Professional Documents
Culture Documents
VICTORIA CLARK
Afterword 284
Notes 290
Bibliography 311
Index 322
Illustrations
Intended for a general and secular audience, Allies for Armageddon does not
set out to tackle the rights and wrongs of Christian Zionist Bible exegesis,
but I am greatly indebted to the works of two theologians in particular
– Dr Stephen Sizer’s Christian Zionism: Road-Map to Armageddon?
(2004) and Dr Timothy P. Weber’s On the Road to Armageddon: How
Evangelicals became Israel’s Best Friend (2004) – for their lucid and detailed
treatment of the subject from a more theological and academic point of
view. A book as wide-ranging in time and space as this one would not have
been possible without copious reference to the work of countless other
historians and journalists to all of whom I am extremely grateful. I have
the British Library in London, the Library of Congress in Washington and
the Internet to thank for access to their works.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude too to the American Christian Zionists
who allowed me to attend their functions and agreed to speak to me,
and even, in the case of Ted Beckett, offered me friendship and generous
hospitality, despite knowing they might be talking to a ‘liberal secular
humanist relativist’. I deeply appreciated their honesty and openness, as
well as their helpful willingness to put me in contact with other Christian
Zionists. I owe a special thanks to acquaintances forged on Chuck Missler’s
tour of the Holy Land; they made what might have been a lonely and
gruelling research trip a real pleasure.
Without Sophie and Alec Russell’s generous hospitality in Washington
for a month in the autumn of 2005, I would not have enjoyed that portion
of my research nearly as much. The hospitality of friends in Jerusalem –
Nasra and Rahme Dahdal, George Hintlian and Fr Athanasius Macora
– lightened the load of my Israel research. Chris Stephen’s company in
Texas in October 2006 was another welcome boon. Michael Cromartie of
the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Dr John Green at the Pew Forum
on Religion and Public Life, both in Washington, gave me early and crucial
x Acknowledgements
most dangerous and rabid ever.’ 5 His point of view is intelligible only when
one considers that around just under one in three reasonably educated and
decently prosperous Americans like those I encountered on Chuck Missler’s
Holy Land tour sincerely believes that God opposes a peaceful settlement
of the Israel–Palestine conflict in the form of a Palestinian homeland, and
many of them lobby their politicians to act accordingly.
Christian Zionists rarely identify themselves as such, first because
of the word Zionism’s pejorative colouring, but secondly because they
believe it goes without saying that any good Christian who reads their
Bible right must uphold Israel’s claim to the land God promised Abraham.
Generally, they describe themselves as ‘Bible-believing Christians’, a term
which inevitably casts aspersions on Christians of the older denomina-
tional churches who believe the Bible but choose to interpret its truths in
a more metaphorical fashion. Sometimes they call themselves ‘evangelicals’
or, more rarely, Christian fundamentalists. American historians of religion
often divide Bible-believers into ‘evangelicals’ and ‘fundamentalists’,
but for the non-religious, and in the context of Christian Zionism, the
distinction is academic. If the word ‘fundamentalist’ is used in its now
popular sense, to refer to anyone whose vital beliefs and world-view are
informed by a selective and literal reading of a sacred text, then Christian
Zionists are all fundamentalists. Most Bible-believers and evangelicals and
all fundamentalists are Christian Zionists.
I embarked on this examination of Christian Zionism in mid-2005 in
order to determine to what extent the religious ideology might constitute a
threat to the secular values of western civilisation since the Enlightenment.
True, Christian Zionists weren’t Islamic fundamentalists, flying planes into
Tehran skyscrapers or planting bombs on Damascus buses, but history has
often shown how words, ideas and money can end up breaking bones just
as surely as sticks and stones. By immersing myself in the movement – in
its long history, in its dominant personalities, its theology, its politics, its
group activities and its media – I hoped to gain a clearer view of the true
nature and influence of a phenomenon that is either heartily applauded or,
alternatively, stridently vilified as our own western world’s mirror image
of Islamic fundamentalism.
Like it or not, the Christian face which the battling and embattled
Muslim world is seeing at the start of the twenty-first century is predomi-
nantly a Christian Zionist one. Israel–Palestine is visited by hundreds of
thousands of American Christian Zionist pilgrims every year. Joining a
Christian Zionist tour of the Holy Land, one among dozens advertised on
the Internet, seemed to me a good way of engaging with the movement I
was setting out to describe. In the first place, I couldn’t think of a better
Chuck Missler’s Tour of the Holy Land 7
Melissa and I were both listed on the ‘blue bus’, which led the convoy of
four. On that first morning of the tour Chuck and Nancy Missler sat up
front, by the driver.
A petite blonde neatly dressed in pastels and white and outsize sunglasses,
Nancy exuded an air of hard-won serenity. Chuck, a Californian giant in
his early seventies, robust and bluff and handsomely endowed with the
charisma of a born leader, welcomed us all aboard with a merry quip,
‘Hey! I noticed how few of you were going for the biblical breakfast.’ He
was comparing the tinned fish on the buffet table with that which Jesus
cooked fresh for his apostles on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
After improvising an opening prayer – ‘Lord, we thank you for making
it possible for us to be in your land ...’ – Chuck instructed our Israeli
guide, Ronni, to teach us the Israeli national anthem, the Hatikvah. With
a grimace of ironic distaste, Ronni did his best. The group’s enthusiasm
helped.
First stop, the Roman ruins of Caesarea where Chuck, sporting a
green sun visor emblazoned with acts 17:11 (a coded invitation to Jews
to recognise Jesus as their messiah), settled us all down on the steps of
the ancient amphitheatre, for some bible study. A practised performer,
he warmed us up with the information that the logo on his business
Chuck Missler’s Tour of the Holy Land 9
card read ‘Have Bible, will babble.’ Next, he drew our attention to the
Old Testament Book of Obadiah, 1: 9, which speaks of ancient Israel’s
enemies, the Edomites, being ‘slaughtered’ and ‘covered with shame’. ‘It is
a legitimate perspective,’ Chuck informed us, ‘to view those Edomites as
today’s Hamas. The Edomites are the descendants of Esau who, as you all
know, always hated the House of Jacob, the Jews, so they incurred God’s
specific wrath.’ He continued: ‘My point is that we’re seeing the same
thing with Hamas today.’ The Hebrew word for ‘shame’, he told us, was
bushah. ‘Anyone recognise the name of our president? Could be a bit of a
stretch, but we’ll see!’ The man sitting beside me had a bible open on one
knee, a notepad on the other. He was writing down Chuck’s every word.
While exploring the Roman ruins I got talking to Ron. A former
management consultant for IBM, he was now a full-time pastor based
in Portsmouth in Britain, and busily distributing Chuck’s works – books,
DVDs and CDs – all over Europe. Ron had known Chuck for twenty-five
years, and he explained to me that Chuck’s reputation in the field of bible
prophecy rested on his uniquely impressive background in the fields of
science, the defence industry and military intelligence.
By the age of nine, Ron told me, Chuck was already an amateur radio
ham. Aged fourteen, he was building a primitive computer in his parents’
garage, and learning to fly aeroplanes. A spell in the navy was followed
by another in the air force as a branch chief in the Department of Guided
Missiles, and then by a move into the private sector, as a systems engineer
for a large aerospace firm. Chuck spent his thirties, the 1960s, working
on intelligence and defence projects for the state, and setting up the first
international computer network for Ford Motor Company in Michigan.
During the 1970s and ’80s, his forties and fifties, he was setting up his
own companies, and rescuing others. On one occasion, Ron told me, while
Chuck was managing director of Western Digital Corporation, travelling
to Israel for a meeting with Israeli defence chiefs, his hosts sent up two
military jets to escort his plane into Tel Aviv.
Chuck was a man of substance and standing, it seems, living the
American dream with Nancy and their four children in Big Bear, California
when disaster struck. In 1990, what Chuck had billed as ‘the deal of the
century’ – a multibillion-dollar contract to supply six million personal
computers to perestroika-era Soviet businesses and schools – collapsed in a
mire of unpaid debts. After flying his Soviet clients around the country in a
hired Lear jet and helicopter, after a glitzy New York launch, and a boast
to his Bible class back home that foreknowledge of the deal had reached
him by divine inspiration, a subsidiary of Chuck’s investment company was
discovered to have no experience in computer production and insufficient
10 Introduction
capital. The Misslers were liable for everything: their home, cars and even
their health insurance. Chuck had had to reinvent himself. Decoding the
Bible became his new living.
It has served him well. He’s now a leading exponent of Christian
Zionism, a popular speaker and the author of a number of books, CDs
and DVDs. He has a daily Christian radio programme, 66/44, and a
flourishing Internet ministry, Koinonia House, which advertises itself as
‘bringing the world into focus through the lens of Bible prophecy’, based
in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
Ron didn’t object to my describing Chuck as a fundamentalist, or to
my asking how he differed, in his essence, from an Islamic fundamentalist.
‘Fundamentalism’s natural to a scientist because a scientist can trust some
basics,’ he said. ‘Liberals can’t trust anything. You can’t be a liberal and
a real scientist.’
Our next stop was Megiddo – Armageddon – a hill rising high above the
Plain of Jezreel. Picturing the battle against the Antichrist at which Jesus
will stage his Second Coming, one of my fellow tourists marvelled: ‘Would
you just look at that! The place is just made for strategic manoeuvring,
isn’t it?’ But Chuck had different ideas: ‘By the way, there won’t be any
battle here at Armageddon. That down there’s just the gathering place for
the final assault on Jerusalem, like England was the launch pad for the
Normandy landings in World War Two. Check it out, Isaiah 63! But I can
tell you now that it would be a very convenient place for Israeli pilots to
return to after sorties against Iran.’
Someone asked Chuck how he viewed the threat of a nuclear-armed
Iran. ‘We’ll talk about that in a more sequestered environment,’ he
said, frowning. Someone wanted to know if the Antichrist was alive
today. ‘Absolutely!’ answered Chuck, ‘but let’s save that discussion for
another time ...’ Someone else pressed him on the details of the Battle of
Armageddon. ‘That stuff about the blood reaching as high as the horses’
bridles?’ said Chuck. ‘Well, there are different interpretations ...’
‘Which nations will be fighting Israel at the Battle of Armageddon?’
was the next question. ‘All of ’em!’ Chuck fired back. ‘The members of
the European Union and the United Nations are all anti-Israel.’ Someone
asked him when we could expect Armageddon and the Second Coming.
‘Many of us,’ said Chuck, presumably referring to an elite of bible-
prophecy experts he belonged to, ‘believe it’s going to happen within
the next few decades. All the pieces are dropping into place; we’re just
waiting for Turkey to get rejected by the European Union. It’s a case of
when you pass downtown stores full of Christmas decorations, you know
Thanksgiving’s on its way!’
Chuck Missler’s Tour of the Holy Land 11
Melissa and I were woken early and reduced to helpless giggles by the
sound of male voices raised in argument next door. The tenor of the
discussion and the odd word – ‘Rapture’ and ‘prophecy’ and ‘End Times’
– were a giveaway. It was my first-night table companions, Marty and
Richard.
My room-mate and I shared a language and a sense of humour but I
often failed to catch her meaning. When I expressed surprise that none
of the group drank a glass of wine or beer with their evening meal, she
Chuck Missler’s Tour of the Holy Land 13
my great pleasure to connect the Christian community like this with the
Israel Defence Forces ...’ – was barely audible above the Bible-tourists’
happy chatter.
We all clustered around a tangled hillock of khaki Israeli army shirts,
each selecting and donning one, as instructed. ‘You look great!’, ‘Hey, you’re
going to need the biggest they’ve got!’ Some strayed away to photograph
each other against a background of Israeli military hardware: ‘Can you
get one of me on the tank?’, ‘Go stand by that jeep, will you?’ An ex-
Marine happily noted that the Israeli and US armies used the same make
of gun. Buttoning a shirt over his barrel chest, Terry repeated his birthday
wish and added another: ‘I just hope they’ll let me fire a gun now, and
donate some blood.’ Chuck outdid us all by dressing up in full military
kit – shirt, helmet and flak jacket – but there was something missing. In
a group photo of last year’s visit to the base I had viewed on his website,
he’d been posing with a gun.
Guns are as American as apple pie. No one I spoke to found it strange,
let alone distasteful, that adherents to a religion whose founder preached
‘blessed are the peacemakers’ should be condoning and blessing the
activities of an army infamous worldwide for its brutal efficiency. An
interior decorator from Florida restricted her comments to worries about
the shabby state of the base. I concluded that support for the military,
whether American or Israeli, came as naturally and was as unquestionable
as Christian Zionism to these foot-soldiers of the American Religious
Right. It occurred to me that the international outcry following President
Bush’s use of the word ‘crusade’ to describe his post 9/11 War on Terror
would have taken my fellow tourists utterly by surprise.
For many of the group, especially the men, the visit was a highlight of
the tour, the main reason why, like me, they’d selected it over the hundreds
of others advertised via their churches or Internet ministries like Chuck’s.
For some, the discovery that it was only an engineering corps base, far
from any flashpoint, and almost deserted because most of the soldiers
had been sent home for a long weekend, was a little disappointing. Terry
quickly realised he wouldn’t be allowed near a gun. But Ronni the tour
guide told us that our visit meant we belonged to Israel and Israel to us,
and the liaison officer assured us that our support meant a lot to the
soldiers. After a request that we donate to the army’s welfare fund, she
divided us into work-teams. Some of us were set to planting the tour
group’s gift of cypress trees, some to weeding verges, some to collecting
rubbish and others, myself included, to spring-cleaning the mess hall.
The chief cook looked irritated, then baffled, but finally amused by the
arrival of a troop of American women wearing crumpled army shirts over
Chuck Missler’s Tour of the Holy Land 15
their holiday casuals. He needed us to mop the floor, clean the windows,
scrub all the tables and hundreds of plastic chairs, he said. Outside, another
team was crouched over the flowerbeds, while another roamed the base
in search of empty cans and plastic bags. Planting trees was the hardest
work. New Zealand Rachel worked up a sweat, swinging a pickaxe at the
rocky soil, while Chuck and Marty loitered in some shade, downloading,
as Marty put it, about prophecy and global issues.
In the space of two hours the mess hall was gleaming, our gift of fifty
saplings had been planted and the verges were neat. Lunch was served.
Chuck rose to his feet to ask us to pray for ‘a special blessing’ on the
Israeli Defence Force, ‘in the name of Yeshua’ – Hebrew for Jesus. At
the end of the meal we did our ragged, unaccompanied best to sing the
Hatikvah again.
Ronni was pensive and weary that afternoon, too weary to give us a
thorough guided tour of the Roman ruins at Bet Saida. Perching on a pile
of stones, he told us he would love to believe in God but just couldn’t bring
himself to because ‘in Israel, religion divides people from each other’.
‘Thank you for sharing that with us, Ronni,’ said a usually taciturn
American called Sam.
‘That’s God working on you,’ said Marty, a quiver of excitement in his
voice; ‘just the fact that you’re saying that.’
The mood had changed. Everyone forgot the morning’s hard labour. As
Ronni continued, we were enthralled by the impromptu drama unfolding
before our eyes. ‘OK, let’s say I become a believer – which God should I
believe in? I’m a Jew, so I should believe in the Jewish God, but how can
I when he allowed six million of us to die in the Holocaust?’
‘But your God told you people all along that if you do this, this will
happen and if you do that, that will happen,’ answered Sam. ‘You know
God deals with nations as well as with people, don’t you?’
‘But six million?’
‘Don’t blame Hitler’s action on God,’ interjected Marty. ‘The enemy is
Satan – the one who hates Jews is Satan. He was just using the Jews to
attack Jesus.’
Marty and Sam were standing over Ronni, jabbing their forefingers at
him for emphasis, urgent. The rest of us were silent, watching.
‘The Bible says that you Jews are partially blinded until the fullness of
the Gentiles comes in,’ Sam was saying.
Ronni ignored that. ‘But can you tell me, where is God when children
are dying of hunger in Africa?’
‘Saving those African souls is more important than giving them a meal,’
Sam retorted, before trying another approach. ‘Hey Ronni, you want to
16 Introduction
know why Christians like us are so attached to Jews? It’s because no other
people has demonstrated through history that the Word of God is true.
Prophecies about the Jews have been fulfilled and are being fulfilled.’
‘You’re seeking, Ronni. God has you here by divine appointment,’ added
Marty, reverently.
Sam’s young wife, who was standing beside me, reached for my hand
and that of the person on the other side of her, and struck up a hymn. She
seemed to think that Ronni was about to recognise Jesus as his messiah,
but the rest of us were not so sure. I didn’t take her hand and no one took
up her tune. The drama ended.
In the privacy of our room that night, Melissa confided that the incident
had left her feeling out of her depth. ‘I think some of the gentlemen on
this tour are all brain and no heart,’ she said, heading off to the hotel
gym instead of to Chuck’s evening lecture.
The session was interesting in three respects. Chuck warned us that
Jews who refuse to acknowledge Jesus as their messiah by the time of
the Battle of Armageddon will face divine punishment in the form of a
double-strength Holocaust. ‘Check it out! Zechariah 13:8 – “in the whole
land, says the Lord, two thirds shall be cut off and perish, and one third
shall be left alive”. A third of the world’s Jews, six million out of eighteen
million, died in the Holocaust. We’re talking two-thirds at Armageddon
– do the math!’ He also let slip that he was ‘fortunate enough to have
met our president’ and he told us that, because the mainstream media
‘tells us the inverse of what’s really happening’, he preferred to rely on
his own ‘intelligence network’ to ‘monitor strategic trends’ in the light
of prophecy. One of the 50,000 subscribers to his Internet news service
was keeping a close eye on developments on the Iranian stock exchange,
he said. American servicemen in Iraq were taking aerial photographs of
Babylon for him.
Ronni seemed none the worse for his spiritual battering the day before. I
was sitting, having breakfast with him, fishing for an authentically Israeli
view of Christian Zionism, when Chuck hove into view. Planting a fatherly
hand on Ronni’s shoulder, he said, ‘I understand that you touched people’s
hearts yesterday – something’s moving ...’ Ronni smiled politely, but said
nothing.
We were all on the move, headed for Jerusalem at last.
‘OK guys,’ said Ronni, as we bowled down the motorway with a view
of the Jordan River and Jordan on the other side of it, to our left, ‘what’s
the real name of Jordan?’
Chuck Missler’s Tour of the Holy Land 17
believers in the twinkling of an eye, but the bus driver would not stop
honking his horn. Chuck began shouting to be heard, but some little
Arab boys were wolf-whistling with all their might. Here, at last, was an
authentically Arab response to Christian Zionism, perhaps increasingly to
all Americans – and their western allies. ‘They say you can’t prove your
Bible,’ Chuck was roaring. ‘Well, yes, you can!’
Phil, the finance consultant from Nevada who’d later express a desire to
erase the Haram al-Sharif because Americans like to start anew, needed a
cold beer as much as I did that evening. He opened up on the second one,
to tell me he’d become a Christian at the age of thirteen when a school-
friend invited him to a Bible summer camp. A trained engineer, he felt
strongly drawn to Chuck’s scientific approach and saw nothing odd in his
definition of the Bible as ‘an integrated message system of supernatural
origin’. He was taking stock of his life, he said. He planned to emigrate,
possibly to Israel. ‘America has no purpose. At least Israel has a purpose,’
he mused. Like Chuck, Phil believed that America was ‘only hanging on
in there’ as the world’s superpower because it was blessing Israel. Phil had
never heard the term Christian Zionist. All he knew was that Christians
had at least ‘an indirect command’ to support Israel.
Our first visit the next morning was to Jerusalem’s ‘Temple Institute’,
founded by a small fringe group of Orthodox Jews who are as eager as
Christian Zionists to see the Temple up and running again as a symbol
of renewed nationhood. The centre of Jewish worship on the Temple
Mount, it was destroyed by the Romans during the Jewish Revolt of
ad 70. Recognising the lethally inflammatory potential of any changes to
the status quo on the Temple Mount today, most Israelis are not in favour
of its restoration. The Temple Institute is visited and funded by American
Jews and Christians, not by Israelis.
A small but elegantly appointed exhibition centre in the Old City’s
Jewish quarter, the place was filled with careful replicas of the precious
paraphernalia Jewish priests will need to wear or use as soon as the
Muslims’ Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque have been removed and
the Temple built. Many of the tour group were interested, but most of
them believed – as Marty did – that no good could come of that Temple
because the Antichrist would demand to be worshipped there. Terry was
impatient; the Jews needed to recognise Jesus as their messiah, not worry
about their ancient Judaic rituals, he told me.
Ronni’s guided tour of the Old City was aimed at proving the impossi-
bility of dividing Jerusalem into the capitals of both a Palestinian and
a Jewish state. Explaining that the city is holy to three faiths – Jews,
Christians and Muslims – he posed a question:
Chuck Missler’s Tour of the Holy Land 19
‘If I ask Christians “What is your vision of the city?” – what will they
say?’
‘It’s a Jewish city,’ answered members of the group without
hesitation.
‘Guys, guys, you’re killing me! I’m not talking about your kind of
Christians – I mean the other kind of Christians – the Catholics, the
Orthodox and so on. They’ll say it must be Christian ...’
Ronni was preaching to the thoroughly converted, to people who did
not consider Catholics and Orthodox worthy of the name Christian, but
he had to do his job.
‘Listen, this is not a political statement,’ he said next. ‘Jerusalem has
never been a Muslim capital. They even turn their backs on the city when
they pray in order to face Mecca.’
If these people know that Jerusalem belongs to the Jews and that Israel
will some day, somehow, comprise all of the land God gave to Abraham,
from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq, that doesn’t necessarily
make them philo-Semites. Marty had proved that at our first meeting,
and Terry illustrated the point again. ‘Look at them all down there,’ he
said disgustedly, as we gazed across the Western Plaza at a crowd of Jews
praying at the Western Wall: ‘all bobbing up and down like ducks!’ Terry
was of the opinion that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke in January
2006 had been his just punishment for deciding that Israel must relinquish
the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005.
Melissa was not moved by my effort, late that night, to explain to
her that Jewish West Jerusalem and Arab East Jerusalem were two very
different places, two different realities. She didn’t want to know there were
two sides to the thorniest question on earth. ‘I guess, the thing is, the
Palestinians are not a real people. They never had a land here,’ she said.
‘Try telling them that!’ I said, switching off the reading light.
On the evening before our visit to the Temple Mount, Chuck was
resplendent in a dark suit and tie, in honour of another highlight of the
tour, ‘The Jerusalem Temple Conference’, which we would all be attending
in one of the hotel’s banqueting suites.
Chuck had hosted Jerusalem Temple conferences before, but not for
a while. Not since the mid-1990s had he gathered various Israeli experts
– archaeologists, amateur enthusiasts, historians – to explain to his
tour groups where exactly on the Temple Mount they each thought the
prophesied new Temple should be situated. After boasting that Israeli
friends had ‘hunted’ him down in Annapolis and ‘begged’ him to resurrect
the event this year, he took a question.
‘Which temple do we believe will be desecrated by the Antichrist?’
20 Introduction
‘From our point of view,’ he had to admit, ‘it’s the next Temple to be
built – Daniel 9 – check it out! That’s where the Antichrist will set himself
up to be worshipped. That would be the classic Christian eschatological
point of view.’
The Israeli conference speakers, of course, did not share this ‘Christian
eschatological point of view’. None of them believed that an Antichrist
would provoke the divinely engineered destruction of their new Temple
by demanding to be worshipped there. They believed the rebuilding of the
Temple would prepare the way for a Jewish messiah.
After another long, hot day’s sightseeing, two complicated talks with
lots of diagrams seemed like hard work. Not until a young American-born
Israeli who directs the Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus – a new body
devoted to tightening the bond between Israel and her American Christian
supporters – did people begin to listen attentively. Josh Reinstein was an
excellent speaker and, thanks to his American upbringing, he knew exactly
who his audience was.
‘Chuck and I have a special bond,’ he began confidingly. ‘On one of
the radical Islamic websites there’s a spot about him and his activities on
Israel’s behalf, describing him as a known associate of Josh Reinstein ...’
Reinstein told us about the ‘unprecedented burst’ of activity that was
bringing Christians and Jews closer and closer, before claiming that ‘this
war on terror we see around the world is all about who controls the Temple
Mount’. He is a member of the extreme right-wing Yisrael Beitenu party
which, in the interests of an ethnically pure Jewish state, aims at depriving
Israel’s two million Arab Israelis of their citizenship. He played to the
group’s Religious Right fears: ‘We live in a morally confused age when there
is snide amusement about the Bible in the media.’ He asserted that the
great divide was no longer between Jews and Christians but between those
who believed in the Bible and those who didn’t. Ignoring the differences
between Old Testament Judaism and New Testament Christianity, not
mentioning the fact that Christians were expecting the messiah to appear
in the form of Jesus while the Jews were awaiting a stranger, let alone
addressing the gorier aspects of bible prophecy as Christian Zionists
understand it, he claimed, ‘Only Jews and Christians and no other people
cherish these biblical values like we do, and they are the reason for our
prosperity.’
After carefully reminding us of God’s promise to Abraham that he will
bless anyone who blesses his people, and curse anyone who curses them,
Reinstein closed with what most of that audience would have interpreted
as a rousing call to arms, ‘I look forward to praying with you next year on
the Temple Mount!’ and won a standing ovation. As the conference ended,
Chuck Missler’s Tour of the Holy Land 21
the pressure to sign the petition demanding that the American embassy in
Israel be moved to Jerusalem was embarrassingly hard to resist.
Fuelled by Chuck’s teachings and roused to righteous indignation
by Reinstein’s rhetoric, was it any wonder my fellow tourists couldn’t
appreciate the Muslim monuments on the Haram al-Sharif?
For most of the first three hundred years of its history, until the rise of
Jewish Zionism in the nineteenth century, Christian Zionism was either
popularly denounced as a form of ‘judaising’, or mocked as eccentric
‘Restorationism’ – a term referring to its proponents’ belief that the Jews
must be ‘restored’ to the land they lost in ad 70. If modern Christian
Zionists are primarily concerned with the fulfilment of End Times prophecy
and with securing God’s favour for America, their predecessors were more
interested in making the Jews’ return to their long-lost home contingent on
their conversion to Christianity. Christian Zionist motives have rarely been
selfless or disinterested. The stakes – eternal salvation and the triumph of
Christian civilisation – have always been too high for sentiment.
The Christian Zionist story begins in early seventeenth-century England,
another famous hotbed of Christian millenarianism.
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PART ONE: 1621–1948
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chapter 1
which he headed, had stuck with the Roman Catholic line of interpre-
tation: the non-national Christian church of the New Testament had
supplanted the Old Testament’s nation of Israel in God’s favour as soon
as the Jews rejected Jesus as their messiah. However, he did accept the
ultimate authority of the Bible. James’s own claim to a divine right to rule
over England and Scotland was as rooted in that authority as any of the
assertions in the new book of commentary. So his amusement at the new
book was soon replaced by fury. The author’s unorthodox harnessing of
the scriptures to the cause of predicting the geo-political shape of things
to come, things that diminished his royal dignity as a divinely appointed
monarch of the nation that claimed to be leading the world in the reform
of Christianity, was anathema to him. The assertion that the Jews would
‘come to Ierusalem againe, be kings and chiefe Monarches of the world,
sway and governe all’ 1 smelt to him of treason.
Dispatching copies of the The World’s Great Restauration, or the Calling
of the Iewes and (with them) of all the Nations and Kingdomes of the
Earth to the Faith of Christ to his synod of bishops at Westminster for
routine censorship, James was mollified only when they, ‘with much Zeal,
unanimously’,2 voted to ban it. The synod’s main objection was that its
lingering descriptions of the fabulous prosperity and superpower status
awaiting the Jews in Palestine ‘savoured too strong of the flesh’, being ‘too
servilely addicted to the letter’.3
They ruled that copies of the work on sale at the ‘shop near the great
North dore of Paul’s, at the signe of the Bible’ 4 be confiscated, and its
anonymous author hunted down and incarcerated.
An addiction to the letter of the Bible of the kind displayed in The
World’s Great Restauration in 1621 – Christian fundamentalism, in
today’s terms – was a natural side-effect of the early modern revolution
in communications. First the invention of the printing press and then the
translation of the Bible from Latin and Greek into plain English had been
promoting what many welcomed as a happy democratisation of religion.
But it had also led to what King James and his bishops deplored as a
foolishly literal understanding of the scriptures, to precisely what critics
of religious fundamentalism today characterise as a dangerous distortion
of the faith.
Almost a century before the fleeting appearance of The World’s Great
Restauration King Henry VIII had launched the English Reformation by
proclaiming himself head of the Church of England. He had also precip-
itated an important change in the way Englishmen perceived their faith and
its scriptures by ordaining that ‘one book of the whole Bible of the largest
volume in English’,5 rather than Latin, be available in every church in the
‘One Book of the Whole Bible’ 29
land. After centuries of filtering Catholic controls, the Bible was a free-for-
all or, as the pre-eminent English historian of the period, Christopher Hill,
has graphically put it, ‘a huge bran-tub’,6 from which an infinite number of
conflicting but unassailable truths could be drawn. At liberty for the first
time to enjoy unrestricted access to both the Jewish Old and the Christian
New Testament, Englishmen like the author of the The World’s Great
Restauration had begun developing and expounding their own notions
about who God was, what he expected of Christians and what they, in
turn, might expect of him.
If a seventeenth-century English monarch could find precedents for
his claim to divine appointment and Church of England bishops point
to others to bolster their positions, the era’s religious fundamentalists,
Puritans, were uncovering equally valid truths, especially in the Jewish
Old Testament. In the hands of people like the author of The World’s
Great Restauration the prophetic sections of the Old Testament became
the key to unlocking God’s future plan for the Jews and the entire
world. That was disruptive enough. In the hands of later Puritans, who
feared that the English Reformation had not travelled far enough in the
direction of the perfect theocratic state God had revealed to the ancient
Israelites, the Jewish Old Testament would become a weapon to wield,
first against the Church of England which sustained the monarchy and
finally, with the execution of James’s son, Charles I, in January 1649,
against the monarchy itself.
Barely a month before that crime a speaker at Whitehall was heard to
lament the banefully disruptive influence of the Jewish Old Testament on
English politics: ‘Kings and Armies and Parliament might have been quiet
at this day if they would have let Israel alone.’ 7
By the closing years of Elizabeth I’s reign in the 1590s and for the whole
of James I’s reign and on until the Civil War and the regicide, the version
of the Bible most commonly in use in England was the Calvinist Geneva
Bible.
The French theologian, John Calvin, was the most radical of all
the sixteenth-century reformers battling to free the faithful from their
subjugation to the Roman Catholic Church by acquainting them with
the Word of God. Calvin taught that the only way to learn what God
expected of one, and so the true meaning of one’s life on earth, was to
sift through the Bible endlessly in search of meanings and messages. Much
more than the Anglican or Lutheran reformed tradition, the Calvinist
tradition is responsible for encouraging millions of American Christians
30 1621–1948
today to approach the Bible as they would a computer manual. The line
linking Calvin to Chuck Missler and his ‘integrated message-system of
supernatural origin’ is a long but perfectly straight one.
Translated into clear English and helpfully arranged in verses as well as
chapters, the later editions of the Geneva Bible were largely the work of
Calvin’s close friend, a Burgundian named Theodore Beza. Where Calvin
had highlighted Christians’ enduring bond with the ancient Israelites by
emphasising the continuity between the Old and the New Testaments,
Beza was the first to insist, in explanatory marginal notes, that the
words ‘Israel’ and ‘Zion’ always and everywhere in the Bible referred
to the Jewish people or their physical homeland. Beza claimed that the
Christian Church of the New Testament had never, in some speciously
self-serving Roman Catholic allegorical sense, supplanted the Jews in
God’s favour. Here was the new Protestant movement firmly distancing
itself from Catholicism, critiquing the Catholics’ neglect of the Old
Testament. Naturally, the reinstatement of God’s Chosen People by the
Calvinists had a great deal more to do with opposing Catholicism than
with any real regard for Jews.
