It is time. The word ‘Jihad’ frequently appears in the Qur’an with and without military connotations, idiomatically articulated as "striving in the path of God (al-jihad fi sabil Allah).” Jihad, Arabic: جهاد jihād, an expression of hope, literally striving or struggling, especially with a praiseworthy aim.
The word ‘Zion’ ranks among the most sacred words in Judaism and Christianity and, is just as sacred as the word ‘Jihad’ with strikingly similar meanings and connotations. Zion and Jihad are but two words that connect Jews, Christians and Muslims in our Abrahamic Faiths. Judaism and Islam are the two closest religions to each other. What’s more, for centuries Jews and Muslims have lived in harmony side by side. Many classical works of Judaism are written in Arabic. Historically, both have lived a lot better together than within Christian realms.
Lights and shadows with moments of grief characterize the relationship among Jews, Christians and Muslims. Can we work toward real reconciliation among all believers in the one God? Can we become one in the Spirit, to do that which has the most chance of being good for all concerned?
Judaism honors the Almighty as protector of the human person and as the God promulgating the promises of life.
Christianity knows that God is love and expects mankind, created in His image, to manifest Agape11 love.
Islam views God as good, compassionate and merciful. He grants the believers His abundant mercy.
Inspired by these convictions, those who are one in the Abrahamic Faiths – Jews, Christians and Muslims – reject the supposition that hatred threatens the earth; that endless wars continue to plague humanity; that mankind will destroy itself. And yet, peace between our people remains a bridge too far unless trust can be the thrust to bring us together.
Zion has a broad spectrum of meaning that is greater than any one single entity or identity. Zion, which simply means ‘fortification,’ is also known as the seat of power not just for the ‘kingdom’ of Ancient Israel, but especially the [Spiritual] Kingdom of God. Zion is also another name for Jerusalem, the ‘City of David’ but has always been superseded as ‘the City of God.” (Isaiah 52:1-2, the “City of God,” the people of God becoming the “Light among nations.” Jeremiah 31:6, “Arise, and let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God.” Mount Zion signifies the spiritual Kingdom of God as in Hebrews 12:22: “you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” … the New Jerusalem that will descend out of heaven (Revelations 21:10-26), the ‘heaven on earth’).
Nothing is More Anti-Semitic than …
But nothing is more anti-Semitic12 than ultra-nationalist or heathen ‘Zionism.” Heathen Zionists have bastardized a most beautiful, God-given word to veil their crimes and ingratiate themselves on the world stage, to justify their atrocities against a defenseless people under the banner of Holy Goodness. It is worse than FAKE, it is FALSE.
They have grimly misrepresented and gravely misconstrued true Zionism as depicted in the Sacred Texts. Many Jews are atheists not ‘Jewish’ (a religious Jew who observes Judaism). According to a 2015 WIN/Gallup Poll, 65 percent of the Israeli population “said that they are either not religious or convinced atheists, compared to just 30 percent who say that they are religious.”13
Fake Zionism has been a rupture and a rebellion against Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The ‘return to a homeland’ with a modus operandi of ‘taking – attacking, invading, dispossessing, displacing and imprisoning the indigenous people of Palestine – rather than humbly giving as exemplified by the biblical Abraham’14, defiles all that is good and Holy in our Abrahamic Faiths. When it has emerged in the late 19th century, most religious Jews have rejected this false doctrine, Fascism veiled as Zionism.
Heathen-Zionists reflect their former oppressors by perpetrating an ideology of ethnic cleansing and external expansion and by abandoning democratic norms in pursuit of redemptive violence against anyone who stands in their way without ethical or legal restraints; equipped with lethal modern warfare, under pretense of defense. Their godless faith is in canons of deception, destruction and decadence. They sing the praises of greed and self-indulgence. Heathen-Zionism, hell on earth, is not the same as Biblical-Zionism, heaven on earth.
Does Heathen-Zionism warrant another world war? In my letter to President Donald J Trump15, I ask him: “How would you respond, Mr. President, to another East Aleppo but this time in West Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv”? Mr. President, you didn’t risk an Apocalypse, a world war between the US and Russia to rescue the people of East Aleppo? What if ‘they’ bomb Tel Aviv back into the Stone Age?
Collision Course Against Judaic Conscience …
Revealed as a dark side of Judaism, Heathen-Zionism rules and dominates the Israeli zeitgeist beguiling and chaining many Jews into believing in something they are not. This aberration ruptures civility in Israel-Palestine. Heathen-Zionism has split many Jewish families apart. Worse, Heathen-Zionists, dare in the glare of world television, torment and inter the indigenous Palestinians into concentrated encampments to live a hell on earth.
Without the Israeli - Palestinian Conflict, there would be an internal Israeli conflict that inevitably could unglue their social fabric now fragilely held intact by the fear mongering against a common enemy. Peace could bust the socio-cultural seams between the secular-nationalists, the religious-nationalists, the Orthodox, and the Ultra-Orthodox; between the Ashkenazim16, the Mizrahi Middle Eastern or Oriental Jews, and the Sephardic communities; between the recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia; between the Heathen-Zionists (hell on earth) and the true Biblical-Zionists (heaven on earth); and could further alienate the Israeli-Arab citizens (21%), whose separation from the rest is increasing. Socially, Israel is unstable. It is even worse economically. In Israel, the disparity between rich and poor, so underreported, is reprehensible.
Zionist leaders from David Ben Gurion to Binyamin Netanyahu have, according to world public opinion, taken many wrong turns in their territorial obsessions – their rage and blind ambitions – to expand their lebensraum. Instead of triumphing in peaceful harmony, they have capitulated to criminal misconduct – steal, kill, and destroy (John 10: 10) –, perpetrating heinous crimes against humanity, colliding against their Judaic conscience. Zionism, meant to be the light in the world, has become a prayer without end.
Is Heathen-Zionism sustainable: create an exclusive community or kampf17, a state for Jews-only; by deploying brute force without considering the consequences of the other; by unconscionably dispossessing and displacing ‘them’ from the land with no hope to ever return with neither compromise, concession or conciliation; them or us; the end justifies the means? This perversion and aberration, this depraved, distorted and deviant ideology can never have a happy ending. Ask Nazi Germany!
I worry. I want Israel - Palestine to survive. I am of Jewish descent. I, too, have a spiritual connection to the land. The region is my home, born as a refugee on the outskirts of Israel – Palestine on the Red Sea, a British Ship of Dutch parents. Inside my soul and within all of my being, I am attached to the splendor of its many colors, their tints and hues. I really do not know how to explain my love and deep devotion to the land, but I understand intuitively why neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will ever leave.
Jewish like Abraham?