(The big Q - is this what American Evangelicals want? - CL)
“What do these people want?”, asks Max Blumenthal; “What is their ultimate goal?”
“It is apocalypse”, warns Blumenthal, whose book Goliath traces the rise of Israel’s eschatological Right:
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“They have an eschatology that is based on the Third Temple ideology – in which the Al-Aqsa Mosque will be destroyed and be replaced with a Third Temple and traditional Jewish ritual will be practiced”.
And in order to bring that about, they need a ‘Big War’.
Smotrich always has been frank about this: The project of ultimately removing all the Arabs from the ‘Land of Israel’ will require an emergency – a ‘big war’ – he has said.
The big question is: Do Trump and his team grasp any of this? For it has profound implications for Trump’s methodology of transactional deal-making. ‘Carrots and Sticks’ and secular rationality will carry little weight amongst those whose epistemology is quite different; those who take Revelation literally as ‘truth’, and who believe it commands complete obedience.
Trump says he wants to end the conflicts in the Middle East, and bring about a regional ‘peace’.
His secular, transactional approach to politics, however, is wholly unsuited to resolving eschatological conflict. His bravura style of threatening ‘all hell will break out’ if he doesn’t get his way will not work, when one or other party actually wants Armageddon.
“All hell break out”? ‘Bring it on’, might well be the response Trump gets.
