DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
I cristiano-evangelici americani, 1/4 dell’elettorato,
appoggiano la politica filo-israeliana di Bush, paventano la possibilità di un
cambio di rotta con dialogo con l’Iran.
Sono decenni che è in atto l’alleanza tra il governo
israeliano e gli USA con gli evangelici; ad es. la cooperazione con Hagee è
iniziata al tempo del primo ministro israeliano Menachem Begin.
L’alleanza tra Israele, i suoi sostenitori
cristiano-evangelici e il presidente Bush non è però mai stata tanto forte come
ora,
gli evangelici costituiscono circa ¼ dell’elettorato
americano.
Nello scorso luglio, temendo un contraccolpo sul Libano,
funzionari israeliani e i loro alleati americani hanno sollecitato dagli
evangelici americani dichiarazioni pubbliche di appoggio. Alcuni gruppi
evangelici si sono rifiutati per non mettere a rischio i missionari nel mondo
arabo.
La conferenza della Christian United for Israel,
organizzazione degli evangelici USA di recente fondata, si è riunita a
Washington per la prima volta nella seconda settimana di attacchi israeliani
contro il Libano.
Il messaggio al Congresso e alla Casa Bianca del reverendo
John Hagee: “lasciate che Israele faccia il suo lavoro” di distruggere la
milizia libanese; il conflitto israelo-libanese sarebbe «una battaglia tra il bene
e il male».
Durante le 5 settimane di guerra, un gruppo di evangelici ha
conquistato 30 000 nuovi donatori, che hanno fatto aumentare del 60% le
entrate dell’organizzazione nei primi 10 mesi 2006, calcolate in $80mn per
quest’anno.
Diversi cristiani conservatori americani pensano che
l’appoggio americano ad Israele adempia ad un ordine biblico di proteggere lo
Stato ebraico.
Assieme ad Israele molti cristiani-evangelici puntano su un
nuovo “cattivo”, il presidente iraniano Ahmadinejad, «minaccia mortale» per
Israele.
Preoccupazione da parte di alcuni leader evangelici per la
possibilità che il gruppo di studio capeggiato da James A. Baker III porti al negoziato
con l’Iran sul futuro dell’Irak. Sarebbe come se i britannici avessero
negoziato con Germania, Italia e Giappone alla vigilia della II Guerra
Mondiale.
Il Jerusalem Post ha
di recente dato il via ad un’edizione per i cristiani americani.
Nyt 061114
For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is ‘God’s
Foreign Policy’
By DAVID D.
KIRKPATRICK
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.
New York Times