JJ Goldberg, The Forward's editor, told me that one reason some Jewish leaders now feel liberated to take on the religious right is because the administration is no longer in a position to threaten them. "The timing here is crucial," he said. "The Bush administration is imploding, so the fear of White House retaliation is much lower than it was. That was a very real fear. It wasn't just a theoretical fear about Israel. It was threats. Play nice or you won't be able to come in and talk to us about the things you need. The major Jewish organizations, either individually or working through AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee], they go in every week because there's all kinds of stuff they need -- a missile, a box of bullets, intelligence sharing. It's good for them to be able to play that role and it's good for Israel and the United States to have an intermediary. In Tom DeLay's Washington, if you didn't play nice, you didn't get to walk in the door. So there has been this silence, coupled with the fact that they didn't think they could win."
Readers of this site know that evangelical support for Israel isn't motivated by solidarity with the Jews; it's largely inspired by premillenial dispensationalism, the belief that the return of the Jews to biblical Israel is a necessary precondition for the rapture, the apocalypse and the second coming. Jews don't fare well in this scenario -- in the "Left Behind" books, those who don't repent of the "specific national sin" of "[R]ejecting the messiahship of Jesus" are slaughtered (their anguish is conveyed in bloody detail) and consigned to hell. Jewish leaders who have decided to make alliances with the evangelical right know this, of course, but they figure that since they don't believe it's going to happen, it doesn't matter -- what's important is that the Christian right uses its considerable influence on Israel's behalf. (Leon Wieseltier perfectly characterized this arrangement as "a grim comedy of mutual condescension.")
I would argue that militant Christian Zionism is dangerous for Israel's security and for it's very existence, since it supports the most hard-line and expansionist elements in the country -- even Ariel Sharon is now to the movement's left. Ultimately, the two groups' interests collide, since those aggressively pursuing the conditions that would precipitate the rapture see a bloody war in the Middle East as something to be encouraged, not assiduously avoided.
But given the Christian right's own investment in Israel, I was struck that, apparently, some members of their movement are willing to use their support for the country as a bargaining chip in their domestic agenda. It's often hard to discern the balance between fervor and cynicism operating in right-wing power politics, but here it's pretty obvious.
Nice homeland you've got there, shame if something happened to it | 14 comments (14 topical, 0 hidden)
Nice homeland you've got there, shame if something happened to it | 14 comments (14 topical, 0 hidden)
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