UK Column Radio

Christian Zionism- Its origins, goals, and influence – with Stephen Sizer

The word Zionism is embroiled in division, angst, hate, and war. To restore peace in the Middle East and the world, we need to understand what Zionism really represents. Read the write-up at: https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/christian-zionism-its-origins-goals-and-influence-with-stephen-sizer

Duration:: 1h 16m
Broadcast on:: 21 Nov 2024
Audio Format:: other

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My guest is Reverend Dr. Steven Sizer, and we're going to be talking about the subject of Christian Zionism, and I'm going to say to the audience that I have particularly been looking forward to this discussion, because as somebody I consider myself to be a Christian, I have never claimed to know a huge amount about scripture. I know there are many people that are great, are much better read than I am. However, in recent months, we've seen some really quite extraordinary reactions from our audience, particularly from people who will tell us that they're Christians, that the present upheaval in the Middle East clearly caused a lot of people to be not only anxious, but in some ways quite motivated with events taking place in the Middle East, and I was stunned to be told on more than one occasion that I could not criticize Israel, I couldn't criticize any of the military operations, I couldn't criticize the death and destruction, because Israel was taking that action, and as a Christian, I could not criticize Israel. Now I'd never encountered this particular response from Christians before, I was quite puzzled about it, I reflected on it a great deal, and I'm very pleased to say that today I'm going to get the opportunity to learn from Reverend Dr. Stephen Sizer and his research and I am looking forward to learning a great deal from him. Now I'm just going to say before I bring him on screen that he was formerly, where are we, he was formerly Vicar of Christchurch, Virginia Water in Surrey for 20 years, until his retirement in 2017, and as we're going to hear in a minute due to his research and work he ultimately was censored by the church, more on that in due course, but on a positive note I want to say that he's heavily involved, still heavily involved in lots of organization, so he's founder and director of the peacemaker trust, convivientia alliance, he's chair of that organization, he's chair of the Israeli committee against house demolitions, bishops chaplain to the right Reverend Rhea Abou El-Asal, the retired Anglican bishop in Jerusalem, and there's a great deal more, so I'm going to say Stephen, welcome to UK column. It's a delight to be with you Brian, thank you for inviting me. Well, as I've already said, thank you for being here, I've really set the scene, Stephen, and I talked to you about this when we spoke privately on the phone, because I can say that I found some of the pushback from our audience, when we've tried to report some of what I regard as horrors in the Middle East, I found the pushback from some members of the Christian audience to be quite extraordinary, I am happy to say that I found some of them to be unbelievably cold and callous in their response, but what I learned very quickly was that they felt justified in behaving in this way due to their beliefs and/or interpretations of scripture which led them to believe that effectively as Christians we couldn't criticize Israel. Now, you've been studying Christian Zionism for a long time, I know you're very learned on this and you've produced a lot of papers, but I wonder whether you can give us a little overview about that subject, Christian Zionism, its origins, goals, and influence. This is clearly a very important ideology, particularly as we see the Middle East events in 2024. I'll be pleased to… Christian Zionism is Christian support for Zionism, basically. Zionism is the historic conviction among some Jewish people that they would desire to be restored to the land that they'd lived in thousands of years ago, Palestine, so it gave rise to the Zionist movement in the 1880s onwards among Jewish emigres in Eastern Europe, Russia, who were suffering from the pogroms and really developed in the 20th century. What most people don't realize is that Zionism as a political conviction was undergirded and preceded by a Christian movement, although the word Zionism wasn't coined until the 1880s, prior to that, the terminology was restoration or restorationism, restoring the Jews to Palestine. This was a Christian conviction that really began in the 1810s, 1820s, particularly in the light of the conflict that had gone on for hundreds of years between Britain and France, trying to control the Middle East within our two empires, and so Christian Zionism preceded Jewish Zionism by at least 50 years, facilitated Jewish Zionism because you have to remember that without the dominant Christian powers in Europe, Zionism as a political aspiration would have been about as successful as the Kurdish desire for independence and sovereignty over their land, or the Armenians. So it was preceded by Christian Zionism, was facilitated by Christian Zionists like Alfor, Lord Shaftesby and others in the 19th century, early 20th, and today is dominated by Christians. So when you use the word Zionism today, it's synonymous with supremism, with racism, with ethnic cleansing, with genocide, it's a colonial set, a settler colonial project. But nine out of 10 Zionists in the world are Christians. There are, I don't know, six, eight million Zionist Jews, but there are at least 200 million self-confessing Christian Zionists, so it's predominantly a Christian heresy. Any form of Christian nationalism is a heresy. And when you add to that settler colonialism and supremism, the idea that we use superior to others, then it becomes a very toxic, almost cultic belief system. Thank you for that. If I come back here, this is in reading your book, so maybe this is a good place to introduce them to the audience, because my knowledge for the interview today is going to be based on this. We'll bring about, I'll hold the book up and then we'll bring it up on screen. So this is Christian Zionism, that's a pretty thick book that you've written, our viewers can see that a little bit better. And the second one that I've been reading is Zion's Christian soldiers, which is slimmer, and you kindly told me when we were speaking that this smaller version was designed to almost be a summary of your earlier work to make the subject easier for people. I'll let you comment, just wanted to answer that, but when I was reading this big book, I'm not entirely finished, but I'm about 90% through, I was absolutely fascinated to read this history about the start of the Zionist movement buried within Christianity. You've mentioned Balfour, and of course, there are many other big names that the average Christian in the West would associate with the Zionist movement. But without getting too deep into the history, I was fascinated to see when you were talking