(RNS) — Right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson has famously broken with the pro-Israel Republican old guard over the past six months, forcefully questioning U.S. evangelicals’ fervent support for Israel.
Last week’s sparring match with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an avowed Christian Zionist, was just another in a string of such interviews. (Carlson’s interview with Sen. Ted Cruz, also challenging evangelicals’ loyalty to Israel, drew 3.5 million views on YouTube.)
But on the day before the interview with Huckabee was released, Carlson also released a nearly two-hour interview with another evangelical — who has a wholly different perspective on Israel.
Fares Abraham, a Palestinian American born in Beit Sahour, about 2.5 miles east of Bethlehem, talked frankly and without rancor about the stranglehold that Israel has placed on Palestinians and especially on his community of Palestinian Christians in the West Bank.
“Christians are leaving, and there’s not a lot of debate about why they’re leaving,” Abraham told Carlson. “They’re leaving because of Jewish settlers moved into the town and … are driving out the Christian population.”
Abraham, who now lives in Florida, is the founder and CEO of Levant Ministries, which has established Christian youth centers across the Middle East, and soon in Bethlehem. He worries that Palestinian Christian communities across the Middle East but especially in the West Bank are in danger of disappearing. And he has dedicated his life to fighting for them to remain.
The town where Abraham grew up, Beit Sahour, is where, according to the Gospel of Luke, angels told a group of shepherds about the birth of Jesus. Last month, Israel formally recognized a new settlement, called Yatziv, that bisects the town. At an inauguration ceremony for the new settlement, Israel Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told The Associated Press: “We’re going to be here forever. We will never establish a Palestinian state here.”
Abraham wants U.S. evangelicals to wake up to this reality.
“The church in the United States doesn’t have a full understanding of the reality on the ground,” Abraham told RNS in a phone interview from Malta, where he was attending a conference. And that’s why he decided, despite some risks, to accept an invitation to speak on Carlson’s podcast.
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Carlson has been increasingly strident in his criticism of American policy toward Israel and has questioned whether Israel is really a U.S. ally. He has insisted that Ashkenazi Jews such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should undergo genetic testing to determine if they have a rightful claim to the land. He has accused Israel of having a “sinister agenda.” In October, he invited the Hitler apologist and white nationalist Nick Fuentes to his podcast for what turned out to be a softball interview. Some have accused him of antisemitism, which he denies.
Abraham’s view of Israel is different. He has made clear he wants the Jewish people to live in safety and dignity. Like other Palestinian Christians, he is committed to nonviolence in the face of injustice and to a shared existence in the Holy Land.
“Palestinian Christians have always preached peace from their pulpits, always extended hands, always taken Jesus’ teachings very seriously,” he told RNS.
Though he grew up an Orthodox Christian, Abraham is now an evangelical. When it came time to go to college, he chose Liberty University and got the late Jerry Falwell Sr. to grant him a scholarship. He and his family (his wife is a Baptist from Gaza) now worship at a charismatic nondenominational Every Nation church.
Abraham came to the U.S. in 1998, and ever since, he said, he has had to explain to evangelicals how oppressive Israel’s occupation has been to Palestinians.
“When (evangelicals) hear Israel is building a wall, they think it means protection for Israelis, but it means confinement to Palestinians,” Abraham said. “When they hear Israel is building a settlement, they think it means bringing Jews back to their homeland, but it means land confiscations for the Palestinians.”
During the Carlson interview, Abraham related some of the horrors of his childhood growing up on Israeli-occupied land. When he was 10 years old, his mother was shot in the back (she survived). A neighbor living on his street was shot dead through a window in his house. None of these cases was ever investigated, and no one has ever been charged. Israel, he said, acts with utter impunity.
He described how Israel has built a system of roads across the West Bank that are only accessible to Jews and how Israel requires Palestinians to have permits to travel anywhere outside their villages. Palestinians living in Bethlehem, for example, cannot travel to Jerusalem — a distance of 5 miles — without a permit.
In 2001, during the second intifada, Abraham’s parents left their home in Beit Sahour temporarily, they hoped, until things cooled down. As soon as they got to Jordan, their house was demolished by an Israeli tank. They never returned and now live in the U.S.
Abraham thinks Christian Zionists in their dogged insistence that God gave Israel the land make some serious mistakes. For one thing, God gave the land to the biblical patriarch Abraham (Israel is not mentioned in Genesis account of relating to Abraham). As such, Christians, many of whom are also descendants of Abraham, cannot be excluded from that covenant.
He also argues Jews do not own the land. God does. They are merely its tenants and if they do not abide by God’s laws, they will be thrown out, as they were before.
He criticizes Christian Zionists such as Mike Evans, who recently brought 1,000 evangelicals to Israel without ever meeting with Palestinian Christians in the land. “Are we going to keep it as an ethno state, or can we find a diplomatic solution?” Abraham asked.
Mae Elise Cannon, executive director of Churches for Middle East Peace, a coalition of 36 Christian denominations that advocate for justice in the Holy Land, believes it was important for Abraham to share his vision on Carlson’s podcast.
“Many American white evangelicals dismiss the church in the Middle East because of the belief that traditional churches or Orthodox churches don’t have a conservative Christology,” Cannon said. “But here you have a conservative Palestinian evangelical who does address the realities of war and violence and conflict. He does it softly and gently and from a very moderate perspective. But I think that’s really important in terms of evangelical perspectives not being viewed as monolithic.”
For Abraham, that’s the hope.
“I’ve always had this deep conviction that the church should not take anyone’s side,” Abraham said. “Both sides can make a political, legal, moral argument, but the church can make the Gospel shine through all of this.”
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