Full disclosure: I’ve always been pro-Israel and am so today, at least if that means that the nation has a right to exist. Since 1948, Israel has fought for its own existence, while Palestinians have also defended their homes. The only way forward was a two-state solution, which was very close in the 1970s and 80s, but is being brought to a forever-impossible point with the current Israeli government.

…In the United States especially, the relationship of Israel and its neighbors in end-times prophecy has been a major theme. In the Dispensationalist churches of my youth, the whole Bible centered not on Christ but on the nation of Israel, especially its reconstitution in 1948. Any opposition to the Israeli government was viewed as siding with Antichrist. But many of the West Bank victims of horrific acts of ultra-orthodox violence are Christians. As is too often true in families and national histories, those subject to extreme violence seek revenge through a similar dehumanization of the other.

I am Reformed and there is a long history in my tradition of respecting ethnic Jews as special in God’s sight. The history of redemption centers on the people of Israel. Jesus and his disciples were Jews. “Salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:24).

Yet, as in the day when Jesus said this, there is a strong reaction against considering Jewish Christians true Jews at all. And there is a deep hostility of radical Israeli Zionists to Christians and Muslims in territories they believe belong to them from biblical times. Christianity in the West Bank, including Bethlehem, is being erased by ultra-orthodox settlers under the protective umbrella of the Israel Defense Forces. The support of Dispensationalist Christians in the U. S. for Israel’s land-claim has presented a basic obstacle to the hope of a two-state solution.

The crucial question for Christians is not whether God gave Israel land “from the Nile to the Euphrates,” but whether this covenant is obsolete and we now have a universal horizon of God’s kingdom. I argue here that there is no biblical basis for Israel’s claim to this land today. Read more»

Michael S. Horton, “No Holy Land: Does Israel Still Have a Biblical Claim on the Middle East?” Modern Reformation (August 18, 2026)

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Post authored by:

• Michael Horton

  

  Dr. Horton has taught systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary California since 1998 and is ordained in the United Reformed Churches in North America. He is also the founder of Sola Media and its associated endeavors: the White Horse Inn radio show and podcast, Modern Reformation magazine, Core Christianity, and Theo Global.

  More by Michael Horton ›