about an organisation in London, working with then famous lay preachers to help instill this belief system. Can you tell us a little bit more about that slightly earlier history? Yes, you find individual Christian leaders convinced that the scriptures mandated the return of the Jews to Palestine and spoke about it in the commentaries and so on. But as a movement, it began in the 1809 approximately with what became known as the London Jew Society, and it was a group of Christians convinced for humanitarian reasons that they cared for Jewish people who were suffering in the East End of London and other areas of Britain, particularly in Europe, from their fleeing persecution, and therefore there was a desire to show Christian compassion to refugees, emigrades, but alongside that was the conviction that the Jews remain God's chosen people, were destined to control much of the Middle East from Egypt to Iraq, and that it was the destiny of the church to help facilitate that movement. Alongside that, it coincided with Britain's desire to expand its empire, defeat the French, and control the trade routes to Africa and India, which pass through Palestine, it's the bridge between Europe, Asia, and Africa. So this conviction, I would call it Manifest Destiny, Britain's Manifest Destiny was to help the Jews back to the Land of Palestine so that they would assist Britain to further its colonial interests. It's exactly what the US is doing in the Middle East today. The US is in the Middle East because it wants Israel as a compliant partner to control the Arab states, secure the oil, and maintain US supremacy, particularly in that part of the world. So it was a coalition, if you like, or a confluence of two rivers, one political, one religious, naive, and misguided, which led to numerous organisations that were dedicated to helping the Jews back to the Land of Palestine. If I remember by reading correctly from your book that these earlier individuals and organisations, it seems to me that they operated more or less autonomously in the beginning. They then began to link up with other light-minded groups. But it was only later that particular individuals in this Christian movement, and we are particularly talking within the UK, and then later you stress that at the big expansion in America, these individuals were largely acting autonomously or within small, light-minded groups. But then one of two people seemed to be able to leap the divide and get political interest. And then when that political interest inside the UK began to grow, this is where the movement as a whole really began to gain strength and power. That's correct. What I neglected to emphasise was that at the beginning of the 19th century, you see the rise of millennialism, a particular, I call it PMT, pre-millennial tension. The idea that the crisis returning, the end of the world is coming. You've had the Revolutionary War in America, Britain was seen as the anti-Christ, then you had the French and the British, Napoleon, for example, Napoleon Bonaparte was the first world ruler in 2000 years to promise the Jews a homeland, because he needed the Jewish bankers to back his war against the British. Britain needed the same bankers to back them against the French. So there was a lot of speculation about the return of Christ, the end of the world, the early 19th century. It gave rise to the Mormons, the Jehovah Witnesses, the Seventh-day Adventists, and many of the millennial cults. And this is why it became so popular. No people were reading their newspaper in the one hand about war in this part of the world and they were reading their Bible, the way they were guided to read it, and putting the two together, thinking that they were the final generation. And that's how it became popularized. The individuals that stand out for me were John Nelson Darby, who founded the Brethren. He developed a way of reading the Bible. You know if you have the Old Testament, a New Testament, you have the Hebrew Scriptures and Christians, and the coming of Christ is in the middle of the two. Well, he kind of did the same thing on every page of the Bible, either this passage was about the Jews, this passage was about the church. And anything in the Scriptures that had not been fulfilled literally, like the rebuilding of Ezekiel's temple, or Jerusalem under Jewish sovereignty, if things had not taken place literally, he put them into the future. So you stacked up all of these prophecies that had to come true before Christ returned. And again, this helped fuel expectation among naive, ignorant, illiterate Christians. DL Moody was one of the popular evangelists in the States, convinced of this theology. And then Cyrus Schofield, people may not have heard of, put these ideas alongside this text of Scripture, and it became known as the Schofield Reference Bible. And it became the most popular study Bible in the world, by the 1950s, 1960s. And what it really did was it made the notes equal to the Scriptures. You know, to save time reading the Bible, all you have to do is read a few notes to understand as they saw it, how to read the Bible. This is how it became popular. And in the 20th century, the movement was dominated by what we would call radio evangelists, or television evangelists, people sitting at home, you know, in their rural settings in the States, listening to the television, or listening to the radio to get their religious beliefs, if you like. Many of the most influential Christian leaders in America today, Benny Hinn, Rodney Howard Brown, John Haigee, you know, these individuals have an audience of millions of people on a weekly basis, through radio, through television, and they are pushing this line that Israel is central to God's purposes in our generation. The sad thing is it has so little biblical basis at all. You mentioned my two books that the first one, Christian Zionism Roadmap from Armageddon, is really an attempt to understand the movement as a whole. So we looked at the history of the movement, it's theology, and it's political agenda, because it's political agenda is where it gets scary, seriously scary. So that was my thesis, my PhD thesis. The second book, Zion's Christian Soldiers, is it's not really a summary of the earlier book, it's a read, an attempt to read the Bible, again, and deconstruct Christian Zionism. It's like a, I call it like a hot air balloon. How many pins do you need to burst a balloon? Well, I'll give you seven. Anyone will do. So the book has got seven chapters, and each of them is like a pin that bursts the balloon of hot air, which is all that Christian Zionism is. So it's an attempt to inoculate Christians from this Celtic heretical theology. I want to move deeper into this question of about how people interpret the Bible. But before we do that, I think this would be a good place to be saying to our audience that as a result of your work, deep research, historical research, huge amount of biblical research, this has cost you a lot, this has cost you your career within the church. And just before I was settling