Beza’s ‘large exposition of the phrases and hard places’ 8 in the Bible left
no room for a pious Jacobean Puritan to doubt that the Jews remained
a crucial element in God’s plan. Where St Paul’s letter to the Romans,
11: 28 – a firm favourite with Christian Zionists today – speaks of God’s
continued concern for Jews in spite of their rejection of Jesus, Beza’s
marginal note instructed his readers to remember the ‘debt the Gentiles
owe to the Jews’ and understand that ‘the nation of the Jews is not utterly
cut off, without hope of recovery’. In another note he firmly stated that all
God’s old promises to the Jews about their ownership of their land could
not be ‘frustrate and vain’, and he even claimed that a Jew had as much
chance of being saved by God’s unfathomable ‘mercy and grace’ as any
Christian. Beza warned that if reformed Christians were justified in hating
Roman Catholics they must not be ‘glorying and bragging’ 9 about their
superiority to the Jews. It was their job, he declared, to do God’s will and
advance the divine plan by bringing Jews to a faith in Jesus Christ.
King James hated Beza’s influential marginal notes so much that he
banned all such commentary from his 1611 version of the Bible, but those
notes were the bedrock authority on which the author of The World’s
Great Restauration based his vision of a future Jewish superpower: ‘Where
Israel, Judah, Tsion, Ierusalem etc, are named in this argument,’ he’d
carefully emphasised at the start of his book, ‘the Holy Ghost meaneth
not the spirituall Israel or the Church of God collected of the Gentiles ...
but Israel properly descended out of Jacob’s loynes’.10
‘One Book of the Whole Bible’ 31
Christian and ‘the whole East shall be in obedience and subjection unto
them, so that this people are not called Kings unworthily, in regard of their
large and wide Iurisdiction and Empire’.26
Almost a thousand pages long and exuberantly confident, Brightman’s A
Revelation of the Revelation first appeared in around 1609 in Latin in the
Dutch Netherlands, where censorship was less strict than in England, but
its thrilling larger message, that the end of the world and Christ’s Second
Coming were nigh, ensured its translation into English, its smuggling back
across the Channel and its discreet circulation. Brightman was holding
out the enticing prospect that Englishmen then alive would see not only
the conversion of the Jews and their return to Palestine but ‘a most long
and doleful Tragedy which shall wholly overflow with scourges, slaughters,
destructions’ 27 that would begin in 1650 but end in ‘a most glorious
triumph’ 28 – the overthrow of the Antichrist. Evil incarnate in Brightman’s
day was not an Iraqi Assyrian Christian, or an international diplomat, as
some of Chuck Missler’s fellow prophecy buffs have suggested, but the
Sultan of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.
There is a similar exultantly urgent tone about Finch’s preface to The
World’s Great Restauration. Addressed directly to Jews, even translated into
Hebrew for their benefit, it went one better than Brightman by painting
a dazzlingly attractive picture of the divine reward, all the ‘glorious and
excellent estate’, that awaited the Jews in Palestine just as soon as they
had recognised Jesus as their messiah: ‘dainties and iunketting dishes ... fat
things and wine, not the ordinary and common sort, but fat things ...’ 29
This joyfully expectant mood suggests that Brightman and Finch were
acquainted with the Jewish Lurianic kabbala.
A theological system whose exultant spirit would go on to permeate
the entire Jewish diaspora, including the nearby Amsterdam community,
by 1650 this kabbala was a bravely defiant response to the cataclysmic
eviction of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth
century. One of a small community of Ashkenazi Jews living in Palestine,
Isaac Luria had evolved a comfortingly hopeful faith in a pacification and
reordering of the world resulting from the eventual restoration of the Jews
to their long-lost home. The Lurianic kabbala may have sowed the first
seeds of Christian Zionism in England. Brightman and Finch certainly
copied the typically kabbalistic practice of teasing out the dates of events
predicted in the Bible by making one biblical day equivalent to a year and
counting forward from some significant historical date. Both had alighted
on 1650 as the crucial date by counting forward from ad 360, the year an
earthquake had put a stop to the philo-Semitic Emperor Julian’s attempt
to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
‘One Book of the Whole Bible’ 37
Towards the end of the seventeenth century the eminent scientist, Sir
Isaac Newton, would arrive at a much later date by counting forward from
what he decided was the peak of Christian power in Europe: the crowning
of the Emperor Charlemagne in the year 800. Newton was far nearer the
mark than Brightman and Finch. He believed the Jews’ conversion to
Christianity and return to Palestine might not occur until 1948; certainly
not before 1899.30
Newton was free to conjecture on the Jews’ restoration by the end of the
century, but back in the spring of 1621 Sir Henry Finch’s musings on the
theme had been perceived as a serious national threat. Swiftly identified,
he’d been arrested and imprisoned without trial. Attacked in Parliament
and from the pulpit, by the Bishop of London and by an Oxford theologian,
he’d been wittily described by a contemporary historian as someone who
had ‘so enlarged the future amplitude of the Jewish state that thereby he
occasioned to confining himself’.31
King James, however, didn’t punish Finch as he had the lowly school-
master, or as Elizabeth I had Francis Kett. Finch was neither branded with
a J for judaiser nor burnt at the stake. After a mere two months and a
sheepish climb-down in the form of a fulsome apology, he was pardoned,
and freed to reinvent himself, as an assistant to a bishop who valued him
highly as ‘the best heifer he could have ploughed with’.32 Finch died in
1625, the same year as the monarch he’d offended, of plague.
It’s easy to imagine him as a vivid character, as a proto-Chuck Missler;
monomaniacal and preposterously self-confident perhaps, but also
dynamic, enthusiastic and funny. Simply, he may have been too attractive
a personality for even a king to harbour a grudge against for long. A Dutch
historian who visited seventeenth-century England described the average
Englishman in terms that might have fitted Finch, but could easily be
applied to Missler. In Emanuel van Meteren’s experience, Englishmen were
‘bold, courageous, ardent’, but also ‘very inconstant, rash, vainglorious,
light ...’ 33
Historians, Zionist and Christian Zionist, have handsomely applauded
Finch’s selfless sacrifice of his status, reputation and livelihood to the cause
of a Jewish homeland,34 and even credited the elderly knight with being
the first Christian to have understood Jewish history ‘as a unity stretching
from the biblical times until the present and future days’.35 I prefer to view
Finch’s proto-Christian Zionist commentary as a transparent attempt to
cajole Jews into converting to Christianity with appeals to what he saw as
their basest instincts: greed and hunger for prestige.
38 1621–1948
If Sir Henry Finch has earned his place in the pantheon of Christian
Zionist saints, it’s for having been an early and skilled practitioner of
the art of forcing a fit between contemporary Middle Eastern affairs and
bible prophecy. His tale is perhaps most usefully viewed as a measure
of the extent to which championship of Jewish restoration to Palestine
in seventeenth-century England depended on the Jews converting to
Christianity. This was the vital string attached to Christian Zionism in its
earliest phases – in New England as well as in Old England.
It was a string that would frustratingly delay Jesus’s Second Coming
and the millennium. Naturally enough, the vast majority of Jews were no
more inclined than they are today to exchange their ancient religion for
that of their Christian persecutors, let alone admit to so large a fault as
refusing to recognise their own messiah.
chapter 2
When a thousand Puritans set sail for New England in April 1630 there
was every reason to fear that England’s sins were inviting ‘some heavy
Scquorge and Judgment’ 1 from God, of the kind that he’d meted out to
the ancient Israelites.
Twelve years before the outbreak of the Civil War, King Charles I was
even less well disposed towards the Puritans than his father James had been.
His soon-to-be Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, loathed those
holier-than-thou radicals with such a passion he was rooting them out
of the Church, systematically hunting down members of their ‘malignant
faction’, torturing their Puritan consciences by forcing them to wear lacy
surplices in the old Catholic style, for example.
One of Laud’s targets, a Puritan named Thomas Shepard, hastily took
ship for the New World after Laud called him a ‘prating coxcomb’ and
banned him from performing any of his duties. ‘If you do,’ Laud had
thundered at him, ‘I will be upon your back and follow you wherever you
go, in any part of the kingdom.’ 2 No idle threat. Another Puritan minister
had to flee the country under an assumed name and in disguise to evade
Laud’s spies. The need to escape an England that had become, not just ‘a
labyrinth of error, a gulfe of griefe, a stie of filthinesse’,3 but also a hostile
police state, had never been so great.
Puritan identification with the sufferings of the Israelites during their
Babylonian and Egyptian captivities was at its height. To those crossing
the Atlantic in four ships in that spring of 1630, King Charles I was
the tyrannical Egyptian pharaoh whose bondage they were fleeing and
his ecclesiastical courts, like those of the Pharisees, ‘dens of lions and
mountains of leopards’.4 Their flight across the ocean was a second
Exodus, the Atlantic another Red Sea whose storms they weathered by
the grace of God and the help of two daily services of worship, psalm-
singing, fasting and keeping every Sabbath. Even the sailors played their
40 1621–1948
part on the nine-week voyage, marking the start of every new watch with
a sung psalm and an improvised prayer.
As they approached land and their new lives, their leader aboard
the Arbella, John Winthrop, preached a first declaration of spiritual
independence, a long, stirring sermon about the exemplary role of the
perfect Christian community he had in mind for them:
The Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as his owne
people, and will command a blessing on us in all our ways ... we shall
finde that the God of Israell is among us ... wee must consider that wee
shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all the people are upon us;
so that [if] we shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have
undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us,
wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world.5
Cotton Mather, the first historian of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was
the proud grandson of two early colonists, Richard Mather and John
Cotton, and the son of Increase Mather. These four men, three generations
of one family, worked harder through their activities and writings than any
of their fellows to maintain and strengthen New Englanders’ hopes of the
Second Coming promised in the Bible, and so also the bonds linking New
England to Old Israel.
Cotton Mather tells us that in the first twelve years of the colony’s
existence, until the outbreak of the English Civil War, disaffected English
Puritans of all ranks ‘kept sometimes dropping and flocking into New
England’,15 so that it was soon ‘like an hive overstocked with bees’.16
Among those four thousand or so bees was his grandfather, John Cotton, an
eminent Puritan divine from Boston in Lincolnshire and an ardent admirer
of the ancient Israelite theocracy. On arrival in his new home in 1633, John
Cotton – described by his grandson as ‘a becoming mediocrity’ to look at
– preached a rousing sermon exhorting the settlers to feel as confidently
invincible as the Old Testament’s Zerubbabel and Joshua because the Lord
of Hosts was with them; he reminded them that they were building ‘a
theocracy, as near as might be to that which was the glory of Israel’.17
‘This New English Israel’ 43
It was said of John Cotton that he was the ‘prime man of them all in
New England’ when it came to ‘a knowledge of Arts and Tongues and in
all kinds of learning, divine and humane’.18 Cotton, like thirty-five of the
129 Oxbridge-educated early settlers, was a graduate of Emmanuel College
Cambridge, a bachelor of divinity with some ten years of theological
learning under his belt. He would certainly have brought as much of his
library as he could to the New World – bibles, commentaries, prayer books,
sermons and Hebrew, Latin and Greek grammars. Another early settler
is on record as having arrived with twenty-three barrels of books, many
of them in Hebrew. Those first settlers, the educated elite at least, were
terrified by the very real prospect of their entire pious project foundering
for lack of a properly educated second generation of churchmen.
A proper education, even in that rugged outpost of English Puritanism,
entailed a working knowledge of ancient Hebrew. Within ten years of
the colony’s foundation, Cotton Mather’s paternal grandfather, Richard
Mather, a Puritan divine from Toxteth in Lancashire, was involved in
compiling the first American book, an ‘original metrical translation of
the psalms made directly from the Hebrew’.19 Described as ‘a mighty
man’ with a gigantic physical presence and a magnificent preaching voice,
Richard Mather must have ideally qualified himself for fellowship in a
church and a position of leadership with his heart-rending ‘testimony’
about his dedication to Jesus back in Lancashire at the age of eighteen:
‘the pangs of the New Birth were exceedingly terrible to him, in as much
as many times when they were at Meals in the Family where he sojourned,
he would absent himself to retire under hedges and other secret places,
there to lament his misery before God’.20 In New England Richard Mather
would devote more time and energy to maintaining religious orthodoxy
and church discipline.
In the year the colony’s first book appeared, America’s first college,
Harvard, opened its doors to start remedying the feared shortage of
educated churchmen. The speedy establishment of a place of learning
was, as Cotton Mather noted in his history, strictly in accordance with
another ancient Israelite precedent: ‘In every town among the Jews there
was a school whereat children were taught the reading of the law; and
if there were any town destitute of a school, the men of the place did
stand excommunicate until one were erected.’ 21 At Harvard, where sons of
ministers were sent at the age of twelve, the study of ancient Hebrew took
precedence over all other subjects. Pupils had to be able to translate ‘out
of Hebrew into Greek from the Old Testament in the morning and out
of English into Greek from the New Testament in the evening’.22 In that
harsh place, so far away from the sources and ideals of European learning,
44 1621–1948
where the urgent tasks of surviving the seasons and fending off attacks
from the natives would have absorbed most of their energies, motivation
to learn Hebrew must have been in short supply.
The Cotton Mather clan produced some of the colony’s most notable
Hebraists. After only a few months at Harvard, the first historian of
America’s sixteen-year-old brother had perused the entire Hebrew Old
Testament and was able to give a ‘good account of the academicall affairs
among the ancient Jews’ 23 in fluent Hebrew. At the same age Cotton Mather
was defending his thesis, ‘Hebrew punctuation is of divine origin’. His
father, Increase Mather, had been among Harvard’s first intake and arrived
at the belief that, since Hebrew was ‘an eastern wide-mouthed language
which does remarkably expose to the eye the motions of the lips, tongue
and throat’,24 it might be of use in communication with the deaf and
dumb. As late as 1685, at the start of his fifteen-year stint as president of
the college, when enthusiasm for the ancient tongue had waned, Increase
Mather gave a long Commencement Day Oration in Hebrew.
He was upholding a tradition that would endure all the way through
the eighteenth century and on until 1817. Yale University, founded in
1701, would go a step further than Harvard by taking as its motto two
Hebrew words which they chose to translate as ‘light’ and ‘truth’ – ‘Urim’
and ‘Thummim’ – but every one of the ten colleges founded before the
American Revolution in 1775 offered Hebrew.
Leading lights of American Christian Zionism today, writers and speakers
on bible prophecy, are inclined – as Chuck Missler did at Caesarea – to
pepper their commentaries with impressively erudite-sounding references
to the ‘Hebrew’ text of the Old Testament.
One of the books John Cotton must have carried with him over the ocean
to New England was a copy of his friend Thomas Brightman’s exultantly
millenarian A Revelation of the Revelation – the same gigantic work that
had inspired Sir Henry Finch’s ill-fated advocacy of repatriation of the
Jews to Palestine a decade or so before.
Like learning Hebrew, speculating about bible prophecy must have
struck many of the colonists as a luxury they could ill afford in their new
home. But Cotton boldly made it the subject of a series of lectures he
delivered every Thursday at his Boston church between 1638 and 1641. Like
Brightman, he believed the world was on the verge of the thousand years
of glorious prosperity and peace ushered in by Jesus’s Second Coming.
The year 1655 seemed to him the most likely date for a final showdown
in Europe. He believed that in that year an alliance of ten Protestant
‘This New English Israel’ 45
seemed to him compelling proof that they must be Jews. Their language
exhibited traces of Hebrew words, he discovered, and they were ‘much
given to anointing of their heads’. The men separated themselves from
their menstruating womenfolk and they liked dancing, especially after
victories. They calculated time by nights and months, and held funerals
with ‘grievous mournings and yellings for the dead’,28 in the ancient
Israelite manner. Furthermore, they exhibited a tell-tale ‘great unkindness
for our swine’ 29 which might, Eliot admitted, have been only because the
settlers’ pigs ate clams, to which natives were also very partial.
The weight of evidence available convinced Eliot that they were Jews.
Others, not only in New England but also in the old England of the
mid-1640s, which was gripped by millenarian fevers and racked by civil
war, were eager to concur with his findings. The Bible spoke of the Jews
being dispersed from ‘one end of the earth even unto the other’,30 so
why shouldn’t there be Jews in the New World as well as the old? The
American Indians must, they decided, be the descendants of one of the
tribes of Israel that had been lost after their capture by the Assyrian king,
Sargon, in 721 bc. Eliot’s theory received fresh corroboration in the form
of a report that reached him from the Dutch Republic via England at the
end of the 1640s. A prominent Jewish rabbi of Amsterdam, Menasseh ben
Israel, a friend of many learned and eminent English Puritans, had heard
a story from a converted Spanish Jew who had recently returned from
South America, about a tribe of Jewish Indians he had encountered in the
Cordilleras mountains, in what is today Colombia.
This marvellous news about the American Jews was a sure sign that
the Bible was true in every detail. When coupled with the popular belief
that Jews must be dispersed even as far as England and converted before
they could be gathered up and restored to Palestine, it contributed greatly
towards Oliver Cromwell giving a sympathetic hearing to Rabbi Menasseh
ben Israel’s 1651 request that Jews be welcomed back into England.
spirit of the Lurianic kabbala, was preaching the imminent return of the
Jews to a Palestine in which they would live as ‘lords, and whatever they
order, the nations will be obliged to carry out, and every one of the
uncircumcised will stand before a Jew like a slave before his master and
be filled with fear and terror of what the Jew will command’.31 It was Sir
Henry Finch’s old message, but home-grown and stripped of that worrying
conversion precondition. It has been suggested that Sabbatai Zevi, who
hailed from what is today the Turkish port of Izmir but was then Ottoman-
ruled Smyrna, was not so much divinely as humanly inspired – by the
millenarian notions of visiting English merchants, which he seized upon
and adapted to his own purpose.
Sabbatai Zevi had fixed on a more than usually precise date for his
people’s restoration to Palestine: September 1666. In Gaza and Alexandria
and Aleppo, and especially in Salonika where the Jewish community
numbered 60,000, Jews flocked to follow him, preparing for imminent
transplantation to the Holy Land by selling their homes and businesses,
marrying as fast as possible and wearing penitential sackcloth and ashes.
In German and Polish towns they processed through the streets bearing
icons of their messiah and incurring the wrath of the authorities. Italian
Jews named their sons Sabbatai, while in Sarajevo Jewesses dressed in
white linen and slaughtered demons. London’s Jewish community was still
tiny, but tales of the Jewish messiah enthralled Christian Englishmen too.
Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary that he knew of a Jew offering odds
of ten to one on Sabbatai Zevi being proclaimed the King of the World
within two years.
The pan-European hullabaloo was only calmed when news arrived
from Constantinople in early September 1666 that the Jewish messiah
had appeased the wrath of the Ottoman Sultan and avoided summary
execution by abandoning all his claims and converting to Islam.
News of Sabbatai Zevi’s activities reached Increase Mather in New
England seven months before this dismal denouement. It fired his prophetic
imagination and sent him hurrying to his library of over a thousand
volumes to consult the works of authorities like Thomas Brightman and
his father-in-law, John Cotton. By the summer of 1666 he was eagerly
buttonholing three Jews who visited Boston, labouring to convince them
their messiah had arrived and, in the process, incurring the disapproval of
his fellow church members. By the time his book, The Mystery of Israel’s
Salvation, appeared in England in 1669 to wide acclaim, Increase had been
forced to modify his views in the light of Sabbatai Zevi’s apostasy. But
he argued that although the time was obviously not yet ripe for Jewish
repatriation, it soon would be if only they’d accept that their messiah was
48 1621–1948
Jesus. He reasoned, just as Henry Finch must have done, that there could
be no harm in playing up the idea of a future Jewish empire of ‘such glory
as the like never was’ 32 if it made Jews more amenable to conversion.
A year before his death in 1723, at the venerable age of eighty-five,
Increase Mather wrote in his diary, ‘I desire nothing more than the
conversion of the Jews’,33 and lamented that illness prevented him attending
the baptism of a Jew who’d taught Hebrew at Harvard for the past forty
years.
Increase Mather’s historian son outlived his father by only five years, and,
for by far the greater part of his life, faithfully espoused all his father’s
views.
Father and son had been in full agreement on such matters as restricting
church membership to those who could prove they’d been born again in the
faith, and their common experience of life as a battle waged between the
forces of light and angels and dark and demons. Although they had both
had doubts about the conduct of the Salem witch trials in the late 1690s,
that collective trauma had not shaken their belief in evil spirits. Increase
would have found nothing to argue with in his son’s assertion that ‘there
are devils ... the Air in which we breathe is full of them ... they have so
much liberty that until the Second Coming of the Messiah into this lower
world they may range and rove about ... our air is full of them as with
flies in mid-summer’.34 And Cotton Mather had had no trouble believing
that his father was a prophet in the mould of the Jewish prophets, after
Increase forecast that a great fire would destroy whole streets and his own
Boston church in 1676, and warned that a smallpox epidemic, in which
‘the slain of the Lord would be many’,35 would devastate the colony two
years later.
It was only towards the end of his life that Cotton Mather discovered he
could no longer concur with his father’s views concerning the Jews. He’d
long believed that the time for the fulfilment of the prophecy regarding
their restoration must be 1697 and that the millennium would start in
1716. But that meant there was precious little time for the entire Jewish
race to see the error of its ways and convert to Christianity. For a long
while he’d worried that there were so many of ‘the Israelitish nation’ –
10,000 of them in Prague, 10,000 more in Rome, ‘vast numbers’ of them
in Poland, in Constantinople and Salonika 36 – that the conversion could
be achieved only en masse and by supernatural means.
For most of his life he’d believed, just as his father, Thomas Brightman
and John Cotton had done, that Jesus would have to put in a brief and
‘This New English Israel’ 49
‘These oaks shall remain standing and the hand of man shall not be
raised against them till Israel return and is restored to the land of
Promise.’ 1
So said the last will and testament of an eccentric old lady of Exmouth
in Devon with regard to a grove of old oak trees on her property. And
so it came about in 1811 that a romantic young evangelical Christian – a
visitor from London who happened to be riding by the grove – resolved
to devote his life to the project of converting the Jews and returning them
to Palestine.
An Old Etonian, an Oxford graduate and a lawyer, a cheerful and
energetic and pious young man, Lewis Way had long been casting
around for a way to spend a windfall fortune of £300,000. Now his life’s
purpose was clear. The holy challenge would require ‘more than the faith
of Abraham, the perseverance of Moses and the patience of Job’,2 he
calculated; Palestine was still a remote and impoverished backwater of
the Ottoman Empire and the Jews still as stubborn in their faith and
scattered throughout the world as they had been in Sir Henry Finch’s day.
But Way was undaunted. After asking the local bishop for advice on how
to set about his task, he addressed himself to a new organisation named
‘The London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews’ and
alleviated its financial woes with a generous gift of £12,500.
That was just the start. Way immersed himself in the study of Hebrew,
the Bible and Jewish history, and made a list of the instances of appalling
English injustice towards the Jews – from the eleventh-century reign of King
Canute to King Edward I’s expulsion of all Jews from the country in 1290.
The Jewish community in England at this time was around 20,000 – mostly
Eastern European Ashkenazis. Galvanised by pity and prophecy, he began to
seek out other people interested in how the arrival of the millennium might
be hastened by converting England’s Jews and relocating them in Palestine.
52 1621–1948
fighting and skirmishes, but here we were in the midst of the enemy, and
verily had a brisk encounter ...’ 6
Arriving at last in St Petersburg he was only momentarily disconcerted
to discover that Tsar Alexander was almost 400 miles to the south, in
Moscow. Once in the old Russian capital he and his companions took up
residence in a large wooden house of the kind hurriedly erected after 1812
when the Muscovites checked Napoleon’s advance by burning down their
own city. There he patiently awaited a summons to the Kremlin.
When at last it came, he was not disappointed. A boyish forty-one-
year-old whose semi-miraculous eleventh-hour deliverance from defeat
by Napoleon happened to have awakened in him a passionate penchant
for bible prophecy, Tsar Alexander was, in Way’s opinion, ‘exactly what
Israel [the Jews] wants at present’.7 Immediately drawn to Way’s project,
Alexander graciously informed him, ‘I consider your coming to Russia
as a providential occurrence of circumstance – each must do his part,
and in time, by the blessing of God, all will be achieved.’ 8 The Russian
Emperor and the eccentric English gentleman met four times, speaking in a
mixture of French and English, sitting ‘toe to toe, tete a tete’ 9 because the
Emperor was a little deaf, cosily consolidating their friendship by reading
the Bible together. When Alexander travelled south, Way followed him to
the Crimea and enjoyed another imperial audience, at which he read Mark
13 and the Tsar read the more hair-raising Revelation 13–16. And when
Alexander insisted that Way delay his going home for a few months in
order to attend an international congress at Aix-la-Chapelle in November
1818, Way agreed and undertook to prepare a detailed proposal on the
restoration of the Jews for the occasion.
At Aix-la-Chapelle, ‘Dear Alexander shook me by the paw like an
old friend!’ Way merrily reported home, ‘and I drank the health of Old
Eton with former Etonians, in champagne.’ 10 Way’s was very far from
being the main business of the gathering, but his lucid laying out of the
religious, moral, political and administrative advantages of a Jewish return
to Palestine before the glittering assembly of three European emperors
and assorted illustrious statesmen was kindly received. The romantic tale
of his personal conversion to the Jews’ cause went down especially well,
as did his modified appeal for tolerance: ‘What I plead for on behalf of
this distressed people is civil and political freedom. It is vain to ask the
Jews to become Christian otherwise.’ 11 A clause was duly inserted in the
Congress’s final document, to the vague effect that each of the undersigned
European powers would give their Jews social and civil rights if, in return,
Europe’s Jews undertook to improve their morals and abandon their anti-
social habits.
54 1621–1948
But the Aix-la-Chapelle Congress was Lewis Way’s finest hour. Tsar
Alexander’s pious enthusiasm for prophecy died when he died, in 1825.
Under his brother Nicholas I, the miserable plight of Russia’s Jews only
worsened. Way’s precious, hard-won clause was politely ignored by the
other European powers. Still fixed on his dazzling final goal, Way’s gaze
shifted east, towards Jerusalem. During a trip to the Holy Land he met
Prime Minister William Pitt’s niece, the famously eccentric Lady Hester
Stanhope who shared his enthusiasm for the restoration of the Jews to
Palestine, because she believed she’d lead them there herself. But Lady
Hester was so unstoppably talkative that Way was forced to retreat,
exhausted by whole nights of her conversation. And, seeing that his
attempts to distribute 10,000 bibles were unsuccessful, he sailed for home
disappointed. When a serious falling out with the London Society for
the Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews occurred because Way
was deemed to be too eccentrically fixated on prophecies about the End
Times that must follow the conversion of the Jews, he huffily withdrew
his financial support for the organisation.
Retreating into a sad exile in Paris, prematurely aged by his self-imposed
challenge, he died in 1840.
Lewis Way’s life span – the almost seventy years between 1772 and 1840
– coincided with the heyday of evangelical Christianity in England.
The weary and worldly Church of England, firmly re-established since
the failure of the Puritan experiment and the demise of Cromwell’s republic,
was back on the defensive again. Wesleyan Methodism was forcing it to
accommodate a refreshed Puritan seriousness about the Word of God.
The old emphasis on the defining ‘born-again’ experience was back in
vogue. To this more or less familiar mix evangelicals were adding a new
ingredient: a busy reforming energy channelled into some 10,000 new
charities, foreign missions and societies like the London Society for the
Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews. This was the era in which
William Wilberforce famously battled for the abolition of slavery and the
Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury bullied a succession of British governments
into improving the conditions of lunatics, prostitutes, factory workers and
chimney-sweeps and, as we shall see, of the Jews.
The evangelicals’ need to anticipate a millennial reign of peace on
earth by building a new ‘Jerusalem in England’s green & pleasant Land’ *
* Unitarians do not believe that Jesus was the Son of God; and therefore do not
believe in the Holy Trinity.
56 1621–1948
That turbulently hopeful era also bred lowlier, more colourful judaisers in
the style of the seventeenth century’s Traske, Tany and Robins.
Lewis Way was a young man of twenty, still more than ten years away
from discovering his life’s true purpose, when an obscure former navy
officer named Richard Brothers proclaimed himself the ‘Prince and Prophet
of the Hebrews’ who would be masterminding the Jews’ repatriation to
Palestine in six years’ time. Brothers assumed that the Jews would convert
to Christianity, but was at least as interested as Sir Henry Finch in imagining
what a Jewish state – effectively a new British colony, under his own rule
– would be like.
He sent out appeals for contributions to nations as far-flung as Abyssinia
and Japan; from Russia, for example, he required 400 shiploads of timber,
6,000 barrels of beef, 40,000 tents, 100 large wagons and 800 wheelbarrows,
and he expected England to contribute 100,000 tons of coal and 90,000
sacks of flour.20 In a letter to a trusted female admirer whom he graciously
appointed his future Queen of the Hebrews, he wrote a megalomaniac ‘to
do’ list: ‘I have first to divide it [Palestine] into numerous portions, then
get it cultivated with the plough and the shovel, to sow and plant trees;
I have harbours to make for shipping, and store houses for immediately
receiving what is landed from them; high roads to make; and water courses
to form; materials to provide and cities to build ...’ 21 His favourite pastime
was meticulously designing a Jewish Palestine’s flags, palaces and military
uniforms.
Brothers caused a sensation and had many admirers, among them a
Member of Parliament and an ex-serviceman who funded the printing of
his best-selling books. A person styling himself ‘book seller to the Prince
of Hebrews’ 22 stocked fifteen different titles in support of Brothers’s
prophecies. Brothers’s plans for Palestine aside, he had tapped into the old
English Puritan fear that a calamitous divine punishment was about to be
visited on England. The French Revolution represented God’s judgment on
all monarchies, he announced, proceeding to forecast the imminent demise
of King George III and the destruction of London by a natural disaster.
In much the same way as John Traske had sealed his fate by slandering
King James I in 1618, Richard Brothers earned himself arrest, a charge
of treason and a spell in a lunatic asylum for his dismally disrespectful
prophecies.
But he was only the first and most renowned of the early nineteenth-
century judaisers. In 1814 a sixty-five-year-old Devonshire upholsteress
named Joanna Southcott declared herself a virgin about to give birth to a
messiah named Shiloh who would lead the Jews home to Palestine. In 1825
a Leicestershire woman named Mary Seddon gathered together a band of
58 1621–1948
Jews and set off in the direction of Jerusalem on a white donkey. The odd
cavalcade had reached Calais by the time her husband retrieved her and
deposited her in a lunatic asylum.
By the early 1840s a specialist in the treatment of religious delusions
was addressing the public perception that religious insanity was on the
increase in England. In a work entitled Observations on the Religious
Delusions of Insane Persons Nathaniel Bingham identified ‘terror inspired
by fanatical preaching, perplexity of mind from studying controverted
subjects, or endeavouring to unravel the mysterious parts of the sacred
writings, or the misapplication of particular texts’ 23 as pastimes partic-
ularly conducive to insanity. He drove home his point by highlighting the
pitiful case of the influential French author, Pierre Jurieu, a translation
of whose popular commentary on the Book of Revelation had vastly
contributed to a resurgence of millenarian interest in England. Monsieur
Jurieu, Bingham claimed, had ‘so disordered his brain’ while writing his
sensational commentary that ‘he firmly believed that the violent colics
with which he was tormented arose from the continual engagements of
seven knights who were shut up in his bowels’.24
A ‘Restorationist’ – an advocate of returning the Jews to their ancient
homeland on the grounds of bible prophecy, a nineteenth-century Christian
Zionist, in other words – was frequently dismissed as, if not downright
‘mad’, then at least ‘enthusiastic’ or ‘eccentric’. In a survey of England’s
cultural engagement with the Holy Land in the nineteenth century, Eitan
Bar-Yosef has observed that due to this association with insanity, the
dream that Lewis Way chased all his life was far from the popular cause
both Zionist and Christian Zionist historians claim, but was ‘a desire very
reluctant to speak its name’.25
* A-millennialists are those who understand the millennium as allegory and who
therefore do not expect a thousand-year reign of peace on earth.
