A Match Made in Heaven

by Zev Chafets

  During the intifada, American Jews, even many on the left, rallied to Israel’s side. So did the broader American public. The pro-Palestinian liberal Christian activist faction counterattacked with an ugly weapon: economic disinvestment.

  In July 2004, the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to “study” diverting the money in its church portfolio from some companies doing business with Israel. A few months later, the Episcopal Church voted for “year-long study” of the feasibility of boycotting companies linked to the “Israeli occupation.” Shortly thereafter, the international policy body of the Anglican Church (to which the Episcopalians are affiliated) called on other denominations to undertake similar “studies.”

  In June 2005, the Virginia and New England conferences of the United Methodist Church approved resolutions calling for an investigation into whether they had holdings in companies that profited from Israel’s occupation. A month later, the General Synod of the United Church of Christ voted to examine ways of using “economic leverage” to influence the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.

  The campaign of divestment was not a real economic threat; the Israeli economy is too large, and church investment too small. The power of divestment was symbolic. It had been a tool in the international campaign to discredit the apartheid regime in South Africa. It was a way of calling into question Israel’s essential morality.

  American Jews, especially liberals, were incensed. If Israel was South Africa, then what were they, its supporters? The Jewish establishment attempted to explain to their Protestant counterparts that Israel wasn’t just another issue for them, but the very heart of their agenda. They expected their fellow liberals, who wanted and counted on Jewish support on their core social issues, would drop, or at least modify, support for Israel’s enemies.

  The mainstreamers turned this request down flat. They couldn’t abandon the Palestinian cause, they explained, because it was “just.” But like all moralistic political explanations, “justice” was code for a much more complex set of motives.

  First, the Christian liberals believe that the meek shall inherit the earth—especially the earth where Jesus lived and taught. In their view, the Palestinians were the weaker party to the conflict, and this, automatically, located justice on their side.

  “Israel power is a far more significant issue [to the liberal Protestants] than the pain caused by [Arab] terrorism,” David Elcott wrote in an internal American Jewish Committee memorandum. “To make this point and correct the imbalance, Israel must be humbled and the suffering Palestinians exalted.”

  Second, liberal Protestants, no less than evangelicals, feel emotionally connected to the Holy Land. “When I see Bethlehem surrounded by Israeli troops, it moves me as a Christian,” I was told by Canon Brian Grieves, the director of Peace and Ministries for the Episcopal Church and a leader of the pro-Palestinian forces.

  Liberal denominations also have self-interested motives. The Anglican Church, for example, has a cathedral, Saint George’s, in the eastern (Arab) part of Jerusalem. Presbyterians and other denominations own tracts of choice land in the Galilee. Everyone has real estate in Bethlehem. Christian Arabs are a small and shrinking minority among the Palestinians, but some of their ministers have forged strong links with the mainstream American denominations. Foremost among them is Reverend Naim Ateek, a Palestinian theologian who heads the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem.

  Mainline denominations also have constituencies—and missionary aspirations—in the wider Arab and Islamic world. A strong anti-Israel (or as they would prefer to have it seen, pro-Palestinian) bias is a way of ensuring goodwill in anti-Semitic countries where it is necessary to have government permission to function.

  In other words, mainline Protestant activists have a rooting interest in the Arab-Israel conflict that goes beyond the pure pursuit of “justice.” If American Jews instinctively support their coreligionists in Israel, these Christian liberals feel—and want to encourage—a similar sense of solidarity with their side.

  The decline of the mainline church in America also plays a role.

  According to pollster John Green, there are now nearly twice as many evangelicals as mainline Protestants, and “progressives” are a minority within the mainline minority. Not unnaturally, progressives have sought allies beyond the borders of the United States, especially within the framework of the international, mostly anti-American World Council of Churches.

