Edmund Hanauer -- the director of SEARCH for Justice and Equality in Palestine/Israel <http://www.searchforjustice.org/>, the speaker whom we recently invited to give a talk at the Ohio State University, as you may recall -- brought up the topic of collaboration between Zionists and often anti-Semitic Christian evangelicals in his talk. While Max says it's all because "most American Jews support a Jewish state and accept the need for some measure of realpolitik as the price for that, including alliances with obnoxious people," comparable to the majority of Ohio voters' support for Republicans, I think that most American Jews (many of whom are more liberal than conservative) are actually unaware of the degree to which those who claim to represent American Jewry, as well as Israel, have made a marriage of convenience with Jew haters (not just garden-variety "obnoxious people"!). I think Jewish leftists can stir up a meaningful controversy if they call out Zionist leaders on their habit of sleeping with enemies.
***** Evangelicals and Israel: Theological Roots of a Political Alliance
by Donald Wagner
Donald Wagner is director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at North Park University in Chicago and director of Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding. This article appeared in The Christian Century, November 4, 1998, pp. 1020-1026. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This article prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington this past January, his initial meeting was not with President Clinton but with Jerry Falwell and more than 1,000 fundamentalist Christians. The crowd saluted the prime minister as "the Ronald Reagan of Israel," and Falwell pledged to contact more than 200,000 evangelical pastors, asking them to "tell President Clinton to refrain from putting pressure on Israel" to comply with the Oslo accords.
The meeting between Netanyahu and Falwell illustrates a remarkable political and theological convergence. The link between Israelis Likud government and the U.S. Religious Right was established by Natanyahu's mentor, Menachem Begin, during the Carter and Reagan administrations....
...Israel's occupation of Arab lands after 1967 created tension between many Jewish organizations and the mainline Protestant, Eastern Orthodox and Catholic communities. Many Jewish organizations, particularly lobbying groups such as the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), turned to the growing evangelical community for support. As Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the American Jewish Committee stated, "The evangelical community is the largest and fastest-growing bloc of pro-Jewish sentiment in this country." AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) added staff to focus on relationships with evangelicals and fundamentalists. The Israeli ministry of tourism eyed evangelicals as a major new market for Holy Land tours and thus a source of revenue.
...[F]ull-page advertisements appeared in major U.S. newspapers stating, "The time has come for evangelical Christians to affirm their belief in biblical prophecy and Israel's divine right to the land." Targeting Soviet involvement in the UN conference, the ad went on to say: "We affirm as evangelicals our belief in the promised land to the Jewish people . . . . We would view with grave concern any effort to carve out of the Jewish homeland another nation or political entity."
The ad was financed and coordinated by Jerusalem's Institute for Holy Land Studies, an evangelical organization with a Christian Zionist orientation. Several leading dispensationalists signed the ad, including Kenneth Kantzer of Christianity Today and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, singer Pat Boone, and dispensationalist theologian and Dallas Theological Seminary president John Walvoord.
The advertising campaign was one of the first public signs of a Likud-evangelical alliance. A former employee of the American Jewish Committee, Jerry Strober, who had coordinated the campaign, made the political connection in a statement to Newsweek: "[The evangelicals] are Carter's constituency and he [had] better listen to them... The real source of strength the Jews have in this country is from the evangelicals."
At times the new alliance was uncomfortable for Jewish leaders. On one such occasion, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Bailey Smith, stated that "God does not hear the prayers of the Jews." Within weeks, the AIC took Smith on a trip to Israel and corrected his views. While Christian Zionists and Jewish organizations agree on many points, the Christian Right's enthusiasm for evangelizing Jews remains an unresolved point of tension.
...Likud policy was aggressively represented by AIPAC both on Capitol Hill and within the Reagan administration. For example, when Israel decided to invade Lebanon in the spring of 1982, Begin sent Ariel Sharon, his defense minister, to Washington to enlist the Reagan administration's support. By late May, Sharon was reportedly given the green light by Secretary of State Alexander Haig. Within days of the June invasion, full-page ads appeared in leading newspapers requesting evangelical support for the invasion.
Begin developed a unique relationship with Reagan and many fundamentalist leaders, especially Jerry Falwell. Falwell and his Moral Majority had long supported Israel. In 1979, Grace Halsell reports, Israel gave Falwell a Lear jet and in 1981 gave him the prestigious Jabotinsky Award during an elaborate dinner ceremony in New York. When Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear plant in 1981, Begin called Falwell before he called Reagan. He requested that Falwell "explain to the Christian public the reasons for the bombing."...
<http://www.religion-online.org/cgi-bin/relsearchd.dll/showarticle?item_id=216> *****
BTW, in addition to the Jabotinsky Medal, Billy Graham also received the following awards:
The Torch of Liberty Plaque by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, 1969; International Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1971; and First National Interreligious Award, American Jewish Committee, 1977. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>