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IPFS News Link • Israel - Palestine

Chris Hedges: Trump's Christian Fascists and the War on Palestine

• https://www.activistpost.com, Chris Hedges

This campaign includes visits to Israel by prominent leaders, including Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins and Mario Bramnick, petitioning the White House, lobbying Congress and calls for annexation at Christian conferences, including a resolution of support for Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank adopted at the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference. The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) Convention in Dallas, in March, gathered over 200 signatures from pastors and right-wing religious leaders from across the United States calling for the annexation of "Judea and Samaria" — the purported biblical name for the West Bank —and declaring the two state solution "a failed experiment."

American Christian Leaders for Israel, which says it represents a network of "over 3,000 organizational leaders from across the nation, including the National Religious Broadcasters," endorsed the NRB resolution and sent it to Trump. Congresswoman Claudia Tenney and five other members of the congressional "Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus," sent a letter to Trump asking to "recognize the right of Israel" to declare sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territories, arguing that it will advance "the Judeo-Christian heritage on which our nation was founded."

Trump, who rescinded a Biden administration executive order that sanctioned Jewish colonists in the West Bank for human rights violations, promised, on Feb. 4, to make an announcement in the "next four weeks," about possible annexation of the West Bank. This follows Trump's call for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and death threats to the Palestinians unless they release Israeli hostages. "You're talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing," Trump said of Gaza while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One.

The agenda of Zionist extremists and Christian fascists, who hold senior positions throughout the Trump administration, have long converged. The language, iconography and symbolism used by the Christian and Jewish fascists is biblical. But the bonds are political, not religious.

I detail the history and ideology of our homegrown fascism and its kinship with Jewish fascism in my book, "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a Baptist minister, has been nominated by Trump to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee has said there is "no such thing as a Palestinian" and asserted that Palestinian identity is "a political tool to try and force land away from Israel." He proposes that any Palestinian state should be created outside of Israel in neighboring countries such as Egypt, Syria or Jordan. He dismisses the two-state solution as "irrational and unworkable."


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