down for the interview, I was just looking at a couple of headlines that were in the press back in 2023. And of course, the BBC was in there with a big headline. It said a church of England priest who shared quote, very virulently, apologies to that anti-semitic unquote material has been barred from ministry for 12 years. And a pretty brutal article about you, no bones about it, you're an anti-Semite. You've been barred from working in the church for 12 years. I think it was. And yeah, you're a thoroughly nasty person. There were other reports as well. Obviously the main newspapers picked it up. I think the times or the telegraph was another one. But just tell the audience how this attack came about and how you've been forced to try and defend yourself. You've done proper PhD research into this subject, but that's cost you your career and caused you to be censored by the church. How did that happen? Well, I liken it to football. And you know, if you're watching a football match, if a player cannot win the ball and the opponent is about to score a goal, what do they do? They try and bring the opponent down. They foul the opponent. They go for the legs rather than the ball. And so I'm not the only one. Many others have addressed the whole subject of designers and critiqued it, theologically, tried to challenge Christians to recognize it as a heresy. And the standard operating procedure, if you like, of Zionists is to allege anti-Semitism. You must hate Jews. You must be prejudiced toward Jews if you criticize Israel. Again, this is a misnomer. It's untrue. You know, criticizing a state for racism isn't anti-Semitic, it isn't racist in itself. I abhor all forms of racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, you know, it's sinful, it's evil. And we must repudiate any theology, any political system that denigrates one people group because of their color, their religion, their race, whatever. But it began for me about 20 years ago, a group of Zionist Christians who did not like the way I was challenging their theology, began to write anonymous articles about me. And then they set up a website, seismic shock, play on my name, and they were writing stuff virtually every day, criticizing me for visits, how I was making to the Middle East, in Christian ministry terms, reaching out to Muslims, reaching out to groups in Palestine, calling for basic human rights for Palestinians, for example. And then they began to try and isolate me from organizations I was working with. And that led to a first complaint against me in the Church of England about 12 years ago. And that was to dismiss my rubbish, he said, just sit down with these people and find a way forward, conciliation, which is what we did. We agreed a form of words, and I promised to get my website and documents fact checked, and they agreed that they would come to me if they had a problem rather than going to the press, which is the way they stand, you know, their standard operating procedure is to do that. And then they made a second complaint against me about five years ago, which is the way one you're referring to, alleging antisemitism. They gave 12 examples where they thought I had was demonstrating antisemitic behavior. People I'd met with, all of the sources were second-hand, some of them were anonymous, which would be inadmissible in a court of law, but in the ecclesiastical court, you'd get away with anything. The final conclusion was, and this was a statement from my barrister, Christian barrister, he said, "The central message arising from the tribunal is that the well-documented accusations of repeated antisemitic behavior made over more than a decade have been dismissed." That was factually correct. Only one allegation of antisemitism has been found to have substance, and that was dealt with quickly and effectively nine years earlier at the time by the Bishop of Guilford, which the Board of Deputies accepted at the time. So again, this was double jeopardy. And that one incident, what it was, was I posted an article on Facebook for three days about 9/11, and it was called Israel Did It, 9/11, and I'd only put it up there to promote discussion. If you agree with the article, I don't believe Israel was behind 9/11, but that was deemed antisemitic. In '15, I apologized having posted it on my Facebook for three days, took it down straight away, and it was done and dusted, but it was regurgitated, if you like, in this more recent complaint. But most important of all, and this is really where no one has been able to challenge me on. My barrister said it is significant, and not one word or statement from Dr. Sizer has been shown to be antisemitic there are none. And then the expert witness on antisemitism, my tribunal, Professor Anthony Lerman, who's a world leading expert on antisemitism, he was disgusted at the outcome of the tribunal. He said this, and he's Jewish. His disgraceful miscarriage of justice against someone who has never uttered a word of hate against the Jews will be a permanent stain on the Church of England and aborted deputies. So basically, I was given a 12-year suspension, although I'm already retired, so it's a suspension from being able to take services in an Anglican church. On the basis of three things they found me guilty of, one was this article, which I'd posted for three days, nine years earlier, and had been dealt with. Another was, I'd met with an Islamic leader who was linked to his Balah in southern Lebanon, and at that occasion, I'd pleaded with him to release these rally captives. And the third was, an interview I had in Australia, gone out in the UK around midnight, so no one was listening to it. And they said, "I was not sufficiently contrite over things I'd said on previous occasions." So it was incredibly subjective. They were clutching at straws. But having got my head, any other clergyman's going to think twice. David Miller, you may know, was an academic from Bristol University. He was censured and lost his job. They've got one academic. They've done the same with other political leaders, Jeremy Corbyn, for example. You take, you get the head of a political leader, an academic, a clergyman, and everyone else stays quiet. So in the sense it's a form of, how can I put it? Sensorship. Exactly. It's censorship. But irony is that when you feel free, sorry, when, you know, they took away the one thing I didn't need, you know, I don't particularly want to do services at eight o'clock in the morning in country parishes on a cold, cold winter's morning, you know, there's nothing they could take away from me that I care about. And it's actually free to me to be more active in campaigning for human rights for Jews as well as Muslims, as well as Christians, particularly in the Middle East. Yes, I've used the word censorship, but I think that's exactly what it is. We're seeing more and more censorship coming in academia. And in fact, over recent weeks, one of our valued correspondence, Diane Rasmussen-McGaddie, has come under this form of attack herself because she's dared to speak out on a