  At the WCC Assembly held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in February 2006, the American delegation, representing thirty-four mainline Protestant and Orthodox denominations, issued an extraordinary “apology” to the world for the villainy of the United States. “Our leaders turned a deaf ear to the voices of church leaders throughout our nation and the world, entering into imperial projects that seek to dominate and control for the sake of our own national interests,” the American delegation proclaimed. They accused the United States of “raining down terror” and begged forgiveness for the “violence, degradation and poverty our nation has sown…. Nations have been demonized and God has been enlisted in national agendas that are nothing short of idolatrous.” For people who feel such a strong animus toward the United States, Israel’s status as America’s best friend in the Middle East is not a character reference.

  Finally, and I hesitate to mention it, there is a possibility that some of the anti-Zionist clerics of the mainline churches harbor a tiny, un-Christian resentment toward Jews who have, to a large extent, replaced them in the country’s cultural, intellectual, and political elite. “A couple of years ago the heads of the Methodist Church came to us and asked us to set up a meeting for them with President Bush,” one Jewish lobbyist told me. “And Bush is a Methodist. I can’t imagine they liked that very much.”

  IN SEPTEMBER 2005, a delegation of Jewish and Christian liberal activists undertook a “peace pilgrimage” to the Holy Land. Ostensibly they went looking for ways to foster harmony between the Palestinians and the Israelis. In fact, they were searching for a means of making peace among themselves or, as David Elcott put it, their competing “narratives.”

  “We [Jews] see ourselves as the ultimate victims, witness to the Holocaust,” Elcott told me before the trip. “We feel that our suffering is being ignored by Christians who we assume are our friends.”

  Elcott’s Christian friends, including Canon Grieves, had a narrative of their own, in which it is the Palestinians who are victims, the Israelis the victimizers. The question was, could these two versions of reality be reconciled?

  The trip was carefully structured. Each side hosted an equal number of days. The Jews used their time to walk their liberal Christian counterparts through Old Testament history (Message: We Jews were here first), introduce them to Israeli victims of terror (Arabs don’t fight fair), visit the Supreme Court in Jerusalem (Israel is a democracy and a nation of laws), travel along the security barrier that Israel is building between its eastern settlements and the Palestinians on the West Bank (It works and it’s not a WALL, it’s only a fence), and expose the Christians to liberal Israeli Jewish and Arab politicians and writers (This is an open society, like yours). The centerpiece was a visit to the Yad V’Shem Holocaust Museum (We rest our case).

  The Christians responded with a trip to Bethlehem (Israel occupies the birthplace of Jesus), meetings with student activists at Bethlehem University (The Zionists are stealing our water and trying to humiliate us into obedience) and a man whose house has been demolished three times (When humiliation fails, the Israelis use brute force); and offered a Palestinian-eye view of the settlements (Colonialism, pure and simple). For their pièce de resistance the mainliners scheduled a visit to the Sabeel Center, where they introduced the Jews to Naim Ateek (Here is a man who can refute all the propaganda your narrative is based on).

  The mission was, by all accounts, a civil affair. Both sides strained to demonstrate good manners and sensitivity. The liberal Jews conceded that the Palestinians had many grievances (and groused am
ong themselves that they didn’t need liberal Christians to instruct them that Israel has its flaws; why, they themselves had been criticizing Israel for years). The Christians conceded that the Jews, too, had a right to a state (even if it would be better for everyone if it hadn’t been created). The group issued a statement calling for a two-state solution, and everyone yawned. Israel and the Palestinian Authority had long since adopted similar positions.

  The Jews came back from this mission convinced they had won the argument. “The ah-ha moment for the Christians came at Yad V’Shem,” said Ethan Felson, assistant director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “We met with a professor from Hebrew University who described how Nazi propaganda and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion permeate the Arab media. Seeing, in the post-Holocaust era, that Arabs still feel almost like Nazis about the Jews helped our Christian colleagues understand that we are still vulnerable.”

