Netanyahu Coalition and Evangelical Christians Are on Collision Course

By Nathan Jones

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel's principal Washington, DC lobby, makes no bones about it. While its clout in the media flows directly from Jewish network executives, publishers, journalists, and advertisers, its hold on Congress is further strengthened by "60 million Evangelical Christians" who, as lobby advertisements put it, "believe the creation of Israel is the fulfillment of God's prophecy."

There's a complication in that, which neither Israel's Jewish supporters nor the two remaining most prominent televangelist leaders of this supposed pro-Israel horde, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, mention. (The other three nationally prominent pro-Israel televangelists, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker Tammy Faye's ex-husband all suffered an apparent cooling of ardor for Israel while serving jail time for unrelated sins.) The way these Charismatic Christians look at it, the "ingathering of the Jews" in Jerusalem is a necessary prelude, like the battle of Armageddon, for which they pray, to the second coming of Christ. They believe that they and others "who accept Christ as their personal Saviour" will be "raptured" into heaven, and the Jews, and probably the Christians who haven't set their watches to Christian Coalition time, will be left on earth to face "tribulations." It's not clear to this writer what these "tribulations" associated with Armaggedon are. Presumably they also await all of the four-fifths of the human race who are Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Theosophists and such, and to whom the British Rev. John Nelson Darby probably never gave a thought when in the 19th century he twisted fragments of Biblical prophesy into this gloomy scenario.

So U.S. support for Israel is based on America's 5 million Jews, who think Israel is a nice place to visit but wouldn't want to live there, and an earthly host of born agains who follow Pat Robertson and recently were enjoined by him to convert those Jews. (When Jewish leaders taxed him with "anti-Semitism" for trying to mess with their children's minds, he indignantly responded that it was impossible to call him anti-Semitic because he is so pro-Israel. It's not logical but nevertheless a neat defense.)

None of this seems to bother U.S. Jewish leaders who support Israel, few of whom spend a lot of time listening to televangelists. It does, however, upset the religious Jews in Israel. They are only about 20 percent of the population, but since they vote for their own parties, they have a lot of votes in Israel's parliament. Neither Likud nor Labor can form a coalition without some of the religious Knesset members.

In March, 21 of those members passed (to 7 opposed), the first draft of a law banning Christian missionary work in Israel. That doesn't sound like much in the 120-member Knesset and the legislation will have to pass two more votes before it becomes law. But a poll of Knesset members showed that 78 of the 120 would vote for the bill, which makes it a criminal offense punishable with up to 15 years' imprisonment and subsequent deportation for foreigners "to teach or propagate Christian doctrine" in the Holy land.

Catholic or Protestant clergy, teachers or aid workers will be allowed into Israel only while traveling "in a wholly private capacity, as tourists or transients, with no public religious functions or observances included in their itinerary."

Israelis have long resented Christian clergy, both the liberal kind who support Palestinian human rights, and the evangelical kind who encourage Jews to convert to their religion. It was one of the latter, however, the Rev. Morris Cerullo of Worldwide Evangelism Inc. of San Diego, CA, who inspired the crackdown. He was reputed to have mailed one million copies, at a cost of $3 million to $4 million, of a missionary tract entitled The Peace to Israelis in late 1996. Since there are only about 5 million Israelis, counting Jews, Muslims, Druze and Christians, that's about one copy per Jewish household.

Cerullo is a Charismatic or Pentecostal minister, and in the backlash his own staff departed the country. But that left many other Christian congregations in limbo, particularly some 6,000 Messianic Jews, the so-called "Jews for Jesus," who fear that under the new law they may be arrested, jailed and deported for owning a New Testament. "It was his [Reverend Cerullo's] prerogative, and from what I understand there were mixed feelings in the Messianic community in Israel," Scott Moore, leader of the Ohev Yisrael Messianic Jewish Congregation in Newington, VA, told The Washington Times. "The mass mailing is not an obstacle, but the law may be."

A delegation of the United Christian Council in Israel met to protest the pending legislation on March 17 with secretary Nissim Zvili of the Israeli Labor party, some of whose Knesset members voted for the bill.

With two more votes to go, many of the ambiguities may be cleared up before the bill becomes law sometime in 1998. For example, what happens to the hundreds of Protestant ministers and teachers and Catholic priests, nuns and monks of many nationalities in the Christian shrines, landmarks and schools that dot the Holy land? And what about the communities of indigenous Palestinian Christians, direct descendants of the earliest Christian communicants who were actual contemporaries of Jesus Christ?

Neither Pat Robertson nor Jerry Falwell, both of whom have been involved in Christian proselytizing by radio from Israel's "security zone" in southern Lebanon, and both of whom could be arrested, expelled, or even imprisoned on their next visits to Israel, could not be reached or would not comment after passage of the draft law. Others did, however.

"We see the noose of religious repression tightening all over the world," said David Kammerdiener, executive vice president of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board. "We certainly now even see it flowering in Israel." Citing American Jewish protests when the Southern Baptists adopted a resolution to support "proclamation of the Gospel to the Jews," Kammerdiener said of the Jewish responses in both Israel and the U.S., "either one is an attack on liberty."

Even those Evangelical Christian ministers generally assumed to be receiving Israeli financial support, channeled through front organizations, found the law impossible to defend. "This bill means great hardship for Zionist evangelicals like myself," the Rev. David Allen Lewis, president of Christians United for Israel, told Spotlight, a Washington, DC national weekly frequently critical of Israel. "It will revive the argument of Christian anti-Semites who say: 'How can you support the Jewish nation when they are against Christianity?'"

Indeed the Israeli Knesset backlash against the Christian clergy could create an American backlash against Israel, as AIPAC undoubtedly understands. Presumably that lobbying organization, which claims all of its funding originates in the United States, but which generally changes both officers and policies whenever Israel changes governments, will have to get busy.

Will it go all out to keep news of the Israeli law out of the American media? We've seen it mentioned only in The Washington Times and Spotlight to date, but such a sensational story is pretty hard to suppress, as this article demonstrates.

Or will AIPAC work as hard on Israel's Knesset as it would on the U.S. Congress to keep from being enacted a law that so obviously jeopardizes the U.S.-Israel relationship? Or would interfering in Israel's Knesset the way AIPAC interferes in America's Congress endanger some of AIPAC's own funding?

Let's make it clear. We don't know where all of AIPAC's $13 million in annual funding comes from. All we know is it "don't plant taters and it don't chop cotton," but each year it finds $13 million to spend intimidating Congress and hiring lawyers to tell the Federal Election Committee why it shouldn't have to disclose the sources of its funding. (All the big and little political action committees that do the same thing have to disclose their finances.)

Nor, we suspect, do most of AIPAC's own American Jewish members know where all that money comes from. But maybe if we all look closely at how AIPAC deals with this potentially devastating story, we'll begin to find out.