[Nasional-e] Meet the new Zionists

[Ambon]

Features / Meet the new Zionists /

The men and women in the picture on the right are some of the most
passionate defenders of Israel in America. There's just one catch: they want
to convert all Jews to Christianity. Matthew Engel reports on an unholy
alliance

Meet the new Zionists

At first sight the scene is very familiar: one that happens in Washington
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 3m 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, the House majority
whip.
"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. 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 in September. 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. 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."
The coalition is not the force it was. This is partly held to be due to
Combs's 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 terrorist attacks
on, among others, "the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the
gays and the lesbians".
Recently Falwell called Moham
 med 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.
"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 US 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."

The Guardian Weekly 21-11-2002, page 23