60 1621–1948
graced at least one of her conferences with his presence, Lady Theodosia
lamented the corruption and decay all around her and longed for Jesus’s
Second Coming. ‘The church and the world are like tumbled drawers,’
she wrote to a friend. ‘May the great head of the Church, the King of the
Universe, quickly come and put us all in order!’ 37
The Powerscourt prophecy conferences were far grander than the Albury
Park ones. Twice a day the doors of the castle opened to welcome the local
gentry, the ladies all in evening dress. There were times when the crowd
puzzling over pressing Restorationist conundrums like ‘By what covenant
did the Jews, and shall the Jews, hold the land?’ or ‘What light does
Scripture throw on present events and their moral character’ 38 numbered
up to four hundred.
If the Scotsman Edward Irving was the star attraction of the Albury
Park conferences, an Irishman named John Nelson Darby was easily the
dominant voice and personality of the Powerscourt ones. But where Irving
had become a fashionable preacher, Darby had chosen a less public route,
gathering about him a small group of like-minded people who met as the
earliest Christians had, informally for detailed bible study. They, along
with others in England, would make up the core of the millenarian sect
known as the Plymouth Brethren (the sect’s stronghold was in Plymouth,
Devon). Where Irving’s prepossessing physical presence had guaranteed
him a fond female following, Darby was less than attractive to look at. A
male friend even recalled feeling a ‘strong revulsion’ on first meeting him:
‘A fallen cheek, a bloodshot eye ... a seldom shaved beard, a shabby suit
of clothes ...’ 39 Nevertheless, at least as eccentrically charismatic as Irving,
Darby also shared the older Scotsman’s gloomy pre-millennialist views; a
churchman who attended a Powerscourt conference claimed he had never
experienced ‘a more awful sense of coming evil’.40
If Darby honed his pre-millennialism with Irving’s help, he never
acknowledged a debt and always claimed to have been directly inspired
by his own close reading of the Bible. This refusal to admit to any
human influences may explain why he, rather than Irving, is credited
with being the father of a theological system known in America today
as ‘pre-millennial dispensationalism’. If the first word refers to the belief
that Christ must come again before the dawning of any thousand years
of peace, the second refers to the theory that the entire trajectory of
human history, as recorded in the Bible, is divided into a number of
eras – biblical ‘dispensations’. One of the dispensations was the pre-ad
70 Jewish one, another the Christian Church dispensation that followed
it and which Darby and Irving both believed was about to make way for
the last, Messianic age.
62 1621–1948
conversion of the Jews was a more urgent and important task than
ministering to the heathens of Africa and Asia, lent the society a veneer
of respectability.
A German Jew, a convert to Christianity named Joseph Frey, quickly
proved himself its most valuable asset. Frey was an excellent and energetic
public speaker who liked nothing better than travelling up and down the
country delivering stirring sermons about the urgent need to love Jews,
convert them to Christianity and assist their restoration to Palestine. In
1812 for example, he boosted the society’s coffers to the tune of £4,000
by preaching a total of 279 sermons. The following year he visited sixty-
seven different communities in Scotland and, a year later, he was being
congratulated for covering a total of 1,900 miles on his tours.47 Between
1813 and 1815 the society made a staggering £31,000, most of which was
spent on establishing schools, a small factory, a printing press, a church
and workshops at a brand new headquarters set in five acres of London’s
Bethnal Green. ‘At a little distance it looks like a country seat,’ said an
admiring visitor to Palestine Place in 1814, ‘ – a miracle of God manifested
before our eyes.’ 48
Unfortunately, Joseph Frey was also an embarrassingly depreciating
asset. Free to roam the country unsupervised, he was also free to gain
an unsavoury reputation as a womaniser and as the client of a brothel
in Ipswich. Eventually he was persuaded to emigrate to America where,
for a time, he continued to preach, philander and make money for the
cause and himself. The society’s problems did not end there. A golden
opportunity to persuade the Archbishop of Canterbury to take on the
role of patron of the society was lost when the mission’s trophy convert,
a rebarbative rabbi from Jerusalem, insisted that his own private study of
the kabbala had brought him to a faith in Christ – not any effort by the
society. Later the rabbi was observed leaving a brothel in Houndsditch and
soon reconverted to Judaism. In 1815, the Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria’s
father, who had consented to assume the patronage of the society two
years earlier, resigned in disgust at the crude and material way in which
Jews were being evangelised.
By this time its too grandiose schemes for expansion had brought the
London Jews’ Society to the brink of bankruptcy, from which Lewis Way’s
generous gift rescued it. Even a staunch supporter of the basic project
of converting the Jews was accusing the missionaries of ‘practising upon
the credulity’ of donors in order to pursue a ‘course of squandering and
spoliation’,49 and regretting that so decent a person as Lewis Way had
‘fallen into such hands’.50 The same sad critic also deeply regretted that,
thanks in large part to the colourful antics of people like Frey, the mission
‘The English Madness’ 65
to convert the Jews and restore them to their land was making abysmally
little headway where it really counted. Between 1809 and 1814 there were
around 100 converts, half of them children. Jews were dismissing the entire
pious project as ‘the English madness’.51
Rattled by the organisation’s tarnished reputation, the leadership made
an important decision. The mission to England’s Jews would be shelved
and all operations transferred abroad, where Jews of Europe and the
Middle East would be targeted for conversion instead, far from the English
public’s mocking gaze. Lewis Way eagerly threw himself into the work
of establishing mission stations in Warsaw, the Crimea and Beirut. The
polymath Joseph Wolff, mainstay of the Albury conferences, was dispatched
to Jerusalem to evangelise the city’s small but stridently religious Jewish
community. Wolff’s reports home were not encouraging; Jerusalem’s Jews
were ‘prejudiced and unwilling to listen’ to him,52 he discovered, and at
least as mockingly disrespectful as Jews in England. An impudent Rabbi
Mendel wanted to know why, if Jesus was really the messiah, he hadn’t
performed a real miracle by being born of a man instead of a virgin.
The London Jews’ Society did retain William Wilberforce’s support,
although Restorationism was never a main concern of his and he turned
down an invitation to attend the prophetic conferences at Albury Park.
But the person chiefly responsible for saving the organisation’s face was
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the most famous
reformer of his time and the ‘Tower of Strength of the Evangelical Party
from Land’s End to the Shetland Isles’.53
Shaftesbury would be president of the London Jews’ Society for thirty-
seven years, from 1848 until his death in 1885, when a newspaper obituarist
paid him a backhanded compliment: ‘If it be necessary to have Puritanism
represented in the Peerage Lord Shaftesbury did not spend his public life in
vain, for it would not be possible to find a more honest, a more dignified,
or a less objectionable representative of that cult’.54 For a while in the
course of his long career as a Tory peer, Shaftesbury had been the ‘most
unpopular man in the kingdom’.55 A zealous observer of the Sabbath, he’d
succeeded in cancelling England’s Sunday postal service, in banning brass
bands from parks and in closing all pubs and other places of entertainment
on the day of rest.
The puritanical brand of Christianity Shaftesbury had early imbibed
from a beloved nanny was his mainstay, and his favourite book of the
Bible the Old Testament’s Chronicles, because it was ‘full of hope for the
restoration of Israel to the Divine favour, and of their gathering to their
own land’.56 All his life he wore a signet ring carved with the exhortation
‘O pray for the peace of Jerusalem!’ and the backs of his envelopes –
66 1621–1948
inscribed with the ancient Greek for ‘Even so, Come, Lord Jesus, come!’
– loudly advertised him as an evangelical, immersed in Bible prophecy,
impatient for the Second Coming. ‘Our Lord delayeth His coming; and
why?’ he once wrote in a letter. ‘Perhaps He comes not because so few
people ask Him to come.’ 57
Shaftesbury’s mother-in-law thought him ‘almost a saint’.58 The admiration
of another close friend, however, was not unalloyed: ‘his understanding is
so warped by the most violent prejudices, that he appears quite ridiculous
whenever he finds an opportunity to vent them’,59 Henry Edward Fox wrote
in his diary, wondering if there was not a ‘dash of madness’ in Shaftesbury.
For all his magnificent reforming energies, Shaftesbury seems to have been
prey to what would be diagnosed today as violent mood swings or, perhaps,
bi-polar depression. Inclined to lurch from the ‘wildest and most jovial of
spirits’ to longer bouts of ‘cruel despondency’,60 he once nervously enquired
of his doting mother-in-law if she’d noticed any tell-tale ‘moroseness, any
fanaticism, any superstitious excess’ 61 in him. Presiding over the work of
the Lunacy Commission, he was probably wounded when a fellow commis-
sioner recommended confinement for a woman on the simple grounds that
she subscribed to the London Jews’ Society. ‘Indeed?’ Shaftesbury remarked
politely. ‘And are you aware that I am President of that Society?’ 62 One
hopes he never heard Florence Nightingale’s observation, that if he hadn’t
devoted so much energy to reforming lunatic asylums he’d surely have been
consigned to one himself.
Whatever the state of Shaftesbury’s mental health, there was nothing
deranged about the way in which he pursued the goal of persuading his
stepfather-in-law, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, that the time had
come for Britain to play her part in the fulfilment of bible prophecy by
arranging for the Jews to relocate to Palestine.
To any American colony? To any Asiatic sovereign or tribe? ... No, no,
no! There is a country without a nation; and God now, in his wisdom
and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country. His own once-loved,
nay, still-loved people, the sons of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob.’ 82 The
English Jewish writer, Israel Zangwill, who is often credited with coining
the phrase and making it the Zionist movement’s most effectively emotive
slogan, was aware of its originating with Shaftesbury when he wrote that
‘Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a
country’ in 1901.83
As impatient for progress and change as he was for the Second Coming,
Shaftesbury was pre-empting the demise of the Ottoman Empire by some
sixty years. Never having set foot in Palestine, he was ignoring the region’s
majority of Arab inhabitants, of whose existence he must have been aware
via his London Jews’ Society contacts. Perhaps he was not well informed
enough to know that Palestinian Arabs were not the same people as the
Ottoman Turks. It seems more likely that he simply didn’t regard Arabs as
a ‘nation’. But then in what sense could the Jews be described as a ‘nation’?
Perhaps in Shaftesbury’s view a people qualified as a ‘nation’ only if they’d
spent long enough in Europe to understand the desirability of nationhood.
A more plausible explanation seems to be that, almost a hundred years
before the establishment of Israel, Shaftesbury was contriving to grant
Jews their nationhood by merging the Jewish Old Testament sense of the
word ‘nation’ with its contemporary European sense.
If the British ambassador to the Porte had not been so deeply
uninterested in his 1840 scheme and the Sultan so opposed to it on the
grounds that there were enough foreign influences already at work in that
corner of his domain – the Russian Orthodox and the Catholic Church
– Shaftesbury might be credited with engineering the fulfilment of a key
Bible prophecy: the restoration of the Jews. But Shaftesbury’s bequest to
Christian Zionism is great enough. Almost half a century before Jews
started to organise in the cause of their homeland, he’d invented their best
slogan and pioneered a distinctively religious yet modern style of politics.
Recourse to that same style would tip the balance in favour of the Zionists
when it came to pressing their case with Britain and the United States in
the first half of the twentieth century.
Although it had been almost nineteen hundred years since the Jews were
last a majority in Palestine, key British and American politicians would
soon find themselves agreeing that the Jews must be ‘restored’ there – and
only there. Argentina or East Africa, or anywhere else, would not do.
chapter 4
In early 1866, the journal of the new Church of the Messiah in Maine, New
England, announced that its pastor and much of his flock – with all ‘our
houses, our agricultural implements, also our mechanical implements and
our furniture’ 1 – would shortly be relocating: not to Texas or California,
Idaho or Wyoming – but to Palestine.
As convinced as British Restorationists that bible prophecies about
the End Times were about to come true, 156 members of Pastor George
J. Adams’s church were hurrying out to the Holy Land to ‘regenerate’ it
for an influx of Jews whose arrival would precipitate the Second Coming
of Jesus in no more than ten years’ time, they believed. The enterprise
was an urgent one, and doubly appealing to its participants. If a glorious
End Times vision had persuaded many to transplant themselves to the
Holy Land, others were dazzled by Pastor Adams’s lively description of a
Palestine on the brink of an economic miracle. The truth, that Palestine
was miserably poor, corruptly misruled by the Turks and dangerous and
desolate outside a few main towns, paled into insignificance beside their
enthusiasm for the scheme. If they arrived out there soon enough, with all
their American know-how and state-of-the-art farm machinery, they could
surely beat the Jewish rush.
Preparations were well in hand for a September departure. The Nellie
Chaplin – a brand new, 567-ton sailing ship with three masts, an enlarged
cabin house and galley, and a full seven feet below deck to hold her human
cargo and all their worldly goods – was ready. By June the Church of the
Messiah’s newsletter was informing all those committed to the regeneration
of Palestine that the price of a first-class cabin would be $100, a second-
class one, $65. Each family must reckon on spending a minimum of $225
on a prefabricated wooden house – complete with sash windows, panel
doors and a brick chimney – of the sort the state of Maine had made a
name for itself supplying to pioneer settlements all over the expanding
74 1621–1948
one who reels drunk to his pulpit?’ 6 The rest, meanwhile, heaped the blame
for what the author Mark Twain later called the ‘complete fiasco’ 7 on
Adams’s agent and the incurably sceptical journalist. Doggedly defending
the enterprise in which they had invested their money and their souls, they
appended their signatures to a version of the truth as they needed to see
it: Pastor Adams was the ‘most noble, honest and upright of men’, and
the journalist ‘the greatest liar in Palestine’.8 The feud between the two
parties waxed so bitter that the consul feared a bloodbath. Telegraphing
his superior in Constantinople, he begged him to send a gunboat to impose
a peace.
Tempers cooled without military intervention but by the end of the
spring Adams’s critics were firmly in the ascendant. There had been four
more fatalities and some of the Regenerators had already sailed for home.
Desperate, all their money spent, the majority had no choice but to humbly
throw themselves on the charity of the mockers back in New England.
In a published appeal, they begged for the price of their return passages,
confessing to feelings of ‘bitter sorrow and humiliation’ at having been
‘duped’ by their mentor, at having ‘blindly followed his advice, believed
his word, obeyed his counsel and remained his most ardent supporters
in everything’ for so long.9 Twain, who later sailed from Jaffa as far as
Egypt with some of the poorest, noted that the appeal had fallen on deaf
ears: just one dollar had been donated towards the rescue effort, which
suggested to him that ‘practical New England was not sorry to be rid of
such visionaries’.10 Only the private charity of two American tourists and
the harassed consul in Jerusalem saved the ruined Regenerators.
Their basic and early error had been a failure to make sensible enquiries
into the background of the person they were trusting with their lives.
The theatrical character who had appeared in their quiet eastern seaboard
neighbourhood only six years earlier, the powerful preacher who ‘quoted
scriptures in such torrents’,11 was a tailor turned hack actor, best known
for his spirited interpretation of Shakespeare’s paranoid Richard III. If
they could be forgiven for not knowing that this showman had abandoned
his consumptive first wife and children in order to take up with the heartily
disliked Louisa, his reputation as a heavy drinker should have rung alarm
bells. And a little more investigation might have yielded another insight
into their pastor’s chameleon past. Born a Methodist, Adams had recently
attained, and then suddenly lost, an important position in the Mormon
Church of the Latter-day Saints.
Adams’s bungled scheme to regenerate the Holy Land for a mass influx
of Jews and the Second Coming owed its genesis to a typically Mormon
pre-millennialist take on the Bible and to a Mormon belief that, just as
‘The Americanising Effect’ 77
the members of the Church of the Latter-day Saints must build themselves
a New Jerusalem in Jackson County, Missouri, so the Jews had to rebuild
theirs in Palestine. One important respect in which both Mormonism and
the Church of the Messiah differed from most Protestant sects of the early
nineteenth century – though not from John Nelson Darby – was in their
insistence that the Jews did not need converting to Christianity, either
before or after their restoration to Palestine.
Pastor Adams had not lied to the Sultan when he told him he was not
a missionary; his odd judaising belief that he and his congregation were
themselves the remnants of one of the lost tribes of Israel, and so almost
Jews, ruled out a campaign of conversion. But theological niceties of this
kind were irrelevant in Jaffa in the summer of 1867, when Adams’s lurid
American past was repeating itself in an ever more lurid present. With his
vision collapsing around him, he was collapsing too – night after night,
blind drunk and burbling Shakespearian soliloquies – in Jaffa’s narrow
stone alleys.
The exasperated American consul in Jerusalem bypassed his superior
in Constantinople to write direct to Washington to inform the American
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs – the man who’d originally given his
blessing to Adams’s enterprise – that the leader of the American Colony
in Jaffa had been discovered lying in the middle of a road, ‘in the most
degrading drunkenness’ and, once sober, had returned home, cursing and
blinding and challenging his enemies to public fist-fights. The next day,
drunk again, Adams had collapsed ‘upon the road, against a telegraph
pole’.12
By 1 October 1867 – almost a year to the day after they had landed at
Jaffa – only a handful of the 156 Regenerators had chosen to remain rather
than return, humbled and destitute, to America. Among them were Rolla
Floyd, who would make a proud name for himself as the best tour guide in
Palestine, and Adams and his wife, who hung on for a few months before
robbing some English tourists of the price of their passage home. Adams
had promised the remnants of his flock that he would return with more
funds, but it was two years before he was heard of again, in Philadelphia,
where he died in 1880 at the age of sixty-nine.
Both Americans and British living in the Holy Land in the mid-nineteenth
century believed that the time for the restoration of the Jews was nigh, but
their preparations for that prophesied event were different. Where British
Restorationists generally concentrated their efforts on converting the Jews
to Christianity by theological argument, their American counterparts
78 1621–1948
usually tackled the practical task of improving the land. How was an
Israel ever going to prosper again in the manner so lovingly detailed by
the Bible prophets and, for example, Sir Henry Finch, unless the land was
made more fruitful?
Almost ten years before the Adams colony failed, two other millenarian
farming ventures had started and ended in disaster. The first was a small
group mostly of women, led by Clorinda Minor, a wife and mother from
Philadelphia who declared herself a latter-day Queen Esther whom God
had instructed to ‘make ready the land of Israel for the King’s return’.13
Minor’s project soon provoked a diplomatic incident that pitted the
American consul in Beirut against his British counterpart in Jerusalem.
The second venture, that of the extended Dickson family from
Massachusetts, who farmed 12 acres of land near Jaffa, had ended in tragedy
in 1858. Local Bedouins attacked the farm, plundered the farmhouse, killed
one man and beat up another, before raping two of the women. The writer
Herman Melville, who happened to have visited and spoken to the old
patriarch of the family and his wife a year earlier, painted a picture of an
enterprise already in trouble, of a fond dream colliding with harsh reality.
Melville’s conversation with old Dickson speaks tragicomic volumes:
century sympathies are all with the Palestinian Arabs and their right to
their homeland.
In their different ways, British and Americans did their best to hurry
along the fulfilment of prophecy, but with unimpressive results. For all their
practical hard work, the handful of American eccentrics who dreamed of
making Palestine a land fit for Jews to return to could point to no greater
success than the British missionaries with their dream of converting the
Jews. But it was Restorationists – British and American – whose efforts
mobilised a French Jew, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, to invest in the
creation of rural settlements in Palestine and promotion of agriculture
among urban Jews in the early 1880s, when the emergency created by the
Russian pogroms of that period led to the establishment of the first rural
Jewish settlements.
* There were 2,000–3,000 Millerites in Britain but the press was hostile and they
were often confused with Mormons. A stubborn remnant of American Millerites
adapted their expectations and became the Seventh Day Adventists.
‘The Americanising Effect’ 81
complexities where not everyone either wanted to, or could, follow them.
Those they left behind were alarmed and outraged that the Bible as the
inerrant word of God, the sturdy, intellectually respectable mainstay of
Protestant Christianity for the best part of three hundred years, was under
attack: not by Roman Catholicism or Judaism, but by forces inside the
Protestant fold. Who knew where such attacks might end, they asked
themselves. Would these theologians soon be claiming that Jesus had
never lived and died and risen again? Would they dare to suggest another,
brand new, route to salvation? That way lay perdition and atheism, said
those Christian conservatives; that way lay what their spiritual descendants
today, American fundamentalists, regularly and bitterly revile as ‘liberal
secular relativist humanism’.
The first tiny seeds of a conservative religious movement that would
be known as fundamentalism by the 1920s germinated in this climate of
anxious anti-intellectualism. A stubborn defence of the old verities, and a
preoccupation with the part the Jews and their land must play in bringing
about the Kingdom of God on earth, would be two of early American
fundamentalism’s salient characteristics. In the course of the twentieth
century the battle lines would become more clearly drawn between two
opposing Christian camps. The first, and more liberal one, increasingly
viewed the Bible in the context of history; the second, the conservative
fundamentalist one, viewed not just history but the future, too, in the
context of the Bible.
In the 1870s John Nelson Darby was inclined to blame his disappointing
harvest of American souls on the Millerites’ foolish date-setting or on the
Americans’ general lack of spirituality. He never admitted that his own
personality was probably his biggest handicap.
Darby was not a mass-communicator; he hated large gatherings and
frowned on emotional excess. But large gatherings and emotional excess
were the special hallmarks of both America’s great evangelical revivals
– in the 1740s and again from the 1790s to 1810. In the same way as
pop bands now tour a country or the world, playing to sports stadiums
and parks crammed with their fans, so the great revivalist preachers of
nineteenth-century America provided the mass entertainment of their
time, touring the United States, battling the evils of breakneck urbani-
sation by exhorting, terrifying, comforting and reviving whole towns at
a time, in fields and parks and churches and homes. When it came to
the wider dissemination and firm implantation of pre-millennial dispen-
sationalist theology, Darby’s impenetrable writings, whose style was ‘half
86 1621–1948
took notes on the proceedings, prayed and sang hymns, provided conservative
Christians of any Protestant denomination with a forum in which to affirm
their enduring belief in the inerrancy of the Bible and defend it from attack
by those contaminated by Darwinism and the German Higher Criticism.
At these earnest gatherings, in a spot ‘overlooking the lake Ontario and the
river Niagara ... surrounded by green trees ... secluded from the noise of
the world’,40 American fundamentalism began to sprout and produce an
intellectual framework to oppose that of the liberal theologians with their
fancy new theories. Pre-millennial dispensationalist fundamentalism was
clear, consistent and reassuringly coherent.
Pre-millennial dispensationalists soon dominated the Niagara conferences
but James H. Brookes was a bridge-builder, not a fanatic. Concerned
not to alienate other Protestant Christians, he was more tolerant of the
smorgasbord approach than Darby. For pre-millennial dispensationalists
like him, with a particular interest in decoding prophecy, there was a First
Bible and Prophetic Conference in a New York church in the autumn of
1878, at which a reporter for the Christian Observer felt like Alice in
Wonderland, ‘stumbling around in an unfamiliar landscape’, astonished
at what he was hearing and ‘often quite cross’.41 The Jews, on whose
restoration to Palestine the entire unfolding of the End Times depended,
were naturally a central theme of the event. ‘Here they stand today, as
distinct as ever, occupying no country of their own, scattered through
all countries, identical in their immemorial physiognomy, Earth’s men of
destiny,’ 42 rhapsodised one of the speakers.
The New York conference was the first of six; the last would take place
long after Brookes’s death, in 1918, in a mood of exultant expectation.
A year earlier Britain had issued the Balfour Declaration, indicating her
willingness to ‘view with favour’ the establishment of a Jewish homeland
in Palestine, and General Edmund Allenby had led the British capture of
Jerusalem. The influence of mainly English Christian Zionists on those
two crucial steps towards the fulfilment of an End Times prophecy is the
story of the next chapter.
Brookes excelled in his spheres but it was a friend of his, the Billy
Graham of the nineteenth century, a New England farm boy turned
Chicago shoe salesman, named Dwight L. Moody, who spread Darby’s
message beyond books and pulpits and conferences. Moody had enjoyed
‘moulding’ his customers’ wills ‘to buy more and costlier shoes’,43 but
soon nourished an ambition to be moulding souls. No intellectual, despite
his claim that he would rather part with his ‘entire library, excepting my
Bible’ 44 than with the works of one of Darby’s most faithful interpreters
(C. H. Mackintosh), Moody did not just reject the new German Higher
88 1621–1948
Criticism that was sending its exponents ‘up in a balloon, whizzing away
above the heads of the people’;45 he stripped Darby’s message down to
its urgent basics. In the words of one of his biographers, pre-millennial
dispensationalism in Moody’s hands became simply ‘another weapon of
evangelism’.46 With the ‘wrecked vessel’ of the world growing ‘darker
and darker’ and people taking to the lifeboat he was offering them, there
was no time to lose. The race was on to save as many souls as possible
before the moment when God came in judgment to ‘burn up this world’.47
Mass evangelism was all that counted: ‘Why polish the brass on a sinking
ship?’ 48 was Moody’s challenge to post-millennialists still struggling to
build the Kingdom of God on earth.
‘Crazy Moody’, as he was known in the Chicago of his youth, went
hectically about his SOS business. He smashed the whisky jugs of
alcoholics, chased potential child converts through the streets, held services
in saloon bars, and harangued crowds of passers-by from the steps of
the town hall. His uncle described the twenty-three-year-old evangelist as
‘crazy as a March hare’ on account of his driving into his yard one cold
morning, his face ‘as red as red flannel’, shouting ‘“Good morning, Uncle
Zebulon, what are you going to do for Christ today?”’ 49 before hurrying
on his way again. But by the age of thirty-six, when he embarked on
a three-year revival tour of Britain in 1872, Moody had matured into a
preacher the like of whom Britain had not known since the era of the
Wesleys or, perhaps, of Edward Irving. Tens of thousands of English, Scots
and Irish, of all social classes, sampled and loved his simple and homely
preaching style, his energy and warmth, his lack of pomposity and the
tear-jerking hymns of his musician partner, Ira Sankey. Moody was no
snob; when Queen Victoria’s daughter-in-law, Princess Alexandra, graced
one of his meetings, he behaved just as usual, ‘rolling into his chair like a
New England farmer’.50
The aged Earl of Shaftesbury pronounced himself ‘deeply impressed’
by Moody, the more so ‘because of the imperfection of the whole thing’.
Moody’s voice was ‘bad and ill-managed’, he thought, his language
‘colloquial’ and his anecdotes unsuitably humorous, and yet the overall
result was ‘striking, effective, touching and leading to much thought’.
Seeing Moody perform instant rebirths in the Holy Spirit, Shaftesbury
marvelled at God’s ability to make use of such ‘feeble materials’.51 There
is no record of them meeting to discuss the restoration of the Jews. No
doubt Shaftesbury, not to mention Darby, who dismissed Moody as ‘the
active man in Chicago’ 52 and his tour of Britain as ‘very shallow work’,53
would have judged Moody’s views on the subject as lacking in profundity.
In a sermon about God’s promise to Abraham to make his people a great
‘The Americanising Effect’ 89
nation,54 Moody asked, ‘... hasn’t that prophecy been fulfilled? Hasn’t
God made that a great and mighty nation? Where is there any nation that
has ever produced such men as have come from the seed of Abraham? ...
When I meet a Jew I can’t help having a profound respect for them for
they are God’s people.’ 55
On his return home, no one in Chicago called him ‘Crazy Moody’
any more. A dazzling but fleeting phenomenon in Britain, he went on to
become a national hero in his own country, and a model for all fundamen-
talist pastors. Shortly before his visit to Boston, the poet Walt Whitman
denounced him as an ‘ignorant charlatan’ and a ‘mistaken enthusiast’,56
but 6,000 Bostonians turned out to hear the great ‘Dr. Evangelical’ speak.
In Philadelphia he addressed 12,000 in a freight depot and in New York’s
Great Roman Hippodrome on Madison Avenue he reached out to save
60,000 a day. Moody died in 1899, after a last ‘crusade’ to Kansas. But a
decade before his death he had founded Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute.
A stronghold of pre-millennial dispensationalism, it would proudly call
itself the ‘West Point of Fundamentalism’ and was soon turning out pre-
millennial dispensationalist evangelists, missionaries, RE teachers and
pastors of evangelical churches on an industrial scale.
Moody wanted practical and active ‘gap-men’ to bridge the widening
gulf between intellectual ordained ministers and the mass of busy, working
people. Out went the Hebrew and Greek studies pursued at America’s
top theological colleges; in came practical crash courses in spreading the
fundamentalist world-view. The institute’s most famous method of teaching
the Bible rejected minute analysis of the text and its different authors, as
well as examination of its historical context, in favour of ‘synthetic study’,
which involved reading each book of the Bible, straight through, at one
sitting, over and over again. After two years students were expected to
be Word-perfect. The religious historian Timothy P. Weber has recently
located the key to the spread of pre-millennial dispensationalism’s success
in its adherents’ circus-trick-like ability ‘to “out-Bible” everybody else in
sight’ 57 – like my fellow tourist Marty, on Chuck Missler’s Holy Land
tour.
By the late 1920s, when ‘fundamentalism’ had been recognised as a
movement, the institute’s complex of thirty-four buildings in downtown
Chicago boasted 2,000 students and a staff of 40, presided over after
Moody’s death by a succession of able pre-millennial dispensationalists. A
mission to the Jews had been added to the choice of courses on offer. The
institute’s radio transmitter broadcast reports about trips to the Holy Land
in Yiddish, to encourage Jews to restore themselves to British Mandate
Palestine. In pride of place in the main hallway was a thoroughly modern,
90 1621–1948
word of Scofield and the Word of God easily merged into one supremely
authoritative whole. An American theologian who recalls being born
again with the help of a Baptist who knew Scofield’s annotations as
well as he knew the Bible, has noted that within living memory ‘many
a pastor has lost all influence for no other reason than failure to concur
with all the footnotes of Dr Scofield’.64 For the first half of the twentieth
century the Scofield Reference Bible was the fundamentalists’ Bible par
excellence, the single most influential fundamentalist text. By 1937 it had
sold over three million copies, and by the 1950s an estimated half of all
evangelical groups were using it.65 Revised in 1967, it is still in print,
though the New American Standard Bible (NASB) is the version of the
Bible most favoured by American evangelicals today.
Helped by Brookes, Moody and Scofield, by the first decade of the
twentieth century Darby’s pre-millennial dispensationalism had evolved into
an alternative intellectual blunderbuss with which conservative American
fundamentalists could combat the threatening complexities of mainstream
liberal theology. It was a sufficiently sophisticated weapon of argument, a
competing ideology. The genial Brookes had worked hard at maintaining
respectful contact with other conservative evangelicals. Moody had raised
its profile and the emotional temperature by insisting on the nearness of
the End Times and establishing his Bible Institute. Scofield had hammered
home the central theme – the crucial importance of the Jews’ return to
Palestine for any Christian who wanted to be sure of qualifying for the
Rapture.
For those who had chosen to view history in its biblical context rather than
the Bible in its historical context, the future was not a closed book but a
bible opened at the prophetic utterances of Isaiah and Daniel, Zechariah,
Ezekiel and the author of Revelation. And there would be times when
such people tried to hurry that pre-scripted history along. Lewis Way, the
Earl of Shaftesbury and Pastor George J. Adams were good examples of
the type. Late nineteenth-century America produced another in the shape
of William E. Blackstone or, as he preferred to think of himself, ‘God’s
little errand boy’.66
A respected Chicago businessman who’d made a fortune in real estate
after the Civil War, a ‘tall, fine intellectual man, with sideburns’,67 immense
energy and a boundless confidence in the imminent fulfilment of bible
prophecy, Blackstone was also an autodidact like Scofield, a friend and
admirer of Dwight L. Moody, an acquaintance of James H. Brookes and
a regular at the Niagara Bible conferences. It was Brookes who one day
‘The Americanising Effect’ 93
deflected the little errand boy’s request that he write a book about Jesus’s
Second Coming for easy distribution on trains and in other public places,
with a suggestion that Blackstone write it himself. The result, in 1878,
was Jesus is Coming.
