Bethlehem, of course, without mention of Palestine or Palestinians. And this is ironically a very, very well-documented tactic that the South African apartheid government used to take with politicians from all over the world when it was trying to whiten its image as not as bad as everybody’s talking about.

They were just misunderstood. This is exactly the same kind of policy. So yeah, Christian Zionism is acting on multiple layers in the South African government to try and reestablish relations fully and to soften the stance of the ANC on the, on Israel, on the occupation, and to limit its criticism.

Yara Hawari 23:25

It’s so jarring to hear that comparison with apartheid South Africa.

Fathi Nimer 23:30

It makes sense that apartheid South Africa and Israel were such strong allies because their enemies were first and foremost on the inside of their borders rather than outside of their borders. So there’s same strategic thinking in how to deal with these populations and how to kind of pacify, which made both countries kind of big exporters of surveillance technology and facial recognition technology.

It’s not a coincidence that they were such strong allies together, and it would make sense that they would adopt very similar tactics and strategies to deal with population as well as foreign relations, because at the end of the day, there’s only so much leeway you can get while trying to beautify apartheid, and this is one of the ways.

Yara Hawari 24:10

Fathi, what is being done locally to challenge Christian Zionism in, in South Africa and maybe also in other places in the Global South?

Fathi Nimer 24:18

There’s definitely been more a kind of scrutiny on Christian Zionism in the last, let’s say, decade or so, or even less possibly, because the, the streams that the theological streams that support Christian Zionism are growing in number in the Global South, and there’s kind of been some alarm bells going off.

In South Africa, it’s a particular kind of sensitive subject because apartheid was justified using religious language. There was a complete biblical and religious argument to why the races should be separate, why we shouldn’t be mixing, why there should be a superior race, why the Black population should be at the bottom.

This was all justified theologically and through the churches that were supportive of apartheid, of course, not all of them, but the pro-apartheid churches. So it’s kind of a sensitive topic for South Africans when it comes to supporting Israel. The Mandela Foundation, for example, I believe it was last year, they issued a call for proposal for their… they have a prize or an award called the Solidarity in Action Award. One of the topics of the proposal was challenging Christian Zionism in South Africa and the world, and this was their prompt. Because they understood very deeply how religion can be twisted and used to support apartheid and colonialism and everything that we’re witnessing in Palestine and was witnessed in apartheid South Africa.

There is the South African Council of Churches. It’s been very instrumental in passing BDS legislation, organized workshops, organized conferences not just in South Africa, but also around the world to spread liberation theology, which is a, in a direct contrast of what Christian Zionism stands for.

They also utilized their efforts as a member of the World Council of Churches. They helped spread the Kairos Palestine document, which came out in 2009, Bethlehem, from Palestinian theologians. And it is kind of like a callback or based on the Kairos document that actually came from South Africa during the apartheid era in the mid-’80s, ’85, I believe. It was calling on Christians of the world to unite against apartheid and to put pressure on the apartheid government to stop their apartheid policies and colonialism.

So it’s kind of a callback to this, which is also another reason for the strong relations between South Africans and Palestinians. Like, we take from each other’s anti-colonial solidarity and history together and build on it in the future. They had a instrumental role in popularizing the Palestine Kairos document and on these conferences and workshops.

I believe that there was, very recently, uh, in late 2025, there was a meeting in Johannesburg of the World Council of Churches, where they issued a very strong condemnation of Israeli genocide and an affirmation of Palestinian rights. Around the globe, there’s also a strong effort to establish pro-Palestinian solidarity networks on the grassroots level, public campaigns linking Palestinian rights to anti-colonial solidarity, anti-colonial history, and to kind of tie together the history of solidarity between Palestinians with the actual material struggles of these colonized or formerly colonized populations.

And of course, we can’t underestimate the importance of church-based education programs. Because this is a theological argument, it benefits from a counter-theological argument on the same level.

Yara Hawari 27:27

Fathi, you began to answer my final question for you, which is: what can the international solidarity movement do to organize against this phenomenon?

Fathi Nimer 27:37

In my view, when it comes internationally, what we can do, there are two main avenues. The first one is the theological one. During my research, to try to understand what Christian Zionism is, I started listening to Christian Zionist podcasts, and that’s as painful as it sounds. Somebody was talking about her trip to the Holy Land, and she visited Bethlehem, of course.