range of subjects on the UK column, but the university is now absolutely going for her with charges which could result in her losing her job. So we're seeing this happen across the board, but in this case, you were faced with it particularly because of your work and your efforts in relation to Christianity and Israel. If we come back to the Bible, and I'll again qualify by saying that when I started to get interested in the Bible myself, I can remember a friend saying to me, but the thing is, Brian, you need to understand which Bible you are reading. And it had never occurred to me before that comment that I had to be careful about what biblical version I was reading, and for a lot of reasons, I suppose I've stayed focused on the King James, but I'm aware and that there are errors in the King James Bible. These are acknowledged. It's a shame we haven't got Alex Thompson, and there are friends in correspondence here because he does a lot of work in relation to biblical translations. But we have to accept that whatever Bible we have is going to have some actual mistakes in translation, we'll call those foundational mistakes, but we then also get into the arena that we have different versions of the Bible, as you've described with Schofield, where a whole spin is woven into the biblical text itself by taking historic text as in King James and making it in a more readable modern form, the choice of words and phrases can drastically alter the meaning that was originally attended in the Scriptures. So I had to learn all this myself. I'm sure many people will be saying, "That shows your ignorance, Brian, but I'm happy to take that comment, but at least I did pick up on it." But what I have been shocked at is the attacks coming in from the Christian community to the UK column for daring to say, "Well, we think that Israel is wrong in prosecuting the war in the Middle East in the way it is," is people are absolutely locked into the belief system created by their interpretation of the Scriptures. And it's black and white. They won't shift. They won't. I even said in response to one particular unpleasant email, "Are you saying to me that if Jesus Christ was stood with you watching the slaughter and carnage unfold in Gaza, he would be saying, "It's okay because the Israelis are doing it." And of course, I didn't get a response to that email, but I've had to really be quite strong in responding to some people because their comments have been horrible. So my question to you is, what's your explanation for the reason that people seem to become so deeply locked into Scripture? They seem to forget the key messages of love you, God, love one another and love your enemies. This seems to be a pretty simple, ununderstandable message in the Bible. But a lot of Christians, the deeper they get into their interpretation, the more happy they seem. We can explain it in a number of ways, without denigrating individuals' belief system necessarily. A bedroom rustle once said, "Most people would rather die than think, and most people do." And if we apply that, my observation as a pastor over 35 years, 40 years, is that it is easier to take our belief systems pre-packaged than to think it through for ourselves. It's like you go shopping and increasingly you can buy meals prepared for you. So all you want to do is buy your shepherd's pie and stick it straight in the oven and eat it, rather than buy the raw materials, prepare it, cook it. And it's normally much healthier than the packaged meals. So in many ways, people's theology, their belief system, is packaged for them either because they've read a book or because they believe what the pastor says. And one of the most dangerous things we can do as Christians is believe what we're told rather than reading the Bible for ourselves and allowing God's Spirit to help us to understand it. So books like commentaries and even my books are there to help understanding, not replace it. And so the people you've described who've been hostile towards the UK column, I interpret that as a kind of a brittleness. And when something is brittle, it may be made of iron, it may be very hard, but it's brittle. And if it's brittle, it's weak. Many people's theology is very brittle and they get defensive when you challenge it because they haven't thought it through for themselves, you're taking their baby away from them. It's the umbilical cord, they get threatened. So it's a sign of immaturity, it's a sign of brittleness if people cannot engage. It's ironic, you know, you would think that Zionists will be queuing up to debate me. They don't. They don't want to debate me. You have to ask why. Can I qualify that when you say Zionists, do you mean Christian Zionists? Yes, because the majority of Zionists are Christians. The overall majority, 9 out of 10 Zionists and the world are Christians, not Jews. You know, ironically, most of the people that defended me at my tribunal were Jews, Jews who were anti-Zionists who realized that Christianity in its settler colonial form in the Middle East is not a friend of the Jewish people. But to go back to theology, Christians, many, many Christians don't read the Bible for themselves. They'll read a simple book that will suggest that the end of the world is coming, Jesus is coming back, and these things have got to take place before he comes back. So my question is, was the coming of Jesus the fulfillment of the Old Testament promises God made to the Jews or the postponement, fulfillment or postponement? And for many Christian Zionists, the coming of Jesus is Plan B, because Israel is Plan A, Israel is central to God's purposes. The fundamental mistake they make is to draw a line from Genesis to today and say, "Israel is Israel is Israel is Israel, Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews." When it's a total nonsense, the Hebrew Scriptures themselves talk about the Jewish people not as an ethnic group descended from Abraham but as the people of God made up of many nationalities. We've got to deconstruct the way we use the word. So Israel, again, Zionists like to think, "Israel is Israel is Israel is Israel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, twelve tribes of Israel, Israel today is the descendants of the twelve tribes of Israel. Therefore, they inherit the promises God made to Abraham. It's not what the Bible says. The Bible insists that the promises God made to Abraham are fulfilled through Jesus, not through Israel. The Bible emphasizes that the people of God in the Old Testament was inclusive of all nations just as the church today is inclusive of all nations. Occasionally you walk into a church today and they're all white, they're all middle-class. They're all retired and you have to think they do not reflect the community within which that church exists. They are not the church. They're a small part of the church. So I'll just give you a couple of examples. This is what I mean by bursting the balloon. Let me just give you one example. Zionists insist that the promises God made to Abraham apply to Israel exclusively