A work as clear and user-friendly as Brookes’s own Maranatha, with a
similar Heath Robinson-style diagram of the dispensations, complete with
Rapture and Tribulation, Jesus is Coming was written in a tone guaranteed
to excite a lust for territorial conquest on the Jews’ behalf: ‘The title deed
to Palestine is recorded, not in the Mohammedan Seraglio of Jerusalem nor
the Seraglio of Constantinople, but in hundreds of millions of Bibles now
extant in more than three hundred languages of the earth,’ 68 Blackstone
proclaimed, and ‘Like the red thread in the British rigging, it runs through
the whole Bible’.69
More importantly, Blackstone provided future generations of Christian
Zionists with a rationale for watching affairs in the Middle East as closely
as they might the ticking hands of a clock, or a pan coming to the boil.
Israel, in the biblical sense of the Jews, rather than their modern state,
Blackstone wrote, is ‘God’s sundial. If we want to know our place in the
chronology, our position in the march of events, look at Israel ...’ 70 To
successive and lengthening editions of the books – the second edition was
almost double the length of the first, the third almost three times longer
– Blackstone added fresh evidence for his belief that the restoration of the
Jews and the End Times were already under way. The completion of the
Jaffa–Jerusalem railway line in 1882 and the waning of Ottoman power,
for example, were both grist to his prophecy-inspired mill. Jesus is Coming
was an even bigger hit than Maranatha in terms of distribution; it would
sell over a million copies and be translated into forty-two languages.
The Rapture was a vivid reality for Blackstone and its proximity made
him behave in ways even Shaftesbury would have recognised as eccentric.
While on a tour of the Holy Land with his daughter Flora in 1888, he
carefully arranged to store thousands of copies of Jesus is Coming in a
cave at Petra, today in Jordan. Blackstone believed that the Jews suffering
the seven-year Tribulation under the Antichrist after the Rapture would
flee there from neighbouring Palestine and be eternally grateful for some
literature to teach them the way to salvation. Twenty years later, caught
up in the prophetic over-excitement generated by Britain’s conquest of
Palestine in 1917, and expecting to be Raptured at any moment, Blackstone
appointed the eminent Supreme Court judge, Louis Brandeis – a friend
whose Jewish faith meant he could not be Raptured and would have to
suffer the Tribulation – the executor of his estate. All moneys were to
be expended on the missionary activities of a prophesied 144,000 Jewish
94 1621–1948
Feelings were running high but, when it came down to it, neither the
Americans nor the British welcomed the waves of Jewish immigrants
washing up on their own shores. With 62,000 destitute and mostly Russian
Jews pouring into the United States between 1881 and 1884, the case for a
Jewish restoration to Palestine seemed to Blackstone to be making itself.
Ignoring the fact that most of his Reform * Jewish friends in Chicago
firmly opposed his scheme – ‘We say “the country wherein we live is our
Palestine, and the city wherein we dwell is our Jerusalem”,’ 74 said Rabbi
E. G. Hirsch – Blackstone composed a short Restorationist petition and
collected 413 signatures of prominent Americans to append to it. In March
1891 he delivered it to President Benjamin Harrison.
President Harrison must have been impressed by a list of supporters
that included a judge of the Supreme Court, the Speaker of the House
of Representatives, the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign
Affairs, the governor of Massachusetts, six mayors, ninety-three editors of
newspapers and periodicals, Dwight L. Moody and the businessman, John
D. Rockefeller. The combined prestige and influence of those signatories to
the ‘Blackstone Memorial’ was a testament to Americans’ rising resistance
to Jewish immigration but also to the businesslike style in which Blackstone
framed his bold request that America initiate a mass transplantation of
Jews to a land ruled by a foreign power.
Blackstone’s declamatory writing style – rhetorical questions, such as
‘What shall be done for the Russian Jews?’ and ‘Why not give Palestine
back to them again?’ – ideally suited his purpose. He reasoned that since
Russia wanted to be rid of her Jews, and Europe lacked room for more
peasants, and bringing them all the way to America would be ‘a tremendous
expense and require years’, and since the Jews had as much right to a
national homeland in the crumbling Ottoman Empire as the liberated
Greeks or Serbs or Bulgars, and since wealthy Jews would willingly pay
off a part of the Ottoman Empire’s debt in return for a homeland in
Palestine, Restoration was the obvious solution. No mention was made
of Palestine’s Arab inhabitants, and no account was taken of the fact that
the Balkan peoples were already majorities in their lands, which meant
that – unlike Israel – Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria could never be resented
as foreign colonies.
Blackstone’s covering letter was an equally lucid enlargement of the
same themes. Swiftly disposing of the protests of Reform Jews as those of a
tiny minority, he forecast that the Jaffa–Jerusalem railway line, once under
internationally sponsored Jewish control and extended via Damascus into
the valley of the Euphrates, would become an ‘international highway’ and
Jaffa a busy port – just as Pastor Adams had imagined. And, just as Lewis
Way had done while canvassing Tsar Alexander I’s support some seventy
years earlier, Blackstone issued a flattering invitation to President Harrison
to act as a latter-day Cyrus, the Persian king who had facilitated the ancient
Israelites’ return to their land after their sixth-century Babylonian exile. In
the last line of his letter, he hinted at that old Christian Zionist motivation:
by securing a home for the ‘wandering millions of Israel’ the president and
all America would surely benefit from the ‘promise of Him who said to
Abraham, “I will bless them that bless thee”, Gen. 12: 3.’ 75
Blackstone’s offers of personal advantage proved no more attractive to
President Harrison than the same offer, by Sir Henry Finch to King James
I, had done in 1621. For all its illustrious signatories the Memorial was
ignored by any American in a position to make its recommendations a
reality, in part because of George Washington’s legacy of wariness towards
foreign entanglements. But that did not prevent a battle about it raging in
the Jewish and Christian press.
While mostly favourable, Christian opinion did sound the odd note of
caution. A New York Sun editorial identified the ‘proposition to segregate
the Jews and shut them up in Palestine’ as ‘a development of anti-
Semitism rather than an expression of pure philanthropy’.76 Conservative
and Orthodox Jews who still believed in the coming of a messiah were
cautiously in favour of Blackstone’s scheme, but there was a swell of
opposition from Reform Jews who anxiously objected both to being hurled
back into a tribal identity based on their faith and to feeling themselves
no longer welcome in America. Their arguments ranged from the practical
– Palestine would never be able to support such a large number of Jews
– to the worldly-wise: ‘It is not at all unlikely that the Jews of Palestine
would proceed to expel all non-Israelites and become as exclusive and
intolerant as other persecutors ...’ 77
Undaunted, Blackstone was soon sounding off again in the pages of
a journal called Our Day. He calculated that there would be room for
three million Jews in Palestine – more, if they could populate the ‘ancient
scriptural limits of the country’, an area comprising most of the Middle
‘The Americanising Effect’ 97
East. To win his Jewish critics round, he described a rebuilt Jewish Temple
in Jerusalem that would surely act as ‘an irresistible stimulant for a world-
wide rally to their fatherland’. He neglected to mention his belief that, after
the Antichrist had demanded to be worshipped in it during the Tribulation,
that same Temple would be destroyed. Instead, he clinched his plea with an
echo of Shaftesbury’s forty-year-old diary entry about ‘a country without
a nation’ and a ‘nation without a country’. ‘A land without a people for a
people without a land’ 78 was how Blackstone rendered the future Zionist
slogan. In the same year as the Blackstone Memorial appeared, a hugely
popular lecturer on the Holy Land named John Lawson Stoddard had
made the formula current in United States; independently of Shaftesbury
it seems, Stoddard had come up with ‘a people without a country’ and ‘a
country without a people’.79
In spite of his repellent eschatology, God’s little errand boy has earned
an even more exalted position than Shaftesbury in the pantheon of
Christian Zionist saints. His Jewish friend, Justice Brandeis, observed
that since his Memorial had preceded Theodor Herzl’s Zionist manifesto,
Der Judenstaat, by five years, Blackstone was more deserving of the title
‘Father of Zionism’ than Herzl. In 1956, on the seventy-fifth anniversary
of the Blackstone Memorial’s appearance, the eight-year-old state of Israel
named a forest after its author.
chapter 5
‘A Great Idea’
ancestral homeland, he believed. All that had been lacking was an inspiring
Jewish leader to set the process in motion and now, just in time, such a
person had appeared in the ideal shape of Dr Herzl who, to Hechler’s
astonishment, knew nothing whatsoever about bible prophecy. The burden
of Der Judenstaat’s argument was that Europe’s Jews were forever a target
of persecution in Europe because they lacked a national homeland and not,
as Hechler argued, because God had justly punished them for their ancient
collective sins but was about to keep his promise to reinstate them.
The epitome of a modern Western European Jew, Herzl had written
off all religion, including the hope of a Jewish messiah and the fulfilment
of God’s territorial promises to Abraham, as nothing but ‘the apparent
solution to riddles, the answer to all childish questions’.4 Herzl had no
burning attachment either to Jerusalem or to the Restorationists’ dream
of a Jewish Palestine. His dream of a Jewish homeland was not restricted
to Palestine; Argentina, he thought, might do just as well. But he had no
objection to Hechler’s calculations, especially since the chaplain’s bible-
based dates for the fulfilment of his dream were so imminent. Time was
of the essence, Herzl believed. First the Russian pogroms provoked by
Jewish involvement in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and then
the celebrated Dreyfus Affair * in France, a cause célèbre that Herzl had
reported for his newspaper, had forced him to the shocking conclusion
that Europe – west or east, under enlightened democratic or unenlightened
autocratic rule – would never be safe for his people, no matter how much
they strove to assimilate. Race rather than religion was at the root of the
modern anti-Semitism and there was nothing Jews could do about that.
Thirty-four years before Herzl wrote his Der Judenstaat, a German Jewish
writer, Moses Hess, had made the same point: ‘Jewish noses cannot be
reformed, and the black wavy hair of the Jews will not be changed into
blond by conversion or straightened out by constant combing ...’ 5
After their first meeting at the offices of the influential liberal Neue
Freie Presse where Herzl worked, Herzl confided to his diary that, although
the Anglican chaplain seemed ‘a sympathetic and sensitive man’, he was
undeniably an oddball. With the ‘long grey beard of a prophet’,6 Hechler
was ‘an incredible figure when looked at with the quizzical eyes of a
Viennese journalist’ 7 – but possibly a very useful one. Hechler’s job as
embassy chaplain allowed him privileged access to the British ambassador
and so to wider diplomatic circles, to people with the power to help Herzl
* In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the French army,
was falsely accused of spying for Germany. The case became a cause célèbre,
exposing virulent anti-Semitism in a ‘civilised’ Western European society.
‘A Great Idea’ 101
realise his dream. Less than a fortnight later, the Viennese journalist was
climbing the stairs to his bizarre admirer’s fourth-floor lodgings in high
hopes of gaining more than a lesson in Bible prophecy.
Had Herzl already calculated that the price for securing the chaplain’s
and other Christian Restorationists’ assistance was his acceptance that the
Jewish homeland had to be in Palestine and nowhere else? If he hadn’t
yet, he soon would.
After listening politely to Hechler’s excited talk of rebuilding the Temple
in Jerusalem and poring over maps of the Holy Land which he spread on
the floor, Herzl brought the chaplain back down to earth by explaining
that if he, Herzl, was to gain the trust of his fellow Jews sufficiently to
become their leader and have a hope of realising the dream they shared,
he must win the backing of at least one European head of state. Herzl
had thought that Britain, long notorious among its European neighbours
for its church’s Restorationist leanings and its comparative freedom from
anti-Semitism, might furnish him with such a sponsor, but he had now
changed his mind. In the light of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s growing stature on
the European stage, he thought Germany a more promising place to start.
Hechler responded instantly to this challenge with the welcome news that
he happened to be acquainted with Kaiser Wilhelm II’s chaplain. He would
immediately travel to Berlin to speak to his friend and suggest that he lay
Herzl’s scheme before the Kaiser, on one condition: Herzl must undertake
to pay all his travel expenses.
The clergyman’s abrupt plunge from the visionary to the mercenary put
Herzl on his guard. Was Hechler really as well connected as he claimed
or ‘merely an impecunious clergyman with a taste for travel’? Herzl could
easily imagine how one or other of the chaplain’s Berlin contacts would
‘pat him ironically on the shoulder and say “Hechler, old man, don’t let
that Jew stuff your head with nonsense”’.8
Three things finally persuaded him to part with money he could ill afford
for Hechler’s trip. First, the chaplain was not as naive as he appeared; he
seemed to understand that feverish chatter about bible prophecy would
not help their cause, and that he ran the risk of being accused of using
Herzl to force the fulfilment of prophecy. Next, Herzl found the sight
of Hechler rolling up his great map of Palestine and storing it carefully
in a specially enlarged coat pocket oddly reassuring, ‘his most naive and
convincing touch’.9 And, when the chaplain settled himself down at a little
organ to treat him to a stirring rendition of a Restorationist – now Zionist
– song he had written, Herzl could no longer doubt his devotion to the
future Jewish state.
Hechler was as canny and effective as Shaftesbury or Blackstone when
102 1621–1948
for two and a half hours with what Herzl described as ‘a peculiar look of
peace in his fine, steady eyes’.15 Herzl couched his appeal in political terms
calculated to attract, not just the Grand Duke, but all Europe’s crowned
heads. The prospect of gaining a homeland could be guaranteed to lure
many Jews away from their dangerous preoccupation with socialism,
he told him, and they would naturally be importing Europe’s superior
civilisation to a ‘plague-ridden, blighted corner of the Orient’.16
The Grand Duke’s response was kind and encouraging, but also cautious.
He feared most Jews would interpret the scheme as a concerted anti-Semitic
campaign to rid Europe of its Jews, and was anxious that no one should
learn of his own interest in the matter, or think him in any way swayed
by Hechler’s mystical arguments. In spite of Herzl’s repeated insistence
that he needed the backing of a Christian ruler or minister to lend him
authority and his plan credibility, the Grand Duke remained firmly of the
opinion that no prince or politician would throw their weight behind Herzl
unless they were sure most Jews wanted to emigrate to Palestine.
On the train journey back to Vienna Hechler entertained Herzl by
unfolding his maps of Palestine, lecturing him at length on the vast pre-
ordained extent of a modern Jewish state – ‘the northern frontier is to be
the mountains facing Cappadocia, the southern, the Suez Canal’ 17 – and
suggesting a catchy slogan for the Zionist movement, ‘Palestine as in the
time of David and Solomon!’
Although repelled by Hechler’s occasional unthinking lapses into
anti-Semitism and suspicious that he planned to convert him, Herzl was
beginning to trust him. After all, his connections were proving as good as
he claimed, and his advice and ideas were helpful. ‘Unless it turns out later
that in one way or another he is a double dealer, I would wish the Jews to
show him a full measure of gratitude,’ 18 he wrote in his diary.
Jews, especially from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, were flocking
to the Zionist cause but Herzl remained as convinced as Shaftesbury and
Blackstone had been that a Jewish homeland was unattainable without
the endorsement of a great Christian power. Eight months later, when his
chances of co-opting the Kaiser looked bleak and he had been rebuffed
by the British Foreign Office with a curt ‘Lord Salisbury cannot grant an
audience to Dr Herzl’, a discouraged Herzl gratefully singled out Hechler
as ‘the most genuine and enthusiastic’ of his supporters.19 Hechler was
one of only three Christian Zionists to attend the First Zionist Congress
at Basle in 1897. Another was Jean-Henri Dunant, the Swiss founder of
the International Committee of the Red Cross.
For all his millenarian enthusiasm Hechler was proving both more patient
and more realistic than Herzl. ‘The great ones of the world have to be
104 1621–1948
tamed,’ 20 he told him. If the grand dream they shared was not yet inspiring
a majority of Jews, they could hardly expect the rulers of Christendom to
rally to their flag. Fortified by his Christian faith and privileged insights
into the prophesied future, Hechler did his best to comfort Herzl: ‘Let us
calmly remember, especially at the most trying and darkest times, that the
will of God is accomplished in spite of the foolishness of men.’ 21 Together,
they steadily pursued Herzl’s chosen strategy; Tsar Nicholas II of Russia
was sent a Russian edition of Der Judenstaat via his German father-in-
law, as was the Grand Duke of Hesse, who was another of Hechler’s old
acquaintances. The Tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir, who took a great
interest in the Holy Land, was approached, and so was the eccentric but
enlightened King Ferdinand of Bulgaria and, eventually, Victor Emmanuel II
of Italy and Pope Pius X, but all to no avail.
Herzl’s doubts about Hechler tended to resurface when he was forced
to see him as others saw him. Shortly before a second meeting with Grand
Duke Friedrich at his castle on an island in Lake Constance in the autumn
of 1898, he was mortified to hear a court official accuse Hechler of having
falsely predicted the end of the world back in the mid-1870s. ‘I held it very
much against you,’ the man remembered. ‘And you see the world hasn’t
come to an end yet.’ 22 Herzl confided to his diary: ‘Hechler is fine for the
entrée, but afterwards one becomes a bit ridiculous because of him’.23
The embassy chaplain seems to have been a pre-millennial dispens-
ationalist in the style of Scofield or Blackstone; his reading of the Bible
made him inclined to believe that a Jewish restoration to Palestine would
bring not instant peace and prosperity for the Jews, but the Tribulation. A
letter he sent to a Jerusalem missionary in the autumn of 1898 suggests
that he was as disinclined as John Nelson Darby to seek the Jews’
conversion to Christianity before their return to Palestine and that he
viewed bible time in dispensational divisions. Given the establishment of
a handful of Jewish farming settlements, he also seems to have favoured
the more practical American approach to assisting the Jews’ Restoration,
that pioneered by Clorinda Minor, the ill-fated Dicksons and Pastor
Adams’s Regenerators:
You look to the conversion of the Jews, but the times are changing
rapidly, and it is important for us to look further and higher. We are
now entering, thanks to the Zionist movement, into Israel’s messianic
age. Thus, it is not a matter these days of opening all the doors of your
churches to the Jew, but rather of opening the gates to their homeland
and of sustaining them in their work of clearing the land and irrigating
it and bringing water to it ...24
‘A Great Idea’ 105
Grand Duke Friedrich had better news for them at their second meeting.
During a frank conversation about Zionism, Kaiser Wilhelm had declared
himself intrigued by the subject, especially since he was about to embark on
a grand pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He had been particularly interested
in Hechler’s archaeological sideline: his mission to prove exponents of
the German Higher Criticism wrong by unearthing the ancient Israelites’
Ark of the Covenant and some of Moses’s tablets from their probable
burial place at Mount Nebo, in eastern Palestine, today in Jordan. Kaiser
Wilhelm had promised the Grand Duke that he would ask his ambassador
in Vienna to inform himself both about Hechler’s chances of digging up
these priceless holy grails and about the finer points of Zionism.
When Herzl arrived at the German embassy in Vienna for his first
interview with Ambassador von Eulenburg, he was astonished to find
Hechler busily converting one of the embassy’s reception rooms into a
Museum of Palestine: ‘Mounting his charts, Hechler started perspiring
and finally threw off his coat,’ noted Herzl with embarrassed distaste.
‘He went on working in his shirt sleeves. At last everything was arranged:
temple model, plaster casts of ancient relics etc.’ 25 In the course of a
short visit to Vienna for the funeral of Empress Elizabeth, Wilhelm would
find time to admire the curious exhibition, but not to speak to Herzl.
Nevertheless, Zionism’s fortunes seemed to be taking a turn for the better.
While Ambassador von Eulenburg doubted the soil of Palestine could
sustain a larger population or that the Turks would take kindly to having
two million Jews in the region, he was ‘visibly fascinated’ 26 by Herzl’s
ideas – especially once he had grasped the fact that in taking up the Zionist
cause, Germany would become more influential in the region and, in so
doing, irritate Britain.
Away at his hunting lodge but on the point of departing for the Holy
Land, the Kaiser dashed off a letter to his uncle, Grand Duke Friedrich: ‘A
momentary pause in the amorous concerts of my deer gives me a chance
to write a few lines to you ...’ 27 On the strength of von Eulenburg’s report,
he could declare himself firmly in favour of Zionism. Neither Herzl nor
Hechler saw the letter, but their determination was such that even its tell-
tale mix of anti-Semitism and cold calculation would probably not have
dismayed them. He would be happy, the Kaiser wrote, to see ‘the energy,
creative power and productivity of the tribe of Shem directed to worthier
goals than the exploitation of Christians’,28 and he could appreciate the
wisdom of placing the Jews in a position of gratitude towards Germany.
Promising to raise the topic of Zionism with the Sultan in Constantinople,
he suggested that he and Herzl meet for the first time, shortly afterwards,
in Palestine.
106 1621–1948
who had once publicly admitted to despising only one race on earth: the
Jews, for being ‘physical cowards’.34
Fortunately for Herzl, Chamberlain proved as primarily concerned with
the aggrandisement of Britain abroad as Lord Palmerston had been when
approached by Shaftesbury on the matter of a Jewish homeland over half a
century earlier. If European colonisers in the shape of the continent’s Jews
could be made to serve the Empire by consolidating Britain’s hold on areas
that were still officially Ottoman, as well as reversing the tide of Jewish
refugees into Britain, he could easily swallow his prejudice. Chamberlain
could quite see how a British-ruled Zionist homeland in the region might
eventually ‘prove a useful instrument for extending British influence into
Palestine proper, when the time came for the inevitable dismemberment
of the Ottoman Empire’.35
When both Cyprus and Al-Arish proved impracticable, it was the
businesslike Chamberlain who kept contact with the Zionists open by
offering Herzl a slice of British East Africa in 1903. Both he and Herzl
knew how far short the offer fell of the Zionists’ dream, but reports of a
new wave of pogroms on the south-western edge of the Russian Empire, at
Kishinev, had convinced Herzl that time was running out, that the Zionists
would have to compromise in order to save thousands of Jewish lives.
The Zionists’ lawyer in Britain, a young Welshman and aspiring politician
named David Lloyd George, drew up a legal charter for a Jewish settlement
in Uganda, which the Foreign Office responded to with what the American
historian David Fromkin has called ‘the first Balfour Declaration’ 36 – a
vaguely phrased, cautious approval for a grant of land and local autonomy
subject to overall British control. In this first recognition of the Jews as a
nation, Britain had gone far further than any other great power towards
realising the Zionists’ dream.
Hechler predictably opposed the Uganda plan, as did ‘God’s little errand
boy’, William E. Blackstone, who sent Herzl a bible with every mention of
‘Israel’ or ‘Zion’ underlined, and an accompanying letter insisting that the
Jewish homeland be in Palestine. Herzl was free to ignore his Christian
Zionist supporters but he could not overlook a far weightier force of
opposition among Jewish Zionists. At the Zionist Congress of 1903, a
mighty grouping of predominantly religious Russian Jews signalled their
opposition to an African homeland with shouts of ‘Palestine or Death!’
Some branded Herzl a traitor, while others tore their garments in a display
of Jewish mourning.
Blackstone and Hechler had proved themselves better attuned to the
mass of the movement than the secular Herzl: ‘The religious element is,
according to God’s word, to become the inspiring force,’ Hechler had
108 1621–1948
written approvingly as long ago as 1898, ‘and I think I can see that it is
the religious faith in Zionism, which is now already influencing the whole
nation of the Jews’.37 Similarly, Christian Zionist support for Israel today
is welcomed and appreciated far more by Israel’s religious Jews and right-
wing nationalists than by secular and liberal Israelis. The reason was and
remains simple: millenarian Christian Zionists and Israeli religious Jews
and nationalists share the crucial conviction that God promised Abraham
and his descendants dominion over the ancient land of Israel – including
today’s occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights – not
over a patch of Africa or Argentina, or anywhere else. For all three groups,
the question of how many Jews are sacrificed in the process of securing
that land is secondary, just as the question of how many Jews would have
to be sacrificed in Russian pogroms was a secondary consideration for
Hechler, Blackstone and the religious Zionists of 1903.
Herzl managed to carry 295 delegates to the Congress with him, but
there were 178 votes against and 100 abstentions. The movement split into
secular ‘Ugandists’ and religious Zionists, and Herzl was torn in half. After
eight years of fruitless hammering on the doors of European palaces in the
company of a Christian clergyman who could be as much of a liability as
an asset, of trailing around after the crowned heads of Europe in the hope
of securing their backing, the Viennese journalist was a sick and sad man.
He died in Hechler’s arms, in 1904, at the age of only forty-four.
Heart-broken, bewildered by this apparent failure of the bible prophecies
he’d devoted the best years of his life to helping to fulfil, Hechler’s misery
was compounded when he was prevented from placing a bag of Jerusalem
soil on his friend’s coffin. The only sense he could make of the tragedy was
that God had taken Herzl ‘because the Jews were not worthy of him’.38
The first Christian Zionist retreated into an impoverished retirement
in London, prophesying darkly and correctly about a coming ‘world war’
and worse tribulation for the Jews. Although the Zionists recognised his
years of faithful service to the cause with a monthly pension of £10, he
wore pages of The Times wrapped around his feet instead of socks and
subsisted on a diet of toast and tea, with a pair of candles for light and
warmth. When the pro-Zionist travel agency Thomas Cook’s offered him
a free cruise to the Middle East, he refused, begging instead for a place to
store his thousand bibles.
Hechler lived to rejoice in the Balfour Declaration and in General
Allenby’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1917, but also to lament the irresolute
failure of the British Mandate in Palestine, before dying in 1931 in the
public ward of the London Hospital, at the venerable age of eighty-five.
‘A Great Idea’ 109
The dandy statesman whom many branded ‘the Jew’ in spite of his
Christian faith melted the reserve of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert,
becoming ‘Dizzy’, later the widowed Queen’s friend and confidant. When
Victoria once quizzed him on the precise nature of his religious beliefs,
Disraeli wittily advertised his mediating role between the two faiths by
calling himself the blank page between the Old and the New Testaments.
But he also told her that, in his view, the best proof of the truth of
Christianity lay in the miraculous but prophesied survival of the Jews,
despite centuries of dispersal and persecution. It’s an anecdote many
eminent American Christian Zionists – Pat Robertson, for example 40 –
recount fondly today.
Disraeli’s efforts to provide the British public with a more sympathetic
image of a Jew to set against their anti-Semitic stereotypes were greatly
assisted by his dazzling endeavours on behalf of the British Empire.
During his second term of office, between 1874 and 1880, he transformed
that haphazardly acquired encumbrance into a glamorous and swiftly
appreciating asset, a process that required mounting involvement in the
Middle East as well as in Asia and Africa. In 1875, assisted by a loan from
his banker friend Lionel Rothschild, MP, he pulled off the brilliant coup of
buying Britain a majority stake in the Suez Canal, justifying the gigantic
£4 million expenditure as vital for the protection of the shipping route to
British India. Three years later he returned from the Congress of Berlin
with control of the first significant Ottoman possession in his pocket – not
Palestine, as had been rumoured, but Cyprus.
When Joseph Chamberlain blithely offered Herzl 6,000 square miles
of British East Africa for a homeland and Prime Minister David Lloyd
George later decided that Britain would have to compensate herself for
the mass slaughter of her youth on the Western Front with some new
jewels in the Empire’s crown (Palestine, for example), it was Disraeli’s
bold, buccaneering legacy they were honouring.
The confidence Disraeli generated aroused a similarly enterprising
spirit in Laurence Oliphant. A well-connected diplomat and spy who had
also spent some time as a shepherd and wagon-driver with an American
millenarian sect near New York in the 1860s, Oliphant was emboldened
by Disraeli’s revelation of Ottoman weakness at the Congress of Berlin in
1878. Why should he not plant a Jewish agricultural colony on a million
and a half acres of eastern Palestine, in the valley of the Jordan River,
under Turkish sovereignty but with British protection? He believed he
could bring Sultan Abdul Hamid II round to the idea by arguing its case
from a variety of practical angles: the Ottoman Empire would benefit
financially; it would be as well for the Turks to be friendly towards the
‘A Great Idea’ 111
homeland for the Jews in ‘a new Judea, poised between East and West – a
covenant of reconciliation’.46
Its Jewish story line is a simple one: young Daniel, an upper-class
Christian Englishman of impeccable looks and character, meets the ailing
Jewish sage Mordecai who has spent the past five years on the watch
for a messiah of sufficient ‘youth, beauty, refinement, Jewish birth, noble
gravity’ 47 to lead his people home. Not until Daniel’s discovery of his long-
lost Jewish mother removes the last impediment to his taking on the role
does Mordecai die in peace. A final scene of the book has Daniel bravely
informing a friend of his true Jewish identity, ignoring her carelessly anti-
Semitic comments – ‘I hope there is nothing to make you mind. You are
just the same as if you were not a Jew’ 48 – and announcing that he is
about to set off for the Holy Land:
Although not a religious Jew, the brilliant Russian chemist who replaced
Dr Herzl at the head of the struggle for a Jewish homeland in Palestine
was never tempted by Joseph Chamberlain’s East Africa solution. For all
the slaughter of the Russian pogroms, Dr Chaim Weizmann had early
recognised that without its emotional component, without its appeal to
the embedded collective memory of centuries of exile from Jerusalem,
Zionism was a lost cause. He believed that ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’, the
yearning prayer of every diaspora Jew’s Passover meal, was the ideology’s
vital engine whereas ‘Next year in Uganda’ bordered on ‘idolatry’.60
Fortunately for Weizmann, he encountered little resistance to this
argument in the corridors of British power. Even the hard-headed
imperialist Joseph Chamberlain had suspected that his 1903 offer of a
choice slice of Africa would not be acceptable, and Arthur J. Balfour, the
former Conservative prime minister who would join Lloyd George’s War
‘A Great Idea’ 115
Cabinet a decade later and become the Englishman most associated with
the creation of Israel, was easily won over to the cause. In 1906 Balfour
had been curious enough about the Zionists’ reasons for rejecting Uganda,
a solution he himself had approved, to request a Manchester meeting with
Dr Weizmann and to grant him an hour instead of fifteen minutes of
his time. Over forty years later, Weizmann recalled that meeting and his
attempt to persuade Balfour that Uganda could never be Israel:
I felt that I was sweating blood and I tried to find some less ponderous
way of expressing myself.
Then suddenly I said, ‘Mr Balfour, supposing I were to offer you
Paris instead of London, would you take it?’
He sat up, looked at me, and answered, ‘But Dr Weizmann, we have
London.’
‘That is true,’ I said, ‘But we had Jerusalem when London was a
marsh.’
He leaned back, continued to stare at me, and said two things which
I remember vividly. The first was ‘Are there many Jews who think like
you?’
I answered ‘I believe I speak the mind of millions of Jews whom you
will never see and who cannot speak for themselves but with whom I
could pave the streets of the country I come from.’
To this he said ‘If that is so, you will one day be a force.’
Shortly before I withdrew, Balfour said: ‘It is curious, the Jews I meet
are quite different.’
