A new form of anti-Semitism has emerged in the last few years. It uses traditional themes, motifs, and imagery, but the specific target of the animus has shifted to the Jewish collective-the State of Israel-with individual Jews and the Jewish people targeted for their identification with that nation. Frequently originating in the Islamic Middle East, this new anti-Semitism has moved on to the West, especially Europe, where some elements on the left wing of the political spectrum have been particularly receptive to it.

In a variant on this development, themes familiar from Christian teachings of an earlier era are being promulgated by certain Middle East-based Christians clerics who are obtaining audiences in American mainline Protestant churches, with especially troubling results. What is being taught and implied in these Christian quarters is a new form of “replacement theology," in which beliefs long held in the Christian world but repudiated by the Catholic Church 40 years ago and by many other Christian denominations as well are being recycled.

In the current form of this teaching, the Palestinians have replaced the Jews as the “new Israel," entitled to the land of Israel. They have also become the new Jesus, tormented and crucified by the Jews. Today’s Jews are thereby considered undeserving of sovereignty in the land of Israel. At worst, they are also seen as meriting the kind of contempt and misery that the Jewish people experienced in earlier ages.

Such notions are today being promulgated by Palestinian Christian leaders with followings in the United States. Most notable is Naim Ateek, former Anglican Canon of St. George’s Cathedral and founder and current director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem.

In a sermon entitled “The Zionist Ideology of Domination Versus the Reign of God," delivered in the Notre Dame chapel in Jerusalem on Feb. 22, 2001, as part of a Sabeel conference, Ateek talked about “the evil structures that have dominated the Palestinians for the last hundred years." Mixing the language of religion and theology with that of politics and ideology, he said: “I believe that the original sin and crime was Zionism in the way it turned into a colonial force. Israel still lives and acts in the same basic ideology." He closed this sermon by saying: "Jesus Christ, living in our country as a Palestinian under occupation, offers us a different model of power."

In a sermon delivered in the same setting two days later, Ateek proclaimed that "Israel has placed a large boulder, a big stone that has metaphorically shut off the Palestinians in a tomb. It is similar to the stone placed on the entrance of Jesus’ tomb." We have a name for this boulder. It is the OCCUPATION.

These themes recur for Ateek. In an Easter message from Sabeel in 2001, he specifically declared that “in this season of Lent, it seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around Him.…The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily." At the opening worship service of the Sabeel International Solidarity Visit in Jerusalem on April 17, 2002, he asserted that “Palestinians have been condemned as a nation by Israel, and sentenced to destruction. The accusations of people in power are strikingly similar throughout history to the charges leveled against Jesus in this city-terrorist, evildoer, or rebel and a subversive person. Palestinians are being crucified today for refusing to succumb to Israel’s demand for greater concession on land.

Ateek’s thesis and language have been picked up on by others. In an Easter reflection printed in the Winter 2002 issue of Cornerstone, a Sabeel publication, one of his followers spoke of the way that “many Palestinian Christians refer to their experience living under occupation and the suffering they endure as ‘walking the Via Dolorosa.’" She described the way that the Sabeel Center "leads what they call the ‘Contemporary Way of the Cross,’" offering Western Christian pilgrims “the opportunity…to join Palestinians for an afternoon of making the modern stations of the cross, the ongoing suffering that Palestinians endure under occupation." Echoing her mentor, she went on to say: “Today, Palestinians are still walking the Way of the Cross, and anxiously awaiting the day of resurrection, the day the stone that blocks the tomb of occupation is rolled away."

Ateek himself has often come to the U.S. to speak in church-sponsored programs, while Sabeel has established a network of supporters in North America which has become a vehicle for advancing his teachings. A conference initiated and coordinated by the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem and the Friends of Sabeel in North America will be held here in Chicago on Oct. 7-8. The venue is the Lutheran School of Theology, which is a primary sponsor of the conference along with a number of other groups. Ateek himself will be a lead speaker.

Others within mainline Protestantism have been advancing such attitudes as well, such as Donald Wagner, a Presbyterian minister and director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at North Park University in Chicago. Wagner’s 2003 book, “Dying in the Land of Promise," is subtitled Palestine and Palestinian Christianity from Pentecost to 2000. Summarizing it, my colleague Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, Judaic Scholar for the Jewish United Fund, has pointed out that for Wagner, “the Jewish people ceased to have any attachment to the land so very long ago, and were replaced by the real Israel, the Palestinian Christians.

The theme of Wagner’s book is encapsulated by its cover, a photograph of a mural at the Christmas Lutheran Church and International Centre in Bethlehem, whose pastor and director, Mitri Raheb, is another promulgator of the kind of replacement theology I am talking about. This mural portrays 13 Palestinian men in a local setting engaged in an apparent re-enactment of The Last Supper-or perhaps it is meant to be understood as a picture of the original Last Supper itself. In the theology of the new anti-Semitism the two are one, as the Palestinians become both the new Jews and the new Jesus.

The impact of these ideas is not merely academic. As James Besser has reported in The Chicago Jewish Star and in The New York Jewish Week, representatives of Sabeel had significant impact at the recent synod of the United Church of Christ, influencing that body as they have other American mainline denominations as decisions have been made about divestment from Israel. Countering Sabeel’s benign description of itself, Besser goes on to say: "A number of analysts say the center is playing a much more malevolent role, pressing for punitive actions against Israel, ignoring Palestinian violence and ultimately arguing against the legitimacy of a Jewish state."

There is no room in discourse about the Israel-Palestinian conflict for language which resurrects the theological anti-Semitism that was widespread in Christendom for so many centuries. The circulation of such concepts, impeding rather than advancing the true peace with justice that those who use them frequently claim to wish to see in the Middle East, poisons relations between Jews and Christians and introduces a dangerous venom into the bloodstream of the body politic.

Charges of anti-Semitism may occasionally be misplaced, and those of us who use such terminology need to be careful. By the same token, though, there indeed is a new anti-Semitism abroad in the land. Its promulgation is a serious matter that cannot be ignored.

Michael Kotzin is executive vice president of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. He presented an expanded version of this column at the annual conference of the International Council of Christians and Jews that was held in Chicago this past July.