God’s just Gaza war: futurity foreclosed through evangelical apocalypse as orthogonal promise of Eretz Israel

Abstract

ABSTRACT After the evacuation of the Gush Katif settlement and intensifying with the 2008–2009 Israeli War on Gaza, the border town of Sderot and its surrounding landscape became, for American Christian Zionists, a pilgrimage landscape and therefore a sacred space as it was performed as an event site portending the apocalypse. Christian Zionists interpreted the war and the landscape it took place on as a mise-en-scène of hope: the hollowing out of Gaza in anticipation of Christ’s return. Christian Zionists read the future as history. To explain this, I employ Philip K. Dick’s conceptualization of ‘orthogonal time’. Time and space merge as always already existing prophetic kairos time manifests itself in prophetic space. Watching Operation Cast Lead from pilgrimage landscapes overlooking the Gaza Strip, I conducted a yearlong ethnography before/during/after the 2008/09 war on Gaza with American Christian Zionists. They justified the war through colonial imaginings of terra nullius in three ways: 1) by denying that Palestinians exist as a legitimate national identity; 2) by denying the Palestinians’ ability to reason; and 3) prophetic inevitability. Gaza is therefore interpreted as God’s land and the demise of Gazans – present and future – is not only anticipated and preempted, but will have (already) happened.