I answered ‘Mr Balfour, you meet the wrong kind of Jews.’ 61
the eve of the First World War only about one in a hundred of the world’s
Jews had signalled their active support for Zionism.63
The delicate political implications of the question which Montagu had
raised never interested Balfour, the son of a devout Scots Presbyterian
who’d instilled in him a love of the Bible and a special fondness for reading
aloud from the prophet Isaiah. Balfour was interested in the Jews for the
same intellectual and moral reasons as George Eliot. He was as painfully
aware as she’d been of the Christian debt to the Jews for the concept
of monotheism and the person of Jesus Christ – a debt that had been
‘shamefully ill-repaid’ with centuries of persecution.64 Not that he was
a philo-Semite; he once admitted to Weizmann that his primary instincts
were as anti-Semitic as those of Cosima Wagner, the wife of the famously
anti-Semitic German composer. But still, his moral sense of history inclined
him to judge that the Jews’ claim to territory they hadn’t dominated, let
alone ruled, for two thousand years trumped all others. He once justified
this stance by explaining that for the Jews ‘race, religion and country are
inter-related as they are inter-related in the case of no other religion and
no other country on earth’.65
Dr Weizmann had early developed an uncanny knack of finding the
argument most likely to strike a chord with whomever he was talking to
about Zionism. He’d soon understood that when that person was English
the chord was religious and historical. In his autobiography Trial and
Error, he confidently stated that the reason why a surprising number of
key British statesmen accepted the idea that a Jewish homeland could
only be in Palestine was their lasting fidelity to the British Restorationist
tradition with its seventeenth-century origins in bible prophecy. ‘Men like
Balfour, Churchill, Lloyd George, were deeply religious and believed in the
Bible, to them the return of the Jewish people to Palestine was a reality,
so that we Zionists represented to them a great tradition for which they
had enormous respect,’ 66 he wrote, before reiterating the point twenty-six
pages later: ‘those British statesmen of the old school, I have said, were
genuinely religious. They understood as a reality the concept of the return.
It appealed to their tradition and their faith.’ 67
Christian Zionist writers have never doubted this was the case; it’s
always been obvious to them that God employed the Bible-loving British
as an instrument for the working out of his divine will. Weizmann’s claim
was echoed by the historian Barbara Tuchman in her book, Bible and
Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (1956), and
has recently been reinforced by David Fromkin in his magisterial historical
survey of the creation of the modern Middle East, A Peace to End All
Peace (1989): ‘Bible prophecy was the first and most enduring of the many
‘A Great Idea’ 117
motives that led Britons to want to restore the Jews to Zion,’ 68 Fromkin
claims; not the main nor the most important motive perhaps, but ‘the first
and most enduring’. A decade later, in One Palestine, Complete, the Israeli
historian, Tom Segev, cited ‘an inclination to perform an act of biblical
compassion’,69 as the second of four reasons why the British government
championed Zionism in the middle of the First World War. (The three
others, in order, were ‘their sense of historic justice ... their vague but
deep-seated belief in the great power of world Jewry, ... their hope that
they might be rid of them’.)
In God, Guns and Israel (2004), Jill Hamilton has highlighted the special
role that Nonconformist Christianity played in the personal formation of
the politicians whose combined efforts led to the Balfour Declaration of
1917. Hamilton points out that seven of the ten men who at one time or
another served in Lloyd George’s coalition War Cabinet were bible-believing
Nonconformists to whom the Restorationist idea would have been, if not
uniformly appealing in its immediate and practical application, at the very
least, powerfully familiar.70
A term whose origins lie all the way back in the tumultuous religious
free-for-all of the seventeenth century, Nonconformism had assumed many
different shapes but always entailed a basically Puritan, literal approach
to and reliance on the Bible as the sole source of moral authority. Barred
from Oxford and Cambridge, Nonconformists had founded their own
academies where the Word of God was studied alone in its glory rather
than diluted by the British public school staples – the ancient Greek and
Latin classics. Imbued with Puritan precepts regarding sober living and
hard work, some Nonconformists had succeeded in raising themselves out
of the working classes to the thriving merchant class and on and up to
the world of local, then national – usually Liberal – politics by the late
nineteenth century. The socialism of the early twentieth-century Labour
Party was Liberal Nonconformist Christian rather than Marxian in origin.
So was its Christian Zionism.
Joseph Chamberlain, the one-time screw-manufacturer and Mayor of
Birmingham, the Secretary for the Colonies who had offered Herzl a
homeland in Uganda, was a Nonconformist of the Unitarian persuasion.
Unitarians’ rejection of the Trinity and the orthodox Christian belief
that Jesus was divine placed them closer to Judaism than to other
forms of Christianity. The judaising Francis Kett was burnt at the stake
for basically Unitarian beliefs in the late sixteenth century. Joseph
Priestley, the eighteenth-century millenarian chemist, was another Unitarian
and so too was America’s President John Quincy Adams, who fantasised
about his Jewish friend leading an army of 100,000 Jews into Ottoman-
118 1621–1948
ruled Palestine in 1819. Charles Prestwich Scott, the illustrious editor of the
Manchester Guardian for fifty-seven years, but also the Englishman who
arguably did more than anyone but Balfour and Lloyd George to promote
the Zionist project, was yet another Unitarian. ‘With his piercing blue eyes
and commanding white beard, he looked like a prophet descending from
the mountain to rebuke unrighteousness,’ 71 a contemporary recalled of
the elderly newspaper editor whom Dr Weizmann first encountered at a
charity function in Manchester back in the autumn of 1914.
One of the first Nonconformists to go to Oxford after the ban was lifted
in 1854, C. P. Scott had been bullied for skipping daily Church of England
services at his college. The grandson of a preacher, he had been destined
for the Unitarian ministry as a youth but decided that he couldn’t face
a lifetime upholding the beliefs of an embattled minority. ‘The very fact
of being in a small minority is so likely to awaken one’s combativeness
as to make one perhaps blindly zealous for truths which one felt to be
by others unjustly and hastily rejected,’ 72 he explained to his parents. It
seems that Scott’s experience as a member of a persecuted minority and
his understanding of how it felt to have one’s most deeply held beliefs
dismissed, when combined with his acquaintance with Manchester’s lively
Jewish community and Weizmann’s charm and skill, were what won him
over to the Zionist cause. He discovered in Weizmann a man after his
own English puritan Nonconformist heart, describing him as ‘a rare
combination of the idealistic and severely practical’.73
Dr Weizmann had struck lucky again, because Scott would prove as
influential a supporter as Balfour. A Liberal Member of Parliament for a
time, he’d remained in close and friendly contact with his old colleagues,
many of whom were also Nonconformists. He made it his business to
introduce Weizmann to as many politicians as possible. Within a couple
of months of their first encounter, only three months after the outbreak
of the First World War, Scott was meeting Weizmann off an early
train from Manchester and informing him they would be breakfasting
with Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a Nonconformist
Welsh Baptist. Again on Scott’s suggestion, the Russian Zionist chemist
was soon engaged by Lloyd George, who had been redeployed as Minister
for Munitions, for the crucial war work of inventing an artificial substitute
for acetone. At the time, acetone was a substance that could only be derived
from the timber Britain was running short of. Without acetone there could
be no explosives, no British guns firing on the Western Front.
It was Scott who badgered Lloyd George to recompense Weizmann
adequately for this vital service, Scott who bullied the prime minister into
doing battle with civil servants who were spitefully obstructing the foreign
‘A Great Idea’ 119
of Jews secretly pulled the world’s strings. This overestimation led Lloyd
George to the conclusion that giving the Zionists what they wanted was
a tactical necessity. As Tom Segev points out in One Palestine, Complete
(2000), Lloyd George calculated that by promising the Jews a British-
sponsored homeland in Palestine after the war he could place them in
Britain’s debt for ever. Russia’s Jews would surely want to repay the favour
by influencing the new Bolshevik regime to stay in the war on the side of
the Allies, while America’s Jews might similarly encourage the US war
effort; President Wilson had finally entered the war in April 1917. Lloyd
George also imagined that when the powerful Zionists living in Germany
and Austria-Hungary learned that Britain was offering them Palestine,
they would happily undermine their native countries’ morale.82
On 2 November 1917, the time was ripe. Looking hopefully ahead
towards eventual victory and a post-war peace by solemnly undertaking to
restore the Jews to their ancient homeland, Balfour believed, would boost
the spirits of the nation. For Britain to stand for the restoration of the Jews
to the Holy Land shared by both peoples of the Bible would strike just
the right high moral note. With Dr Weizmann’s constant encouragement,
with the tide of the war running in Britain’s favour at last because General
Edmund Allenby was at that moment marching an army towards Jerusalem
to deal a knockout blow to the Kaiser’s Turkish ally, Balfour appended his
signature to a letter to the leader of the Anglo-Jewish community:
For armies of eager decoders of bible prophecy, the signing of the Balfour
Declaration and General Allenby’s conquest of Jerusalem had little to do
with righting a historic injustice or with winning the war, but everything
to do with Jesus’s Second Coming.
At last, in that momentous winter of 1917, millenarian Christian
Zionists on both sides of the Atlantic could point to concrete proof of
God’s existence and engagement with human affairs – what American
evangelicals call today ‘a validating sign’, but of a quality and magnitude
not seen since the age of the Apostles.
Thomas Brightman, Sir Henry Finch, John Cotton and Increase and
Cotton Mather had all viewed the Jews’ survival since ad 70 as some
kind of ‘validation’ of their faith, while eagerly expecting their mass
conversion and restoration to Palestine as two more, even better ones. In
the early nineteenth century Lewis Way, the London Jews’ Society, the Earl
of Shaftesbury and hundreds of Church of England vicars had yearned
for the restoration. Edward Irving and John Nelson Darby had preached
its imminence. James H. Brookes, Dwight L. Moody and Dr Scofield
had promised it to millions at their conferences and revivals and in a
gigantically popular new annotated version of the Bible. As early as 1878,
William E. Blackstone had alerted his readers of Jesus is Coming that if
they ever wanted to know ‘our place in the chronology, our position in the
march of events’,1 they must keep their eye on developments in the Middle
East. The restoration of the Jews, that same vital step along the way to
the thousand years of peace and Jesus’s Second Coming, had galvanised
William Hechler into action with Dr Herzl.
Millenarian excitement had been mounting long before General Allenby
reverently dismounted on his entry into Jerusalem in December 1917.
As early as 1912 a British Methodist minister had dumbfounded both
himself and his audience by forecasting – while in the grip of something
124 1621–1948
* Between 1910 and 1915 two wealthy Californian oilmen – Lyman and Milton
Stewart – had funded the production of three million copies of twelve pamphlets
called The Fundamentals – a manifesto for conservative Protestant Christians who
rejected the Liberals and their German Higher Criticism. Two of the pamphlets
treated the question of the Jews and their role in God’s plan. The Moody Bible
Institute in Chicago was the hub of the movement.
‘The Wrong Kind of Jew’ 125
Sunday didn’t declare for the Allies until President Wilson brought America
into the war against Germany in March 1917, at which point he suddenly
126 1621–1948
Roman rule. Italy would gain Trieste and other northern areas formerly
belonging to Austria-Hungary which, in turn, would be divided and lose
most of its territories north of the Danube – in effect, about half its old
territories. Greece and Egypt would be independent, as they had been in
ancient Roman times.
Even if there were occasional misfirings – Constantinople did not detach
itself from Turkey and join Europe and nor did Portugal unite with Spain,
for example – those lacking a detailed grasp of the more banal economic
and political factors that rendered such dramatic alterations to the map
of Europe imperative after the First World War couldn’t help but marvel.
Viewed alongside the most significant alteration of all, the miraculous
prospect of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, those bible-based predictions
were astonishingly accurate.
A mood of triumphant exultation reigned at a flurry of prophecy
conferences, as well as at American Christian Zionists’ meetings with Jews
after the war. ‘The capture of Jerusalem is more than a prophetic event, it is
a pivot in prophecy,’ a former pastor of the American Church in Jerusalem
informed a capacity crowd of over 3,000 at Philadelphia’s Academy of
Music in May 1918. ‘We have entered on a prophetic era. We are looking
upon the things which Moses and the prophets and Christ himself has
foretold.’ 13 In Los Angeles the same year, William E. Blackstone told a large
Jewish audience of their need to decide their immediate future. As he saw
it, they had three options: they could escape the prophesied Tribulation by
converting to Christianity without delay, or they could be ‘true’ Zionists,
clinging to their hope in the coming of a Jewish messiah and building up
their new national home in Palestine or – and he did not recommend this
course of action – they could go on ‘enjoying their social, political and
commercial advantages’ in a country that was not their own.14 Blackstone
didn’t use words like ‘leeches’ or ‘bloodsucking parasites’ to describe Jews
who chose the last of these options, but he might as well have done.
For millenarian Christian Zionists like Blackstone there were always
those whom Dr Weizmann wittily referred to in his 1906 conversation with
Balfour as ‘the wrong kind of Jew’ – the ones who balked at tying both
their nationality and their faith to the land God had promised Abraham.
As for many Christian Zionists today, these are the Jews who will greet the
Antichrist with open arms, believe his false promises of peace for a period
of three and a half years, and suffer the seven-year Tribulation. These are
the two-thirds of the Jewish race who will persist in their rejection of Jesus
till the end and pay a terrible price at Armageddon.
When many Jews complain that Christian Zionists do not care for Jews
as fellow humans but only as puppets in their gory Christian apocalypse
128 1621–1948
story, this is what they are referring to. How can Christian Zionists be true,
reliable friends of Jews and Israel, they wonder, when so many of them
are expecting a world conflagration and a rerun of the Holocaust on their
territory? But for such Christian Zionists, the double-strength Holocaust
to come is not a belief, but a divine guarantee as solidly reliable as God’s
promise to restore the Jews to Palestine has proved.
be a pious privilege but a costly, enervating chore. No one knew exactly how
the trouble had started, how it came about that five Jews died and 216 were
wounded in scenes that reminded many of the new Jewish immigrants of the
Russian pogroms, but it proved to many Jews that a friend of Wedgwood’s,
the prominent Russian Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, was right.
Jabotinsky had long argued that the Jews should be prepared to
defend themselves. Defying the Mandate administration’s ban on arms,
he’d embarked on training a Jewish militia. The riots had found him in
possession of three rifles, two pistols and 250 rounds of ammunition, which
won him a fifteen-year prison sentence. Wedgwood successfully protested
against Jabotinsky’s punishment. Incensed by the Mandate authorities’
incompetent handling of the crisis, by its failure to heed warnings about
rising tensions, but most of all by Britain’s refusal to allow the Jews to arm
themselves, he lobbied whomever he could reach on the subject. Wedgwood
would never sympathise with the British government’s anguished efforts to
square the vicious circle they had created with the Balfour Declaration by
operating in shades of unhappy grey in Palestine, rather than in the black
and white absolutes he saw.
Jabotinsky was just the sort of Jew Wedgwood admired, an Israelite
Roundhead. In him, Wedgwood discovered a realism and strength of
purpose he deemed manly, and vital to the establishment of the Jewish
nation state. Like Jabotinsky, who early recognised that the Palestinian
Arabs’ objection to the Zionist project was natural in a people facing an
invasion of ‘alien settlers’ and inferred from this that a Jewish state could
secure itself only if the Zionists erected a defensive ‘iron wall’ that the
Arabs would be ‘powerless to break down’,21 Wedgwood favoured force.
His convictions required a feisty outspokenness on his part, but brute
strength on the part of the Jews.
In a speech at a Zionist fund-raiser in Holland in 1923, Wedgwood
embarrassed the British government by openly referring to the Jewish ‘state’,
rather than a ‘homeland’ being constructed in Palestine. Three years later,
in January 1926, he used the opportunity to address vast Zionist gatherings
in five American cities to expound ideas more uncompromising even than
Jabotinsky’s. Jews were emigrating to their new homeland at the excellent
rate of 35,000 a year, he told his audiences, but would not be in a position to
set up any democratic institutions until such time as they outnumbered the
Arabs. He believed that the wealthiest and most influential of those Arabs
would surely emigrate if saddled with a sufficiently punitive property tax.
Christian Zionists today who back the radical right-winger Rabbi Benny
Elon’s plan for a mass ‘transfer’ of the Palestinians from the West Bank to
neighbouring Arab states are true heirs of Josiah Wedgwood.
‘The Wrong Kind of Jew’ 131
a casual cruelty that would have earned him a prison sentence in Britain. But
they didn’t hate him for it. Instead, touched by his knowledge of the Bible
and Hebrew and desperate to secure the survival of their new homeland
by any means, fair and foul, they tolerated his methods, his discipline
and his manner of relaxing between missions – sitting naked eating raw
onions, reading his bible or his Hebrew dictionary, scratching himself and
brushing his pubic hair with something resembling a large toothbrush.
They honoured him with the Hebrew title hayedid, our friend.
Some Zionist leaders were less impressed. Baffy Dugdale was not
alone in her serious reservations about Wingate. Moshe Sharrett, a close
associate of Wingate’s and later Israel’s second prime minister, found his
Zionism ‘overpowering’.34 Moshe Dayan, a member of his elite force, and
later Israel’s famous eye-patched hero of the Six Day War against Egypt,
appreciated Wingate’s military expertise but described him as ‘mad and
maddening’.35 The ever-diplomatic Dr Weizmann, for whom Wingate was
like a second son, confessed that he ‘did not think that his diplomatic
activities in any way matched his military performance or his personal
integrity’.36 Some Israelis’ view of leading American Christian Zionists
today is similarly ambivalent; if their unconditional support for Israel is
valuable and appreciated, their way of expressing that support can be,
to use Herzl’s words, about Hechler and Dayan’s words about Wingate,
‘ridiculous’ and ‘maddening’.
Josiah Wedgwood’s diplomatic instincts had proved a similarly mixed
blessing to the Jews, but he would put them to the test again, after the
Arab Revolt, when the British government began seeking a way out of the
Palestinian mess it had created – a means of terminating the Mandate.
In 1937, a lengthy report of the Peel Commission finally acknowledged
that Arabs and Jews couldn’t share Palestine and recommended a speedy
division of the country into two states. While Weizmann, Jabotinsky and
Ben-Gurion reluctantly accepted the scheme as a basis from which to
negotiate at some future date, Wedgwood, like thousands of millenarian
Christian Zionists, resolutely opposed it. Never one to compromise, he
became a mentor to hard-line Zionists. In May 1938, he received a letter
from a group named the Association of Former Jewish Army Officers,
begging for his advice and support for opposition to partition. His reply
to them contained that support, and variations on his old virility theme:
‘Like you, I want to see a free, manly fighting people like the Maccabees
in Palestine once again. I want to see an army of 40,000 Jews fit to defend
all that you and I hold dear.’ 37 Chiding them for failing to stand up for
themselves, he told them that the British would never allow themselves to
be pushed around as they were being by the Mandate authorities: ‘You ask
134 1621–1948
me to imagine myself in your place with my kith and kin attacked and
my hands tied. I can imagine nothing of the sort. An Englishman’s hands
would not remain tied ...’ 38
The letter was a propaganda gift in the hands of its recipients, who
wasted no time in translating it into much more inflammatory Hebrew
and circulating it widely. Not for the first or the last time, Wedgwood’s
meddling in Palestinian affairs had outraged the British Foreign Office,
irritated the Zionist leadership and provided the Arabs with yet another
proof of Albion’s perfidy. Back in Palestine, Wingate was banging the same
drum, preaching resistance to Britain and telling his elite squads, ‘There
will be no Jewish state unless you fight for it,’ and, he warned them, ‘it is
the English you will have to fight’.39
If it was impossible to eject Josiah Wedgwood from Westminster, it
was easy to remove Orde Wingate from Palestine; as a soldier, he had to
obey orders. By 1940 the ‘ungovernable’ hayedid was back in London but
still taking an active interest in Zionist affairs, bullying Weizmann to go
to America to stir up propaganda against Britain’s policy in Palestine,
reducing him to tears. When Weizmann refused, Wingate switched his
efforts to Ben-Gurion, who proved no more ready than Weizmann to stab
in the back a Britain that was standing alone against the Nazis at the
time. Before leaving for Cairo with a stamp in his passport barring his
return to Palestine, Wingate called Ben-Gurion a traitor. Wedgwood was
more effective. In what he believed was a last-ditch attempt to secure the
survival of the Zionist dream, he broadcast a long, sad speech to a banquet
gathering of Zionists in New York in 1941. The thrust of his message was
the same as Wingate’s – that Britain was no longer the Zionists’ best friend,
that ‘God’s Englishmen’ such as himself were hopelessly few and powerless
now to assist them, that they would have to find another advocate: ‘I have
tried to save for my own countrymen the glory of rebuilding Jerusalem, of
doing justice, of creating freedom. It is no use. They won’t do it. I can’t
help. You must turn to America and take on the job yourselves. Ask no
more from Britain ...’ 40
One last time, he had enraged the British government, inflamed the
Arabs and out-Zionisted the Zionists. He died of heart trouble two years
later, in 1943, without the satisfaction of knowing that he’d been on a Nazi
list of Englishmen to be eliminated in the event of a German conquest,
and without seeing a photograph of a ship named the Josiah Wedgwood,
filled with concentration camp survivors, docking safely at Haifa in 1946.
Orde Wingate, who had gone on to rehabilitate himself in his superiors’
eyes by acquitting himself heroically in Burma against the Japanese, died
in a plane crash a year later, without ever seeing his beloved Palestine
‘The Wrong Kind of Jew’ 135
today.* For the majority of them, there are no ifs and buts, no Arab case
to be heard, no tragedy born of competing moral claims, no long history
to be considered. In the world-view of many Christian Zionists there is
no room for a Christian ethic when it comes to Israel, only an identical
Old Testament-inspired penchant for virile militarism, and a fixation on
the pledge God made to Abraham and so all Jews for ever: ‘I will bless
those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse.’ 41
By betraying the promise of the Balfour Declaration and hampering the
speedy construction of a Jewish state, Britain had ‘cursed’ the Jews and
so lost her Empire, say Christian Zionists today. It has been America’s
privilege, they say, indeed the primary guarantee of her superpower status
for most of the twentieth century, to ‘bless’ the Jews.
Russia where a British army had been supporting the anti-Bolshevik White
Russian army after 1917, to British Mandate Palestine. Claiming to be the
top secret deliberations of the world’s most powerful Jews, the Protocols
revealed how the Jews planned to take over the world by exploiting the
native ‘frankness’ and ‘honesty’ of the goyim, using a combination of
cunning manipulation and ruthless sabotage.42
Wars, revolutions, industrial unrest and financial crises would all be the
Jews’ handiwork, the Protocols explained, the Jews’ mechanisms to extend
their control over the world’s banking, media, politics and even religions,
until such time as ‘the King of the Jews will be the real pope of the Universe,
the patriarch of an international Church’.43 There were sufficient grounds
in the Jewish Old Testament to lend credence to this last proposition; Sir
Henry Finch had been arrested and imprisoned in 1621 for predicting that
the world’s monarchs would have to travel to Jerusalem to pay homage
to an almighty King of the Jews. The Protocols forgery was exposed in a
series of articles in the London Times newspaper in 1920, but not before
its English version had run to five editions. And, for all Wedgwood’s trust
that Americans would throw their weight behind the Zionist cause, there
was enough evidence of anti-Semitism in inter-war America to suggest
that Zionism would not have an easy ride. Fundamentalist Christianity,
the natural home of Christian Zionism, had caught the virus.
The exposure of the Protocols forgery didn’t prevent America’s most
admired industrialist, Henry Ford, from printing half a million copies of
it in the United States in the early 1920s. A Midwestern farm boy made
wonderfully good in Michigan with his mass production of automobiles,
Ford happened to share the Christian fundamentalists’ embattled belief
that post-war America was losing its way, abandoning the old pieties,
ceding too much ground to the liberals. In the Protocols he discovered a
perfect reason for his feeling. Using them as the basis for a series of articles
in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, he accused two American
presidents – Woodrow Wilson and William Taft – of being ‘Gentile fronts’
for the Jews in their administrations. Daring new fashions, movies, and
even the corruption of the baseball game, were all directly attributable
to Jewish influence, in Ford’s view. Incessant revelations of the forgery,
attempts to halt sales of the Dearborn Independent in Chicago, Detroit
and Pittsburgh and a public library ban made no appreciable difference.
The grand lie continued to be disseminated; Ford’s newspaper articles
the work’s dubious origins and outlawed it – ‘A good cause cannot be defended
by dirty means,’ he said. The work is still widely available in Arab translation, its
authenticity vouched for by numerous Arab regimes.
138 1621–1948
with both divine and human responsibility for ethical conduct and, in so
doing, betrays all that is good in religion.
Jews he liked and admired; first, his close friend Eddie Jacobson with whom
he’d once run a haberdashery business in Kansas City, whom he could rely
on never to exploit their connection, and secondly, Dr Weizmann, whom
he admired, liked and wholeheartedly trusted.
Nevertheless, in March 1948, after two and a half years of painfully
grappling with the problem, Truman was still insisting that the United
Nations must decide the question of a Jewish state and, in Eddie Jacobson’s
words, was ‘as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be’.54
It took all Jacobson’s powers of persuasion to get his old friend to agree
to give the septuagenarian Dr Weizmann, who had crossed the Atlantic
in the hope of meeting him, even twenty-five minutes of his time. In the
event, Weizmann got forty-five minutes, and precisely what he had come
for: Truman firmly pledged his support for the state that was about to
be born in the flames of a war. In his autobiography Trial and Error,
Weizmann recalled clinching the deal by telling the president, ‘History
and Providence have placed this issue in your hands, and I am confident
that you will yet decide it in the spirit of moral law.’ 55 The mention of
‘Providence’ is a small measure of how extraordinarily well Weizmann
understood the Protestant Christian mind.
Truman’s belief in the essential moral rectitude of creating a Jewish
state would undergo its harshest test two months later, two days before
the British Mandate in Palestine ended and the Zionists announced the
birth of Israel. At 4 p.m. on 12 May 1948 the president girded his loins to
confront his hostile State Department with the news that he was planning
to recognise the new state the moment it was declared, and met with the
department chief, the national war hero and author of the Marshall Plan
of aid to post-war Europe, General George Marshall. Truman must have
anticipated a negative reaction but what transpired nearly cost him his
administration’s most valuable asset.
While his adviser on Palestinian affairs, a young lawyer named Clark
Clifford laid out a case for recognition based on the mounting popular
sentiment that Jews must be compensated for the Holocaust with a safe
refuge and on a quotation from the Book of Deuteronomy – ‘Behold, I
have set the land before you; go in and take possession of the land which
the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to
give to them and to their descendants after them’ 56 – General George
Marshall’s face turned ‘redder and redder’ until, according to Clifford, it
was ‘absolutely beet-red’.57 The man Truman called the ‘greatest living
American’ was apoplectic with rage: ‘Mr. President,’ Marshall fulminated,
‘I don’t understand what’s going on here. We didn’t come over to have an
emotional experience of these various elements; we came over to consider
‘The Wrong Kind of Jew’ 143
some fifty years previously President Benjamin Harrison had resisted the
same offer made by William E. Blackstone in his Memorial. Truman prided
himself on having risen to the challenge and did not care who knew it.
Millenarian Christian Zionists, of course, never doubted Truman had
been guided by God’s need to implement his plan. Another huge step had
been taken along the long road towards the Second Coming. A forceful
Texan pastor who’d journeyed all the way to Palestine to try and persuade
the Chief Mufti of Jerusalem that a Zionist state was what the Arabs needed
hailed the creation of Israel as ‘the greatest event in two thousand years’ 60
– since Jesus’s birth, in effect – and took up where Josiah Wedgwood and
Orde Wingate had left off by beseeching Truman to arm the Jews. The
deliriously happy Christian Zionist editor of America’s Weekly Evangel
gushed, ‘We may well wonder whether we are awake or lost in sleep merely
having a very exciting dream ...’ 61
Reverend Jerry Falwell, the personification of American Christian
Zionism during the 1980s and ’90s, has a framed front page of the British
Mandate era Palestine Post hanging on the wall behind his desk. Dated 16
May 1948, its headline reads state of israel is born. America’s most
influential Christian Zionist today, Pastor John Hagee of San Antonio’s
Cornerstone Church was a boy of eight in 1948, sitting in the kitchen at
home, listening to the radio with his father, when the news of Israel’s birth
was declared. He will never forget his father telling him, ‘Son, this is the
most important day of the 20th century.’ 62
PART TWO: 1948 ONWARDS
With the disastrous end of the British Mandate in Palestine and the demise
of the British Empire, the British role in the history of Christian Zionism
dwindles to almost nothing. To the bewilderment of American Christian
Zionists today, Christian Zionism in Britain is about as negligible a force as
it is in any other traditionally Protestant country – somewhat weaker than
in the Netherlands or Norway or South Africa; stronger than in France.
The Christian Zionist story from 1948 to the present day is, therefore,
an overwhelmingly American and Israeli one. America is where the
theological scaffolding of modern Christian Zionism – John Nelson
Darby’s pre-millennial dispensationalism – established itself most firmly,
which accounts for why, in its popular form, modern American Christian
Zionism is more millenarian than humanitarian. This, in turn, means that
its roots are more easily traced back to the seventeenth century or the
early nineteenth century than to the early twentieth-century era of Balfour,
Lloyd George and Truman.
Since 1948 America’s moral support for Israel has been more than
matched by its practical support. The proxy conflicts of the Cold War
cemented the military alliance between the two countries, especially after
1967. While the Soviet Union funded and backed a number of Arab states
in the region as well as the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the West, led
by America, flouted its own Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – thereby
fatally undermining its argument against Iran acquiring nuclear weapons
146 1948 onwards
Charging Army’ charts the current political and cultural influence of these
personalities on George W. Bush’s ‘faith-based presidency’.
‘Watchmen for Israel’ examines the spiritual make-up and activities
of Christian Zionists who feel called by God to counteract international
peace efforts in Israel–Palestine by supporting the establishment of West
Bank Jewish settlements and actively opposing all land concessions.
I examine the Israeli opposition, or rather lack of it, to this Christian
Zionist involvement in their country, and the more vigorous opposition of
the Palestinian Christian churches in Jerusalem.
To determine the nature and extent of Christian Zionist influence
on George W. Bush’s Washington and the reaction of American Jews to
its growth, I attend a Christian Zionist gathering in Washington. ‘Two
Shining Cities upon a Hill’ explores how the ‘special relationship’ between
America and Israel has been outshining that between America and Britain.
Christian Zionism, in its political and millenarian aspects, goes a very long
way towards accounting for the gaping gulf in understanding and sympathy
between Europe and the United States since 11 September 2001.
‘Talking Texan’ describes a journey I made to Texas – the emotional
and cultural heartland of both Christian Zionism and, many would say, of
President Bush’s Washington. I am in search of a reasonable explanation for
so many Americans’ allegiance to an ideology that more closely resembles
Slobodan Milosevič’s or Iranian President Mahmood Ahmadinejad’s brand
of bellicose religious nationalism than anything most of the world would
call Christianity.
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chapter 7
Apocalypse Loud
With his luxuriant crest of silver hair, Zapata moustache and Californian
suntan gleaming under the spotlights of this mega-church in a northern
suburb of St Paul, Minnesota, Hal Lindsey could pass for an ageing film
star.
None the worse for a recent knee operation, he strides to centre stage,
settles his bible on the lectern and opens the prophecy conference. ‘Tonight
I’ll deliver a message,’ he begins in a confiding Southern drawl. ‘I don’t
need to tell you we live in exciting times ...’
Long ago relegated to the pages of history books or the cranky fringe
in Britain, prophecy conferences are a thriving aspect of the Religious
Right scene in today’s America. Bible prophecy, but also inspirational tales
of gays gone ‘straight’ with the Lord’s help, of a PLO member turned
Christian Zionist, or an abortionist turned pro-Life, for example, are all
fit topics for these events. Within a month of this Minneapolis conference,
I could have been attending half a dozen more.
Faithfully gathered here, inside, on what might be the last balmy Friday
evening of 2005, this audience of around 4,000 white Americans of all
ages and both sexes (the Religious Right is almost exclusively a white
phenomenon; African-Americans, even those susceptible to millenarianism,
are traditionally much more likely to vote Democrat) falls silent in time
for Lindsey’s next pronouncement. He’s been saying it for almost forty
years at get-togethers like this, in his many books and his Internet news
service, on his weekly cable television programme and on scores of Holy
Land tours,* but he’ll say it again:
‘I believe we’re on the threshold of the coming of Christ!’
