this war is no longer for the west.

I’ve been a Zionist for most of my sentient life, or at least since I started paying attention to foreign policy in my early teenage years. The logic had always made sense to me: Jewish self-determination after centuries of persecution, a homeland after the Holocaust, survival in a region that has never been entirely forgiving. That position didn’t feel extreme. It felt grounded.

What’s become harder to accept is how that support has quietly been treated as a moral obligation for the West, especially for Christians in the West, without anyone stopping to ask whether the values actually line up.

Because I don’t believe they do.

Let me be clear at the outset. I believe Western governments should be secular. My defense of Judaism comes from my support for pluralistic Western societies shaped by Judeo-Christian ethics - the dignity of the individual, limits on state power, and moral restraint in the use of force. Judaism belongs squarely within that tradition. My critique is not of Judaism, and it is not of Jewish people. My qualm is with Zionism - particularly its religious and political forms, in addition to the expectation that Western governments and Christians in the West must treat this project as morally binding.

Christianity, at least as I understand it, is not a land-claim religion. It doesn’t promise territory, borders, or national restoration through force. I say this as an American who is fully aware of our own complicated history, a history that isn’t easy to grapple with and shouldn’t be glossed over. We are a country born of conflict and contradiction, but also one that consciously broke, however imperfectly, from older political traditions rooted in divine entitlement, inherited rule, and sacred claims to land enforced by blood. Reconciling that tension has been an internal ideological and identitarian struggle I’ve been grappling with for the last few years. I used to chalk up Manifest Destiny as an appeal to heaven, but I think more intellectual legitimacy is earned through an honest reckoning with our own contradictions.

With that said, Christ is my Messiah, and He went out of His way to reject political power, ethnic supremacy, and holy war. it wasn’t poetic symbolism, it was the substance of His teaching. The Kingdom He spoke about wasn’t tied to geography, and it wasn’t built by treating violence as destiny or necessity. Christians haven’t always lived up to that message, and the Crusades make that painfully clear. They aren’t an argument against Christianity, but rather a warning about what happens when faith is bent into empire.

Zionism, particularly in its religious forms, operates on a different premise. It is rooted in covenant, ancestry, and sacred attachment to land. That does not automatically make it illegitimate, but it does make it fundamentally different from Christian moral logic. Many Arab claims in the region are structured in similar ways—through lineage, sacred history, and inherited right. This is not a Western liberal dispute, and it is not a Christian one. It is a religious-national struggle over land, identity, and sacred history, shaped by frameworks that do not translate cleanly into modern secular ethics.

This is where the West keeps tripping over itself.

We behave as if involvement is mandatory, as if restraint equals moral failure. We move money and weapons quickly, talk slowly about consequences, and then act surprised when the outcomes don’t resemble our stated values. Christian Zionism only deepens that confusion. It asks Christians in the West to treat a modern nation-state as a theological project - sometimes even a prophetic one - and then expects secular governments to absorb the moral and material cost. that isn’t Christianity, and it isn’t good governance. It is theology bent into foreign policy.

This framing also creates a rhetorical dead end. The claim that “anti-Zionism kills Jews” has become a conversation stopper. Sometimes anti-Zionism is indeed used as cover for antisemitism, and that reality must be confronted honestly. But taken as a universal rule, the claim collapses into absurdity. It would permanently exempt a state from criticism by definition. Governments are not peoples, Policies are not identities, and Critiquing state action is not the same thing as denying a people’s right to exist.

At the same time, this must be said plainly and without qualification: antisemitism is real, it is rising, and recent acts of violence against Jews internationally are horrifying and must come to an end. Full stop. No excuses.

But blurring the line between legitimate criticism and hatred does not protect Jews. It weakens the fight against real antisemitism by turning a moral boundary into a political weapon. When everything becomes antisemitism, nothing is taken seriously enough.

Christians in the West, in particular, should be honest about this. Christ already came. He did not reclaim land. He did not sanctify violence. He did not ask His followers to secure borders in preparation for His return. If a future messiah is expected to arrive and “restore” the land, and the groundwork for that restoration involves displacement, permanent exception, and civilian suffering, it is fair, even necessary, to ask what kind of restoration that is.

i fundamentally believe that a messiah who arrived to find his name defended through mass suffering would not be honored by it, He would be disappointed it came to this.

None of this means Israel should not exist. It does not deny Jewish self-determination, and it does not pretend the threats in the region are imaginary. But support does not require sanctification, and alliance does not require moral outsourcing. Historical responsibility explains engagement, but it does not justify permanent exemption.

Western governments can condemn antisemitism without outlawing criticism. They can care about civilian life without turning a religious inheritance struggle into their moral mission. And they can finally admit the uncomfortable truth they keep circling around: this is a religious-national conflict over land and destiny, and it is not one that secular Western governments, nor Christians in the West, are morally or even theologically obligated to participate in.

Not every war needs our blessing, and not every conflict maps onto our values. Pretending otherwise has not made anything better. Sometimes the most honest position is not choosing a devout side, but refusing to dress violence up as inevitability, keeping moral lines intact, and calling things what they are.

If that makes people uncomfortable, fine. Reality usually does.