If Protestantism – both before and after Max Weber’s seminal book on the topic – came to be identified as the poster religion of capitalism, then US President Donald Trump has always been a convert.
A former Presbyterian, he now identifies as a “non-denominational Christian” and rarely attends church services but surrounds himself with evangelical Protestants. Indeed, a majority of white American evangelical Protestants view him as “fighting for their beliefs”.
In his restored capacity as the grand missionary of American capitalism and imperialism since his recent return to the White House, Trump has made several missionary declarations and announced a number of policies to advance American capitalism.
These include, but are not limited to, the sought-after imperial territorial expansion of the United States through the power of money or military force.
Trump’s capitalist evangelical plan to steal and colonise Gaza, however, is not the first American project to establish colonies in Palestine.
Just as his ambition to conquer Canada, Denmark’s Greenland, and the Panama Canal reflects 19th-century American imperial ideologies like “Continentalism” and “Manifest Destiny”, his plan for the US colonisation of Palestine mirrors that of fanatical American Protestants from the same era.
American takeover
Over the last few weeks, Trump’s plan for an American takeover of Gaza has progressed from initially calling for the expulsion – or at least the self-expulsion – of most Palestinians living in Gaza to Jordan and Egypt, to his more recent declaration advocating for the expulsion of all Palestinians and an American takeover of the Palestinian territory.
This is the same land that Israel has devastated in the course of committing genocide against its Palestinian population since October 2023.
Seemingly unimpressed by the French Riviera on the Mediterranean, Trump wants to build another “Riviera of the Middle East”.
In the meantime, the expelled Palestinians would be provided with “really good quality housing, like a beautiful town, like some place where they can live and not die because Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying,” Trump told reporters.
Presumably, Trump is assigning the cost of this “good quality housing” to Arab countries.
Meanwhile, Americans would build the “Riviera” under what Trump called an “ownership position”- or as CNN, an otherwise enthusiastic supporter of Israel’s war on Gaza, described it, “colonialism for the 21st century”.
Trump added: “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area, do a real job, do something different.”
It would seem that an American-owned Gaza would be a place where “citizens of the world” and “international communities coexist” – but without Palestinians, whose “return” to American Gaza, Trump said, would be “unrealistic”.
Capitalist crusade
What Trump most likely craves, as do the Israelis, is less the beaches of Gaza’s “Riviera” and more the oil and natural gas reserves that lie in its sea – worth billions of dollars – which Trump and the Zionist settler-colony can divvy up between them.
Long before Trump’s capitalist vision of an American-owned Gaza, 19th-century American Protestant missionaries sought to establish colonies in Palestine and reshape the land and its people in their own image.
It was, in fact, Trump’s former co-religionists – Presbyterian American missionaries – who were dispatched to Palestine in the 1820s to convert Palestinian Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and mostly the 4,000 Palestinian Jews, as well as the few thousand messianic Lithuanian Jews who had just arrived before the Americans.
The Americans remained until 1844, when they moved to Syria and Lebanon following the establishment of British Anglican missions in Palestine, which made their presence redundant. However, before their departure, they managed to distribute thousands of copies of their Protestant Bible, leaving Palestine in the secure hands of their British co-religionists.
As part of the European Christian conquest of Palestine in the 19th century – dubbed the “Peaceful Crusade” – American Protestant millenarians and restorationists joined in the “crusade”, establishing farming colonies in the city of Jaffa.
They hoped to convert the few thousand Jews they encountered in Palestine and teach them farming. However, they found them to be “lazy” and resistant to conversion.
A group of American Seventh-day Adventists, known then as Millerites (followers of one William Miller), settled in Bethlehem in 1851 alongside European Christian settlers in the village of Artas. They later moved to Jaffa to found the colony of “Mount Hope”, but it did not survive for long.
Another fanatical group, the Dicksons, established the “American Mission Colony” in Jaffa in 1854, which was met with Palestinian resistance. The colony was attacked in 1858, several colonists were killed, and the survivors were repatriated to Massachusetts.
In response, the US dispatched a Navy ship, the steam frigate USS Wabash, to the shores of Palestine to pressure the Ottomans into prosecuting the attackers.
History of resistance
In 1866, another group of fanatical American Protestant millenarian artisans and farmers arrived from Maine to set up yet another colony in Jaffa.
The Adams Colony, named after its evangelical leader George Washington Joshua Adams (a former Mormon), started with 156 colonists but lasted only two years.
Adams, who had met with then-President Andrew Jackson – the butcher of Native Americans – at the White House to facilitate his settler-colonial efforts with the Ottoman authorities, compared the colonisation of Palestine to that of the United States.
The Palestinians opposed the presence of the colonists, prompting the Ottomans to write to the US minister in Constantinople to protest that “the natives” were being driven “from their fields by a colony of Yankees”.
Financial difficulties forced Adams to leave, with many of the colonists repatriated through Egypt.
Upon embarking on his colonisation project, Adams had declared that his colony would prepare the land for the “return” of European Jews, which in turn would expedite the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. After the colony was dissolved, only 20 American settlers remained in Palestine.
In 1881, yet another evangelical Protestant American family sought to establish a colony, this time in Jerusalem.
Horatio and Anna Spafford of Chicago led a contingent of 16 colonists to the city to hasten the second coming. They were joined by 55 Swedish fundamentalist Protestants in 1896, which grew to 150 by the turn of the century. They purchased the house of Palestinian landowner Rabah al-Husayni.
Unlike their predecessors, they refrained from proselytising too much, sparing them from local enmity. Their colony survived until the late 1950s, when internal tensions led to its demise.
The Husayni house they had bought was later transformed into the contemporary American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem.
A fool’s mission
Recounting this history is not merely to reassure Trump that his colonial proposition is hardly innovative – it was, in fact, attempted repeatedly in the 19th century.
It also underscores that the Palestinians’ attachment to their homeland and their will to resist its colonisers are stronger than even Trump’s attachment to his capitalist and imperialist ethos.
While the fanatical American missionaries of the 19th century sought to take over the land of the Palestinians and convert its population to their brand of Christianity, Trump’s plan to steal Gaza aligns squarely with his own version of an imperial and capitalist religion.
Sitting alongside Trump, war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, who failed to expel the Palestinians despite his best genocidal efforts, praised the expulsion plan as “remarkable”.
But if the genocidal Israeli army has failed miserably to crush the spirit and resolve that have driven Palestinians to resist the colonisation of their homeland by American and European settler-colonists for over a century and a half, does Trump truly believe that his profiteering imperial mission – and his vision of a “Riviera in the Middle East” for “citizens of the world” – will succeed in doing so?