* Hal Lindsey was in Israel, leading another Bible tour, at the same time as Chuck
Missler was leading his in March 2006.
150 1948 onwards
dismiss events like this as ‘doom and gloom conferences’ so wrong, says
Hal, because ‘when things get dark for the world, they get a lot brighter
for Christians’. The Rapture is around the corner, he claims. ‘Lift up your
head for your redemption draws near!’
A 2004 Newsweek poll found that 55 per cent of Americans believed in
the Rapture,1 but a woman in this audience has identified a technical glitch
in that lucky loophole: what will become of children too young to have
consciously accepted Christ as their saviour when the Rapture happens?
‘Children will go with a believing parent – otherwise you’ll have lots of
parents up there who’ll want to come back,’ Lindsey reasons confidently,
to a ripple of relieved laughter. Digressing a moment, he confesses that
his own twin daughters were so scared by his Rapture talk they gave up
any hope of reaching adulthood. ‘I probably didn’t do it quite right,’ he
admits with an easy chuckle.
All mixed up with his Southern charm, his preacherly pedantry and
boyish enthusiasm for the military, there is a swaggering facetiousness
about Lindsey – very like that of his old friend, Chuck Missler. There’s
also a good deal of the prophecy pro who long ago learned not to schedule
any one of these End Times events too tightly. His advice to this audience
is: ‘Prepare as if you’re going to live a normal life span but each morning,
when you get up, prepare to live that day as if it’s your last.’
Lindsey deals with hurricanes and global warming and the falsely
soothing teachings of many pastors – ‘ear-ticklers’, he calls them – who
play down or ignore the gruesome Armageddon awaiting those who haven’t
pledged their lives to Christ. Now he writes off the older Christian denomi-
nations by dismissing them all as a bunch of ‘cathepiscobapatarians’. The
embattled anti-intellectualism of late nineteenth-century fundamentalism
is clearly audible. The old Liberals versus Fundamentalists clash lies at the
very heart of modern America’s famous ‘Culture Wars’.
Laughing uproariously now, his audience is energised, on the inside
track with him, getting at the truths behind the headlines, expecting the
worst for a sinfully liberal world, hoping for the Rapture for themselves.
The time has come to ensure that they’re fully apprised of the crucial role
that Israel has been playing since 1970 when he, Lindsey, first identified the
rebirth of the Jewish state in 1948 as ‘God’s plot-point’.
‘God’s corporate representative to the world was ancient Israel,’ he
begins. The Jews failed to recognise Jesus Christ as the messiah so it was
up to the Gentiles to spread the Christian Gospel, he reminds us, but God
never revoked his early promises to the Jews concerning their land: ‘Israel
is the only nation that has a title deed from the creator of this planet!’ he
says. The Jews were only ‘temporarily set aside’ until now, when they’re
152 1948 onwards
reclaiming centre stage, starring in the delivery room drama of the End
Times, heading for the Tribulation, for a short-lived peace and then a
struggle against the Antichrist and Armageddon. Hal claims that God has
promised to ‘judge every nation that tries to stop what he’s doing with
Israel’. Anyone who fails to love Israel must take care, he warns, because
‘if you begin to hate the Israelites you’ll begin to find yourself in contest
with God himself!’
Lindsey has loved Israel for the past forty years. Like his old friend
Chuck Missler, or Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, he can act the big fish in
the small but vitally important pond of Israel. Name-dropping Mossad
generals and Israeli prime ministers is his stock in trade. He’s proud to
recall a happy meeting with Ariel Sharon long before he became Israel’s
prime minister, at which he warned him that the prophet Ezekiel had
identified Russia as Israel’s greatest enemy. With a ‘twinkle’ in his eye,
General Sharon reportedly replied, ‘I know that. I use the Bible a lot in
my military tactics.’
Lindsey now admits to feeling shocked dismay at Sharon’s voluntary
withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in July 2005, at his willingness to part
with what Bible-believers know to be land promised to the Jews. How
to account for such a flagrant flouting of God’s will? Lindsey does his
best: ‘Sharon came up with a plan I believe. He knew that there was one
thing he could count on, that the Palestinians would keep on with their
terrorism. He gave them their freedom because he knew what they would
do with it. Now he knows he’s got a target-rich environment there in Gaza
– they’re all in one place!’ His cruel vision of a Palestinian turkey shoot is
met by a burst of applause. ‘That’s right on!’ someone shouts.
The hostess of the event, Jan Markell, joins Hal on the podium and
they settle themselves on high stools with microphones in their hands, as
if they might croon an evangelical hymn together. But this is a question
and answer session. Jan – a Jewish convert to Christianity with her own
syndicated radio show and an Internet ministry devoted, like Hal’s, to
analysing ‘current events from a biblical and prophetic perspective’ 2 – kicks
it off by asking Hal whether the United States or Israel will neutralise the
threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
After carefully opining that the current situation in Iraq would make
opening another front against Iran difficult right now, Lindsey insists that
he loves President George W. Bush as a fellow bible-believing Christian, but
heartily wishes he understood prophecy well enough to realise that Islam
is ‘violent to the core’ and go ahead and open that new front. When Jan
prods him again for a prediction about Israel’s role vis-à-vis Iran, Lindsey
reveals that ‘good friends in the Israeli air force’ have told him Israel is
Apocalypse Loud 153
ready and willing to take on Iran. ‘You can count on it – if someone else
doesn’t do it, Israel will,’ he says.
Jan Markell is just as troubled by the threat posed by another Muslim
neighbour of Israel – Syria. Inviting the audience to open their bibles at
Isaiah 17: 1, Lindsey reads aloud: ‘“An oracle concerning Damascus. Behold,
Damascus will cease to be a city, and will become a heap of ruins ...” My
opinion is that Damascus will be destroyed before the Rapture ...’
‘By Israel?’ prompts Jan again.
‘By Israel. Syria’s a troublemaker, a terrorist headquarters, and the
prime reason why our troops are in such trouble in Iraq. I wish the US
would obliterate Syria and not leave it to Israel ...’
I can hardly believe my ears. Obliterate Syria? The audience is rapt,
eager with more questions. It’s time for a break.
Outside, in the church lobby there’s a hubbub of activity around
trestle tables stacked high with the reading and viewing matter of the
Religious Right, videos, DVDs, pamphlets, and T-shirts inscribed with
‘he’s coming!’ which a woman is touting as ‘a great witnessing tool’
for Christ’s return. Prophecy conferences, Christian book sales, Internet
merchandising of bible study materials and Holy Land tours add up to a
multibillion-dollar business in America, the like of which exists nowhere
else on earth. By these means, and from the pulpits of over 700 mega
churches whose average membership is almost 7,000 and whose average
annual income is almost $5 million,3 the Religious Right propounds and
reinforces a world-view that is attractively exciting, simple and coherent.
Michelle Goldberg, author of Kingdom Coming (2006), a book detailing
what she believes to be the wider theocratic ambitions of the Religious Right,
attended a Denver Christian trade fair at which she found works of history
claiming that Christian America had been sabotaged by liberals, and science
books claiming that men and dinosaurs had shared the Garden of Eden. ‘I
sometimes felt I was in a novel by Jorge Luis Borges,’ she wrote, ‘drifting
through a parallel reality contained in a monumental library of lies.’ 4
While flicking through Closing the Closet, a work aimed at worried
Christian parents of homosexuals, I eavesdrop on a man recounting how
he confronted a work supervisor who forbade him to ‘witness’ to one of
his colleagues: ‘... so I just asked her straight, “D’you really expect me
not to try and stop this person from going to hell? ...”’ I overhear one
woman tell another, ‘You know what? In my church people just don’t get
the importance of Israel.’ A youth in a T-shirt and baseball cap tells me
what’s lured him here this evening: ‘I figure this is the best time in the
world to be a Christian because there are so many validating signs – you
know, the restoration of Israel and all that.’
154 1948 onwards
Someone tells me he’s surprised the Rapture hasn’t happened yet and
also worried that, by giving Sharon a green light to ‘divide Israel’ by
relinquishing Gaza, America will ‘bring down the judgment of God’ on
itself. A man in military intelligence wants to know if I’ve accepted Jesus as
my ‘personal saviour’. Hal Lindsey’s chauffeur for the weekend, a middle-
aged accountant, chuckles admiringly while telling me that Hal started
out as a lowly tugboat captain on the Mississippi, brawling in the French
Quarter of New Orleans on his days off, sleeping off week-long drinking
binges with a loaded Colt .45 by his side, but turned his life around by
reading the Bible, enrolling himself at Dallas Theological Seminary and
qualifying as a pastor. Chauffeuring Hal around town this weekend feels
as good, he says, as ‘driving the Apostle Paul around’.
Twin towers of Lindsey’s published works are shrinking fast, including
The Late Great Planet Earth, the best-selling non-fiction title of the 1970s
that did for Christian Zionism what the invention of the printing press
did for the Bible.
* The Israeli Defence Force captured East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount/
Haram al-Sharif, but retreated from the latter almost immediately, to the chagrin
of many Christian Zionists.
Apocalypse Loud 155
LGPE in the other ... kids were just looking for something, anything, to
make sense out of life.’ 12
Hal’s audience was not all ‘kids’. In 1979 Orson Welles narrated a film
version of The Late Great Planet Earth: ‘... As the world staggers from one
crisis to another, I believe that we’re racing on a countdown to the end of
history as we know it ...’ Described by Internet critics today as ‘boring’,
‘obviously dated and kind of silly’, it featured interviews with scientific,
religious, military and diplomatic experts, including Israel’s ambassador to
the United Nations at the time, who all agreed that the world was headed
for nuclear meltdown.
Soon, Hal was sharing his prophetic insights with America’s Air War
College, and with the Pentagon where ‘hundreds’ 13 flocked to hear him,
and with a group of ‘very distinguished looking men’ whose job was
to gather ‘the latest military intelligence on every nation’s war-making
potential, decide what the American response should be and then predict
the final outcome of any conflicts’.14 They told him their computer had
just forecast the same events the prophet Daniel had prophesied.
Ronald Reagan read The Late Great Planet Earth in 1971, recommended
it to friends and reportedly told a Californian politician over dinner that
year, ‘Everything is falling into place. It can’t be too long now ... Ezekiel
says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people
[Jews]. That must mean that they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons ...
Ezekiel tells us that Gog, the nation that will lead all the other powers of
darkness against Israel, will come out of the north. Biblical scholars have
been saying for generations that Gog must be Russia. What other powerful
nation is to the north of Israel? None.’ 15 Israelis read The Late Great
Planet Earth. A Mossad operative insisted on translating it into Hebrew.
When Menachem Begin, a keen Bible scholar and Israel’s prime minister
between 1977 and 1983, died in 1992 there was a copy of The Late Great
Planet Earth on his bedside table.
Many of Hal’s prophecies neatly came to pass in the 1970s: the European
Economic Community duly expanded from ten to fifteen members; the
‘godless’ Soviet Union remained a threat, especially following its invasion
of Afghanistan in 1979; in the same year the Shah of Iran was replaced
by a fundamentalist Islamic regime; the Cold War arms race accelerated.
Bible prophecy was ‘in’. The most prominent televangelists of the time
– including the subsequently notorious Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker
– preached the gospel of pre-millennial dispensationalism.
Time and again Lindsey doomed all attempts to make peace in the
Middle East to failure. Ignoring the dove-ish sign of Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel in 1971, the hawkish prophet wrote There’s a
Apocalypse Loud 157
Barred from buying time on the television giants, NBC and CBS,
the fundamentalists had set up their own lobbying group, the National
Association of Evangelicals (NAE), in 1942. Two years later, the NAE’s
electronic media arm – the National Religious Broadcasters’ association
(NRB) – was formed, describing itself as ‘a conservative group dedicated to
improving the quality and protecting the rights of independent broadcast
ministries’.24 The NRB voted Robertson ‘Christian Broadcaster of the
Year’ in 1989, and now claims to speak for 1,600 Christian radio and
television broadcasters with a combined audience of 141 million – almost
half the population of the United States. Both the NAE and the NRB are
powerful natural strongholds of Christian Zionism, efficiently promoting
a Manichaean world-view in which Israel and America are automatically
on God’s side against evil Islam, just as surely as they were when battling
evil Communism.
President Reagan chose to deliver his famous ‘Evil Empire’ speech about
the Soviet Union at the NRB convention of 1983. President Bill Clinton
was never invited to speak, but the NRB has held ‘monthly conference
calls with the White House’ 25 since soon after George W. Bush’s election
in 2000. His address to the 2003 NRB convention contained, according to
the Washington Post, the ‘most thorough linkage yet between [his] worldly
policies and his Christian faith – including a pronouncement that an attack
on Iraq would be “in the highest moral traditions of our country”’.26
While reporting the NRB’s 2005 convention for Harper’s Magazine,
the author and journalist Chris Hedges was struck by both the visibility
of the Israeli tourism ministry and the volubility of Christian Zionists.
Prominently displayed in the convention’s exhibition hall was a startling
installation, the scorched skeleton of Bus #19. The horrible handiwork
of a Palestinian suicide bomber who killed eleven Israelis in Jerusalem in
2004, it was decked with banners inscribed with Bible quotes – ‘I will bless
those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse’ 27 and ‘I will
plant [Israel] upon their own land, and they shall never again be plucked
up out of the land which I have given them’.28 Hedges was one among
hundreds attending a lavish convention breakfast, hosted by the Israeli
Minister of Tourism, at which the Christian Zionist religious writer and
broadcaster, Kay Arthur, told him that – faced with the choice – she would
choose Israel over the United States: ‘I would stand with Israel, stand with
Israel as a daughter of the King of Kings.’ 29
Anyone travelling around America today, scanning the airwaves on a car
radio or channel-surfing in a motel bedroom, soon sees that the televangelist
scandals of the 1980s haven’t cramped Christian broadcasting’s style. Some
of the most popular programmes are those of fervent Christian Zionists,
160 1948 onwards
and the sensational yet practical shock and awe tone of their message is
as appealing as Pastor George Adams’s was to the ‘Regenerators’ in early
1860s Maine. With the average prime-time audience for CNN standing
at only just over 700,000, Pat Robertson’s 700 Club * – carried by three
different networks – boasts an audience of 863,000.30 Another big name,
Benny Hinn, is a regular on the Christian networks; Palestinian by origin
but a committed Christian Zionist, he was in Israel in the spring of
2003 promising to boost the country’s flagging tourism by encouraging
thousands of Christians and their pastors to take Holy Land tours. It’s
hard to avoid the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews’ slickly
emotive appeals for funds to ‘restore’ Jews of the former Soviet Union to
Israel.
Once, while watching Christian TV, I happened upon John Hagee, the
most energetic Christian Zionist pastor today, of Cornerstone Church in
San Antonio, Texas. A hefty elderly man in a dark suit, he was sitting with
an Israeli Orthodox rabbi in a sumptuous studio lounge, talking about an
orphanage the rabbi had founded and needed more funding for. At the
bottom of the screen the words ‘Those that bless Israel shall be blessed’
scrolled by, over and over again. Present also in that distractingly opulent
setting was one of the rabbi’s orphans, a shy young Russian Jew whose
brief ‘It’s a special privilege to live in Israel today’ was enlarged upon
by Hagee’s ‘God has promised the land of Israel to his people and he is
faithful to those promises’ and amplified again by his ‘blessings are poured
out on upon those who bless the nation of Israel’.
Hal Lindsey boasted a slot on one of the biggest Christian television
networks – Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), advertised as ‘the world’s
largest religious network and America’s most watched faith channel’ – until
his programme was pulled in December 2005. He complained that ‘some
at the network apparently feel that my message is too pro-Israel and too
anti-Muslim’. Although TBN countered that it had ‘never been, and is
not now against Israel and the Jewish people’,31 the damage was done. A
Hal Lindsey Report is now available on Sundays, on the Angel One or the
international Day Star networks – the latter featuring Benny Hinn’s and
Dr John Hagee’s programmes too.†
The birth of the Internet has boosted the spread of the Christian
Zionist message far beyond individual churches and local communities.
Its touch-of-a button global reach goes a long way towards explaining why
* Named after a 1966 effort to raise $7,000 by asking 700 people to donate $10
a month.
† Lindsey regained a slot on TBN in early 2007.
Apocalypse Loud 161
The Christian sector of the American book trade is booming too. In 2003 it
was 37 per cent up on 2002. While the mainstream book trade slowed and
stagnated, it topped $2 billion in 2004, and rose again in 2005. Millenarians
have had their own version of Amazon.com since 1996, www.armaged-
donbooks.com, which offers nine hundred different items and links to 175
prophecy websites. Subject categories include: Antichrist, Armageddon,
666, Tribulation, Rapture, Millennium, Israel, Second Coming, Mark of
the Beast ...
All leading chains of US bookstores have far larger Christian
sections than their counterparts in Europe, sections where the works of
Christian Zionist writers are prominently displayed, often with the words
‘Armageddon’ or ‘Jerusalem’ in their titles. In the summer of 2006, sales
of Pastor John Hagee’s ‘inspirational book’, Jerusalem Countdown, were
hitting the 700,000 mark. A slightly higher-brow version of Lindsey’s The
Late Great Planet Earth, it has a picture of a nuclear mushroom cloud on
its cover, and the words:
Iran’s president has said, ‘Israel must be wiped off from the map of
the world.’
Iran’s nuclear arsenal is ready, and will impact the world as never
before imagined.
... could this be the beginning of the end?
Pastor: ‘Do you believe that Israel will bomb Iran sometime between
April 2006 and September of 2006?’
Source: ‘I believe so ...’ 33
Hagee very much hoped so. Like Chuck Missler, he is worried that
Iran will turn its electromagnetic pulse weapon (EMP) against America,
meaning the US will ‘cease to be a super-power in one billionth of a
second’.34 Like Lindsey, he sees an Ezekiel 38–39 scenario taking shape
– a Russia that has helped to nuclear-arm Iran, and a coalition of
Muslim states, led by Iran, all coming against Israel in a dress rehearsal
for Armageddon. He regrets to say that America won’t be intervening
in this affray because ‘after America’s extended war in Iraq, the next
administration will probably be Democratic and will withdraw from Iraq,
vowing to stay out of the Middle East in future’.35 If Hagee is reading
his Ezekiel right, the pre-Armageddon war he’d like to see triggered by
a pre-emptive Israeli or US strike on Iran will leave 82 per cent of the
‘Russian axis of evil’ dead: ‘It’s no wonder the world will be stricken
with shock and awe!’ he exclaims.36
Hagee doesn’t refer to the Rapture but otherwise sticks as closely to
the basic millenarian narrative as Lindsey, by forecasting the rise of an
Antichrist in the shape of ‘the head of the European Union’,37 who will
offer Israel an illusory seven-year peace. He tells his readers to be alert
for the moment when the Israelis are lulled into such a false sense of
security that they even start dismantling the security barrier they’ve erected
to protect themselves from Palestinian suicide bombers. His vision of the
Battle of Armageddon is that of a mighty set-to between ‘The King of the
East’, China, and the ‘King of the West’, the Antichrist, at the head of
an army in which ‘doubtless America, Canada and the countries of South
America, Australia and Europe will be represented’.38
Just as the message of The Late Great Planet Earth percolated up to the
defence establishment and on, as far as Ronald Reagan and Menachem Begin
in the 1970s, so there were signs that Hagee’s warning was being heeded
in high American and Israeli places in July 2006. When the Republican
presidential hopeful, Senator John McCain, and the Republican House
Speaker, Newt Gingrich, both told CNN’s Larry King Live they thought
the Israel–Hezbollah clash could escalate into ‘World War III’,39 Israel’s
Jerusalem Post reported Rabbi Benny Elon, a radical right-wing member
of the Knesset, saying that such comments ‘originated’ in John Hagee’s
Jerusalem Countdown.40
A hagiographic history of American Christian Zionism, penned
by Pastor Hagee’s right-hand man in Washington, an American Jew
164 1948 onwards
‘I am a Christian, but I believe with the psalmist that the Lord God of
Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps. Understanding my administration
should not be difficult. We will speak up for our principles; we will
stand up for our friends in the world. And one of the most important
friends is the State of Israel.’ 44
The clue is in the juxtaposition of the ‘Lord God of Israel’ with the ‘State
of Israel’.
Brog begs his fellow Jews to recognise that ‘anti-Semitic Christians’
have been replaced in America by ‘Christian soldiers who passionately
share their concerns’,45 but he fails to address the real reasons why most
American Jews are uneasy about the tightening alliance between Jews and
evangelicals, in spite of those Christians’ passionate love of Israel.
The influence of Christian Zionism on George W. Bush’s White House
will be discussed in more detail in Chapters 8 and 10, but it’s important to
point out here that most Jews’ distrust of Christian Zionism is informed by
Apocalypse Loud 165
By February the following year, he was repeating his protest in a piece titled
‘Israel on the Potomac: Power under Pressure’, for the online magazine
openDemocracy.
* AIPAC is the most powerful component of what is known as ‘the Jewish Lobby’.
With an annual budget of $47 million, it has 200 staff, offices at the foot of Capitol
Hill and 100,000 grass-roots members (Glenn Frankel, ‘A Beautiful Friendship?’,
Washington Post, 16.7.2006).
166 1948 onwards
terms of ‘dainties and iunketting dishes ... fat things and wine’.54 It is also
a very striking feature of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s phenomenally
successful Left Behind series, whose first volume appeared in the same year
as The End of the Age.
Another End Times techno-thriller, but told in twelve volumes, the Left
Behind series has almost everything in common with Robertson’s tale:
a persecuted group of true believers, an anti-Semitic Antichrist, starring
roles for Jews, Jerusalem and Israel, plenty of technology and transport,
Religious Right family values, global catastrophe, appalling violence, and
a happy Bible-prophesied ending.
The first book kicks off with the now famous depiction of the Rapture,
as experienced by passengers on a 747 night flight to Chicago. Buck
Cameron, a famous reporter, is woken by an old woman’s efforts to
catch the attention of a passing pilot. ‘Trouble ma’am?’ Buck enquires.
‘It’s my Harold ... He’s gone,’ she tells him. ‘I’m sorry?’ asks Buck. ‘He’s
disappeared!’ she says. Buck suggests her Harold must have ‘slipped off
to the washroom’ 55 but soon, ‘all over the plane, people were holding up
clothes and gasping or shrieking that someone was missing’.56 Buck racks
his rational brain ‘for anything he had ever read, seen, or heard of any
technology that could remove people from their clothes and make them
disappear from a decidedly secure environment’.57
Buck, the woman and millions more all over the world find that their
pious loved ones have been ‘Raptured’ up to heaven to be with Jesus,
while they’ve been ‘left behind’. Before long, Buck, the pilot and the
pilot’s student daughter have hooked up with a Chicago pastor who’s
belatedly decoded the biblical signs of the times. All fervent bible-
believing Christians now, they band together in a ‘Trib Force’ to face the
prophesied seven-year Tribulation before the Second Coming. The pastor
warns them to watch out for the Antichrist, who duly appears, in the
shape of Nicolae Carpathia, the plausible polyglot president of Romania.
A Transylvanian, like Count Dracula, but as handsome as Robert
Redford, Carpathia soon takes control of the United Nations, which he
renames the ‘Global Community’, before moving its headquarters from
New York to ‘New Babylon’, Iraq.
Joined by a swiftly converted rabbi named Judah ben Tsion, the brave
little Trib Force gathers strength in numbers, plus any amount of bugging
and jamming equipment, high-tech weaponry, light aircraft and all-terrain
vehicles. With God on their side too, the righteous few have everything
they need to combat the evil Carpathia and his ‘GC’ minions. Along with
the rest of the unbelieving world they weather the fulfilment of each of
the prophecies of the Book of Revelation: war and bloodshed, famine and
168 1948 onwards
‘Almost like cookies, those sweet wafer things. And they’re so filling. I
want more and yet I’ve had enough.’
‘Imagine,’ Naomi said, ‘Everything we need for twenty-four hours
comes in three helpings of this.’ 58
‘The so-called Messiah loves the city of Jerusalem above all cities in the
world ... Well, we shall see about that.
‘This strange affection for the Jews resulted in what he tells them is
an eternal covenant of blessing. If we, the rulers of the earth, combine
all our resources and attack the Jews, the son [Jesus] has to come to
their defense. That is when we turn our sights on him and eliminate
him. That will give us total control of the earth, and we will be ready
to take on the father [God] for mastery of the universe.’ 59
But the elderly Rabbi ben Tsion is ready to take on Carpathia in the
battle for Jerusalem. Determined to expunge the memory of his people’s
passive suffering in the Holocaust, he sets out to prove himself a fighting
Jew of the kind Josiah Wedgwood would have approved. After a little
training he’s so handy with his Uzi, he boasts, ‘“I do not see how anyone
Apocalypse Loud 169
can miss. It shoots so many bullets in so short a time, it’s like using a
garden hose”.’ 60 Before heading off to war by helicopter, he gives a last
bible class, with plenty of chapter and verse details about how the blood
of the Antichrist’s allies will flow in the Plain of Jezreel which is ‘about
one hundred and eighty-four miles’ long, and reach as high as the horses’
bridles – ‘four feet or more’.61 Once in Jerusalem, he finds hordes of
proudly defiant Jews awaiting the Antichrist’s onslaught on their city. He
seizes a last chance to save as many as he can by preaching to them at the
Western Wall, treating them to the Christian Zionist line on the thorny
question of the Jews’ need to recognise Jesus as their messiah:
The Left Behind series’ frequently unstable blend of bible prophecy, slapstick
humour, miracles and romance, spiced with guns, gore and gizmos, has
something to suit a great many Americans’ taste. By November 2005, a
decade after the appearance of the first volume, sales of the series had
topped the 60 million mark. Its authors claim to have shown some 3,000
lost souls the path to eternal salvation by their work.
My tenth anniversary limited edition copy of the first book comes with
a useful pull-out time-line of the Tribulation years, showing which period
and which catastrophes each book covers, but also how each title fared in
the best-seller lists. Left Behind (1995) spent eighty-four weeks on the New
York Times list, Apollyon (1997) twenty weeks, Assassins (1999) thirty-nine,
The Indwelling (2000) thirty-five, The Mark (2000) thirty-two. Desecration
was the world’s best-selling novel of 2001. The last three volumes – The
Remnant (2002), Armageddon (2003) and Glorious Appearing (2004)
– were on the NYT list for an average of over twenty weeks each. The
LaHaye–Jenkins writing partnership is the most lucrative the world has
known, even before its multiple spin-offs – Left Behind for teenagers, Left
Behind for the military, three prequels and at least one sequel, computer
games, a website prophecy club, Holy Land tours, prophecy conferences,
merchandise, and two not very successful films.
The events of 11 September 2001 – not an explicitly prophesied ‘plot
point’ in God’s schedule but almost as significant in the minds of Bible-
believing Americans as the birth of Israel in 1948 or the Six Day War in
1967 – sent sales of the Left Behind books into the stratosphere. Steady
sales of half a million a month doubled after al-Qaeda’s attacks on New
York and Washington. Asked by CNN if he thought 9/11 like a scene
from his books, Jerry B. Jenkins admitted, ‘That really was one of my first
reactions, and I’ve probably heard that every day from different readers ...
it even made some of my own fiction more realistic to me.’ 65 Hal Lindsey
had watched his book sales rocket by 83 per cent when the outbreak of
the first Gulf War in 1991 encouraged speculation that Saddam was the
Antichrist, building himself a New Babylon, but in the year of 9/11 LaHaye
and Jenkins’s Desecration sold more copies than any other book in the
world.
Pastors all over America were reporting 20 per cent leaps in attendance
figures if they preached on the Apocalypse. Time magazine reported a
bewildered Manhattan minister saying, ‘I would go for years without
anyone asking about the End Times ... But since Sept 11, hard core,
crusty, cynical New York lawyers and stockbrokers who are not moved
by anything are saying “Is the world going to end? Are all the events of
the Bible coming true?” They want to get right with God. I’ve never seen
Apocalypse Loud 171
use, and can also entrap those who would use it’, she suggests that Bush,
a ‘fundamentalist’, is just the sort of person to fall into the trap. Didion
explains that problems arise ‘in letting this kind of personality loose on the
fragile web of unseen alliances and unspoken enmities that constitutes any
powerful nation’s map of the world’, because ‘the fundamentalist approach
to information does not encourage nuanced judgments’.70
Didion also described the Left Behind narrative as a dream of the
‘unempowered’, in which an empowered macho Jesus and his equally
empowered Christian Right soldiers take a terrible revenge on all their
enemies – the Antichrist, Democrats, liberal theologians, Muslims,
Darwinians, the United Nations, secular Europe, et al. That word,
‘unempowered’, carries echoes that reverberate all the way back to the
angrily embattled, anti-intellectual roots of Christian fundamentalism in
mid-nineteenth-century America. Tim LaHaye, the prophecy expert half
of the Left Behind writing duo, sits squarely in that old fundamentalist
tradition: ‘Those millions that I’m trying to reach take the Bible literally,’
he told Newsweek in 2004. ‘It’s the theologians that get all fouled up
on some of these smug ideas that you’ve got to find some theological
reason behind it. It bugs me that intellectuals look down their noses at
we ordinary people.’ 71
LaHaye’s aggrieved, ‘unempowered’ tone is astonishing when one
considers the amount of not just literary and financial, but political,
power he’s been wielding since the late 1970s. In 2001 the Institute for
the Study of American Evangelicals voted him, rather than Billy Graham,
America’s most influential Christian leader of the past quarter-century. If
Hal Lindsey is the ‘Father of the Modern Prophecy Movement’ then Tim
LaHaye can lay claim to the title ‘Father of the Modern Religious Right’,
a phenomenon I will examine in later chapters and whose foreign policy
is predicated on Christian Zionism.
One author deserves substantial credit for popularising this foreign policy
and therefore the right-wing Israeli agenda in the Middle East in fictional
form. A youthful Jewish convert to Christianity, best-selling author Joel
C. Rosenberg has been challenging Hal Lindsey’s supremacy in the field of
prophecy interpretation since the mid-1990s. I first encountered Rosenberg’s
2005 hit, The Ezekiel Option, published by Tyndale, like the Left Behind
books, handsomely displayed in the Christian bookshop at the Colorado
Springs headquarters of that fortress of Religious Right values, Focus on
the Family. Its jacket informed me that Rosenberg’s previous best-sellers
Apocalypse Loud 173
– The Last Jihad and The Last Days – had uncannily prophesied a 9/11
scenario,* a war against Iraq and the death of Arafat.
A fulsome endorsement from Tim LaHaye – ‘an exciting action-
packed thriller based on one of the most important end-times prophecies’
– promised as much again for the Ezekiel Option, but more interesting was
the author biography on the back flap. Before trying his hand at Christian
fiction, Rosenberg worked as ‘communications strategist’ for a hero of
the Religious Right – the king of conservative talk-radio, Rush Limbaugh
– but also for two eminent right-wing Israeli politicians, ex-deputy prime
minister Natan Sharansky and ex-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It would be hard to conceive of a cleverer way of communicating the
right-wing Israeli agenda than by packaging it as apocalypterature. Far
better written and more satisfyingly complex than the Left Behind books,
The Ezekiel Option does just that. Sharansky highly recommends both
the author and his work: ‘Joel C. Rosenberg is a masterful storyteller, a
true friend of Israel and of the Jewish people. He understands the real
problems and threats in the Middle East better than any American novelist
I know and turns it into a chilling, prescient and unforgettable read,’ says
the book jacket.
