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christian zionism
When Theology Kills: The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the Christian Zionist Agenda
The GHF offers a gospel of charity with one hand while authorizing sniper fire with the other.
Jul 01, 2025
When Rev. Dr. Johnnie Moore, a Trump-aligned Christian Zionist, was selected to lead the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the appointment was framed as a mission of mercy. In reality, it was a calculated move reflecting a theology that sanctifies suffering and weaponizes aid to serve empire.
The GHF is a United States and Israeli-backed entity, established in February 2025 under the guise of delivering emergency food, water, and medicine to a population devastated by bombs and blockades—bombs dropped and blockades enforced by the very governments funding the aid. GHF bypasses United Nations infrastructure and funnels resources through fortified "aid hubs" surrounded by biometric scanners, militarized checkpoints, and private American security contractors. Global humanitarian leaders have widely condemned GHF, and its initial executive director, former U.S. Marine Jake Wood, resigned in May, stating that GHF could not meet "humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence."
What appears to be humanitarian relief is a choreographed catastrophe. Since the GHF launch, over 400 Palestinians have been killed and thousands injured while attempting to access aid. One U.S security contractor described the chaos in Zeteo: metal lanes collapsed under pressure as desperate civilians were funneled into kill zones. "What we—these American companies and contract personnel—are doing is directly leading to more pain, suffering, and death for the Palestinians in Gaza," he said. The Israeli military is not-so-secretly embedded in GHF operations. U.S contractors shared radio communications with Israel Defense Forces (IDF) units, with snipers and tanks operating within earshot. The contractor added, "I would not be surprised if the aid was delivered at night deliberately, given it would then draw people out, at which point they could be fired on as combatants, even though they weren't."
Christian Zionism claims to stand with Israel, but in practice, it turns both Jewish and Palestinian lives into pawns in violent political theology that demands blood to feel righteous.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently published a military whistleblower report confirming that Israeli soldiers were ordered to shoot directly at unarmed Palestinians waiting at designated humanitarian aid sites—the very places GHF celebrates as sites of successful distribution. One IDF soldier told Haaretz: "It's a killing field. Where I was stationed, between 1 and 5 people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force—no crowd-control measures, no tear gas—just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars… I'm not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons." The parallel testimonies of American contractors and Israeli soldiers expose a coordinated structure of lethal control masquerading as compassion. Aid becomes ambush. Flour becomes bait. Mercy becomes a mechanism of surveillance and control.
Yet Moore, in a Fox News op-ed, paints a different picture: one of flawless logistics and divine providence. While Moore boasts of "Over 7 million meals were delivered… no trucks seized, no aid diverted, no violence at distribution sites," Palestinians were being trampled in fenced lanes and shot while reaching for flour, tea bags, and lentils, all requiring water that Palestinians do not have. While he cites spontaneous gratitude from the Gazans, his account includes no mention of the casualties, the gunfire, the biometric surveillance, or the private contractors earning up to $1,000 per day to "protect" food distribution, despite having no training in humanitarian law or weapons discipline.
This narrative, where Christian Zionist leaders claim victory while erasing the suffering caused by their own policies, is part of a carefully crafted theological strategy. My seminary thesis, Bad Theology as a Social Determinant of Health, argues that theologies built on white supremacy—like Christian Nationalism and Christian Zionism—transform faith into a political force that legitimizes structural violence by driving policy; justifying oppression; and becoming a cause of disease, displacement, and death. In this worldview, the modern state of Israel is a divine actor in prophecy, Palestinians are obstacles to redemption, and every military escalation is recast as sacred inevitability. So when global outrage over mass starvation in Gaza grew too loud to ignore, the GHF emerged—not as a bridge to recovery, but as a theater of benevolence. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich made the logic plain when he said that aid was allowed only as a prerequisite for "international legitimacy to conduct this war." In other words, humanitarianism becomes camouflage, and aid is required to sustain the optics of righteousness while the siege continues.
