For Evangelicals,
Supporting Israel Is
‘God’s Foreign
Policy’
By DAVID D.
KIRKPATRICK, NYTimes on the Web. November 14, 2006
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — As
Israeli bombs fell on Lebanon for a second week last July, the Rev. John Hagee
of San Antonio arrived in Washington with 3,500 evangelicals for the first
annual conference of his newly founded organization, Christians United For
Israel.
At a dinner addressed by the Israeli ambassador, a handful of Republican
senators and the chairman of the Republican Party, Mr. Hagee read greetings from
President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and dispatched the crowd
with a message for their representatives in Congress. Tell them “to let
Israel do their job” of destroying the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee
said.
He called the conflict “a battle between good and evil” and said support for
Israel was “God’s foreign policy.”
The next day he took the same message to the White House.
Many conservative Christians say they believe that the president’s support for
Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state, which some of
them think will play a pivotal role in the second coming. Many on the
left, in turn, fear that such theology may influence decisions the
administration makes toward Israel and the Middle East.
Administration officials say that the meeting with Mr. Hagee was a courtesy for
a political ally and that evangelical theology has no effect on policy making.
But the alliance of Israel, its evangelical Christian supporters and President
Bush has never been closer or more potent. In the wake of the summer war
in southern Lebanon, reports that Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran, may be pushing for
nuclear weapons have galvanized conservative Christian support for Israel into a
political force that will be hard to ignore.
For one thing, white evangelicals make up about a quarter of the electorate.
Whatever strains may be creeping into the Israeli-American alliance over Iraq,
the Palestinians and Iran, a large part of the Republican Party’s base remains
committed to a fiercely pro-Israel agenda that seems likely to have an effect on
policy choices.
Mr. Hagee says his message for the White House was, “Every time there has been a
fight like this over the last 50 years, the State Department would send someone
over in a jet to call for a cease-fire. The terrorists would rest, rearm
and retaliate.” He added, “Appeasement has never helped the Jewish
people.”
This time Elliott Abrams, the White House deputy national security adviser who
met with him, essentially agreed, Mr. Hagee said.
Leaving the White House offices, “we felt we were on the right track,” he said.
Now, in tandem with the Israeli government, many evangelical Christians have
focused on a new villain, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Evangelical broadcasters and commentators have seized on Mr. Ahmadinejad’s
comments questioning the Holocaust and calling for the abolition of the Israeli
state. And many evangelicals now talk of the Iranian leader as a “mortal
threat” to Israel.
Some evangelical leaders say they are wary of reports that a panel including
former Secretary of State James A. Baker III might recommend negotiating with
Iran about the future of Iraq. “It certainly bothers me,” said Dr. James
C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and one of the most influential
conservative Christians. “That has the same kind of feel to it as the
British negotiating with Germany, Italy and Japan in the run up to World War
II.”
At rallies this fall for Christian conservative voters, Dr. Dobson sometimes
singled out Mr. Ahmadinejad as a reason to go to the polls, arguing that
Democrats could not be trusted to face down such dangers. “Hitler told
everybody what he was going to do, and Ahmadinejad is saying exactly what he is
going to do,” Dr. Dobson explained. “He is talking genocide.”
The same name, with many pronunciations, comes up repeatedly on Christian talk
radio shows, said Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative political organizer.
“I am not sure there is a foreign leader who has made a bigger splash in
American culture since Khrushchev, certainly among committed Christians,” he
said.
Mr. Hagee, for his part, said Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments about Israel and the
Holocaust were part of what motivated him to found Christians United For Israel
late last year. Since the fight with Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee said, he is
doing all he can to keep the pressure on United States officials to take a hard
line with Iran.
When 5,000 evangelicals gathered last month for a “Night to Honor Israel” at his
San Antonio megachurch, for example, Mr. Ahmadinejad was much discussed.
Mr. Hagee compared the Iranian leader with the biblical pharaoh of Egypt.
“Pharaoh threatened Israel and he ended up fish food,” Mr. Hagee said, to great
applause.