The Ezekiel Option contains most of the familiar vital ingredients:
a starring role for Israel and Jews, bible prophecy, high-tech, hints of
a European Antichrist, violence, bad Muslims, and lines like ‘Evil was
regrouping. Something else was coming, something catastrophic.’ 72
But, unlike LaHaye and Jenkins, Rosenberg has located his saga in a
recognisably contemporary setting and blurred the boundaries between
fact and fiction so artfully that any reader not perfectly versed in both
Russian and Middle Eastern politics stands little chance of separating the
two. His motivation is as explicitly didactic as LaHaye’s and at least as
much political as theological. Rosenberg claims to be writing for people
‘anxious about the Middle East’ but reluctant to learn about it by reading
‘900-page history books’.73
Rosenberg’s post-Soviet Russia is an evil place, still ‘cursing’ the Jews as
it did in Tsarist and Soviet times and allied to an equally evil Iran, which
borders a post-Saddam Iraq, which is peaceful and prospering following
western intervention but also ominously – for those who can read the End
Times signs – engaged in rebuilding Babylon. The European Community,
* The New York Times, 15.11.2003, summarised the plot of The Last Jihad
(2002): it ‘begins with a suicide pilot crashing his private plane into the president’s
motorcade and ends with that president saying a silent prayer as the nuclear bombs
he ordered are dropped on Iraq’.
174 1948 onwards
which backs evil Russia’s suggestion that Israel help bring peace to the
Middle East by surrendering its nuclear weapons, is ‘a waste of time’.74
Only America and Israel are good and, by the end, only Israel, because
‘too many in the American intelligence establishment had a Western,
modern secular mind-set’.75 In part thanks to Tim LaHaye, the word
‘secular’ is now as pejorative as the words ‘liberal’, ‘humanist’, ‘Democrat’
or ‘relativist’ in the lexicon of the Religious Right.
The true hero of Rosenberg’s book, a retired chief of Mossad named
Dr Eliezer Mordechai, has a different mind-set. A Jewish convert to
Christianity and an expert decoder of bible prophecy, Dr Mordechai is the
only man alive who has the tools to figure out what’s really going on:
He was now convinced the ancient prophecies were, in fact, coming true
before their very eyes ... He needed to understand the signs, the timing,
the sequence of events that would climax in the Rapture of the church,
the rise of the Antichrist, and the beginning of the Tribulation.76
this prophesied war could herald ‘the end of radical Islam as we know
it’, Rosenberg dropped a bombshell. ‘I’ve been invited to the White House
and Capitol Hill and the CIA a few weeks ago,’ he said. ‘It’s not that all
those folks are believing that the prophecies are coming true, but they
want to understand the evangelical perspective on the Middle East, and
particularly the prophecies.’
Robertson neglected to follow up this startling lead. Instead, he and
Rosenberg went on agreeing that the ‘signs’ were piling up towards
catastrophe:
next’. On two successive days in the week following the ceasefire, Fox News
– favoured by American conservatives in general and the Religious Right in
particular, over any other news channel – interviewed both Pastor Hagee
and Rosenberg. Neither was introduced as a believer in bible prophecy
or as a Christian fundamentalist, let alone as a Christian Zionist. Hagee
confidently prophesied that the peace would be short-lived:
‘I believe that this next round will be more severe, more aggressive,
and the moment that Israel determines that Iran has nuclear capability
or buys a nuclear weapon from North Korea that they will bomb the
nuclear facilities in Iran, or go after Iran. And then it’s going to become
intense in the Middle East ... Make no mistake, Iran will use nuclear
weapons against the United States of America.’ 79
The next day Fox News billed Rosenberg as a best-selling novelist and
‘Middle East analyst’. Rosenberg’s prophesying highlighted the extent to
which the mind-set of an American Christian fundamentalist resembles
that of its Islamic counterpart.
‘People don’t appreciate yet, particularly in the media ... don’t appreciate
or don’t understand the evil that is rising in Iran, and that’s what I’m
trying to write about in my novels ... the religious, end-of-the-world,
apocalyptic mind-set that Ahmadinejad has. You can’t negotiate with
someone, ultimately, who believes it’s his mission to end the world.’ 80
A few days later, even CNN turned prophecy-mad. Its Live From ...
news programme carried a nine-minute prophecy chat with Rosenberg
and Tim LaHaye’s co-author, Jerry B. Jenkins. It left the show’s presenter
feeling just as early nineteenth-century English witnesses of Edward Irving’s
sermons did. ‘You both scare me, but you both fascinate me. Gentlemen,
thank you so much,’ she said.81
chapter 8
same extra mileage on Sunday, in order to complete his building. The stunt
raised not $5 but $7 million.
With his flock numbering 24,000 today, and with almost 10,000 students
at Liberty and a variety of other educational, media and charity projects
on the go, Falwell informs us that his Christian business empire is turning
over $200 million a year. The congregation gasps in shock and awe. Falwell
beams; he has reason to feel smug. The future of the Religious Right looks
secured by institutions like Liberty University and his own life’s work is
guaranteed an afterlife: his two sons are in line to inherit everything so
Liberty will remain a stronghold of Christian Zionism.
Falwell likes his preaching to be practical, topical. Within a few days of
Ariel Sharon’s election as prime minister in February 2001, for example, his
theme was ‘Israel, Ariel Sharon and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ’.
He began with the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of a valley strewn with dry
bones coming to life again as ‘an exceeding great army’ of Jews, restored
to their ‘own land’.2 Referring to the same Bible text Hal Lindsey used
in The Late Great Planet Earth and Joel C. Rosenberg would return to in
The Ezekiel Option, Falwell forecast that the Jews would only be cured
of their ‘spiritual blindness’ regarding the identity of their messiah after
an attack by an axis of evil led by a coalition of Russia, Iran and other
Muslim states.
When will [that war] happen? Only God knows. But it will happen!
When it does, we as a nation better make sure we’re on the right side.
Supporting Israel is not an option. It is a divine command. America is
the best friend Israel has. In particular, born-again evangelical Christians
are the strongest supporters of Israel I know. The Jerusalem Post cover
has a picture of me this week, saying ‘Israel’s best friend’.3
church with a bomb strapped around his or her waist ...’ Falwell must
live in fear of just such an interruption. In 2002, Iran’s Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, responded to Falwell’s assertion that Muhammad
was ‘a terrorist’ by declaring his death ‘a religious duty’.5 This morning,
his riposte to that fatwa is a defiant, ‘I’m bullet-proof until I’ve finished
the work God wants me to do.’
His message is not all scary. He tells a cruelly funny political joke
against a domestic foe: Democrat presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton.
While on a visit to a school to speak to pupils about current events, Hillary
is bombarded with questions. A bright boy called Kenneth asks her three:
(1.) What happened to Medicare? (2.) Why are you running for office when
your husband shamed it? (3.) What did you do with all those things you
took from the White House? Just then the bell goes for recess. A relieved
Hillary promises to answer Kenneth after the break. Recess over, another
child poses the same three questions and two more: (1.) Why did the recess
bell go? (2.) What happened to Kenneth? The church erupts in laughter,
cheers and Amens!
I imagine that if this jocular Falwell were to repeat some of his more
vicious public pronouncements here – ‘I think Muhammad was a terrorist’,6
for example, or his blaming of 9/11 on ‘the pagans, and the abortionists
and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians’ 7 – few would object.
But the gun-slinging style of Christian Zionist men of God like Falwell,
Lindsey and Robertson, the swaggering, saloon bar judgments that go
down such a storm with their fans, are ever more dangerous in this era of
heightened religious tension and instant communication. No nation, not
even a superpower, is an island; a stray boast or a snappy sound-bite can
be amplified and exploited, used and misused. What is ignorable in the
vast cacophonous variety of America can cost lives in the Middle East.
If Australia or Iceland were the object of Christian Zionists’ worship, it
would not matter so much. But Israel is what and where it is: a nuclear
power effectively planted by the West in a Muslim heartland. If no one
noted either Chuck Missler’s casting of Hamas-supporting Palestinians as
the biblical Edomites who had to be ‘slaughtered’, or heard Hal Lindsey’s
call to ‘obliterate’ Syria, eight people died in Muslim–Hindu riots at
Solapur in south-west India after Falwell’s televised insult to the Prophet.
Falwell the affable family man rounds off the service by telling us
he’s looking forward to spending most of this beautiful autumn day not
far from town at a gigantic Falwell clan reunion in the house where he
was born, but will be back at work here this evening, performing a few
baptisms.
180 1948 onwards
packing David some sandwiches and ordering him to go and find out.
David ‘jumps into his father’s carriage, puts the thing in reverse, gets on
the Jerusalem expressway and takes the exit marked “Battle”’. By the time
he arrives the conflict is heating up – ‘This would be the equivalent of Star
Wars for David, I can just see him shouting, “Yeah! Go Israel!”’ Hindson
enthuses.
David finds his brothers and swiftly decides that he will be the one to
take on Goliath for Israel. One of his brothers mocks him, tells him he’ll
get in trouble with their father, but David is determined. He’s already had
experience with his sling, seeing off a lion and a bear that attacked the
family flock. Hindson digresses a moment for a lesson in the mechanics
of using a sling. When young David releases his stone, like an ‘underhand
fast-pitched softball’, it hits Goliath right between the eyes and knocks him
dead. The plucky little victor chops off the giant’s head.
One moral of the story – ‘God’s on Israel’s side’ – needs no restating
for this audience. Hindson’s moral – ‘Jesus Christ is the champion of our
army. He’s the only one who puts the enemy to flight’ – is another.
The evening ends on a high note, with the recruitment of new troops
to Christ’s army. ‘Hands up if convicted, challenged tonight!’ Falwell
commands. A dozen, mostly men, answer the call-up, making their way
to the front of the church to receive his blessing. A swelling of appropriate
mood music accompanies Falwell’s final ‘The spirit of the Lord has spoken
to your hearts right now ...’
real Texan – cowboy boots and all’, and who’s been signing off his emails
to me with ‘Maranatha’ (Aramaic for ‘The Lord cometh!’), the title of
James H. Brookes’s nineteenth-century bestseller on bible prophecy.
Sporting nothing more exotic than a crumpled grey suit, Dr Ice is setting
up his power-point presentation. The words already projected on the wall
behind his head read israel – god’s super-sign of the end times.
In the row behind me two staff members are discussing Israel: ‘The point
is, that land’s of no value right now, without a king,’ says one. ‘Right.
They’re not accepting him yet,’ says the other. Decoded, this exchange
suggests that if some of the most literal-minded fundamentalists want
prophecy fulfilled in the shape of a Jewish monarch, just as Sir Henry
Finch envisaged, there are others still hoping for a mass conversion of the
Jews to Christianity, just as most seventeenth-century Protestants were.
The hall slowly fills and the event kicks off with a hymn, sung as a
faltering duet by two members of staff, with a third on the piano. ‘We’re
marching, marching to Zion, beautiful, beautiful Zion, We’re marching
upward to Zion, the beautiful city of God ...’
Dr Ice raises the tone with an opening prophecy by Sir Isaac Newton,
about how, near ‘the time of the end, a body of men will be raised up’
who will look into ‘the literal truth of the prophecies’ and find that most
of them concern the Jews and their land. Ice points out that a third of
all United Nations resolutions have also concerned Israel and her land,
all of them negative, except for the first endorsing its creation in 1948.
But where can we see the fulfilment of prophecy today, ‘except in relation
to the land of Israel?’ he asks. The screen behind him is now showing a
colourful pre-millennial dispensationalist time-line. The Restoration of the
Jews and their Tribulation are clearly marked, and the Rapture is a grey
cloud from which Jesus and a righteous few are waving.
As Dr Ice continues I sense that most of this audience is having as much
trouble following his exposition as I am, the more so when a technical
glitch sends his power-point images scrolling wildly up and down, too
fast to glimpse let alone study. Someone behind me whispers, ‘I think it’s
possessed!’
It’s time for a question and answer session. Not everyone in this
stronghold of Christian fundamentalism sets as much store by bible
prophecy as Dr Ice, it seems. ‘Why should we take all these as long-term
prophecies rather than as relating to the era in which they were written?’
asks one member of staff, voicing most theologians’ view. ‘OK, we all
know about blessing and cursing Israel, but does that mean Israel right or
wrong?’ queries another. ‘I don’t know how we can always support Israel
when the Israelis are so divided amongst themselves,’ quibbles a third. But,
‘A Disciplined, Charging Army’ 183
to judge by the group of excited men who cluster around Dr Ice as soon
as the session is over, plenty are tuned to his wavelength.
He invites me to his Pre-Trib Research Center for further discussion.
Temporarily housed in two windowless rooms, it strikes me as cramped for
such a grand title, for such a large man. Reading my mind, he apologises,
‘I just moved here from Washington, where we had a room in Beverly
LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America offices – I’m not really set up
here yet and anyway, I’ll be moving somewhere grander shortly.’ Beverly
LaHaye is Tim LaHaye’s wife. Her organisation is a Religious Right lobby
group. At such close quarters, I notice Dr Ice is wearing a discreet lapel
pin: twinned Israeli and American flags.
A Texan Southern Baptist, Ice had what he calls his ‘Jesus moment’
at college, after reading Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and
hearing a sermon about the Rapture. At Dallas Theological Seminary
(DTS) – Hal Lindsey’s alma mater which was founded by one of Dr Cyrus
I. Scofield’s disciples in 1924 – Ice took a four-year degree, which included
Greek and Hebrew. ‘DTS was considered very academically rigorous back
then,’ he says wistfully. ‘After World War Two all the Bible colleges and
seminaries were pro-Israel, but DTS has changed recently. It’s using the
Higher Critical stuff to argue against what the text is really saying now. A
lot of academics are going for the anti-supernatural interpretative approach
these days,’ he adds dolefully, blaming the Enlightenment.
But all is not lost. While too many of the younger generation are too
open to the ‘let’s shed a few tears for the Palestinians’ line in Dr Ice’s
opinion, all three of his sons are fervently pro-Israel. Two are studying
here at Liberty with a view to becoming pastors. One heads the university’s
Israel Club, established a year ago at the instigation of AIPAC, as part
of its drive to build up support for Israel in Christian places of learning;
AIPAC is a powerful centrepiece of what many refer to as the Jewish
or Israel Lobby. Ice would rather the club was sponsored by the Zionist
Organisation of America (ZOA): ‘AIPAC is too prepared to work with
whatever Israeli government’s in power, right or left. The ZOA would be
safer, more right-wing,’ he says.
Glancing around the small room, I ask him what the Pre-Trib Research
Center does. He writes articles, he says, talks to the media, runs a website
and teaches a class in prophecy to graduate students of Liberty’s theological
seminary. He also organises two- or three-day get-togethers of the Pre-Trib
Study Group – a club of around 300 ‘top prophecy scholars, authors and
populists’ – in a hotel near Dallas airport every year. Modelled on the
Albury Park and Powerscourt conferences in Britain of the late 1820s and
early 1830s, the group was Tim LaHaye’s idea and is now in its fifteenth
184 1948 onwards
year. Chuck Missler is a regular attender. Dr Ice knows all the big names
in the field.
Not for the first time I’m struck by the interconnectedness of this small
army of bible prophecy experts whose mental landscapes bear such an
uncannily close resemblance to those of seventeenth-century Puritans. Dr
Ice can dismiss Missler as a ‘wacko’, Dr John Hagee as a ‘heretic’, Falwell
as ‘winsome’ but inclined to make ‘stupid comments’, and even some of
LaHaye’s ‘positions’ as suspect. But these men are all united where it counts
and there’s nothing complicated about their basic creed. All are uncommonly
interested in the sources of power in the world – natural and supernatural
– and in the battle between Good and Evil. All agree that we are on the
verge of the End Times in which Jews and their land have a crucial part
to play. And, firmly planted in the camp of the Religious Right, they’re all
actively engaged in bolstering the most radical right wing of Israel’s political
spectrum. The fact that these men of God – most are in some form of
Christian ministry – are obsessed with the defence and intelligence agenda
of a country that’s not their own is bizarre, but not hugely significant if
not for another fact: their influence on American politics.
In order to understand precisely how, for the first time in the long
history of the movement, millenarian Christian Zionists come to be playing
an active role in American and Israeli politics, we first need to go back
and examine when and why Revd Jerry Falwell, Revd Tim LaHaye and
Pat Robertson embarked on the wider project of reinstating the Judaeo-
Christian value system America was born with in the Puritan seventeenth
century. We need to look at the rise of the Religious Right, the wider
phenomenon of which Christian Zionism is only one aspect.
Throughout the 1960s Falwell had noisily opposed mixing religion and
politics: ‘preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul-winners’ 8
was his line. But by the late 1970s he had executed a 180-degree turn and
was urgently recommending the reverse.
An originally Presbyterian theologian from Pennsylvania, Francis
Schaeffer, supplied much of the vital intellectual underpinning for what
became a revolution first in fundamentalist Christian behaviour and then
in the wider evangelical community, leading to the formation of what is
known today as the Religious Right. Since the late 1970s a large proportion
of white American Protestants have been battling to rescue their country
from what they judge to be its state of terminal liberal decay by throwing
themselves into the political fray on the side of the conservative Republican
Party. By 2004, white evangelicals made up almost a quarter of the electorate,
‘A Disciplined, Charging Army’ 185
and 74 per cent of them were voting Republican. That percentage slipped
in the mid-term elections of 2006, but only by four points.9
Described by Craig Unger in Vanity Fair as ‘probably the most important
religious figure that secular America has never heard of’,10 Francis Schaeffer
had been galvanised into outraged action by the legalisation of abortion in
1973. For him, the famous Roe versus Wade case was the final straw, after
a decade that had seen campus rebellions, an explosion of sexual activity
and the removal of God from the classroom. Denouncing the ‘tyranny’
of a society in thrall to ‘secular humanist’ values, a society mortally
sinning by making Man rather than God ‘the measure of all things’,11 it
was Schaeffer who prodded Falwell into politics. Falwell has recalled that
Schaeffer showed him he had ‘a responsibility to confront that [secular
humanist] culture where it was failing morally and socially’.12
Schaeffer reasoned that since the democratically elected government of
America had forfeited its legitimacy by succumbing to the lure of godless
materialism, Christians had a ‘duty to revolt’.13 And he hammered home
his point by drawing an unflattering comparison between America and
another tyranny. ‘A true Christian in Hitler’s Germany and in the occupied
countries [of Europe] should have defied the false and counterfeit state and
hidden his Jewish neighbours from the German SS troops. The government
had abrogated its authority, and it had no right to make any demands.’ 14
To any defender of the First Amendment’s exlusion of religion from
the political sphere, Schaeffer had this to say: ‘We must absolutely set
out to smash the lie of the new and novel concept of the separation of
religion from the state ... It has no relationship to the meaning of the
First Amendment. The First Amendment was that the state would never
interfere with religion. that’s all the meaning there was to the
first amendment.’ 15
Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto (1981) sold 290,000 copies in the
year in which Falwell painted political engagement as a crucial military
engagement, an endeavour as noble and justified as a medieval crusade, a
First World War battle or the Vietnam War:
Two years earlier Tim LaHaye, then a Baptist pastor in San Diego,
California, had dedicated his runaway best-seller, The Battle for the
Mind , * to Schaeffer. A punchy broadside against secular humanism, the
book translated Schaeffer’s thesis into terms the uneducated man in the
street could grasp. Secular humanism, LaHaye wrote, was ‘the world’s
greatest evil’,17 ‘the most dangerous religion in the world’,18 and the cause
of all America’s ills. The acceptance of homosexuality and abortion, the
sexual revolution, drugs and crime were all the fault of secular humanism,
he claimed. Secular humanists were ‘one-worlders first and Americans
second’ 19 so they supported the United Nations, voted to give away the
Panama Canal and lost America the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Secular
humanists in Democrat President Jimmy Carter’s administration had been
imposing high taxes in order to lead America ‘down the road to a socialist
Sodom and Gomorrah’.20 Secular humanists taught evolution, ‘the biggest
hoax of the 19th and 20th century’,21 and so on.
The only hope was a wholesale return to Judaeo-Christian values,†
because ‘Christians and Jews agree on the basic standards of morality
upon which this country was founded.’ 22 But how to bring about that
return? LaHaye had a battle plan:
* The work was hurriedly reissued in 1999, after Falwell declared that the
Antichrist had to be a Jew.
‘A Disciplined, Charging Army’ 189
The social issues of the Moral Majority are meeting with practically
no success, whereas anti-Israel sentiment has been distinctly on the rise,
and the support of the Moral Majority could, in the near future, turn
out to be decisive for the very existence of the Jewish state. That is why
the Israeli government has struck its own balance vis a vis the Moral
Majority, and it is hard to see why American Jews should come up with
a different bottom line.35
Israeli right-wingers beat the same ‘existential threat’ drum today when
justifying their alliance with Christian fundamentalists.
This Bible has been placed here on October 17, 1974, by the students
and dean of the Thomas Road Bible Institute in Lynchburg, VA, USA.
190 1948 onwards
what is happening on the West Bank but care a lot about [fending off]
the Soviet Union.’ 40
Israel offered hundreds of American pastors free ‘familiarisation tours’
to Israel, during which they were flattered by the attentions of leading
politicians and high-ranking figures in defence and intelligence, and fêted
at banquets. Lindsey, Falwell, Robertson, Hagee and Missler all owe their
cosy relations with the highest echelons of the Likud Party – and now
Kadima too – to this thirty-year-old charm offensive.
Prime Minister Begin rated Jerry Falwell especially highly, once calling
him ‘the man who represents twenty million Americans’.41 On an all-
expenses-paid visit to Israel in 1978, Falwell was flown by helicopter over
the Golan Heights and photographed on bended knee, among saplings in
a forest named in his honour. A year later, after deriding President Carter’s
hard-won Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt as a waste of
time because ‘you and I know there’s not going to be any peace in the
Middle East until one day the Lord Jesus sits down upon the throne of
David in Jerusalem’,42 Falwell was back in Israel. Surrounded by West Bank
settlers, he pledged his moral support for the building of more settlements
and said God had only been kind to America because ‘America has been
kind to the Jew’.43 In 1980 all these services earned him the first Vladimir
Jabotinsky medal ever awarded to a Gentile.
Begin, who seems to have had as acute an understanding of the
American Christian fundamentalist mind as Dr Weizmann had of its
British counterpart, cultivated other friendships with visiting American
fundamentalists. David A. Lewis fondly recalls meeting him fifteen times:
‘He was always interested in sharing Bible truths regarding Israel’s future
destiny. I heard him tell a senior aide ... that we brought inspiration and
comfort to him.’ 44 Lewis has been busy ‘blessing’ Israel ever since, setting
up a Bible tours agency in 1981 and organising a well-attended Christian
rally in support of Israel in 2002 at which ex-New York mayor Rudolph
Giuliani and the then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz spoke,
and the popular Christian broadcaster Janet Parshall famously promised
‘We will never limp, we will never wimp, we will never vacillate in our
support of Israel!’ 45 In 2003, Lewis signed a petition denouncing the ‘road-
map’ peace plan.
Lamarr Mooneyham, pastor of the 2,500-strong Tabernacle Church in
Danville, Virginia, and graduate of Liberty University, fondly recalled for
me that Falwell was a ‘practical joker’ with ‘a way of slapping you on
the back to knock the breath out of you’. He cherished a memory of
his meeting with Begin: ‘He was a wiry little man with huge teeth, like
Jimmy Carter. He told us that Israel had had no tanks but had invented
192 1948 onwards
one, called the “Chariot” after the prophet Elijah’s chariot, and that it
had destroyed nineteen Soviet-made S70s. I remember him saying “I am a
man of the Old Book but your Dr. Falwell is going to show me the New
Book”.’
Almost thirty years on, Pastor Mooneyham still believed that ‘every
conscientious Christian must support Israel’ and that not one iota of
difference separates the ancient Israelites from today’s Israelis; ‘same
cereal, different box’, he said. And the Palestinians? ‘There’s so much
about that I can’t understand,’ he answered. ‘I can’t begin to get into
that mind-set. I don’t think their state’s ever going to happen.’ A fan of
the Left Behind series, with a fifteen-minute slot on Christian radio every
day, Mooneyham said, ‘The Jews are the only people on this earth who
have a 4,000-year-old document saying it’s their land – we Americans
don’t have that!’
Begin’s new best friends turned out to be as useful as he’d hoped. So
it was that on launching a highly controversial pre-emptive strike against
Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant in 1981, he immediately called not President
Reagan but Jerry Falwell, to ask him to put a positive spin on the attack.
‘Mr. Prime Minister,’ a thrilled Falwell answered, ‘I want to congratulate
you for a mission that made us very proud that we manufacture those
F16s. In my opinion, you must have put it right down the smoke-stack!’ 46
Falwell preached an upbeat sermon on the subject at his Thomas Road
church and urged 80,000 Moral Majority pastors to do the same, despite
condemnation of the Israeli actions by President Reagan and the United
Nations. Falwell’s ‘blessing’ of Israel at this time included converting Jesse
Helms, chairman of the Senate’s powerful Foreign Relations Committee,
into a devout Christian Zionist.
In 1982 Falwell led a party of forty Moral Majority pastors to Israel, to
create ‘as many concerned American citizens into well-informed, educated
friends of Israel as possible’.47 But that was just one of dozens of trips
to the Holy Land he made that decade. The writer and journalist, Grace
Halsell, joined him for two of them. On the first, in 1983, she was one of
a group of 600; on the second, in 1985, she was one of more than 800.
Chuck Missler’s group was a fraction of that size but there are plenty of
similar-sized tours today. Halsell recalled that Falwell ‘did not mention we
would be in the Land of Christ, where Jesus was born, had his ministry
and died. Rather the focus was on Israel. We had only Israeli guides, stayed
only in Israeli hotels ... Falwell did not arrange for us to meet [local,
Palestinian] Christians.’ 48 Just as on Missler’s tour of the Holy Land,
neither Jesus’s birthplace, Bethlehem, nor his home town, Nazareth, was
included on the itinerary.
‘A Disciplined, Charging Army’ 193
If Osirak had been one test of the firmness of Christian Zionists’ support
for Israel, they soon passed another with flying colours: Israel’s widely
condemned invasion of Lebanon in 1982. True to his private pledge to
defend Israel, Pat Robertson joined General Ariel Sharon’s invasion force,
riding into Lebanon in a military jeep. Confronted with a New York Times
eyewitness report of Israeli flares guiding slaughter-squads of Lebanese
Phalangists into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila in
September that year, Falwell claimed ‘the Israelis were not involved’, that
it was all ‘propaganda’.49 Pastor Mooneyham, at the time National Field
Director of Falwell’s Liberty Federation lobby group, hazily recalled an
Israel-funded trip to Lebanon in 1983, when the Israelis ‘were liberating
Lebanon from the PLO’: ‘I was one of a group of forty-five people who the
Israelis decided had access to some sort of media or pulpit. They gave us
all video-tapes, ready to hand over to TV stations back home. They took
us up to Beirut and we stood on a hillside and watched mortars going off.
We thought it was really neat!’
Although quietened by its unheeded opposition to the 1993 Oslo Peace
Accords and a return of Israel’s Labour Party to power, the Likud/Christian
Zionist alliance survived Israel’s switches of government of the later 1980s
and early ’90s. Not until 1996, when the Jabotinsky/Begin ‘iron wall’ line
was restored in the person of the son of an adviser to Jabotinsky, did
Christian Zionists have a friend and partner to rival Begin.
As Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York, Likud’s
Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu had had plenty of opportunities to notice that
American Christian Zionists’ dream of a Greater Israel exactly matched
his own. He’d been a popular guest speaker and made all the requisite
contacts at functions like the National Prayer Breakfast for Israel, at which
Zionist Jews and Christians gather every year to listen to some Jewish
shofar-blowing, consume a kosher breakfast and share their feelings about
Israel’s special relationships with God and America. Within months of
taking power in 1996 Netanyahu was flying seventeen leading Christian
Zionists to Israel for a meeting at which they vowed to support the
settlements and Israel’s claim to Jerusalem as her undivided capital, and
pledged that ‘America will never, never desert Israel’.50
Back home, the seventeen took out full-page newspaper advertisements
to publicise their pledge. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson (who had tried
and failed to be elected as Reagan’s successor in 1988) and Reverend Ed
McAteer – the organiser of the annual National Prayer Breakfast for
Israel – took part in the campaign. Their noisy efforts contradicted and
undermined the softly-softly implementation of the Oslo Peace Accords,
the peace plan that President Clinton had been patiently pursuing with
194 1948 onwards
Falwell dissolved the Moral Majority Inc. in 1989, after a scandal about
its unethical involvement with the Republican Party, but the war against
secular humanism blazed on under the new banner of the Christian
Coalition, an organisation founded by Pat Robertson in 1989.
Same cereal, similar box.
The Christian Coalition’s declared purpose was to ‘preserve, protect and
defend the Judaeo-Christian values that made this the greatest country in
the world’.59 One of those Judaeo-Christian values – ‘blessing’ Israel by
‘A Disciplined, Charging Army’ 195
this time more closely targeted at Christians in crucial swing states such as
Ohio and Florida. White evangelicals accounted for 36 per cent of Bush’s
vote in 2004,68 the same year in which the Pew Forum discovered that in
the wake of the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000 and the events of
9/11, committed evangelical support for Israel had risen from 14 per cent
in 2000, to 52 per cent.69
Tim LaHaye’s original battle plan has succeeded. Dr Green points out
that the decline in Christian Coalition membership to 3–400,000 is a cause
of rejoicing among the Religious Right today. With a born-again Christian
in the White House, says Dr Green, there’s ‘a feeling that there needn’t be
another Moral Majority or Christian Coalition because the Republican
Party is the more useful organisation’.70 In the wittier words of Reverend
Barry Lynn, an opponent of the Religious Right who heads Americans
United for Separation of Church and State, ‘The good news is that the
Christian Coalition is fundamentally collapsing; the bad news is that the
people who ran it are all in government.’ 71 On visits to the White House
Lynn had recognised a number of Pat Robertson’s former legal team.
The Christian Coalition’s highest-profile action for Israel took the form
of a gigantic Washington rally in October 2002. It kicked off with shofar-
blowing and a ringing endorsement from the Oval Office, and featured a
number of leading Republican speakers. Ehud Olmert – then mayor of
Jerusalem and who became prime minister of Israel in 2006 – told the
cheering crowd, ‘God is with us, you are with us.’ 72
Until the mid-1990s, when the phenomenal success of his Left Behind
saga made him a household name, Tim LaHaye had virtually no public
profile as a leader of the Religious Right or as a lover of Israel. But,
while Falwell and Robertson were noisily making their political mark with
Moral Majority Inc. and the Christian Coalition during the 1980s and
’90s, LaHaye was making his own valuable gains for the Judaeo-Christian
cause.
Shortly after laying out a battle plan for Moral Majority Inc., in
1981, LaHaye had dreamed up another strategy for battling the ‘secular
humanist’ enemy. With a handful of wealthy Republicans and his Moral
Majority collaborator, Paul Weyrich, he founded the Council for National
Policy (CNP), an elite club of leading Christian conservatives interested in
shaping America’s domestic and foreign policy. The bland name – easily
confused with that of the entirely unconnected and thoroughly respectable
Centre for National Policy, for example – has proved an ideal camouflage
for the most wealthy and influential Religious Right grouping in America
198 1948 onwards
today. ‘The Conservative Club of the Most Powerful’ was how the New
York Times described the CNP shortly before the 2004 election, going on
to reveal that after long days spent strategising about ‘how to turn the
country to the right’ members held 10 p.m. prayer meetings at their luxury
New York hotel.73
Thanks to assiduous ferreting by interested media, the names on some
of its secret membership lists are known. That partial record reveals that
all the most prominent Christian Zionists today, except for Dr John Hagee
and Hal Lindsey, have been or still are associated with the CNP. Falwell,
a veteran member, called the CNP ‘a group of four or five hundred of the
biggest guns in the country’.74 Pat Robertson, another stalwart member,
has declared, ‘If you want to be in the know about the real scoop, then
you don’t read about it in the newspaper; this is the organisation to be
part of.’ 75 Lt.-Col. Oliver North, sacked by Reagan for his role in the
Iran-Contra Affair,* claims that ‘the kind of people that are involved in
this organisation reflect the best of what America really is’.76 Richard
Viguerie, the direct-mail wizard of Moral Majority Inc. has piously said,
‘I’ve often thought that when we launched the group with prayer and some
very good men, it really seemed like the Lord was with us that day in
Dallas’.77 LaHaye, the club’s first president, has rejoiced in his creation:
‘It isn’t often in life that reality is better than the dream. That’s the way
it is with the CNP.’ 78
A real-life Trib Force whose purpose is to do battle with the Antichrist
of secular humanism, the CNP is as conservative, Christian – and secretive
– as its Left Behind fictional counterpart. Its singularly uninformative
website does, however, reveal that one needs more than born-again
Christian and Republican credentials to gain admittance: first, one has to
be recommended by a current member, and secondly, membership costs
between $1,750 and $10,000 a year.
