A Match Made in Heaven

by Zev Chafets

  This is not to say that there are no actual disagreements between the Jewish liberal mainstream and conservative evangelicals. There are, and will be. But the rhetorical gaps are much greater than the real differences.

  To a large extent, American Jews, even after 350 years in the New World, define themselves in opposition to Christians, as the people who don’t go to church, get presents from Santa, or invoke Jesus. In recent years, they have also come to see themselves as sophisticated, upscale, ironic, Ivy League, even a bit European, with all that entails—very much including contempt for those who are not. Jews may not have landed at Plymouth Rock, but in recent decades they have made it to Martha’s Vineyard, and they are sometimes not very sensitive to the feelings of the inhabitants of Gilligan’s Island.

  But that’s changing. When Eric Yoffie returned from his visit with Jerry Falwell, he was deluged by messages from Reform rabbis and lay leaders from around the country. A few were angry, but most were highly positive. “I was taken aback by that,” Yoffie told me a few days later. “On some level, I was amazed.”

  PART THREE

  AFTERWORD: WARTIME

  THIRTEEN

  SUMMER CAMP

  At the end of June 2006, my family and I went to Israel. Annie, now nine, attended a day camp outside Tel Aviv. Coby, ten, went off to his first sleepaway camp, at Michmoret, on the shore of the Mediterranean, not far from Haifa.

  Tel Aviv, when we arrived, was a big party. The cafés were full, the beaches packed, the roads clogged with cars at two in the morning as people headed to clubs and restaurants. The stock market was up, business was good, and everyone talked about the fact that Warren Buffett himself had just bought an Israeli company. Sure, a soldier had been captured in Gaza and rockets were falling on a few border towns in the south, but they were small towns and small rockets. Here and there, terrorists were caught trying to infiltrate from the West Bank, which the public shrugged off on a no-harm, no-foul basis. Ariel Sharon, the last great hero of the War of Independence, had been felled by a massive stroke and it was a sign of the country’s mellow mood that he had been replaced as prime minister by Ehud Olmert, a lawyer and politician with no military background and no charisma. Olmert pledged to undertake an almost complete withdrawal from the West Bank—a plan that would have been considered treasonous by his mentor, Menachem Begin, and politically toxic only a few years earlier. Pessimists fretted over the Iranian nuclear program, but the general sentiment was that the Bush administration could handle it, and anyway the issue would wait until after the World Cup finals in mid-July.

  But on July 12, a Hezbollah commando unit crossed the northern border from Lebanon, attacked an Israeli patrol, killed eight soldiers, and took two more hostage. A barrage of Katyusha rockets hit the towns and farms of the Galilee. Prime Minister Olmert responded with a massive bombing of Hezbollah targets. Just like that, summer was over.

  The Israeli battle plan was to wipe out Hezbollah from the air. But it became obvious it wouldn’t work. Since Israel had left Lebanon unilaterally in 2000 (a withdrawal I supported), Iran and Syria had turned Hezbollah into a frontline infantry force. As Israeli planes futilely bombed well-built fortifications, hundreds of rockets rained down on northern Israel every day.

  My son Coby was at camp when the war started, and at the end of his first week we drove up for a Saturday visit. It was a festive scene, hundreds of parents mingling on the lawn, munching pizza and listening to the skits and songs of the campers. The kids of a sister camp in the Galilee were there too, brought down to Coby’s camp the day before to get them out of rocket range.

  The camp director made it plain that he contemplated no change in schedule. “I doubt the missiles can reach us this far south,” he said. “But if they do, we have shelters here. And we’ve been in touch with the civil defense authorities. Don’t worry, things will be fine.”

  The next day, at five in the afternoon, we got a call from the director. There had been a change in the military intelligence assessment. The camp was now considered to be within Hezbollah’s range (a couple of weeks later a missile struck not far away). “We’re calling off the session,” he said. “Come get Coby right now.”