Evangelical Christians who know President Bush, including Marvin Olasky, editor
of the magazine World and a former Bush adviser, said Mr. Bush, unlike President
Reagan, has never shown any interest in prophecies of the second coming.
Such theological details, however, have not kept the Israeli government and
Jewish pro-Israel lobbying groups from capitalizing on the powerful support of
American evangelicals. Fearing a backlash over Lebanon last July, Israeli
officials and their American allies sought public statements of support from
American evangelicals. Some groups declined because of risks to
missionaries in the Arab world.
Dr. Dobson read a statement on his popular radio program expressing “heartache”
at the civilian casualties but comparing Israel’s fight to “the Biblical
skirmish between little David and mighty Goliath.” He explained, “There
sits little Israel with its five million beleaguered Jews, surrounded by five
hundred million Muslims whose leaders are determined to drive it into the sea.”
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the founder of the International Fellowship of
Christians and Jews and the Israeli government’s official goodwill ambassador to
evangelicals, said the statements turned out to be superfluous because there was
a groundswell of grass roots evangelical support.
Mr. Eckstein said he had discovered the depth of that support when he ran
television commercials on the Fox News Channel seeking donations. The
response, mainly from evangelicals, “burned out the call centers,” Mr. Eckstein
said. During the five-week war, his group added 30,000 new donors.
Thanks to the influx of money, he said his organization has exceeded its income
from the first 10 months of last year by 60 percent, putting it on track to pull
in $80 million this year. “The war really generated a momentum,” Mr.
Eckstein said.
Evangelicals’ support for Israel, of course, is far from uniform. Mr.
Hagee is an author of several books about the interpretation of biblical
prophecies. He says he believes the Bible assigns Israel a pivotal role as
a harbinger of the second coming. Citing passages from Revelation and
Ezekiel, he argues that conflict between Israel and Iran may be a sign that that
time is approaching.
Others say they believe more generally that God maintains his Old Testament
covenant with the Jewish people and thus commands Christian believers to help
protect their “older brothers.”
“My theology indicates that Israel is covenant land,” Dr. Dobson said in an
interview.
Many conservative Christians and their Jewish allies acknowledge a certain
tension between the evangelical belief in a Biblical commission to convert
non-Christians and their simultaneous desire to help the Jews of Israel.
“Despite all the spiritual shortcomings of the Jewish people,” Dr. Dobson said,
“according to scripture — and those criticisms come not from Christians but from
the Old Testament. Just look in Deuteronomy, where Jews are referred to as
a stiff-necked and stubborn people — despite all of that, God has chosen to
bless them as his people. God chose to bless Abraham and his seed not
because they were a perfect people any more than the rest of the human family.”
Dr. Dobson, along with some other evangelicals, has expressed disappointment
with what he saw as the Bush administration’s pressure on Israel to sign the
cease-fire that ended the fight.
“They began by saying they had to take a hard line, by saying they would support
Israel and they ended up urging them to compromise and go home,” Dr. Dobson
said. “All that is going to do is allow everybody to reload. That
didn’t solve anything.” (Mr. Hagee said that he believed the
administration gave Israel “ample time” but that Israel erred by not “unleashing
the full might of its ground troops” until it was too late.)
The Israeli government and its American allies have been building their alliance
with evangelicals for decades. Israeli officials began working closely
with Mr. Hagee and his church, for example, a quarter century ago, when he met
several times with then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
The Jerusalem Post, an English-language newspaper, recently started an edition
for American Christians.
The Israeli government temporarily cut off ties with the Christian broadcaster
Pat Robertson after he suggested that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke might
have been God’s punishment for withdrawing from territory that belonged to the
Biblical Israel. But then Mr. Robertson flew to Israel during the fight
with Hezbollah. In a gesture of reconciliation, the Israeli government
recently worked with him to film a television commercial to attract Christian
tourists.
“Israel — to walk where Jesus walked, to pray where Jesus prayed, to stand where
he stood — there is no other place like it on earth,” Mr. Robertson says in the
commercial, according to the Jerusalem Post.
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