today. It's not what the Bible says. I'll give you one example. This one verse is enough to burst the balloon. In the New Testament, in Paul's letter to the Galatians, Paul was a rabbi, he was a Jew, he wrote this, "The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed, scripted as not say and to seeds, meaning many people, but to your seed, many one person who is Christ." If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. Meaning people who believe in Jesus inherit the promises God made to Abraham, not a secular state of people in Israel today. Another helpful way to understand this, Brian, is if I ought to have two cuts here. If this is sprite, clear sprite, sprite as a drink, it's a clear liquid and this is coke. This is coke. The Zionists like to claim that they have exclusive claims on the promises of the Bible about identity, about land, but what happens if you, sorry, this is Brown, this is clear. What happens if you add coke to sprite? It changes the colour. You can't go back to sprite once you've added coke. So in the same way, ethnic purity is not something that the Scriptures teach. Let me give you one example of that. One verse again, this Esther 8 verse 17, "In every province and in every city to which the Egypt of the King came, there was joy and gladness among the Jews, feasting and celebrating." That's the feast of Purim when they celebrate their deliverance from their enemies in the time of Esther, but then verse 17 says, "And many people of other nationalities became Jews." Now, what does that mean? It means that many other nationalities, other ethnic groups, other colours, other races became Jews, i.e. a mixing of the ethnic communities, just as you and I. If we did our DNA, we would find that we're 5% Spanish, 10% Italian, 3% Viking, whatever. Everyone is a mixed race. So the idea that the Jews today are the inheritors of the promises God made to Israel in the Old Testament is nonsense, because the Jews of the time of Esther, certainly the time of Christ and today, were made up of many nationalities. So acceptance within the people of God is on the basis of faith, not race, faith, not race. To get the difference, Zionists think it's on racial grounds, the Scriptures teach it's on the basis of faith, trust in the one true God, and all who trust in him are welcomed into the people of God. I think excellence, explanation, I enjoyed that very much. As you were talking through that, in my head is all of the various views on what we're dealing with when we talk about the Middle East and the problems around. We've got Israel, which can be regarded as the nation state. It can be regarded as the wider name for the Jewish community. Then we have Zionists. We have Zionism itself. You correct me if I've got this wrong where we are talking about, I think, or I have thought until now that Zionism, we are more talking about God's kingdom in relation to the people that that involves. We've got political Zionists or Zionist Israel, which is a political concept. It's not even a biblical concept. It's something completely different. Yet we have Christians today that don't even think about trying to pull these various descriptors apart, they just fixate on the fact that Israel is Zionism, is the political state, and we must support that political state otherwise we are, as somebody said, Brian, if you criticise Israel, you'll go to hell. It's a subtle nonsense, criticising a state is not synonymous with racism. You rightly, through identifying these three concepts, they are very different. Not all Jews are Zionists, and only half of all Jews in the world identify with Israel or live in Israel. Most Zionists in the world are Christians, not Jews, and Israel is a secular state made up of Muslims, Christians and Jews. They are not synonymous, and that's the problem. Zionism conflates the three, and people like the Board of Deputies here in Britain like to conflate them, and the Israeli leadership emphasises that all Jews around the world are Israelis, that Israel is a Jewish state, so they want to conflate these because it's then very convenient that criticism of Israel is deemed as antisemitism, criticism of Jews. We should respect Judaism as a religion, we should protect Jewish people from racism, but we can oppose Israel as a settler colonial system that's practising apartheid, and we can call for boycotts, divestments and sanctions as a way of bringing it to its senses. At the end of the day, Israel's got to decide, is it going to share the land, or is it going to share citizenship? Two states means sharing the land, and one state means sharing citizenship, but it won't do either. It won't give up the occupied territories, it won't give equal rights to Palestinians, and therefore it isn't apartheid state, and that's why we must oppose it implacably. With that at the back in our minds, I want to say that as part of my journey to understand more about what was actually happening around Israel and trouble in the Middle East. I have made over recent months quite a big effort to try and have some dialogue with Jewish people, and probably one of the first things that I did together with Mike Robinson, who I work with obviously very closely with the UK column, is we took ourselves up to London for the first very big Palestine demonstration, and we decided that the best way to deal with reporting was to split up and to take ourselves in through a crowd of thousands and thousands of people with a very different look to them, because there were young people in small groups, there were family groups, there were groups of older people, there were also groups of young men, and I say that because some of them looked, I'm going to say, pretty tough. We decided we'd split up and we'd walk in through that big crowd, and we talked to people, and I took some recorded interviews, and I have to say that everybody I met, but they were a little bit fascinated as to who I was, but they responded to me very well, and I got some very nice little audio clips about why they were there and what their concerns were. But where I'm coming to is that when we got into the middle of that pro-Palestine crowd, I was very surprised to see a little group of people together under a big banner which said Jews for peace, and I was intrigued, I went up to them and asked them a little bit about who they were, and one man was kind enough to say that he would give me a little interview, but of course, one of the things I said is here you are as Jews, in the middle of this huge crowd, how are you finding people, are you not frightened? And the instant reply was that people around us have been utterly lovely. And it was my, you know, again, people can criticize and say, "Well, you're very naive, right?" But this was my first personal experience of being with both Jews and Palestinians or Arabs, whatever the exact nature of that big crowd was, Muslims, and here were Jewish people who were there calling for peace in the Middle East, and completely relaxed about being in the midst of that type of crowd. And following on