The brazenness of this theological complicity has only been intensified. Even before Israel's bombing campaign against Iran began, Christian Zionist leaders were at the forefront of urging escalation, framing regional war as a necessary prelude to prophetic fulfillment. Once the Iran-Israel war began, they did not grieve the violence—they celebrated it. Mike Huckabee, a longtime evangelical ally of President Donald Trump and now the U.S. ambassador to Israel, proclaimed on social media that Trump was spared from assassination to fulfill God's plan in the region. In this worldview, every missile launched and every city bombed becomes a step in a divine script. Christian Zionist leaders are not bystanders to this destruction but are its interpreters and enablers.
Christian Zionism does not just erase Palestinian life. It instrumentalizes Jewish death. It claims to defend Israel while advancing a theology in which the majority of Jews are expected to die in a coming apocalypse. As Stephen Sizer documents in Christian Zionism: Roadmap to Armageddon?, evangelical writers describe the Rapture as "the time of Israel's greatest bloodbath" and "a holocaust in which at least 750 million people will perish." This is not solidarity—it is eschatological antisemitism, cloaked in prophecy and wrapped in the American flag.
These beliefs have long shaped U.S. policy. Sizer notes that during the Reagan administration, figures such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were invited to the White House to interpret events in the Middle East through the lens of the Book of Revelation. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin reportedly called Falwell before President Ronald Reagan to brief him on the 1981 bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor. In 1982, after the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon, Falwell falsely insisted, "The Israelis were not involved." When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington in 1998, his first stop was not a meeting with President Bill Clinton—it was with Jerry Falwell. This is why the resume of Johnnie Moore is no surprise: former spokesman for Falwell's Liberty University, participant in Trump's evangelical advisory board, and a carbon copy of Huckabee, known for his infamous quote, "There's really no such thing as a Palestinian."
The GHF is not a bridge to recovery, but a theological rehearsal, a performance of control and consecrated theater. It asks us to witness a catastrophe and call it the fulfillment of prophecy. To baptize privatized militarism and call it salvation. To offer a gospel of charity with one hand while authorizing sniper fire with the other.
Christian Zionism claims to stand with Israel, but in practice, it turns both Jewish and Palestinian lives into pawns in violent political theology that demands blood to feel righteous. Its leaders speak the language of salvation while sanctioning policies that produce siege, displacement, and death. Johnnie Moore and others like him do not save lives—they provide spiritual cover for systems that end them. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is not a deviation from this logic; it embodies it.
As theologian Reverend Dr. Munther Isaac reminds us, Christ is under the rubble—and the church put him there. Will Christians continue to preach biblical literalism that demands a body count? Will Christians let prophecy justify annihilation? The one Christians claim to follow—a Palestinian Jew—was crucified by empire. Yet, Christian Zionism is insistent on crucifying Palestinians and Jews again and again.
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Who’s Drinking Netanyahu’s Genocidal Amalek Kool-Aid?
Religious nationalism may be soaring in Israel, but that’s not the trend in America.
Nov 08, 2023
“You must ‘remember what Amalek has done to you,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admonished on October 28, announcing the “second phase,” a ground invasion, of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Amalek, in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), is a nation that ambushed the Israelites making their way to the Promised Land. Following the attack, which the Israelites were able to beat back, God instructed that they must never forget and must wage an eternal war until no trace of Amalek’s existence remains. Generations later, King Saul killed all but the Amalekite king, whose descendent, Haman, generations after that, in the story of Purim, plotted to kill all the Jews in Persia.
Netanyahu is notoriously secular in his private life. But, ever the shrewd politician, scripture is his language of choice to sell his war to Jewish supremacists in Israel and right-wing Evangelicals in the United States.
The victims of Hamas’ vile October 7 attack come from what is referred to as the “Gaza envelope.” Heavy with kibbutzim (intentional collectives, traditionally based around agriculture), its residents are known for being secular and left-leaning.
