Evangelicals and Israel: Theological roots of a political alliance

Christian Century, Nov 4, 1998 by Donald Wagner

The investigative team found "disturbing indications of political motivations behind [the] recent publicity about Christian persecution." The team learned that a Christian Zionist group, the International Christian Embassy-Jerusalem, had cooperated with the office of David Bar-llan, Netanyahu's chief spokesman, in exaggerating accounts of Christian persecution and circulating them to the international press. A staff member of the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem interviewed Mor, the Israeli religious affairs official, who stated that the report was intended to be an internal document, but Bar-llan's office leaked it to the Christian and secular media.

Asked why the prime minister's office would do such a thing, Mor noted that Bar-llan uses such information as his "bread and butter" in the Israeli propaganda war against the PA. Clearly, there was no attempt by either the Israeli government or the Christian Embassy to note the criminal status of some claiming to be persecuted, or to distinguish between persecution and understandable pressure from families or communities opposing a member's conversion to another faith.

It is true that Palestinian Christians are leaving the Holy Land. But it is not because of Muslim persecution. They are leaving because of the brutality of Israeli occupation and because Israel's resistance to negotiating a just peace with the Palestinians makes them despair about the future.

At this juncture, it appears that the hardline Likud position has the backing of both houses of Congress, the major Jewish lobbies, and the Christian Right. President Clinton and those who advocate the Israeli Labor Party peace formula, or the Oslo Accords, have little leverage with Likud. Palestinian Christians and their supporters fear that the Christian Right's alliance with Likud may in the end serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy, heightening tensions in the region and leading to a new round of conflict in the Holy Land, which the Christian Zionists will readily interpret as "the final battle."

Donald Wagner is director of the Center of Middle Eastern Studies at North Park University in Chicago and director of Evangelicals of Middle East Understanding.