An Uneasy Alliance
News: Jewish-Americans and Christian Zionists agree on certain Israeli security issues--and disagree on virtually everything else.
June 1, 2005
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Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein finally feels vindicated. For almost three decades, Eckstein, the president of the Chicago-based International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), has been trying to convince America's largely liberal Jewish community that it can see eye-to-eye with conservative Christian evangelicals. Now, after years of being mocked and ignored, Eckstein is at last gaining credibility thanks to what he calls a "total change" in Jewish-American attitudes towards the evangelicals. "The Jewish community gets it that these evangelicals are not demonic," Eckstein explained in an interview with Mother Jones in West Jerusalem's Inbal Hotel. The rabbi credits the $22 million that IFCJ has raised among evangelicals for Israeli causes last year to their support of the country's democracy and observance of Biblical passages commanding Christians to bless Israel and the Jewish people: "They're good, serious people who really love the Jewish people, who love Israel."
Nevertheless, the unlikely alliance between Jewish-Americans and Christian evangelicals is not without its sticking points. There is wide consensus on Israeli security issues, especially the security barrier—alternatively known as "the fence" or "the wall"—that Ariel Sharon's government is constructing through the West Bank and which is seen as a vital antiterrorism measure. But that's not to say that they agree on all security issues: Sharon's plan to dismantle Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank has put the two groups at odds. Jewish-Americans support the "disengagement plan" as a step towards a two-state solution with the Palestinians, while Christian evangelicals oppose it as a giveaway of part of Biblical Israel. Meanwhile, on some of America's most divisive social issues, like abortion, Jewish-Americans and evangelicals are on opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Eckstein doesn't pretend that Jewish-Americans have resolved all of their political differences with evangelicals, and he knows that mutual suspicions still persist. On domestic issues, evangelicals continue to be viewed by many Jewish-Americans as part of the "Christian Right" movement that’s out to dismantle the separation of church and state. Nor have past instances of anti-Semitism within the evangelical community been forgotten. Jewish-Americans are also uneasy about some of the reasons why evangelicals support Israel: namely, that many evangelicals believe the Second Coming won't occur until the world's scattered Jewry returns and settles all of Biblical Israel, including the West Bank and Gaza. Some evangelicals also believe that the Second Coming will result in the annihilation of most Jews and the conversion of the rest to Christianity.
On the other side of town, in East Jerusalem's American Colony Hotel, Yossi Alpher, the co-editor of the Israeli-Palestinian website Bitterlemons.org, is not at all happy with the evangelicals' involvement in Israeli affairs: "The evangelicals have a very right-wing agenda in Israeli terms, they are funding settlers, they're even funding some of the most radical fringe right-wing groups that want to destroy the mosques on the Temple Mount." As an Israeli left-winger, Alpher is concerned that evangelical backing of the Israeli right and the settler movement is working to forestall Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. Within a few decades, Israel is expected to have an Arab majority within its post-1967 borders. At that point some form of territorial partition will be necessary if Israel is to remain both a majority Jewish-state and a democracy. This view has resonance not only on the Israeli left but on the right as well, and is the core reason why Sharon's disengagement plan currently enjoys majority support.
At the same time, however, evangelicals in the United States have been one of the few groups providing international support for both Israelis and Jewish-Americans during the intifada years, when the most vehement of criticism of Israeli policies across the globe came from the left. Dr. Eran Lerman, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee's Israel/Middle East office, underscores the dynamic at work here: "American liberals should ask themselves: How is it that the Israeli mainstream-which supports a Palestinian state-were left feeling that the only people who cared about our agony were elements with whom we would normally not be associated?" Indeed, while "Christian Zionists" were pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Israel causes, and making frequent pilgrimages to the country, liberal Protestant churches were leading anti-Israel divestment campaigns, and liberals in American universities were organizing anti-Israeli boycotts.