  Felson pointed to the meeting with Naim Ateek as another dramatic, possibly mind-changing event. “During the trip we spent the whole time talking among ourselves about how it isn’t helpful to deny each other’s narratives,” he recalled. “And then Ateek stands up and says that Israel has no right to exist and it should be located in Munich.”

  Canon Brian Grieves scored the trip differently. “I didn’t learn anything new about the Israeli perspective,” he told me shortly after returning to the United States. “Hopefully, our Jewish colleagues saw things that were sobering to them.”

  Grieves, who was born in London and educated at the University of Hawaii, described the Jewish part of the itinerary as a comedy of errors. “They brought in an Israeli Palestinian journalist from the Jerusalem Post. We agreed with his assessment of the Palestinian leadership, but then he began describing how he, as an Israeli Arab, is a second-class citizen in his own country. I don’t think that’s a message my Jewish colleagues wanted discussed.”

  As for the Holocaust, Grieves allowed that he had been very much impressed by the recent architectural redesign of the Yad V’Shem Museum. “The Palestinians need a Yad V’Shem too,” he said.

  Grieves returned from Israel under the impression that no gaps had been closed. “I don’t think we and our Jewish colleagues can have the kind of deep relationship we both want until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved,” he said.

  Three months after the trip, in January 2006, that goal grew most distant when the Palestinians held an election and chose a Hamas government. Hamas adamantly opposes the two-state solution that the Christian-Jewish pilgrims had called for, a fact that didn’t seem to change many minds on the Christian side. Brian Grieves and his colleagues chose to interpret the Hamas victory as simply a protest against the corruption of the previous PLO regime. Grieves told me that Israeli policies and behavior had driven the Palestinians into the arms of Hamas. He conceded that the Islamic fundamentalist doctrines of Hamas might make life harder for his Christian brethren in the Holy Land, but politics, in this case, would trump religious solidarity.

  But the Hamas victory made Palestinian solidarity a much tougher sell in the pews of the mainline churches. Liberal Protestants may not be Zionists in the same way as evangelicals but, like most Americans—especially since 9/11—Israel is more to their taste than its radical Muslim enemies.

  The Jewish establishment was aware of this, of course.

  “We always knew that in a down-and-dirty vote on supporting Israel, we would win in almost every church in the country,” Elcott told me. The establishment Jews had hoped that a trip to Israel might change the hearts and minds of the anti-Zionist activists, but, it turned out, they hadn’t counted on it. In the autumn of 2004, the Jewish establishment across the country undertook a covert, grassroots campaign to defeat the divestment movement. “You start talking about not doing business with Jews, there’s an echo of the Nuremberg Laws in a strange way,” says Jerry Benjamin, one of America’s best-known Jewish demographers. “We explained that to local liberal Christian ministers and laypeople around the country and a lot of them understood it.”

  Suddenly, in 2006, the anti-Zionist wing of the mainstream denominations found itself under attack in its own churches. One by one, their national denominational bodies began backing away from the Israel–South Africa equation (not to mention Grieves’s implicit Israel-Nazi comparison). The liberation theology activists didn’t like this one bit. “I’ve raised this issue with our Jewish counterparts,” I was told by Reverend Jay Rock, coordinator of interfaith relations for the Presbyterian Church (USA). “I don’t think our interfaith trip to Israel changed opinions very much, but I can tell you that the [Jewish] tactic of talking directly to our people has. It has been very successful in getting them to think about this in a pro-Israeli way.”

  For his part, Elcott was unrepentant about this Jewish assault on the mainstream church. “Churches aren’t isolated islands anymore,” Elcott told me. “What happens in one affects everybody. In America we have the right and maybe the obligation to try to influence each other’s thinking—even on matters of theology.”

  SEVEN

  A FLY ON THE WAILING WALL

  In December of 2005 I went on a Christian pilgrimage of my own to the Holy Land. My companions were thirty evangelicals from around the United States. None needed to be convinced of any Israeli narrative. They had the Bible, and that was enough.

