The Christian Right and Israel

Probably the most important influence on Middle East policy in the Republican Party at this point is the Christian Right.

This article from the Israeli paper Ha'aretz has some good factual information about that particular political trend. It reports on a visit of Israeli Tourism Minister Benny Elon to a Christian Right conference in Memphis. Elon is so hardline that he thinks that Ariel Sharon is way too willing to compromise for peace. And that's exactly the kind of hardline Israeli policy this group of Protestant Christians supports.

These "Christian Zionists," as they are sometimes called, back pretty much the most extreme of the hardliners in Israel. And they are deeply suspicious of any Israeli government that actually tries to make peace. The Ha'aretz piece gives this glimpse at their theology:

The ideological basis for the cooperation between evangelical Christians and the settlers is the Christians' belief that the entire Holy Land has been given to the Jewish people and that only the return of the Jews to the Holy Land will enable the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Although the vision of the Second Coming also includes the idea that the Jews - those who will survive, that is - will begin to believe in Christ, that aspect of the vision is not mentioned at present.

The theology behind this starts from the traditional Christian view that the Jews collectively rejected Jesus, who was their Messiah. They then say that as a result, it is God's will that "the Jews" will never be allowed to live in peace as Jews. As the end of the world approaches - a good thing in this viewpoint - all the Jews of the world will be concentrated in Israel. Most of them will be killed in a cataclismic war. The ones who survive will convert to Christianity, i.e., stop being Jews.

With all the ecumenical goodwill I can muster for my fellow Christians of that viewpoint, I still can't see how a theology that says God doesn't want Jews to live in peace as Jews, and has foreordained that most Jews of the world will be killed off, is anything at its core but the ugliest of traditional Christian theology and anti-Jewish attitudes. So they cheer only for an endless state of war in the Middle East.

This is pro-Israel and "philo-Semitic" only in the narrowest of ways.

Tags: authoritarianism, anti-semitism, christian right, christian zionism, israel