Meet The New
Zionist's
By Matthew Engel
01 June, 2004
Information Clearing
House
At
first sight, the scene is very familiar: one that happens in Washington
DC and other major American cities all the time. On the platform, an
Israeli student is telling thousands of supporters how the horrors of
the year have only reinforced his people's determination. "Despite
the terror attacks, they'll never drive us away out of our God-given
land," he says.
This is greeted
with whoops and hollers and waving of Israeli flags and the blowing
of the shofar, the Jewish ceremonial ram's horn. Then comes the mayor
of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert, who is received even more rapturously. "God
is with us. You are with us." And there are more whoops and hollers
and flag-waves and shofar-blows.
This support is
not offered with any ifs or buts either. The placards round the hall
insist that every inch of the Holy Land should belong to Israel and
that there should never be a Palestinian state. These assertions are
backed up by biblical quotations. It could be a rally in Jerusalem for
those Israelis who think Ariel Sharon is a dangerous softie.
But something very
strange is going on here. There are thousands of people cheering for
Israel in the huge Washington Convention Centre. But not one of them
appears to be Jewish, at least not in the conventional sense. For this
is the annual gathering of a very non-Jewish organisation indeed: the
Christian Coalition of America.
And the strangest
thing of all is not their support, which is a novel and important development
in American politics, but the thinking that lies behind it - which is
altogether more chilling to Israel's traditional supporters than all
the cheers and flags would suggest. You might also describe it as downright
weird.
In a country where
weekly church attendance is about 20 times the level it is in Britain
(40% v 2%), the relationship between religion and politics in the US
is intense. And there is little doubt that, last spring, when President
Bush dithered and dallied over his Middle East policy before finally
coming down on Israel's side, he was influenced not by the overrated
Jewish vote, but by the opinion of Christian "religious conservatives"
- the self-description of between 15 and 18% of the electorate. When
the president demanded that Israel withdraw its tanks from the West
Bank in April, the White House allegedly received 100,000 angry emails
from Christian conservatives.
A decade ago, when
the president's father was in the White House, his eldest son's election-time
job was to act as unofficial ambassador to this group, offer assurances
that they and the administration were at one on such matters as abortion
and pornography and prayer in schools, the issues they like to group
together as "family values". US-Israel relations, which reached
rock bottom when George Bush Sr was president and the obstreperous Yitzhak
Shamir was Israeli prime minister, were never an issue.
What's changed?
Not the Book of Genesis, which is what Michael Brown, the coalition's
church liaison officer, quotes when you ask him to explain the support
for Israel. "And I will make of thee a great nation," the
Lord told Abraham, "And I will bless them that bless thee and curse
them that curse thee."
On the conference
floor, however, the explanation has more to do with the end of the world
than the start of it. What has really changed is the emergence of the
doctrine known as "dispensationalism", popularised in the
novels of the Rev Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. LaHaye and Jenkins may
not mean much to you or to the readers of the New York Times Book Review,
but the ninth volume of their Left Behind series sold three million
hardback copies in the US last year, eclipsing John Grisham.
Central to the theory
- based on a reading of scripture Brown would prefer not to discuss
- is the Rapture, the second coming of Christ, which will presage the
end of the world. A happy ending depends on the conversion of the Jews.
And that, to cut a long story very short, can only happen if the Jews
are in possession of all the lands given to them by God. In other words,
these Christians are supporting the Jews in order to abolish them.
Oh yes, agreed Marion
Pollard, a charming lady from Dallas who was selling hand-painted Jerusalem
crystal in the exhibition hall at the conference. "God is the sovereign.
He'll do what he pleases. But based on the scripture, those are the
guidelines." She calls herself a fervent supporter of Israel, as
does Lewis Hall of North Carolina. "I believe they do have to accept
the Messiah." And if they don't? "I believe they will when
they know who He is. I believe that one day they are going to wake up.
It might take a third world war to do that."
Meanwhile, outside
the hall was Leanne Cariker from Oklahoma, carrying a placard saying
"Just Say No! To A Palestinian State". Her support of Israel
is based on the same premise. "The Bible says there is no way to
worship God except through the son," she explains.
To add to the bizarreness
of this scene, she was standing opposite another group of demonstrators:
anti-Zionist Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn in long black coats, who oppose
the state of Israel based on their own reading of the Bible. Confused?
You should be. Poor Leanne Cariker was. "I'm not against them,"
she wailed. "I'm for them. I believe they're God's chosen people."
You might think
these Christian activists represent the furthest shores of American
politico-religious wackiness. The politicians don't think so. This conference
began with a videotaped benediction straight from the Oval office. Some
of the most influential republicans in Congress addressed the gathering
including - not once, but twice - Tom DeLay, who is hot favourite to
take over as majority leader of the House of Representatives after the
midterm elections on November 5, thus becoming arguably the most powerful
man on Capitol Hill.