  Tel Aviv was also deemed within range. The government advised everyone in the metropolitan area to clean out their shelters, designate a safe room, and plan to run for cover in the event of an attack.

  Lisa and I gave Coby and our daughter, Annie, a security briefing. They could play outside, but if they heard a siren they must race home. If they were too far away, they should take cover in a nearby building. “If an adult grabs you, go with him,” Lisa said. Annie and Coby looked at each other with wide eyes; I thought of the expression in my older son Shmulik’s eyes when I put a gas mask on him during the first Gulf War. Shmulik was a man now, a combat veteran of the intifada, finishing his first year in law school. He phoned his army reserve unit and asked why they hadn’t called him up yet. Within a week, they did.

  Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf states, and Egypt worried about the encroachments of Iran in Lebanon but, under pressure from their public opinion, fell into anti-Israel line. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan blamed Israel for “apparently” intentionally killing UN personnel in south Lebanon and spoke out against Israel’s “disproportionate” response (in fact, Israel’s response proved to be disproportionately mild; too mild to defeat Hezbollah, but that wasn’t a goal of the UN). The Europeans predictably waffled; the French foreign minister even referred to Iran as a “stabilizing force” in the Middle East. The BBC and elite continental media judged Israel to be the aggressor.

  None of this made much difference to Jerusalem; only the American attitude mattered. Some Israeli analysts predicted that Bush would soon force a halt to the fighting, which only proved that the pundits hadn’t learned anything about the American president during the homat magen campaign three years earlier. Bush called Hezbollah the “root of the problem” and, unlike even his most pro-Israeli predecessors in the White House, saw to it that Israel had all the time it wanted. The president of the United States was not acting as an honest broker in this dispute, or even a dishonest one. He was flat-out pro-Israel.

  Americans were, too. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll taken three weeks into the fighting showed 59 percent thought Israel was justified. Asked if, more generally, the United States should continue to side with Israel, 50 percent said yes. Only 2 percent said the United States should side more with Arab countries.

  But the LA Times/Bloomberg poll also revealed a partisan gap. Two-thirds of Republicans said they favored continuing the alliance with Israel; only 39 percent of Democrats did. Most Democratic politicians around the country were vocally supportive of Israel; no one wanted to buck the party’s Jewish establishment in a congressional election year. But it was a warning sign to Jewish liberal Zionists.

  As usual, some of Israel’s strongest critics were Jews. Congressman Bob Filner of California supported a cease-fire resolution that would have allowed Hezbollah to remain in place.

  Adam Shatz, a literary editor at The Nation, compared Israel to the Nazis and Hezbollah to the French resistance. Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun joined the National Council of Churches in a stance of “moral neutrality” between the Jewish state and its fascist enemies. A handful of Jewish “progressives” marched in Washington in an anti-Israel rally sponsored by the ANSWER coalition led by Ramsey Clark, the National Council of Arab Americans, and the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. The speaker’s rostrum was decorated with a large banner, “Lebanon. Iraq. Palestine,” which—unwittingly—made President Bush’s point exactly: all three of those battlefields were part of the same war.

  But these were marginal voices. Even mainstream American Jews who opposed war in Iraq were united behind the administration’s support for Israel. In the 1982 war in Lebanon many Jewish liberals, influenced by the Israeli peace camp, had opposed the Begin government. But in 2006, Amir Peretz, a Labor Party peacenik, was the Israel
i defense minister. When Human Rights Watch, headed by Kenneth Roth, undertook a crude, anti-Israel campaign, the group—normally the darling of liberal Jews—was denounced by every important Jewish organization in the country.

  It fell to the Christian Zionists to hold the first major pro-Israel rally in Washington. This was an accident of timing. Reverend John Hagee’s new group, Christians United For Israel, had scheduled its first national meeting for July 18. The war was only a week old when three thousand evangelical activists gathered at the Washington Hilton. The dais included Ken Mehlman, Jerry Falwell, Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum, and the Israeli ambassador. Reverend Hagee gave a rousing speech in which he called the Bible “God’s foreign policy statement” and made it clear that Israel’s fight against Hezbollah was part of World War III. The next day, he sent his Christian soldiers to deliver that message to their congressional representatives.