The same goes for Israel's security barrier in the West Bank, which Israelis widely credit for the recent decrease in suicide bombings. Christian Zionists supported the barrier all the way, while it was derided in many leftist circles as the "apartheid wall" and ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice. (The Israeli government ignored that court's ruling, but eventually rerouted the barrier on the order of the Israel Supreme Court, which ruled that its original route imposed unjustifiable hardships on Palestinians.)
Israel's increasing inequality and rising poverty provide yet another reason for welcoming Christian evangelicals into the country. According to a recent study by Israel's National Insurance Institute, some 22.4 percent of all Israelis live below the poverty line, and there are many non-profits and local governments eager to accept evangelical funding. From soup kitchens to dental clinics for the poor, the numerous safety net programs run by Christian Zionists are by and large uncontroversial. This is also the case with Christian funds to help ex-Soviet, Ethiopian, and American Jews immigrate to Israel. Even though evangelicals rarely proselytize in Israel, some Jewish leaders suspect missionary motives behind the aid and have called for a boycott of evangelical funding.
The major tensions, however, all have to do with fundamental questions about the future of Israel. Mainstream Christian Zionist organizations maintain that it is up to the elected government of Israel, not them, to decide on questions of war and peace. Yet dissatisfaction with Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza has spread far and wide in the Christian Zionist community, despite the fact that the plan has the blessing of President Bush. Eckstein, who privately supports the disengagement plan as a necessary measure for maintaining Israel's strategic alliance with the United States, gathers that most of his organization's evangelical base is against it. David Parsons, media officer of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, one of the largest Christian Zionist organizations, puts it thusly: "For me, as a Christian, to say that a Jew has a right to live in Gaza just because he is Jew, that's not what the Bible says… But if it's okay to uproot Jews, then why isn't it okay to uproot Arabs? That's a moral question the world has to face in turning the Biblical heartland into a place where there are no Jews. To me, that's the ultimate victory of Hitler from the grave."
With projects like "Strengthening the Next Generation of the Gaza Region," visitors to the website of the Christian Friends of Israeli Communities (CFOIC) may be reasonably confused about the slated dismantlement of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip this summer. CFOIC-which was established in opposition to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)-partners churches worldwide with Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Through CFOIC's "adopt-a-settlement" program, churches pay for security equipment, medical units and sponsor children's programs in the settlements. By e-mail, Sondra Oster Baras, a West Bank settler who heads CFOIC's Israel office, told Mother Jones: "CFOIC believes that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people and should not be transferred to the Arabs… We are convinced that the creation of a Palestinian State will encourage terrorism not only in Israel but globally." (All in all, however, this aid is likely a drop in the bucket next to the estimated $556 million the Israeli government spends on settlements annually.)
If the alliance between evangelicals and Jewish-Americans seems strange to some and non-kosher to others, it is the season of unlikely alliances in Israel. Sharon himself, after all, has been saved from calling for new elections by the Israeli left, after many within prime minister's right-wing Likud party abandoned him over the disengagement plan. Israeli peaceniks still detest Sharon, who is proceeding with the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. However, they are eager to have the Gaza withdrawal take place without delay, believing that it will set the precedent for the West Bank and serve to restart the peace talks. "I don't believe that Sharon is a partner for what should happen as a follow-up to the withdrawal from Gaza. Nevertheless, I am a supporter of the new government because I think this is the only way to put us back on track and start moving towards the two-state solution," says Dr. Ron Pundak, director general of the Peres Center for Peace and one of the Israeli architects of the Oslo Accords.
At the end of the day, Christian evangelical support for Israel doesn't depend on whether or not Sharon goes ahead with the disengagement plan anymore than it hinges on whether or not Jewish-Americans change their liberal views on abortion. As Laura Kam Issacharoff, the co-director of Anti-Defamation League's Israel office, put it: "What is key in understanding the relationship is that there is no quid pro quo." Yet as Israel nears its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and American Jews remain firmly on the opposite side of Christian evangelicals in America's raging culture wars, the common ground in this uneasy alliance isn't expanding.
Nonna Gorilovskaya is a former Mother Jones editorial fellow.