"Are you tired
of all this, are you?" he yelled to the audience. "Nooooooo!"
they roared back. "Not when you're standing up for Jews and Jesus,
that's for sure," he replied.
Jews habitually
do not stand up for Jesus (although this conference did have a sprinkling
of Messianic Jews, who do just that). But most Jewish leaders have opted
to shrug, accept the Christians' support and let them whistle for their
conversions. That certainly goes for Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime
minister, reportedly greeted "like a rock star" by Christian
evangelicals in Jerusalem last month. More thoughtful leaders are at
least concerned.
"I'm going
to take the support because Israel needs it," said Rabbi Jerome
Epstein, vice-president of the US's conservative (in this context middle-of-the-road)
Jewish organisation, the United Synagogue. "Their theology is in
a different world. We can cope with it. If I convince them not to support
Israel, are they going to give up their attempt to convert Jews? No."
Not everyone accepts
this. "They don't love the real Jewish people," the author
Gershom Gorenberg told the CBS programme 60 Minutes. "They love
us as characters in their story, in their play, and that's not who we
are. If you listen to the drama that they are describing, essentially
it's a five-act play in which the Jews disappear in the fourth act."
This is not something
speakers at the rally are anxious to emphasise. DeLay was followed by
Pat Robertson, the coalition's founder, sometime presidential candidate
and the very personification of the successful American TV evangelist:
blow-dried hair, stick-on smile, expensive suit, honeyed voice and certainty
of tone.
Robertson prefers
to dwell on Arab plans to drive Israel into the sea and the iniquity
of Yasser Arafat and "his gang of thugs". But he also cites
the stories of Joshua and David to prove Israel's ownership of Jerusalem
"long before anyone had heard of Mohammed".
Robertson has now
retired from the coalition, leaving it in the hands of Roberta Combs,
a grandmother from South Carolina who has the longest and most scarlet
fingernails I have ever seen. She scratches them across the table when
she wants to make a point. In an interview, her most vigorous point
is in support of Bush. "I think he's a great president. I think
he's a caring person. First of all, he's a Christian, which I identify
with. He's pro-family, he's pro-life, he's a friend of mine."
Combs is not in
the Robertson league as a communicator. And when I shift the conversation
round to Israel, she discovers an urgent need to attend to her toddler
grandson, leaving me with her aide Michael Brown. The prevailing view
is that the coalition, a powerful voice in the early 90s, is not the
force it was.
This is partly held
to be due to her failings, and partly to the rhetorical excesses of
Robertson and his ally Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority,
especially in September last year when Falwell, on Robertson's TV show,
blamed the attacks on, among others, "the pagans and the abortionists
and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians".
The other week Falwell
called Mohammed a terrorist, which might have accounted for his unexplained
non-appearance at the conference. But even the coalition's most tireless
opponent does not sense any kind of victory. Rev Barry Lynn, himself
an ordained minister and head of the pressure group Americans United
for Separation of Church and State, likes to start his speeches by saying:
"The good news is that the Christian Coalition is fundamentally
collapsing. The bad news is that the people who ran it are all in the
government." Whenever he goes over to the department of justice,
he keeps running into Pat Robertson's old lawyers.
The linkage between
the Christian right and the Republican party is getting ever stronger,
especially in the electorally crucial states of the south and west.
And Lynn is alarmed at the prospects for the midterm elections. The
Republicans are quite likely to regain control of the Senate, removing
the roadblock that currently stops the president appointing conservative
judges ("impartial judges", according to most Republicans;
"rabid rightwingers," according to their opponents) to lower
courts and, when the expected vacancies arise, to the supreme court.
This will give the right, and most particularly the religious right,
unprecedented influence over all three branches of government in Washington.
"Karl Rove
[Bush's political guru] has said publicly you cannot alienate your base.
You cannot alienate that 18% of religious conservatives. You don't mess
with these people," says Lynn. "They want you to be just as
they are. And Bush is just as they are. He may waffle on one or two
issues, such as stem-cell research. But fundamentally he comes down
on their side."
In the short term
this might not alter American life all that much. It might take a generation
for the Supreme Court to roll back the restrictions that, for instance,
forbid prayer in school. The abortion debate is for the moment dormant.
Neither the churches nor the government show any sign of imposing teenage
sexual abstinence any time soon. Not before, say, the conversion of
the Jews.
One of the points
Robertson likes to emphasise is to reject accusations that the coalition's
support of Israel is a "Johnny come lately experience". "We've
been with them through thick and thin," he says. This is a point
made by several of his supporters, one of whom presses on me a little
booklet with quotes from Christian theologians on the subject. He especially
recommends the one from Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century puritan divine.
"The Jews in all their dispersions shall cast away their old infidelity,"
said Edwards, "and shall have their hearts wonderfully changed,
and abhor themselves for their past unbelief and obstinacy. They shall
flow together to the blessed Jesus."