  American Jewish Zionists were upstaged once more when Pat Robertson showed up in Israel. Bombs fell as he broadcast The 700 Club from the town of Metulla, toured shelters in the Galilee, and visited Jerusalem. Forgiven by Israeli officials for his “God-smote-Sharon” crack, Robertson was warmly received by Prime Minister Olmert. The Pat reported that the two held hands and prayed, undoubtedly one of the harder moments of the war for the resolutely secular and deeply cynical Olmert.

  Robertson also gave a long interview to the Jerusalem Post, in which he set forth his view of the conflict. “The Jews are God’s Chosen People,” he said. “Israel is a special nation that has a special place in God’s heart. He will defend this nation. So evangelical Christians stand with Israel. That is one of the reasons I am here.”

  Robertson agreed with Bush, and Olmert, that the fight in Lebanon was part of a bigger war. “The nexus of this one comes out of Iran, which is ruled by a man who seems to be a wild-eyed fanatic,” he said.

  Robertson was asked if he told Olmert not to give up biblical land in the West Bank. “Olmert has been elected as the leader of Israel,” Robertson said. “The Israelis have to be responsible for what their leaders do. It’s up to them as a free society to determine the course of action of their nation…. I don’t think the holy God is going to be happy about someone giving up his land. But that would be between Mr. Olmert and his God. It isn’t for me to say….”

  WHILE PAT ROBERTSON was in Jerusalem, a man named Naveed Afzal Haq burst into the Jewish Federation office in Seattle, held a gun to the head of a thirteen-year-old girl, forced his way through security doors, and opened fire with two pistols. He shot six women. Five were wounded, including Danya Klein, who was pregnant. Another, Pat Waechter, died.

  As Mr. Haq explained to a 911 operator, “These are Jews and I’m tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East.”

  Following this incident, the Forward, voice of Upper West Side liberalism, flirted in an editorial with the possibility that there might actually be a jihad going on.

  The initial response to the Seattle shooting has been to treat it as something akin to an overheated domestic quarrel. The alleged shooter, Naveed Haq, is discussed as a mere misguided soul suffering from a toxic mix of ethnic prejudice and mental illness. That’s how we responded to the deadly shooting attacks on the El Al desk at Los Angeles International Airport in 2002, on the observation deck of the Empire State Building in 1997, on Lubavitch students on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994. Each was seen as an isolated act by a deranged individual. To think otherwise, to suspect that the shootings were part of a broad pattern of Muslim rage against Israel—a criminally violent response, that is, to actual Israeli actions—would be, in our minds, to legitimize the violence and blame the victim. We don’t want to go there.

  That logic may have worked once, in an America of picket fences and Brotherhood Week. It does not make sense in a nation where colleges host “death to Israel” rallies, where movie stars and university deans publicly blame Israel and the Jews for America’s troubles. In today’s incendiary atmosphere, it does not take an organized conspiracy to create a concrete threat to American Jews. The nature of the threats has changed. It is time for a change in the response.

  And what should the new response be? Did the Forward call on young Jews to join the fight, enlist in the army or the CIA or the FBI? Did it demand more stringent surveillance of radical Islamic movements in the United States? No, the Forward, speaking for the Jewish left, didn’t want to go there.

  Instead, it put the onus on Israel.

  “We proclaimed to the world that we and Israel are one,” the paper said ruefully.

  It may once have been true that Israel’s policies were only Israel’s business, but no longer. In this new, interconnected world, American Jews now share the costs of Israel’s actions. We are entitled to have our interests represented at the table where decisions are made. If the organizations that purport to represent American Jews will not speak for us, then someone else must be found who will do the job.