from that, that's when I tried to engage with other people in the Jewish community to see what their opinions were, not only about the war in the Middle East, but also how they felt about the Zionist state of Israel, were they happy with their own government. But what I discovered was that although people would speak to me off the record, they didn't want to speak to me on the record. And this wasn't, this wasn't as a result of their concerns over the style of UK column reporting or perhaps their perception that we were against Israel. They wouldn't talk because they were clearly frightened of their own government. And I was, I was really stunned to learn the extent of this. And before I hand over to you, I just had one other bit, I eventually watched a really fascinating interview between two rabbis in America. One was an American, one was actually British about to become a naturalized American, but they were talking about the fact that they considered themselves to be American citizens, and they were being faced with agents of the Israeli state coming to America, coming into the schools where they operated and telling young Jewish teenagers that they weren't really American. Israel was there not only as their home, but that the Israeli defense forces were there to protect them as Jews. And I was just fascinated in the conversation that these two rabbis were really outraged that Israel should have the affront, the state of Israel should have the affront to come into America in order to recruit people away from their accepted identity of being American as their nationality and Jewish in their faith. Grateful for your thoughts. If we just deal with that first one, assimilation is the greatest threat to Zionism and racial purity. There was a series of adverts around Israel a couple of years back. If you lose a cat or a dog, you put a picture of the cat or a dog on a post and you stick it on the lampposts. In some countries, when children have gone missing, I've seen them in the States, children have gone missing, they've got involved in drugs or they're just not, you'll find posters on the lampposts of young people with their name missing. Well, in Israel, there was a political campaign recently a few years ago where they put anonymous pictures of young people on it missing, but they weren't missing. They had married Gentiles. They had assimilated. They were willing to live in America in Britain and that's the greatest threat to Zionism because Zionism needs racial purity and it needs to maximize the number of Jews who live in Israel, minimize the number of Palestinians living in Israel because that's the demographic time bomb. We've got the same in Northern Ireland with Catholics now a majority in Northern Ireland. It's inevitable that Northern Ireland will be united with Ireland at some point in the future. That kind of demographic time bomb is what troubles them to many Zionists. I've been on a number of those demos. I'm going to the one on the 30th of November and I'm because I'm chair of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, which is an Israeli organization, I'm not Jewish, but they welcome non-Jews to assist. We are part of what's known as the Jewish block and there are at least 10 Jewish organizations in the UK that participate in these demonstrations and they are given pride of place at the front of the march. It's a very moving occasion when the Jewish block is welcomed into the march. We've got Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Network for Palestine, the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions. Those are three, Matura Carter is an ultra-orthodox Jewish organization that's anti-Zionist. There are many, many anti-Zionist Jews who participate in these demonstrations because they know what Zionism is doing in Palestine is leading to anti-Semitism, is exacerbating tensions with Muslims and with Christians and other ethnic groups. I would encourage you and encourage listeners to come along and engage with our Jewish friends who are anti-Zionist and listen to them and understand why they are so vociferous in opposing Israeli genocide in Gaza, the expansion into Lebanon, Syria and so on. The greater Israel embraces their aspiration is to expand Israel into much of the Middle East today. Yes. Again, my learning process was one stage came across this sort of division within Israel itself because I didn't realize the extent of unhappiness amongst particularly orthodox Jews to the political policies of the Israeli Zionist state and it was only following this through that I came to understand some of the horrific violence which the state of Israel had unleashed on its own people who dared challenge its policies. And I can't remember the individual's name but an orthodox Jew who put up a YouTube video talking about his experiences that the moment he was speaking out about the government in Israel itself, he was hounded and followed and threatened and unpleasant things happen. And eventually he was allowed to leave the country, that's an interesting statement, he was allowed to leave the country, he went to live in Holland where he continued his activities and eventually he had a raid on his flat in Holland by individuals, he strongly believes were connected to the Israeli state in Mossad and horrific physical violence. And when I read this, I thought my goodness you got so much to learn about what's actually happening inside the Israeli state itself but of course, although Western media doesn't show it, there are now increasing clips, particularly on social media or the wider internet showing protests against Netanyahu or the Israeli government or indeed religious groups, Jewish religious groups within Israel who were challenging the policies and clearly some of them do not want to serve in the Israeli defense forces. And protests where Jews are clearly saying, well, what we're doing is not Jewish because thou shalt not kill. I remember this being said very clearly by an orthodox Jew in one of the video clips. So we're on to a particular thing there because if we have members of the Jewish community recognizing their own teachings are saying, thou shalt not kill and certainly Christians should understand this message. We should be agreeing over the need to stop the violence in the Middle East, shouldn't we? Definitely. Very definitely. Yes, within Jewish society, Israeli society, you have a spectrum of Jewish perspectives. You have the most Jews in Israel are secular. Within the religious community, you have the anti-Zionist Jews. They tend to be the ultra-orthodox because they believe only the Messiah and the God can bring in the Kingdom, the Kingdom requires a King and therefore they will not participate in a secular state and they're clearly a threat and that's why the far right within the government wants to force them to serve in the army. But then you do have religious Zionists and they are particularly prevalent among the settlements, the illegal Jews only settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories where much of