She was describing the wall. She was describing the refugee camps inside of Bethlehem. She was describing the settlers encroaching on the Cremisan Valley and all these different things that would make everyone just question what’s going on. And she said simply that she felt bad for the Palestinians.

She gave some of the kids from the refugee camp some money. But at the end of the day, scripture is scripture, and that kind of stuck in my head, like scripture is scripture. How do you argue against that? If you saw all of this apartheid, all of this war, you saw the people in squalor, you saw settlers burning fields and taking over the valley. There’s a Christian monastery in that valley. You know, they’re taking the land of another Christian monastery.

How do you even begin to try to argue with such a position? And by the way, that’s one of the strengths of Christian Zionism, because it kind of overrides everything else. But thankfully, we have plenty of highly educated, highly charismatic, and highly articulate Palestinian Christian theologians that have been working and writing on this.

We have people like Mitri Raheb. We have Munther Ishaq. We have a lot of people who’ve published on the topic, and they have been making a theological counterargument to the point where they call Christian Zionism a heresy because it’s completely goes against all Christian, you know, thought. I think the spreading this and amplifying this kind of discussions and groups and conferences led by Palestinian Christian theologians, I think it’s a powerful counter tool in, in the whole world’s possession, like, to support them. Because, if you want to have a theological argument, a theological counterargument is very effective in countering it.

This is not the only way, because, yes, there are a lot of dogmatic people that could only be convinced with a theological argument. There are many who are also susceptible to different kinds of arguments For example, there was a spokesperson for a Christian Zionist organization in South Africa who I interviewed.

She became a pro-Palestinian activist once she actually started reading and learning about what’s going on, and from a non-Israeli, non-Zionist source. So we can’t say that everybody is not susceptible to considerations of human rights. The human, human concerns also, and materialist and anti-colonial history, because the struggle against Christian Zionism is also a struggle against materialist and colonial interests in the region.

It’s not simply ideological, because it has a reflection on the material reality. So our resistance must also be, have a material kind of aspect to it. And people can be helped to understand this, but it requires renewed grassroots approach that focuses on shared histories of resistance to imperialism, and this is something that I cannot emphasize enough.

These are the same forces that have been oppressing us for so long. The fact that they’re trying to rebrand and have a new religious legitimacy sheen on it is something that has to be resisted in any way possible. We have to frame Palestine as part of the incomplete decolonization of the Global South.

And it is. This is a direct consequence of the incomplete decolonization of the Global South. Our history is the same history of these peoples. We’re struggling against the same forces. We have to expose how Christian Zionists serves the same neo-colonial interests, and colonial, that have really oppressed the peoples of the Global South for more than a century.

Through their spyware surveillance technologies, their Pegasus authoritarian support, training of intelligence officers in torture techniques, all of this can directly be tied back to Israel. And it should be tied back directly to Israel. We need to understand that it’s not just that for Palestinians, a different, you know, faraway people, it’s part of our shared struggle globally.

We have to help push oversight for NGOs. For example, one of the strongest tools that Christian Zionist organizations have is that they are able to register as charitable organizations. So they can donate to an occupation, to the violations of international law, and get a tax exemption for it. So this is part of, also part of the struggle, not just in the Global North, but also in the Global South.

There has to be stronger oversight of these NGOs. We have to be able to close the loopholes that allow these donations. We have to revoke charitable status organizations if they are found to be in violation of international law, and a lot of them are. When you send money to support settlers to take over houses in East Jerusalem from Palestinians, that is a violation of international law, and it should be punished very severely.

Their license should be revoked. We’re talking about international law here, if anybody still cares about international law or international humanitarian law, and it’s what’s right. So there are a lot of ways to, to support the struggle against Christian Zionism. But I think the strongest approach is it needs to be a complementary one, a holistic one.

We’re talking not just to minds, but also to hearts. So it has to be a two-pronged tactic that tackles the theological argument, but as well shows the materialist effects and root of everything that is going on, and not to have it, Christian Zionism, as some kind of isolated, you know, religious belief rather than a very serious part of modern colonialism that is taking root in the Global South.

Yara Hawari 33:03

Fathi, thank you so much, uh, for that. I think we’ll leave it there for this episode of Rethinking Palestine. Thank you for joining me.

Fathi Nimer 33:11

Thank you. Thank you again, Yara.

Yara Hawari 33:16

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