Asked if losing his parents in Hamas’s terror attack had affected his political views, Maoz Inon, pleaded not for revenge but a reassessment of basing security “on military might.”
Netanyahu is notoriously secular in his private life. But, ever the shrewd politician, scripture is his language of choice to sell his war to Jewish supremacists in Israel and right-wing Evangelicals in the United States.
Likewise, Yotam Kipnis, in eulogizing for his father, said “We will not stay silent while the cannons roar, and we won’t forget that Dad loved peace. He wasn’t willing to serve in the territories. Do not write my father’s name on a missile, he wouldn’t have wanted that.”
Tom Godo, whose son lived and died in Kibbutz Kissufim, blamed the Netanyahu administration: “The fingers that pulled the trigger and murdered, the hands that held the knives that stabbed and beheaded and slashed were the loyal and determined emissaries of the accursed, messianic and corrupt government [of Israel].”
Even after spending 16 days as a hostage in Gaza, eighty-five-year-old peace activist Yocheved Lifshitz retained her belief in reconciliation. Upon being transferred to the Red Cross, she took the hand of her Hamas handler and bade him “Shalom,” (peace).
It’s not the families of those murdered on October 7, nor the families of the hostages who have been sleeping in tents outside the military headquarters in Tel Aviv demanding all Palestinian political prisoners be released in exchange for their loved ones Netanyahu is invoking Amalek to, but the ideological descendants of Kach.
The religious-nationalist Kach party was founded in 1971 by Brooklyn-born Rabbi Meir Kahane who argued for “the immediate transfer of the Arabs,” whom he referred to as “dogs.” In 1984, the one time his party secured a single seat in the Knesset, Kahane introduced legislation to ban all Jewish-Gentile marriages and sexual relations and revoke the Israeli citizenship of non-Jews.
The Kach party was so violently racist that it was prohibited from running in Israel’s next election, banned entirely in 1994, and defined as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.
In what could be perceived as another iteration of Amalek, in 2019, Kahane follower Itamar Ben Gvir formed the Jewish Power party, an ideological offshoot of Kach. Merging with other far-right fundamentalist parties to form Religious Zionism in 2022, they won the third-largest share of Israel’s parliament seats. This is the audience Netanyahu is addressing, but not only them.
On October 8, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ), which claims to represent millions, sent out an email stating that Hamas’ attack, “was not launched due to grievances over the Israeli ‘occupation’ or any real dangers to the al-Aqsa mosque.” Rather, it was driven by the ancient “Spirit of Amalek.”
On October 24, Christians United for Israel, which boasts a membership of over 10 million, raised $25 million in a single night in support of Israel (they raised and donated $100 million over the week). Standing beside CUFI’s Pastor John Hagee, who in 2008 referred to Hitler as a “hunter” sent by God “to help Jews reach the promised land,” was Israeli Ambassador to Israel Gilan Erdad.
Given their belief that when enough Jews have populated their modern state, the apocalypse will come, and “a sea of [Jewish and Muslim] human blood" will fill the land, it’s hard to think of Evangelical Zionist support for Israel as a heartfelt commitment to the protection of the Jewish people. Despite that, amid declining Jewish-American support for Israel, especially among young Jews, Israel has for years been courting Evangelical support. However, polls are finding the support of young Evangelicals is also rapidly declining, dropping from 75% to 34% between 2018 and 2021.
Religious nationalism may be soaring in Israel, but that’s not the trend in America. Some people of faith, like Adam Strater, the senior Jewish educator for Georgia Hillels, are even reclaiming the story of Amalek as a model for Jews to reject “the evil impulse,” described in the Zohar (3:160a) and “make the moral choice to reorient the tradition towards a shared sense of solidarity, and ultimately, liberation.” Given the rapidly climbing toll of death in Gaza—over 10,000 people killed already—these changes could not be more welcome or come soon enough.
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