Israel was created as a Xian homeland in 1830

[Opinion. In 1830, no Jew had thought of ‘going home’ to Palestine. There were handsful of Jewish immigrants to Palestine before Zionism took root in 1897 and more migration followed.

But this backstory is fascinating. The impulse for a homeland originated not from Jews but from Christians!

I think Thais have it right: Don’t think too much! Every religion is nothing more than made-up mythology.]

Whose homeland?

The doctrine that promised Palestine to the Jews was invented in 1830 — in a Dublin drawing room, by a son of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy.

John Nelson Darby invented the rapture and the countdown: God's clock restarts only when the Jews return to Palestine. Eighteen centuries of Christianity had never taught it. Brookes carried it to America. Scofield printed it into the margins of the Bible itself — ten million copies, funded by Darby's own movement. Blackstone petitioned the White House with it. Wilson gave it his blessing. And Hechler walked Herzl into the courts of Europe on it.

1830, a doctrine. 1917, a declaration. The chain ran from a Dublin drawing room through Washington to the British Cabinet — and never once passed through Palestine.

At the helm of the nineteenth-century British Empire, Anglo-Protestant Christian revivalists wove together apocalyptic theological beliefs with their country’s expansionist ambitions. They espoused literal interpretations of prophetic biblical texts, such as Daniel and Revelation, and perceived Jews as a separate nation within God’s divine plan, destined for restoration to Palestine. This event, thought the restorationists, would trigger Christ’s second coming and the end-time battle prophesied to take place on the hills of Megiddo in Palestine, known as Armageddon.

In his book Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon?, Stephen Sizer illustrates how this eschatology was notably sharpened by the theologian John Nelson Darby’s “dispensational premillennialism.” Darby is often recognized as the “father of dispensationalism,” the belief that Jews have their own distinct dispensation and are not required to convert to Christianity before being restored to Palestine—in contrast to “covenantal premillennialism,” which holds that Jews must convert first. Darby’s extensive travels to North America, coupled with his active participation in Bible schools and prophecy conferences, played a crucial role in spreading dispensational premillennialism throughout the continent. His theological development found fertile ground in North America, as his legacy was further propagated by Cyrus Scofield and Dwight L. Moody, who discovered in Darby’s teachings a foundation for their own fundamentalist movement.

Darby’s millennialist theology did not take root in the United States in a vacuum. Rather, it intertwined with and adapted to the prevailing Anglo-American settler culture and the burgeoning colonial ambitions of a nation looking beyond its borders. This theology fed on American national myths, shaped by the doctrines of Manifest Destiny that drove Anglo-Protestant settlers across the centuries to expand their conquest westward, believing it their providential right to do so. 

Emboldened by a blend of eschatological and nationalistic fervor, a number of Americans embarked on pilgrimages to Palestine, some even attempting to establish settlements. These included the early efforts of the first U.S. Consul to Jerusalem, Warder Cresson, who attempted to build a proto-Zionist settlement near Jerusalem. In 1866, Mormon leader George Adams established a Protestant colony outside the city walls of Jaffa, and in 1881, the Spafford family founded the famous American Colony north of the Old City of Jerusalem. All of these were material manifestations of a millennialist, colonialist drive to prepare the Holy Land for the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

A German court ruled that comparing Israel to the Nazi regime is not a criminal offense.

Edited 58 minutes ago58 min by unblocktheplanet