Going Home.

The fates of Jews and Christians have become inextricably intertwined.

IT IS WIDELY ASSUMED that Israel, the Jewish homeland, represents the culmination of a two-thousand-year-old pledge: “Next year in Jerusalem!” In the minds of Israel’s friends Judaism and Zionism merge into a single, indivisible whole. What person of conscience, Jew or Gentile, could possibly argue against the creation of a Jewish home after the Holocaust made it so tragically clear that Jews are never truly safe in anybody else’s?

But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if the roots of the Zionist project lie not in Judaism but Christianity? What if the political movement founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897 merely seized opportunistically upon Christian millenarianism’s determination to facilitate an in-gathering of the world’s Jews to the Holy Land? What if the secular and nationalist motivations of the founder of modern Zionism were cynically harnessed to the efforts of those seeking to bring about the end of the world?