the violence occurs. They are driven by a religious conviction of supremacism. They are the chosen people. They have a right to the land and the Palestinians are the Philistines. They are the inferior races that must be exterminated. So you've got these tensions within Israeli society exacerbated by interference if you like or influence from particularly from the United States and their Christian backers if you like, who see the Jews as part of their view of the future. Gershen Gorhenburg is a Jewish academic. He wrote a book called The End of Days. He said the problem for us Jews is that we're Act 3 in your four act play meaning come the War of Armageddon. We Jews get exterminated and you Christians end up being the winners. So there is some cynicism among some Jews as to why Christians are so supportive of Israel. It's partly eulogizing, romanticizing the Jewish people which is not healthy but it's also in some senses driven by anti-Semitism. Wanting to get rid of the Jews from Britain and America because we want the land for ourselves as a Christian nation, the Jews can go and live in Palestine. So there's a range of a mixture of convictions that leads to the complexity of what we see in the Middle East today. Having said all of that, it is crystal clear and simple that what we're witnessing is apartheid, genocide and ethnic cleansing and we must oppose it. We must find peaceful non-violent ways to resist it and challenge our own governments and big business who are benefiting from what's happening in Palestine today. Absolutely agree with that. What else comes into my mind though is that we will call ourselves the ordinary people are faced with a political elite elite who are openly declaring their support for Zionist Israel. They're openly saying that if members of the population stray too far away from what they consider acceptable criticism, we're being anti-Semitic and you'll likely need to get a visit from the police. So it's now Kia Storm as government but this was the same under David Cameron who said publicly that his belief in Israel was quote unshakable and I said at the time the problem with this is that no man can have two masters deliberately using that quote. And if his belief in Israel was unshakable, it meant that the United Kingdom came second in his mind to Israel itself and in addition to that, we have to, I think we have to consider the fact that we've got these very powerful lobbying groups in UK, Friends of Israel for both the Conservatives and the Labour Party and these are immensely powerful lobbying groups who seem to be able to direct our elected government to their cause over and above anything we might think is right and proper such as peace in the Middle East. How do we deal with these immensely powerful Jewish-backed lobbying groups? They're at work here in UK and also particularly in the US more so maybe. I think we have to be clear in our convictions as to what's right and what's wrong, apartheid is wrong, treating people as inferior because of their colour, ethnic group is wrong, it's always wrong and therefore we must remain firm in our convictions and face the consequences. The first time I was accused of being anti-Semitic, it was like I'd had the words in a 666 tattooed on my forehead but incredibly embarrassing, incredibly upsetting but the more times you're accused of something you know isn't true and something your Jewish friends say is not true, the less impact it has on you, the more it wears off and I think we've got to have those convictions as to what we think is right, what we think is wrong and be consistent and live them out and refuse to play the game, refuse to be silent or motivated by fear. You said some folk on that demo were unwilling to go on the record, it's fear and fear paralyzes, fear paralyzes, nine out of ten things that we're afraid I've never happened anyway. We need to be proactive, boycott is really good, boycott company is profiting from the occupation in the West Bank, the settlements, you know people like McDonald's, Coca-Cola, companies that are selling products into the settlements, profiting from them, we need to boycott them but it must be done in non-violent ways. Let's give you one example, we saw last weekend the Tel Aviv football team, Macabee and the violence we saw in Amsterdam at the weekend, the Israeli newspapers flagged up before the football match that Mossad agents would be there to protect Israeli footballers, football supporters, the initial press coverage covered the fact that the day before the football match Israeli football fans ran riot were making anti-Muslim statements, anti-Palestinian statements, attacking individuals, after the football match you see the Western media cutting those stories out, the majoring on the small number of Israeli citizens who were injured in the aftermath. This coming weekend, the same football team is playing in Paris and the news media is already broadcasting the fact that at least one Israeli politician on the far right is going to be speaking in Paris before the football match. So we expect sadly there to be violence. I suppose what I'm saying is we need to be proactive, we need to be clear on our convictions and to stick to our convictions and not allow those who criticise us to intimidate or silence us. Okay, thank you for that. Well, this one comes into my head and of course it's an appropriate time to ask the question. It's a difficult one. So we'll see how you get on. But of course we are about to have Donald Trump as the next president of the United States and certainly in his campaigning, his election campaigning, he has shown that he is absolutely committed to support for Israel and I'm going to say everything that I see and what I've interpreted is that means military support to enable Israel to continue their war. And in addition, so President Trump comes in against the backdrop of this hugely powerful Israeli Zionist lobby, even be it Christian Zionist lobby in America. How would you, what would you have to say to the American, the genuine American Christians? I'm choosing my words very carefully here. How do we get genuine Christian people to see through the smoke and mirrors as to what's going on? Well, if I was speaking to a Christian friend to America, it would be to say, sadly you're going to read what you saw, they elected Donald Trump and they will have to take the responsibility for the consequences. Donald Trump actually subscribes to what I'll call transactionalism. He sees everything in terms of business deals, not ethics, not right and wrong, not morals. So ironically, we may find that Trump is not the greatest friend of Israel. He will view what's happening in the Middle East in terms of business deals, in terms of profit and he will put America first. He's already indicated to Netanyahu that he wants Israel out of Gaza before his inauguration in January. So I don't, although he has demonstrated total support for Israel as every US politician has to survive and he has in his time recognized the annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, recognized