AIPAC, Gaza, and the Hijacking of Evangelical Theology
Let this be said as plainly as possible: it is not antisemitic to criticize the policies of the modern State of Israel, to object to the mass suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, to question why U.S. politicians take money from AIPAC, or to refuse the idea that Christian faith requires blind loyalty to a nation-state. Antisemitism is hostility, prejudice, discrimination, or violence directed at Jews as Jews; that is categorically different from opposing the actions of a government, its military campaign, or the political machinery that protects it.
That distinction matters because it has been deliberately blurred. In American political discourse, and especially in large parts of white evangelical culture, criticism of Israeli state violence is often recast as hatred of Jewish people. That rhetorical move does two things at once: it shields power from accountability, and it pressures Christians into treating modern Israel as if it were beyond moral scrutiny.
This essay argues for a more honest framework. Jewish people and Judaism are not the same thing as the modern Israeli government. Biblical Israel is not the same thing as the contemporary nation-state. And Christian faithfulness does not require underwriting war, occupation, or civilian suffering simply because powerful pastors, lobbyists, and politicians say it does.
What antisemitism is, and is not
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism defines antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).” That baseline is important because it keeps the focus where it belongs: on real anti-Jewish hatred, not on whether someone supports the current policies of the Israeli state.
The declaration also exists because public debate has repeatedly collapsed distinct issues into one category. Criticism of Israel, opposition to Zionism, advocacy for Palestinian rights, and objections to military occupation have all been treated in some spaces as presumptively antisemitic, even when the argument being made is about state policy, international law, or human rights. Palestinian civil society critiques of these frameworks have argued that this conflation narrows political speech and suppresses advocacy for Palestinian liberation while doing little to clarify or combat genuine antisemitism.
That does not mean every criticism of Israel is automatically clean, fair, or free of bias. It does mean a basic moral and intellectual distinction has to be preserved: saying “Jews are evil” is antisemitism; saying “a government is committing atrocities and should be opposed” is political and ethical criticism. If that distinction is lost, then the term antisemitism stops functioning as a tool against hatred and starts functioning as a shield for power.
The three things that keep getting confused
One of the clearest ways to cut through the noise is to name three separate categories that are constantly collapsed into each other.
First, there are Jewish people and Judaism: a people and a religious tradition with immense internal diversity, including a wide range of political views on Israel and Palestine. Second, there is biblical Israel, the Israel of Scripture and ancient history, which is often invoked in evangelical teaching as though it maps directly onto modern geopolitics. Third, there is the modern State of Israel, a contemporary nation-state with borders, military institutions, elected officials, alliances, and policies that can be evaluated like those of any other government.
These categories are not interchangeable. To defend Jewish neighbors from antisemitism is not the same thing as endorsing every action of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. To care about the Hebrew Bible is not the same thing as turning a modern military state into a sacramental object. And to reject the bombing, siege, and displacement of Palestinians is not to reject Jewish existence or Jewish safety.
That distinction is exactly what much of American discourse tries to erase. When someone says “Israel” and means a present-day government, critics are often answered as though they had condemned an entire people or faith. That confusion is politically useful, but it is morally corrosive.
AIPAC and the machinery of political capture
AIPAC exists to strengthen U.S.-Israel relations and to keep American political support for Israel durable and bipartisan. Whatever language is used around friendship, shared values, or strategic alliance, the practical effect is straightforward: politicians are rewarded for aligning with pro-Israel priorities, and critics of unconditional support face organized political pressure.
That is why it is entirely legitimate to ask what happens when elected officials take money from AIPAC-aligned networks and then consistently support military aid, diplomatic cover, and political narratives that protect Israeli state violence from consequence. Asking that question is not ethnic hostility. It is the ordinary work of democratic accountability.
The same standard is applied to every other power center in Washington. Citizens track fossil-fuel money when lawmakers weaken climate policy, pharmaceutical money when lawmakers protect drug pricing, and gun-lobby money when lawmakers block reform. AIPAC should not be granted a sacred exemption from the same scrutiny simply because accusations of antisemitism can be deployed as a deterrent.
None of this requires conspiracy language or collective blame. It requires clarity. A lobby is a lobby. Campaign pressure is campaign pressure. If U.S. tax dollars are being routed toward policies that deepen war and civilian suffering, then voters have every right to object to the political organizations helping sustain that outcome.
Gaza, Netanyahu, and the language of war crimes
The charge that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal is not merely rhetorical outrage. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity connected to the situation in Gaza. The allegations referenced by the court include starvation as a method of warfare and other inhumane acts directed against civilians.
That matters because it places the debate in the realm of international law rather than partisan branding. Calling Netanyahu a war criminal is not a slur against Jewish people; it is a description grounded in the actions of an international legal body examining the conduct of state leaders. People may debate the court, its jurisdiction, or the political implications of its decisions, but they cannot honestly say that the language came from nowhere.
