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	April 27, 2002	atimes.com

Front

COMMENTARY
Evangelical Christians and the Sharon lobby
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - When the White House tapes were finally released last month, people were stunned.

There was the voice of the premier US evangelist and confidant to half a dozen presidents, Billy Graham - a man who had always publicly expressed respect for Jews and support for Israel - commiserating with then-president Richard Nixon about the Jewish "stranglehold on the media".

"A lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country," he told Nixon during a White House chat in 1972.

Graham's words, for which the 83-year-old has apologized at length, go a long way toward explaining one of the most bizarre but powerful alliances in US politics of the past quarter-century: A partnership between politically neo-conservative, mostly secular Jews and evangelical Christians that is driving US policy in the Middle East - in particular, Washington's all-but-unconditional support for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"If you just focus on the power of Jewish [lawmakers] and Jewish groups in forming US policy on Israel, you're missing the boat," says Steven Spiegel, a political-science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. "The Christian right has had a real influence in shaping the views of the Republican Party toward Israel," he told the Congressional Quarterly weekly.

Christian-right leaders have been some of Sharon's staunchest supporters during the controversial Israeli offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank. And the Republican majority whip in the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, explicitly warned President George W Bush against putting any pressure on Sharon to withdraw his troops from the West Bank.

"We should support Israel as they dismantle the Palestinian leadership that foments violence and fosters hate," DeLay declared in a major policy address in Fulton, Missouri, where the late British prime minister Winston Churchill made his "Iron Curtain" address marking the beginning of the Cold War.

DeLay seems destined to be elected House majority leader next year if the Republicans retain control of the chamber. His speech - and Bush's continuing refusal to pressure Sharon seriously into peace talks with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat - marked the payoff to a 25-year strategy pursued by Israel's Likud Party to woo Christian evangelists to their side in the longer struggle over control of territory that Christians, Muslims and Jews all consider holy land.

Menachem Begin, Israel's first prime minister from the right-wing Likud, initiated the strategy after his election in 1977 precisely to block an effort by then US president Jimmy Carter to launch comprehensive negotiations that would recognize Palestinians' right to a homeland.

Unlike Israel's Labor Party, which has always supported the idea of exchanging land for peace, Likud has supported the idea of a "Greater Israel" that includes those territories referred to by the United Nations as "occupied".

Although many Likud members, including Sharon, are secular Jews, the party refers to these areas by their Biblical names, Judea and Samaria, and has resisted any recognition of Palestinian territorial rights there.

According to Donald Wagner, director of Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding, "Likud's strategy was simple: split evangelical and fundamentalist Christians from Carter's political base and rally support among conservative Christians for Israel's opposition to the United Nations' proposed Middle East peace conference."

The strategy worked so well that many political analysts credit Carter's defeat by Ronald Reagan with Carter's loss of evangelical Christian support three years later and the forging of an effective alliance between neo-conservative US Jews and the Christian right that has grown more and more powerful over the past two decades.

Likud strategists and their neo-conservative allies in the United States tapped into a deep vein in English evangelical thinking dating back almost four centuries. This is based on a certain kind of biblical interpretation called dispensationalism. Dispensationalism evolved into the so-called Christian Zionist movement that actually preceded the origin of Jewish Zionism by two decades.

In this interpretation, the restoration of what the New Testament book of Luke calls "the Kingdom of Israel" will herald the "end times" of the return of the Messiah and the apocalypse. Since Israel's establishment in 1948, dispensationalists have voiced increasing confidence that the "end times" are near.

Billy Graham's father-in-law, L Nelson Bell, wrote after the six-day Israeli war in 1967 that Israel's conquest of all of Jerusalem gave "the students of the Bible a thrill and a renewed faith in the accuracy and validity of the Bible".

Dispensationalists believe that the Jews have a God-given right to the Holy Land, including Judea and Samaria. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe recently quoted Genesis itself on the Senate floor as giving Abraham and his "seed forever" all the land around Hebron, which is on the West Bank.

With such beliefs already a part of the theology of millions of US evangelicals - including Attorney General John Ashcroft - Likud and their neo-conservative Jewish allies have cultivated their leaders since 1977.

Israel reportedly gave Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell a Lear jet in 1979, and, after Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear plant in 1981, Begin called Falwell before he called then-president Reagan to ask his support.

Likud's main ambassador to the evangelicals, however, has been Sharon's rival in Likud, Binyamin Netanyahu, who met frequently with US televangelists, including Pat Robertson and Gary Bauer, in the 1980s and early 1990s when he served as Israel's UN ambassador. Later, as prime minister, he created a storm when he denounced Bill Clinton at an evangelical convention in 1998.

Since Sharon's election a year ago, the Israeli Embassy has regularly briefed leaders and lobbyists of evangelical groups. On a recent visit lasting some two weeks, Netanyahu met numerous times with Christian-right leaders and urged them to speak out against US pressure to constrain Sharon.

It appears the evangelicals' support for Israel, like Billy Graham's, is based on biblical prophecy rather than respect for Jews or Judaism. According to the theology, the return of the Messiah, heralded by the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel, will signal the end of the Jewish people, who will either be converted or damned for eternity.

(Inter Press Service)

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