Ink of the Wound… From a “People Accused of Killing Christ” to a Strategic Ally

By Abdulaziz Yaqoub

At the end of the nineteenth century, in the corridors of European capitals weighed down by fears of unrest and change, a refined, secular-minded Jewish man sat with a pen—not a gun—in his hand. He was no prophet or cleric, but an Austrian writer who wielded politics through ideas rather than creeds. Yet Theodor Herzl would succeed, with striking skill, in transforming the Jewish national dream into a declared political program: a call to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Not born of scripture, but of Europe’s hostility, exclusion, and repeated expulsions of Jews.

Thus was born the political Zionist movement, formally launched at the Basel Congress in Switzerland in 1897. “Zion,” the biblical name of a hill in Palestine, became a symbol of the Jewish longing for a homeland. Nearly two hundred Jewish delegates convened to announce a clear organizational goal: “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” What drove them was not faith, but persecution and fear of a Europe steeped in deep-seated antisemitism that pushed them into isolation and exile time and again.

What is more striking, however, is not the audacity of the idea, but the quarter from which it later found embrace. Who could have imagined that Christianity—which for more than a thousand years had pursued Jews under the charge of “killing Christ”—would one day become the political sponsor of their national dream? History shifted from a narrative of accusation, banishment, and persecution to one of partnership, protection, and open support. From the mass expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 by King Edward I, who seized their property and banished them, to their expulsion from Spain in 1492, and finally to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 granting British recognition of a Jewish homeland in Palestine—an astonishing story of transformation and opportunism unfolds.

After their expulsion from England, Jews lived in isolation for over three centuries until Oliver Cromwell reversed course in the seventeenth century, allowing their return—not out of sympathy, but for economic interests and emerging Protestant theological beliefs. New interpretations of the Old Testament began to spread in England, claiming that the “return of the Jews to Zion” was necessary to prepare the world for Christ’s second coming. From here was born what would later be called “Christian Zionism,” which did not love Jews as individuals, but revered them as instruments in a larger divine plan.

This current grew stronger in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially as European empires expanded and saw in the Zionist project a strategic lever to cement their influence in the Middle East. The theological vision met the imperial hunger for oil, and the Balfour Declaration emerged from this convergence of interests. Britain, which had once expelled Jews, now offered them a homeland that was not hers to give, granting it from a position of power and domination.

Across the Atlantic, Christian Zionism found fertile ground in the heart of the Evangelical movement in the United States, where support for Israel was seen not merely as a political choice, but as a religious obligation. With the rise of Evangelicals in American politics—particularly within the Republican Party—defending Israel became part of the nation’s political creed. Thus, the people once labeled “Christ-killers”—though in truth they killed him not, nor crucified him, but it appeared so to them—were recast as “God’s chosen people.” Not because they had changed, but because their role in the narrative had shifted.

What began as deep theological enmity in European Christianity gradually transformed—through the tides of history and the shifting calculus of power—into a political project sanctified by the West. From discriminatory laws and expulsions in the Middle Ages to a solemn promise in the twentieth century, it was the political utility of the Jews, more than their religious or cultural identity, that shaped the relationship between the Christian West and the Jewish presence. Out of this complex entanglement, Israel was born—not as the culmination of divine right, but as the apex of a utilitarian alliance between visions of “eternity and kingship” and imperial ambitions.

What neither Protestant prophecy nor imperial cartography accounted for, however, was that the land was not an empty canvas, nor history a parchment to be rewritten at will. Palestine was not lying in wait for a foreign promise—it was alive with people, memory, and prophets of its own. Israel’s creation was not the end of a story, but the beginning of a long and bloody wound that has never ceased to bleed.

The alliance of Western Christianity and Zionism gave birth to a state atop the ruins of a homeland, cloaked in prophecy and shielded by power, while the Palestinian people were cast into exile—left to forge their memory from catastrophe to catastrophe, massacre to massacre, carrying their dream upon their backs in the world’s cold indifference.

This strange historical scene reveals a harsh truth: alliances are not always built on love or principle, but on function and role. Those once rejected for religious reasons could be summoned to serve a new role on the grim stage of politics and interests—a play written without the consent of Palestine’s people or of true adherents of Judaism itself.

From expulsion in medieval England to the promise of imperial London, a straight line runs—from hostility to patronage. Palestine, however, has remained like a blade in the side of its occupiers: defiant against distorted scriptures, writing its story in the blood of children, women, and the elderly, etching it into the stone of the land and the memory of free peoples. It reads prophecy in the red ink of wounds, resisting the transformation of its soil into a theological stage for conflicts not of its making, and teaching the oldest lesson of all: that rights never die as long as their people live, and that land watered with blood can neither be sold nor gifted, but awaits the inevitable day of justice.

Thus unfolds God’s decree on high, beyond the reach of tyranny or conspiracy: “And Allah is predominant over His affair, but most of the people do not know.”