For U.S. Christians and taxpayers, this creates a direct moral question. If an allied government is credibly accused of starvation, collective punishment, or crimes against humanity, what does loyalty require? Silence is not moral seriousness. Unconditional support is not peacemaking. Refusing to subsidize or spiritually sanitize those acts is not antisemitism; it is an insistence that no state should be beyond ethical judgment.
How evangelical theology got hijacked
The American evangelical attachment to Israel did not emerge in a vacuum. Christian Zionism has long taught that the modern State of Israel plays a unique role in biblical prophecy and that Christians therefore have a special obligation to support it. In many churches, this teaching is linked to Genesis 12:3 and end-times frameworks that interpret modern geopolitics through prophetic charts, dispensational assumptions, and national-blessing formulas.
The result is a theology in which criticism of Israel is treated as rebellion against God. To question military aid becomes “cursing Israel.” To grieve Palestinian death becomes evidence of deception or weak faith. To ask whether a state should be judged by the same moral standards as everyone else becomes, somehow, a sign that biblical truth is under attack.
This is where theology stops being discipleship and starts functioning as ideological enforcement. Large segments of white evangelical culture have effectively baptized a foreign-policy agenda, discipling believers to think of modern Israel as morally untouchable and politically exempt from the standards they would apply to any other nation. That framework has trained Christians to confuse fidelity to Jesus with fidelity to a flag.
But Christian faith does not require the worship of state power. It does not demand indifference to Palestinian suffering. It does not teach that bombs become righteous when the right nation drops them. When evangelical theology is used to anesthetize conscience and suspend moral judgment, something deeper than foreign policy has gone wrong.
Blessing people is not the same as blessing policy
A central problem in this discourse is the way the phrase “bless Israel” has been flattened. In many evangelical spaces, that phrase is treated as a permanent command to support the policies of the modern Israeli state, no matter what those policies are. But blessing a people is not the same as endorsing a government’s military choices, settlement expansion, siege tactics, or treatment of civilians.
The moral absurdity becomes obvious when stated plainly. No Christian would say loving Americans requires approving every drone strike, every prison abuse scandal, or every unjust war the U.S. has waged. No serious theology should claim that blessing Jewish people requires silence about starvation, displacement, or mass death in Gaza.
To support Jewish safety is good. To oppose antisemitism is necessary. To insist that Jewish life has dignity and worth is nonnegotiable. But none of those commitments obligate anyone to excuse state violence, nor do they require believers to funnel their theology into the service of militarism.
Holding the tension honestly
A morally serious position has room for more than one truth at a time. Antisemitism is real and dangerous, and Jewish communities have endured centuries of persecution, expulsion, exclusion, and violence. That history must never be minimized, denied, or weaponized against Jewish people in the present.
It is also true that Palestinians are living under extraordinary levels of violence, dispossession, and political erasure, and that efforts to name this reality are often met with deliberate bad-faith accusations. It is possible to reject antisemitic tropes, synagogue attacks, and anti-Jewish hatred while also condemning occupation, siege, apartheid-like structures, and collective punishment.
That is the tension many people are trying to hold right now, especially Christians emerging from systems that taught them a shallow and politicized theology of Israel. The false binary says there are only two options: bless whatever Israel does, or reveal oneself as an antisemite. That binary is intellectually bankrupt and spiritually manipulative.
A different Christian witness
A healthier Christian witness would begin with a refusal to confuse God with any state. It would refuse to collapse Jewish identity into a government, refuse to turn prophecy into propaganda, and refuse to let lobbying groups dictate the moral imagination of the church. It would care about Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom at the same time because the image of God is not partitioned by ethnicity, nationality, or military alliance.
That witness would also insist that U.S. Christians have a civic responsibility to examine where tax dollars go and whose interests shape policy. If American money helps sustain war, blockade, starvation, or impunity, then Christians do not become faithful by looking away. They become complicit by baptizing it.
The task, then, is not blind support. It is moral clarity. It is the courage to say that antisemitism is evil, that Jewish people must be protected, that Palestinians are fully human, and that no government should be shielded from criticism by wrapping itself in sacred language.
Closing
The pressure to choose between opposing antisemitism and opposing Israeli state violence is a manufactured pressure. That false choice serves political power, not truth. Criticizing AIPAC, condemning the devastation of Gaza, naming Netanyahu’s alleged crimes, and rejecting the evangelical demand for blind loyalty to Israel are not acts of anti-Jewish hatred. They are acts of political, moral, and theological discernment.
What deserves rejection is the theology that tells Christians to suspend conscience, the politics that equate money with righteousness, and the discourse that treats Palestinian suffering as invisible whenever it becomes inconvenient. A faith worth keeping must be able to tell the difference between loving a people and excusing a state. It must be able to resist antisemitism without sanctifying militarism. And it must be able to say, clearly and without apology, that no one gets to hijack the gospel in defense of war.