the annexation of Jerusalem, moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. He has done everything Netanyahu wants him to, but then again Biden has as well. So of the two, Trump is the wild card. He will make decisions that will not conform to necessarily to what is in Israel's best interests. So we have to wait and see, but I know that our own Prime Minister Kistam has been in France with Macron to discuss how they are going to handle Donald Trump. Netanyahu is very good at smoothing feathers and he will be nurturing Trump's pride, his vanity, his ego in the hope that the US will continue to supply Israel with the weapons it needs to continue its wars in Gaza and Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere. But whether Trump will fulfill Netanyahu's expectations, there's another matter. It's been fascinating so far and my goodness, there's a lot more I could ask you, but a general comment on Christianity is under huge pressure in the United Kingdom and indeed in the West. It might be on a much better base in African countries, but it's clear to me that Christianity is under attack and people's belief in the scriptures, their belief in a loving God is definitely under attack. Some years ago, I'll just bring this on screen. I don't know whether I mentioned it to you the other night, but I started to read this book. It's called False Dawn, The United Religion's Initiative, Globalism and the Quest for a One World Religion, written by a man called Lee Penn. It's very detailed. It's got a lot of footnotes, but in the book, what he's describing is the weakening down of Christianity, the blending together of a number of different faiths in order to create a mixture which is going to be acceptable to a One World Global Political System. Sorry, that's a bit of a mouthful, but it was fascinating, but essentially, it's explaining some of the breakdown that we see in Christian faith, be it here in UK or in other Western countries or the US. You've obviously been a member of the Church of England, correct me if I'm wrong, but congregations have fallen, there's a falling away of faith. What do you think has caused this and what would you like to see happen to get people reengaged with a positive spirituality? I think my observation would be to go back to Jesus Christ and the early church and acknowledge that Jesus told his 12 disciples, most of them were fishermen, may have been illiterate. They were artisans, they were skilled with their hands, they had basic knowledge of how to fish, one was a tax collector, a couple were revolutionaries, zealots. He told them to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations. They were 12, and the church today is a consequence of their obedience to that call. All of them, apart from John, the Apostle John, all of them died as martyrs. A significant proportion of the early church were martyred under the Roman Empire who saw Christians as atheists because they didn't believe in the Roman gods, so I don't have any anxiety over the future of the church or its viability because the true church, the church of Jesus Christ is alive and well and growing. You've alluded to the fact that it's growing in other countries, perhaps faster than it is in Britain, but churches that accept the Bible as the word of God who teach the scriptures faithfully, who share the good news of Jesus with those who wish to hear are growing in the UK. Those churches are growing, it doesn't matter what the denomination is. The established churches, the churches that are major on doing things right and doing the right things, that major on formalism, liturgies, services and so on, they may be in decline and therefore the temptation, as you've said with that book, to find a commonality with other religions leads to a dilution of our convictions, leads to a dumbing down on what we are taught to believe in scripture. So I've got no illusions, it's going to happen, it is happening, it's happening in every generation and those who are faithful to Jesus and seek to follow Him will be persecuted. You promised that, blessed are you when you are persecuted, because they did the same to me. So we should expect opposition as Christians, but we should be gentle and respectful of others. You know, people don't care much, you know, until they know how much you care. And so the first step in sharing our faith is to show by our words and our deeds that we care for people who are particularly in need or vulnerable. So yeah, the church may be in the formal church, the established churches may be in decline, but the Church of Jesus Christ is growing. Stephen, thank you very, very much for that. It's been an absolutely fascinating journey through what I know is an incredibly deep subject, I see that with the depth of your own work, but we've ended on a, I think, a very positive note there. And I just hope that this interview will stimulate some of our Christian viewers, whether they're members of the UK column or they're going to hear this in a detached environment worldwide, but this will stimulate them to think in greater detail about what this whole issue of the trouble in the Middle East and Christian Zionism is. And ultimately, let's get the violence stopped as soon as possible. This seems to me to be the key message. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Just to give a plug, I want to read the books you've alluded to my books. You can access some freely from my website, StephenSarza.com. Just go on the top menu and look under books, and you can access the books in various languages, lots of articles, resources like the one I alluded to about the seven biblical answers. And if people want to know more about myself or the challenges I've faced, they can go to look under friends and they'll be able to read what friends have actually said about me and some of those who've supported me, even bishops and archbishops, who supported me through my trials and tribulations. I was on the phone today to Bishop Rhea in Jerusalem, who's been one of his chaplains, and he's always been very supportive. So if I want to know more, StephenSarza.com, look under the books or look under the other resources, they're all freely available. And find out more about this conviction, this belief system, and how we can easily deconstruct it. Thank you very much, Brian. Yep, Stephen, thank you. We'll ensure that all that detail is in the show notes, which will be in the video. So I'm going to say thank you very, very much indeed for joining me. [MUSIC] Buick Enclave is designed to make together your favorite place to be, with an abundance of thoughtful features, like the hands-free power liftgate. And with generous space for up to seven, your family will agree. Time spent together inside this SUV is time well spent. Enclave gives connectivity a starring role. Your family will stay connected to the world, even when you are on the move. Experience Buick Enclave today. At Shortline Buick, 1301 South Havana Street, you do the drive-in, we'll do the rest. (upbeat music)