  We met at a small hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel was packed, the entire city was bustling. In the previous five years of intifada, tourists—one of the economic mainstays of the capital—had been rare. During the worst period of bombings, I once breakfasted at the famous King David Hotel and found myself sharing the massive dining room with only one other guest, the American mediator, General Anthony Zinni.

  During the intifada, almost the only tourists in Jerusalem had been evangelical Christians. One year, on the holiday of Sukkot, I watched them march through the Old City of Jerusalem, surrounded by police and soldiers. A thin crowd of Israelis stood along the route and applauded. A pilgrim handed a piece of hard candy to a small boy wearing a skullcap. “Thank you,” his father told the American in English. To the boy he said, in Hebrew, “Throw that in the street.” The pious Jews of Jerusalem welcome the support of Christians, but that doesn’t mean their candy is kosher.

  STILL, THE ISRAELI-CHRISTIAN connection isn’t controversial in Israel. Some Israeli hard-line leftists object to evangelicals because evangelicals are so pro-American. Some far-right rabbis oppose them as proselytizers in Zionist clothing. But mainstream Israelis, left and right, are far too pragmatic for such ideological or pietistic scruples. This is especially true in the tourist industry, where evangelicals are seen as little less than saviors.

  “When I started out in this business ten years ago, I naturally concentrated on Jewish groups,” said Mark, our Jerusalem-based tour guide who was born and raised in Montreal. “But the intifada taught us something. The future of tourism is Christian. American Jews will still come in the summertime, but that’s going to be the icing on the cake. The cake is Christian Zionists, and that’s just going to grow.”

  Mark was the leader of our group, along with travel agent Madeline Cohen, a former Israeli, now living in Chicago, who specializes in Christian tourism. She had put together this group for Yechiel Eckstein’s International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. It was a random assortment of evangelicals from around the United States, people who had been strangers to one another until they met at the Toronto Airport en route to Israel. A few had never been outside the United States before. When they came down to dinner at the hotel dining room that first night, they wore looks of disoriented jet lag.

  “You probably saw more Jews today riding through Jerusalem on the way to the hotel than you’ve seen in your life,” I said to a lanky young woman from a small town in Montana.

  She laughed. “I saw more Jews in the airport,” she said. “I can’t recall ever seeing any Jews before.”

  Ours was a diverse group, young and old, black and
white, even a Roman Catholic. It included a retired naval commander with an interest in Zionist military history; an evangelist from Boston who once made national headlines for alleged child abuse; a Jamaican nurse from White Plains who had been inspired to visit Israel by Jewish urologists; an intense, mystical woman who installed airplane bathrooms at a Boeing plant in Seattle; a lady theologian with the gift of speaking in tongues; and a black woman from Atlanta who giggled continuously, made a modest living taking care of old people, and tithed her salary to Israel.

  At dinner I sat across from a man who bore a striking resemblance to Steve McQueen. He introduced himself as Catfish but was vague about his business and residence. “Lately I’ve been living in Port Saint Lucie, Florida,” he said.

  I searched my memory for Port Saint Lucie small talk. I had just written an article on fifties rock and roll, and this piece of trivia surfaced. “Carl Gardner, the former lead singer of the Coasters, lives in Port St. Lucie.”

  “Is that right? I heard Dickie Dale lived around there too, for a while, but I never saw him,” said Catfish.

  George Mamo, a Christian lay preacher and official of the IFCJ, called the group to order. Mamo is a quiet, bearded man, a former Catholic who once worked for Winrock Confidential. He asked people to introduce themselves and say why they had come. An ex-cop from a small town near Los Angeles said that he’d been inspired by attending the bar mitzvah of his commanding officer’s son. A woman from Arkansas said she’d been motivated by God’s commandment to bless Israel. A black woman from Illinois said she was on a roots trip: “This land belongs to my people, too,” she said. “Africa is home to us. So is Israel.”