  Reading the editorial, I wondered what Professors Mearsheimer and Walt would make of the idea—American Jews sitting around the cabinet table of the Israeli government in Jerusalem deciding policy.

  IN THE MEANTIME, the Jewish community geared up for fund-raising. The United Jewish Appeal, now known as the United Jewish Communities, began an emergency fund that brought in upwards of $170 million in one month. But the real financial news of the war was supplied by Yechiel Eckstein.

  Eckstein filmed a commercial, featuring missiles firing, blaring sirens, a fearful Israeli woman, and an 800 number and tried to buy airtime on the three cable news networks. CNN and MSNBC turned him down, but Fox agreed. As soon as the ads hit the air it became apparent that Eckstein had, once more, turned on the golden spigot.

  The normal expectation for a televised appeal is 80 cents on the dollar; the other 20 cents and a profit come in follow-up solicitations. Eckstein didn’t get 80 cents. He got $3.00, an almost unheard-of response. On August 8, an internal memo of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews reported, “We are up to 145.1 percent of last year at this time.”

  Eckstein’s ads were airing in the United States at the end of July, when we returned from Israel. More than a year had passed since I had seen Pastor Steve Munsey ride his Harley onto the pulpit at the Family Christian Center in Indiana. Since then I had chatted with members of the biblical tribe of Manasseh in the Armageddon grocery store, lunched with a woman who raises the dead, fellowshipped with Jerry Falwell, and floated on the Sea of Galilee with a guy named Catfish. Sue Ricksecker, the church secretary from Pontiac, kept sending me books, including a rare copy of Famous Hebrew Christians, with a chapter on Hyman Appleman; presumably I was still on her cell phone conversion list. I had talked Jewish politics with Ken Mehlman and The Professional, toured Pat Robertson’s Virginia headquarters, met a born-again Hollywood producer on an angel-hunting expedition in Denver, and spent countless hours trying to explain to my friends and relatives what on earth I was looking for.

  I had been looking for confirmation that making common cause with the Republican evangelical “enemy” was both safe and prudent—and the war in Lebanon confirmed it. Israel’s security now depends on this coalition, just as a viable Jewish diaspora depends on Israel’s continued well-being. And, in the clutch of jihad, that coalition is proving itself.

  Baffled European elites can’t imagine anyone really liking Israel, a country that the French ambassador in London, in a moment of exasperated candor, once described as a “shitty little country.” But thanks to Christian Zionists—foremost among them George W. Bush—support for Israel had become not a Jewish special interest, or even a short-term strategic partnership, but a bilateral, bicultural, all-American fact of life.

  FOURTEEN

  YES FOR AN ANSWER

  A fact, not a given. There are no final victories in the affairs of nations, no eternal alliances, and nothing’s free. Evangelicals may be, as Yechiel Eckstein says, “pure,” an
d they may support Israel for biblical reasons. But there is more than one way to read the Bible, and every self has interests.

  A month into the war in Lebanon, an enterprising Associated Press reporter, Rachel Zell, noticed a strange silence where declarations of support for Israel should have been. She called three major evangelical groups—Focus on the Family, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the National Association of Evangelicals—and asked why they had refrained from publicly supporting the Jewish state.

  James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, reacted immediately by issuing a statement comparing Israel with “little David” up against “mighty Goliath” and labeling Hezbollah the aggressor. “While we are praying without ceasing for the innocent victims in Lebanon, we stand firmly with Israel and the Jews,” he said.

  Richard Land, the SBC’s man in Washington, who had appeared at Yechiel Eckstein’s Stand For Israel conference the previous fall, was a little softer. “Southern Baptists overwhelmingly support Israel’s right to live at peace with her neighbors and pray for the peace of Jerusalem to prevail in the Middle East,” he said. Lebanon and Hezbollah went unmentioned.

  The most interesting reaction belonged to Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals. Haggard admitted that the Israeli government had been pressuring him to make a statement of support, and he had refused.