Christians Split Over Conflict in the Mideast

The Mideast conflict is deepening a schism in the Christian Church between staunch supporters of Israel, who see Jews as God’s chosen people battling for their Promised Land, and those concerned that the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians violates Judaism’s core values of justice.

In recent days, Christians from both camps have unleashed a barrage of dueling messages on the Mideast--backed by their own selective readings of biblical commands about Israel. Evangelical Christian supporters of Israel cite God’s promises to Abraham of land and divine assurances that God would “curse those who curse” Jews. Those more troubled by Israeli actions focus on biblical railings that the chosen people would be “utterly destroyed” and the land would “vomit” them out if they failed to remain righteous and keep God’s commands.

The intensifying debate has cast the nation’s generally liberal Jews into an odd alliance with conservative evangelical believers and has strained relations with their more natural Christian allies. Those tensions are growing, as the recent violence at the Jenin refugee camp and the standoff at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem have fixated Christian attention on the Holy Land.

Church leaders in Jerusalem and a stream of Christian visitors to the Holy Land have sent out increasingly distressful e-mails from the scene--many of them highly critical of Israeli military actions--to millions of believers worldwide.

Far more than the Catholic Church sex scandals, the Mideast crisis is now the No. 1 concern among evangelical Christians, according to Richard Land of the 16million-member Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

In his frequent travels to Baptist churches throughout the nation, Land said he is constantly asked to relay messages to President Bush not to “abandon Israel” in his effort to secure peace in the Mideast.

“It is very, very important to evangelicals that the U.S. continue to back Israel,” said Land, president of the Baptist convention’s ethics committee. “The Bible Belt is Israel’s safety belt.”

White evangelical Protestants support Israel more strongly than the general American public--64% versus 49% in one recent national poll. In part, their support stems from personal religious beliefs that Jews need to be restored to the Promised Land before the second coming of Jesus can occur.

These advocates have taken a high-profile campaign for Israel to cyberspace, TV and the mass mails. Land and other evangelical leaders recently issued a letter to Bush decrying rising anti-Semitism and what they described as a campaign to “blame the Jews.” Pat Robertson, chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, is featuring “teachings” on his home page that affirm Jewish rights to the disputed land and castigate recent U.S.-led resolution of support for a Palestinian state by the United Nations Security Council.

In passing the resolution, Robertson wrote, the U.N. “said we don’t believe the word of God. We will reverse it, and the United States led the way to say we want to take East Jerusalem back from the Jewish nation in defiance of the words of Jesus Christ.”

Robertson added that such events were forecast in the Bible. Quoting the prophet Zecharia warning of a time when Israel would be attacked by all nations of the world, bringing forth the Lord to battle for Jerusalem, Robertson urged Americans to “begin to pray.”

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, meanwhile, has posted a “Keep Jerusalem Free” petition on his Web site that says, in part: “Palestinian terror MUST stop.... Arafat and his militant Palestinian groups must never be allowed to claim Jerusalem as their own.”

Passions on the other side are just as intense. In Southern California, 83 leaders, most Christian, recently brought a letter to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) asking Congress for a more “balanced” Mideast policy.

The letter, signed by leaders from Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Methodist and other mainline denominations, called the Israeli occupation “illegal and unjustifiable” and blamed it for escalating the violence. (Schiff said he told the group that it was the Palestinian suicide bombings that had devastated the peace process and that there was “no moral equivalency” between those terrorist acts and Israel defense forces’ actions.)

Several Christians participated in a recent silent vigil in Pasadena’s Old Town, where more than 100 people brandished signs and passed out fliers calling for justice for Palestinians. At one corner, evangelical scholar Mark Harlan told a curious passerby that Palestinians had lost hope, and were forced to resort to suicide bombings because “they don’t have F-16s” like the Israeli military.

“Unfortunately, fanatical Islam springs up when you have this oppression and people feel desperate and see no other option,” said Harlan, who explained that his once-hawkish views supporting Israel had been transformed by several years in Jordan teaching theology to Arab Christians.

Glen Stassen, a Fuller Theological Seminary professor in Pasadena, called Harlan a “symbol of the change” occurring among many Christians, who he said seem to be rethinking their traditional one-sided support of Israel.

“I think there is an awakening and growing distress about what Israel is doing with its army and with the settlements because of the messages that the church in Israel is sending out,” said Stassen, who also considers himself an evangelical Christian.

For example, the Episcopal Church Web site is carrying links to diaries from its churches in Nablus and Ramallah describing massive Israeli destruction of the communities there.

“They continue to destroy everything in their way including valuable documents, archives, research work, medical and dental clinics .... In short, they are destroying the Palestinian people--their identity, their culture and their memory,” said one April 20 letter from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Ramallah.

Stassen, a professor of Christian ethics and author of “Just Peacemaking,” argued that God did not give Israel the land unconditionally, but warned that unless people acted with justice, they would be punished with war and exile. “The greatness of Israel is the commitment to justice for the oppressed, and many Jews are now really concerned that they are losing their identity because of the violence,” Stassen said.

Such views provoke withering retorts from people like Land, who called Stassen a “neo-evangelical” and his biblical views “silly nonsense.”

“God does not make conditional covenants,” Land declared.

On the national level, another letter on the Mideast was issued last week by a delegation from the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, which represents 50 million believers in 36 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox denominations.

The delegation, which recently returned from a trip to the Mideast, called on both sides to end the violence. But the group said it was “alarmed” over what it called Israel’s “intentional destruction of Palestinian civil society.”

It called on the Jewish state to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, dismantle settlements and address the Palestinian refugee problem. The statement also called for a shared Jerusalem and Palestinian affirmation of Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.

Meanwhile, in a widely circulated commentary published last week, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa expressed distress that Israeli Jews who had experienced the iniquities of the Holocaust were now subjecting Palestinians to a humiliation that reminded him of his homeland’s apartheid policies.

“Such reactions have frustrated many American Jews, who question why their progressive friends seem to have left them with fundamentalists as Israel’s strongest Christian allies. The generally liberal American Jewish community is often at odds with evangelicals over such issues as prayer in public schools, end-times prophecies and proselytizing.”Many liberal Jews are uncomfortable, if not offended, with having these fundamentalist Christians be the only Christian friends of Israel, and their motives in my mind are highly suspect,” said Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark of Temple Beth Ohr in La Mirada, a Reform Jew and past president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California. “But at tough times, you’ve got to take your friends wherever you can get them.”

On the Orthodox side, however, Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles said he was gratified by the evangelical support. He criticized their more liberal Christian brethren for “making an icon of left-leaning Western values and putting that ahead of the Judeo-Christian ethic of good and evil.”

“People with as much blood on their hands as the church can’t point fingers,” Adlerstein said.

The difficulty of bridging the divides among faith communities was illustrated by a recent failed attempt to draft an interfaith statement on the Mideast by the Rev. Ed Bacon of All Saints Church in Pasadena, a liberal Episcopal congregation. Among other things, the statement faulted the Israel occupation as the primary source of violence, and failed to get even liberal members from the Progressive Jewish Alliance to sign on.

“There are political and emotional land mines on both sides that just set people off,” Bacon said. “It’s a matter now of learning where they are.”