Given that all participants are bound by the ‘strictest secrecy’,
information about the CNP and its thrice-yearly meetings is hard to come
by but it was no surprise to find Chuck Missler listed as a member in 1998,
and described as having ‘participated in the development of some of the
most exotic, top-secret weapons systems, including Stealth bomber and
anti-submarine warfare.’ 79 Chuck might have heard an old war-horse of
the Moral Majority, Howard Philips, speak; Philips looked forward to the
day when America would be plunged into such a crisis that the Christian
* North secretly sold arms to Iran and funnelled the proceeds, via Israel, to the
right-wing Contras in Nicaragua. Despite his public disgrace, he has remained a
hero of the Christian Right.
‘A Disciplined, Charging Army’ 199
Right would be invited to take over. ‘My friends, it is time to leave the
“political Titanic” on which the conservative movement has for too long
booked passage,’ Philips told a meeting that year; ‘it is our task to build
an ark so that we can and will be ready to renew and restore our nation
and our culture when God brings the tide to flood’.80 George W. Bush
sought and received the CNP’s support for his candidacy at a meeting in
San Antonio in 1999.
The Middle East has certainly featured as a discussion topic. While
recommending no action against Iran or North Korea, a 2002 meeting
endorsed an invasion of Iraq: ‘America in its strikes against Iraq, will not
be the aggressor but the leader and the united force of all the opposition
groups inside Iraq – the Kurds, the Shia minority etc.’ 81 was the confident
forecast. Vice-President Dick Cheney spoke at a meeting in 2003. So
did Secretary of State for Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who received the
CNP’s coveted Thomas Jefferson Award and called the club ‘the heart of
a great consciousness movement that helped to make America strong in
the 20th century and is now helping to ensure that she remains free and
strong in the 21st century’.82 The famous right-wing talk show host, Rush
Limbaugh, and Falwell were guest speakers in 2005. Falwell explained to
club members, ‘We now, because of “motor voter registration”,* are able
to legally resister our congregations very methodically each year, right
in the pews, and to urge them out to the polls to vote “Christian”, not
Republican or Democrat.’ 83 Voting ‘Christian’, of course, entails voting
Christian Zionist.
Sarah Posner, a journalist who has researched the CNP, objects to
the organisation on the same grounds as many criticise some gigantic
Christian ministries: tax evasion. Because the CNP describes itself as
‘an educational foundation’,84 it has charity status, known in America
as 501(c)(3). Although the group was investigated, found wanting and
stripped of its preferential tax bracket, it has been reinstated as a charity
on condition that it publish some account of its proceedings. Posner points
out that the resulting quarterly journal goes out of its way not to advertise
itself; no mention of the CNP appears in its surely deliberately opaque
title, Policy Counsel.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the workings of the CNP mirror
the conspiratorial mind-set of its founder Tim LaHaye and some of its
Christian Zionist members. Surprise turns to disbelief at the news that
* The popular name for the Voter Registration Act (2000), designed to reduce the
red tape involved in registering to vote.
200 1948 onwards
there’s a still more elite group within the CNP – the Arlington Group.
Falwell, direct-mail supremo Richard Viguerie, Reverend James Dobson of
Focus on the Family, Pastor Ted Haggard of the National Association of
Evangelicals (NAE), and two more of the most vocal Christian Zionists
today – Dr Richard Land of the mighty Southern Baptist Conference (SBC)
and Gary Bauer of American Values (AV), about both of whom more in
Chapter 10 – are all members of this inner Trib Force.
‘We talk to each other daily and meet in Washington probably twice a
month,’ Falwell bragged to Vanity Fair. ‘We often call the White House
and talk to Karl Rove while we’re meeting. Everyone takes our calls.’ 85
chapter 9
Spread far and wide on the south side of the russet Rocky Mountains,
Colorado Springs started life in 1871 as a health resort so popular
with English tourists it was nicknamed ‘Little London’. Today it’s ‘The
Evangelical Vatican’ or the home of the US Air Force Academy, or simply,
America’s ‘best big city’.
All three factors – religious, military and quality of life – combined to
attract veteran Christian Zionist Ted Beckett here. A fourth, the city’s extraor-
dinary rate of growth, was another consideration. Ted is in real estate.
Perched up high beside him in the front of his SUV, I am being given
a guided tour of his business empire. We’ve enjoyed spotting his cream
signboards dotted around the fringes of town. We’ve visited his motel,
his mobile-home park and the downtown office where, with the help of
six staff, he fixes up what he calls his ‘anointed business deals’; half a
million dollars a year of his profits go to charity, much of it to Israel.
I’ve exclaimed in awe at it all, and he’s humbly replied ‘Way I look at
it – I’m just a steward of God’s property.’ Ted’s prominently displayed
mission statement reads: ‘beckett develops land to provide resources
to extend god’s kingdom while modelling biblical principles.’
We continue our tour of town. Ted points out for me that Colorado
Springs is ringed with five defence establishments. He explains that in the
event of the Cold War turning hot, the defence of the entire western world
would have been masterminded from a bunker deep inside the Rockies
here. ‘It’s sort of like God had his hand on this area,’ he says, before
informing me that Colorado Springs also boasts the highest concentration
of fundamentalist Christian groups America has ever known.
‘What is this connection between Christian conservatives and the
military, Ted?’
I am recalling my solidarity visit to the Israeli army base on the Golan
Heights with Chuck Missler, but also Jerry Falwell’s awestruck joy at Israel’s
202 1948 onwards
lightning strike against its neighbours in the Six Day War of 1967, and
Hal Lindsey’s 1981 call to America to rearm herself and become mighty
again. I’m remembering how Christian Zionists hurled themselves into
Reagan’s crusade against Communism in Central America in the 1980s,
as actively as they’re promoting George W. Bush’s war against Islamic
fundamentalism today. Back then, Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum had
distributed ‘Freedom Fighter Friendship Kits’ to the right-wing Contras in
Nicaragua. Pat Robertson had raised money for the evangelical Christian
pastor who presided over Guatemala’s genocide of 100,000 Mayan Indians
in 1982.1 I’m also recalling that 87 per cent of white American evangelicals
backed the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003.2
Andrew J. Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism (2005),
notes the Religious Right’s remarkable success at conferring ‘moral
palatability’ 3 on every one of America’s recent military adventures and
firmly attributes this to its ‘fetish’ for Israel, a country that for reasons of
‘geography, demographics and history’ – none of which the United States
shares – has usually placed ‘its trust in guns rather than expressions of
goodwill’.4 That may be too simplistic. A society that holds as fast as a
country like Yemen – where guns worn slung over the men’s shoulders are
as common a sight as women’s handbags – to its people’s traditional right
to own weapons is surely honouring its pioneer origins. But what has this
gun-toting to do with the Christian Gospel of peace and humility? The
only explanation I can find is that the appeal of the mighty, just God of
the Jewish Old Testament has always been far stronger than that of the
New Testament’s humble saviour, for American Protestants. I’m interested
to know how Ted accounts for his Christian love of war.
‘From God’s perspective,’ he answered me, like a character out of one of
the Left Behind books or an updated Old Testament, ‘he’d like his people
to have their finger on the trigger.’
We will never see eye to eye, but I feel more comfortable with Ted than I
have with any other Christian Zionist, confident that our encounter won’t
degenerate into a Bible-believer versus secular humanist bust-up of the
kind I suffered with Chuck Missler. Although as big a man as Missler and
Falwell, with the same self-belief, the same air of military command, Ted
has something else too: some Irish ancestry. Last night – over a bottle of
whisky, which the Lord had providentially instructed him to buy without
telling him why it might come in handy – we had a frank exchange of
views about his vocation as a ‘prophet’ and a ‘watchman for the house
of Israel’.5 He didn’t slam down his bible and show me the door when I
questioned the wisdom of ‘meddling’ in Middle Eastern affairs. Far from
it. He seemed to relish the altercation.
Watchmen for Israel 203
I have high hopes that Ted will furnish me with an insight into the
spiritual make-up of an actively committed American Christian Zionist.
I like him so much I can enjoy even his powerful urge to witness to his
faith, which is working to my advantage. He has confided, ‘As soon as you
called, the Lord told me to take care of you. He’s prodding his prophet!’
He’s tried to appeal to me on my own level by pointing out that ‘people
as pragmatic, as sharp and savvy’ as he is wouldn’t fall for any fairy tale
– ‘we go for Christianity because it works!’ A few minutes ago he ordered
me to reach on to the back seat of the SUV for a paperback, open it at
random, and read the first thing I saw. I read a modern meditation in
pseudo-biblical language entitled ‘I Want to do a Beautiful Work’. ‘You
see?’ he said. ‘God’s told me to help you write this book – so it’ll be a
“beautiful work”.’
Witnessing to his faith is as second nature to Ted as striking business
deals.
During a pit-stop at a steak-house, he tries his large Christian charms
on our young waitress. Swiftly reading her name-tag as she sets down our
outsize helpings of steak, he begins, ‘Nicky, my British friend here and I
are just about to say grace. Now, I’m getting a sense that there’s someone
you’d like us to pray for, someone in your family who’s in trouble?’ Nicky
is visibly touched by the overture. ‘You are so sweet! How did you know?’
she exclaims. ‘My brother Michael’s an alcoholic.’ Ted clasps his hands
and closes his eyes. ‘Satan, get your hands off Michael!’ he commands.
When he’s done praying and has interrogated Nicky on her churchgoing
habits, he produces a business card: ‘Nicky, when Michael gets saved, healed
and delivered, send me an email, will you?’ he says. Nicky disappears. I
compliment him on his sales pitch and he admits with a grin, ‘OK, there’s
a little bit of a salesmanship aspect to this. What you have to understand
is that girl’s going back there to the kitchen to show the others my card.
That’s how God works!’
‘I see, you’re killing two birds with one stone! Jews would call it
chutzpah ...’
‘You know, I get along with those rabbis in Israel – they think I’m
Jewish – they say I’ve got more chutzpah than they have!’
Here is my cue, but Ted doesn’t want to launch straight into the tale of
his conversion to Christian Zionism, and I’m happy for him to start at the
beginning of his life-story. As an extraordinary tale of sin and redemption
unfolds, I’m cast straight back into the fast-moving, swiftly changing, rough
and tumble world of Pastor George Adams and his Regenerators in the
mid-1800s, a world in which the scramble for money and the urge towards
God were one and the same, in which divine and economic miracles went
204 1948 onwards
hand in hand. It seems to me that nothing but technology and the existence
of Israel has changed.
Grandson of the fabulously wealthy inventor of the oil filter for Henry
Ford’s automobiles, Ted recalls a childhood spent in 1940s California, in
a vast house with thirteen bathrooms and a rifle range in the attic. But he
also remembers being a juvenile delinquent, expelled from two Catholic
boarding-schools. ‘I guess God was just delivering me from Catholicism!’
he says comfortably. Worried by her black sheep of an eldest son, his
mother offered him $1,000 to join the Marines. He spent nine months in
Korea where he was almost cashiered for misconduct, before returning to
the US. Studying at the army’s expense in Nevada in 1957, Ted took up
gambling and impregnated his girlfriend. By the time he’d married her
and a second baby was on the way, they were living in Las Vegas and he’d
gone ‘berserk’ – gambling away a loan from his mother, failing to pay his
wife’s hospital bill, losing his family, and trying but failing to rob an old
woman in a casino.
Ted recalls: ‘Finally, I got to asking myself “How low have I fallen?
What’ll I do?” and it’s like a little voice spoke to me saying “Why don’t
you pray?”’ Ted had made a deal with God: if God would help him get
his family back, he would believe in him. Homeless, sleeping in his car
on the freeway one night, he’d been sprayed by a passing water truck: ‘It
was like I’d gotten baptised – I felt clean,’ he says. Taking himself off to
the nearest gas station, he’d got a job. ‘I took one step towards God, and
BOOM!’
With God in his heart and some money in his pocket, he was able
to retrieve his family and move to ‘the buckle on the Bible Belt’, San
Antonio, Texas, where he became such ‘a big shot’ he forgot about God.
When a Baptist preacher tried to draw him back into the fold, he fled
to buy cigarettes, but no sooner had he jumped in his car than a voice
said, ‘You’re a hypocrite.’ For a moment he wondered if the preacher had
planted a tape-recorder on the back seat. ‘So you’re not going to give it a
try?’ the voice badgered him. ‘I didn’t know what “it” was but I told God
I’d give it two weeks,’ says Ted, reminding me that ‘in the US if a thing is
valid you get a two-week money back guarantee’.
Turning over a new leaf the next morning, he offered to baby-sit his
children, and settled down to read the newspaper. But there’d been a
message scrolling across the top of the page: ‘If you’re a Christian you
have to read the Bible,’ it said. ‘It was weird, and it wasn’t weird, all
at the same time’, he explains. ‘But I don’t have a bible,’ he protested.
‘Ask your wife,’ said another scrolling message. He began to read the Old
Testament’s Genesis, but it bored him. A fresh message appeared at the
Watchmen for Israel 205
top of the page. ‘Try the New Testament,’ it said. Ted obeyed. ‘Now, the
New Testament has some kind of story line, so I’m doing OK and, as I’m
reading the Sermon on the Mount, the lights go on. I know what this guy
Jesus is doing! He’s recruiting! Just like in the Marines, someone takes full
responsibility and in return they get total submission. Good’s got nothing
to do with it; if you’re not on the team, who cares whether you’re good
or not? Like in the Marines, the only way to survive is if you know the
ground rules; there’s a Devil out there and God blesses those who show
great faith in him.’
My lights are going on. In affording me this glimpse of the roots of
his faith, Ted was revealing that his brand of Christianity was all about
power. Small wonder that appeals to compassion for the sufferings of
Palestinians fall on stony ground. Here at last is a rational accounting for
the swaggering facetiousness of Christian Zionist luminaries like Missler,
Falwell, Robertson and Lindsey. Armed with their selected Bible chapters
and verses, these Christians are engaged in a war against Evil, working to
another code of conduct entirely. When the stakes are this high, when it
has to do with Israel and God’s plan for the end of the world, man-made
laws about the ethics of just wars and the proportionate use of force, the
Sermon on the Mount’s ‘blessed are the peacemakers’, are utterly null and
void. That, and diplomacy, nuance, empirical evidence, human rights and
the art of compromise count for nothing.
Neglecting my giant steak, I’m noting every word Ted says: ‘... you see,
once you get my kind of faith, you get authority, you get to be boss, you
get to control events. It’s in Luke 10: 19 – behold I, Jesus, give unto you,
Ted, authority to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power
of the Devil [sic], and nothing shall by any means hurt you. So, I’ve got
the best weapons and body armour anyone could possibly have. I can do
stuff no one else can do because I know the authority of the believer.’
While we’re on the subject of power, I ask Ted about President Bush’s
favourite means of communicating with the Religious Right, his frequent
recourse to their lexicon: ‘For example, Ted, most British politicians don’t
tend to use the word evil ...’
‘Of course they don’t, because they’re chicken! But from a biblical
perspective Bush is right! We’re in a giant chess game between God and
the Devil. For liberals and left-wingers there are no absolutes like that. But
that’s wrong! Only the Bible will tell you what those absolutes are. You
see, I have the proof, the other side only has opinion!’
Reminded of Chuck, I’m hoping that in the absence of a handy bible, Ted
won’t be tempted to hurl his coleslaw at me. I try a different tack, appealing
to the ‘savvy’ businessman in him. ‘But Ted, $3.5 billion of American
206 1948 onwards
taxpayers’ money to Israel a year, a third of the foreign aid budget, and
what exactly do you get in return? There are people who say America’s
alliance with Israel makes little sense now the Cold War is over.’
‘Right!’
‘So?’
‘America has a tendency to do things that are right. It’s the only nation
in the world to do that these days. The Devil’s plan is to destroy Israel.
You see, Britain quit doing God’s will out in Palestine before World War
Two, and what happened? She lost her empire. Now it’s the United States
that has the power to do God’s will around the earth.’
Our dessert has arrived, and it’s time to resume the life-story because
we’ve only reached as far as the early 1960s. A judge at his local Baptist
church in San Antonio introduced Ted to bible prophecy on Wednesday
nights, and he went up a rank in the Lord’s army by acquiring what
Pentecostals call ‘the baptism of the Holy Spirit’. God started showing
him things ‘about the key to prosperity’, but no one in his church liked
his divinely inspired suggestion that instead of strictly donating a tenth
of their income to the church, they should obey St Paul’s second letter to
the Corinthians – ‘as a man purposes in his heart so let him give’. Ted
had accepted his fellow church members’ rebuke; ‘OK, I’ve got a false
doctrine,’ he admitted.
I interrupt with another question: ‘What do you mean when you say
the Lord’s speaking to you, Ted? How do you know it’s God? It could be
Satan, couldn’t it?’
‘OK,’ he says, pausing for thought, ‘let me liken natural man to a radio
tuned to AM; that’s man with his natural sense. When he’s tuned to FM,
that’s man with all his mental capacities. The born-again experience
connects you into short-wave, where you can hear, though it’s kind of
scratchy. But the baptism of the Holy Spirit gives you XM – the latest! It
comes straight off the God satellite, static free! What you seculars don’t
understand is that we’re getting information you don’t get. It’s coming
from a different dimension.’
Obviously, there’s the occasional glitch and an earned rebuke from fellow
Christians: ‘You have to learn through trial and error,’ he admits. Back
then he was so ‘addicted to miracles’, he got himself expelled from his
church, left town and moved to Dallas. ‘It’s the mid-60s now, I’m in Dallas
and I’m somebody,’ he recalls, ‘I’m hobnobbing with all these hotshots.
God’s prospering the socks off me and he’s putting it into my heart that
I have to go out into the world with the Gospel.’
Ted had had a real-estate business and most of his seven children to
take care of by then, but off he went to Mexico and Haiti to spread the
Watchmen for Israel 207
Back in the SUV I learn that Ted knows everyone who’s anyone in Colorado
Springs. Though he’s arrived too recently to have heard any gossip about
how a forty-year-old George W. Bush triumphed over the demon drink after
a night at the city’s luxury Broadmoor Hotel in 1986, Ted has breakfasted
with Jerry B. Jenkins, the multimillionaire co-author of the Left Behind
series. He’s telling me that I have to visit the gigantic new premises of
Reverend James Dobson’s Focus on the Family organisation, a major
campaign headquarters for battling Christian Right demons – homosexual
partnerships, abortion, evolution and liberal Supreme Court judges. He
says I also have to see the New Life mega church on the edge of town,
where his friend, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals,
Pastor Ted Haggard, presides over a flock of 14,000. ‘I’ve known Haggard
for years. I gave one of his sons his first gun,’ he remarks.
Haggard was the star interviewee in a 70-minute documentary film Ted
spent $300,000 producing in the run-up to the 2004 elections. Reproduced
in 300,000 copies for distribution in churches and Christian bookstores,
George W. Bush: Faith in the White House was directed by David Balsiger,
author of Secrets of the Bible Code Revealed and member of the secretive
Council for National Policy. Ted did not answer an email enquiring if he
was a member of the CNP. A hagiographic portrait of the president, the
film shows Pastor Haggard fulsomely endorsing Bush as a man of God,
208 1948 onwards
and following up with a bullish prophecy that ‘in another 100 years, in
the Islamic world, [Bush] will be viewed as a great liberator’. The New
York Times panned the film: ‘In this pious but not humble worldview,
faith or at least a certain brand of it, counts more than competence, and
a biblical mission, or at least a simplistic blunderbuss facsimile of one,
counts more than the secular goal of waging an effective focused battle
against an enemy as elusive and cunning as terrorists.’ 6
‘Haggard’s gotten much more pro-Israel recently,’ Ted tells me.
True, but Haggard remains as moderate a Christian Zionist as they
come. Most Christian Zionists loudly objected to Sharon’s cession of
Gaza to the Palestinians in the summer of 2005; some even joined the
Gaza settlers’ protest and they heartily applauded Israel’s revenge attack
on southern Lebanon the following summer.
Haggard’s position is more nuanced. Although he invited an Israeli
extremist who had made dangerously active efforts to rebuild the Temple
to speak at his church, he’s also said he’d be surprised if the Temple
were erected any time in the next two hundred years. While allowing
one of his ‘small groups’ * to fund-raise for an illegal West Bank Jewish
settlement, Haggard indicated his willingness to see a Palestinian state in
that same West Bank. On a trip to Israel in the spring of 2005, Haggard
met both Benjamin Netanyahu and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and
promised to ‘support the state of Israel come hell or high water’,7 but
he was cautious about openly championing Israel’s campaign in southern
Lebanon. Admitting that he was being bombarded with phone calls from
Israeli officials begging him to speak out in support of Israel, Haggard
excused his reticence on that occasion as ‘not a rejection of Israel, or even
a hesitation about Israel’.8 He was concerned to protect the soul harvest
of a small army of American evangelical missionaries to the Arab Middle
East since the turn of the new millennium – embattled communities of
born-again Christian Arabs. Non-born-again Christian Arabs, adherents
of the old denominations who are finding their faith is being brought into
disrepute by the activities of Christian Zionists, were no concern of his.
Haggard’s friend and neighbour in Colorado Springs, Reverend Dobson at
Focus on the Family, was more forthcoming in the summer of 2006. Likening
Israel to ‘little David’ and Hezbollah to a ‘mighty Goliath’, Dobson loyally
declared that Israel was being ‘threatened with annihilation’.9 But even he
didn’t follow Pat Robertson out to Jerusalem to hold hands with Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert and pray for Israel’s victory, or let rip with a battle-
cry like Robertson’s ‘This is a supernatural struggle. It is either Jehovah, the
God of the Bible or it’s the moon god of Mecca that they call Allah.’ 10
Haggard and Dobson belong to a younger, more sophisticated generation
of Christian Zionists than Robertson and Falwell and Beckett. Until
November 2006, when Haggard’s reputation and career were spectacularly
ruined by revelations concerning his use of drugs and the services of a male
prostitute, both were members of the inner Arlington Group, with carte
blanche to telephone President Bush or his top advisers once a week. As
head of the NAE, Haggard represented 45,000 American churches. Dobson
is still riding high as probably the most significant Religious Right leader
today; his daily radio programme reaches 200 million listeners on 6,000
radio stations, in 164 countries.
The circle of Ted’s acquaintance extends as far as Chuck Missler, who
lives in Idaho. Ted knew Chuck well back in California in the ’60s and
recalled how the local chapter of Fire-fighters for Christ had paid Chuck
to record all his bible prophecy on tapes, which they’d then distributed free
of charge. ‘I still have the whole set,’ says Ted, ‘but I’m thinking of giving
it to the boy who does our gardening – he thinks Chuck’s God.’
On a Sunday morning Ted and I set off to Faith Bible Church in Denver
to see his friends, Pastor George Morrison (an ex-marine and reformed
drug-dealer, who came to Christian Zionism via Hal Lindsey’s Late Great
Planet Earth), and his wife, Cheryl. ‘Theirs is the mega church to go to
in Denver if you love Israel and you want to express that in any way,’
Ted explains. The Morrisons had helpfully set CFOIC’s ball rolling by
adopting the settlement of Ariel in 1995.
Visitors to Faith Bible Church are greeted by a wall of Jerusalem
212 1948 onwards
limestone inscribed with ‘Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem’ and a stand
promoting Israeli beauty products. Ted is a ‘big shot’ here; the Morrisons
have recently recognised his services to Zionism by presenting him with a
bust of Theodor Herzl.
During a chat with Cheryl that is frequently interrupted by her mobile’s
cheerful Israeli ring-tone, I learn that the church hosts a lavish Israel
Awareness Day every other year. The charred carcass of Jerusalem’s Bus #19,
the same that graced the NRB conference, was the centrepiece in 2005.
Other attractions included an installation of a plane fuselage to symbolise
the airlift of Soviet Jews to Israel since 1990, a maze to navigate while
being instructed about the Holocaust through headphones, and a display
of Israeli dancing by a hundred junior church members. Alongside annual
solidarity trips to Ariel and school exchanges, the Faith Bible Church is
currently ‘blessing’ Israel by funding Ariel’s new child development centre
and a scholarship for anyone who has completed their military service, as
well as ‘a certain kind of video camera’ the settlers had requested.
Cheryl, who has visited Israel more than forty times since God ‘did
something dramatic’ by making Israel her ‘driving passion’, is deeply
distressed by the dismantling of the Gaza Strip settlements in 2005. It
was ‘biblically wrong’, she says flatly; ‘somehow or other, in God’s time-
keeping, that’s not the end of it’.
an ‘answer to the cowardice of all those nations who didn’t dare stand up
for Israel’. Prime Minister Begin was ‘thrilled’, and soon the ICEJ was not
only championing Israel but also promoting Israel’s superpower ally’s anti-
Communist activities in Central America. In 1987, ‘God and Politics’, an
American TV documentary about Honduras, showed footage of boxes of
supplies labelled ICEJ being shipped across the border to the right-wing
Contras in Nicaragua.
Van der Hoeven’s bold initiative had won him instant access to the
highest Israeli places.
‘I’ve known the last five prime ministers but I’m closest to Bibi Netanyahu
– he comes to eat Shabbat at our house,’ he tells me.
The ICEJ and van der Hoeven have recently parted company, but
he’s set up another organisation and defiantly planted its brand new
headquarters in the West Bank, at Bethel, where God promised Abraham
and Jacob that he ‘would give them and their descendants this land as
an everlasting possession’.13 The tone and content of van der Hoeven’s
newsletters more than explain the rupture. He is far too embarrassing a
Christian Zionist to be useful to the ICEJ, an organisation which advertises
itself as engaged in nothing more meddlesome than ‘comforting’ Israel
and ‘speaking tenderly to Jerusalem’,14 as the prophet Isaiah commanded.
A few days into Israel’s assault on southern Lebanon in July 2006, while
a bewildered Ted Beckett was merely shaking his head in wonder at
the ‘restraint’ Israel was showing, van der Hoeven was informing his
supporters, ‘I wish and pray Israel would use this unbelievable political
window of [American and British] support to finish the story by taking
care of the nuclear reactors in Iran and, if need be, of any potential
threat Syria may cause.’ 15
Teeming with friendly young Christian Zionists of many nationalities,
the ICEJ is more businesslike than van der Hoeven’s outfit. Its current
executive director is Reverend Malcolm Hedding, a white South African.
Extraordinarily like Ted Beckett to look at – burly, with a neat moustache
and a military air – Hedding walks me through a lobby hung with photo-
portraits of Israeli prime ministers, into a private meeting room. Shifting
his bulk uneasily in his armchair, he treats my first few questions with
testy impatience, until finally he asks me bluntly if I’m a Christian. ‘I’m
just trying to find out who I’m talking to,’ he says.
His question unnerves me. I know just what kind of ‘Christian’ he
means; my long-lapsed cradle Catholicism is neither here nor there. The
last time I was required to declare my allegiance like this was in the early
1990s while interviewing Bosnian Serb nationalists during the Yugoslav
wars. Then I had been at liberty to explain that my job as a reporter
216 1948 onwards
was not to take sides in a conflict between Christian Serbs and Muslim
Bosnians. This is different. Directly questioned, I won’t lie or prevaricate
about where I stand on Christian Zionism.
The American author and journalist Michelle Goldberg has defined
the geo-political situation as I’m seeing it now. The struggle the world is
currently engaged in, she argues, is not between East and West, or Islam and
Christianity, but ‘between modernity, humanism, reason and progress on
one hand, and fundamentalism, tribalism, Puritanism, and obscurantism
on the other’.16 Christian and Jewish fundamentalists and nationalists are
squaring up to Muslim fundamentalists, with heaven and hell on their
minds and Israel–Palestine in their sights.
‘I think you would call me a “secular humanist liberal relativist”’ is how
I answer Malcolm Hedding.
He relaxes; smiles, even. Now that he has me pigeonholed, he paints
himself as a Christian Zionist so political as opposed to millenarian that
he condemns ‘theological gun-slingers’ like Chuck Missler and denies that
Israel will have to suffer a Tribulation under the Antichrist. Sparing me
any Bible proofs whatsoever, he concentrates instead on facts I can note
down: ‘Since 1990 we’ve chartered fifty-one Boeing jets to bring Jews of
the former Soviet Union home to Israel,’ he says. ‘Our main engine in
Europe is Scandinavia, especially Norway’, and, ‘In 2000 we got 14 million
signatories to our petition endorsing Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided
capital ... Our annual Jewish Feast of Tabernacles festival is the biggest
event in Israel’s tourism calendar – we’re expecting 8,000 this year.’ * The
ICEJ’s budget is ‘in the millions’, according to Hedding. The organisation
has its own news service and a daily radio programme received all over
the United States and it has recently teamed up with the Jerusalem Post
to produce a monthly magazine called The Jerusalem Post – Christian
Edition. In an effort to tackle Europe, the ‘architect of secular humanism’
and a hotbed of support for the Palestinians, it has co-founded a Christian
Zionist lobbying group in Brussels.
Christian Zionists increasingly view Europe as enemy territory, fatally
infiltrated by Muslim immigration, and as blind as it was in the 1930s to
the peril of anti-Semitism. In early 2007 one Christian Zionist right-wing
Israeli group – Jerusalem Summit – held a public meeting at the Methodist
Central Hall in London’s Westminster at which speaker after speaker urged
the British to waste no time in spearheading a religious ‘reconquista’ of
the continent.
In that same year, 2004, the same Dr Shtern, a leading member of Yisrael
Beitenu, the radical right-wing party that favours maintaining Israel as an
ethnically pure Jewish state, established a brand new inter-party group in
the Knesset – the Christian Allies Caucus (CAC).
220 1948 onwards
interest in the Christian End Times story: ‘We disagree with that theology
completely,’ he says, ‘but the most important thing is that we agree on the
first part of the story.’ He means the crucial, all-trumping, divine gift of
all the land to Israel.
Reinstein has the right background for the work he’s engaged in.
His father was president of the Dallas branch of the hard-line Zionist
Organisation of America (ZOA). In 1981, at the age of three, he attended
Pastor John Hagee’s first ‘Night to Honour Israel’ in San Antonio. After
emigrating to Israel in 1999 he volunteered to join the Israeli army; ‘I
wanted to be a fighter,’ he tells me. He first met Yuri Shtern while working
as English-language spokesman for his party.
Reinstein is a very political animal. He enjoys explaining how, with most
American Jews voting Democrat and providing the bulk of the party’s
funding, and with tens of millions of pro-Israel American Christians voting
Republican, Israel has American politics sewn up at last. Israel can count
on stalwart US support whichever party is in power. Of President Bush,
Reinstein declares confidently, ‘We have no greater friend in the White
House.’ But, I point out, Bush has explicitly declared his support for the
establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, hasn’t he? 30
‘Right, but people don’t read between the lines,’ Reinstein replies,
referring to the same April 2004 letter to Sharon in which Bush accepted
some Israeli West Bank settlements as ‘realities on the ground’: ‘Bush
said Israel has the right to defend herself until about ten other conditions
that the Palestinians will never fulfil have been accomplished. It adds up
to unconditional support for us.’ Reinstein hugely appreciated America’s
removal of Saddam Hussein: ‘I don’t think people realise how much of a
threat Iraq was to Israel. Now we’re just hoping that America’s up to the
challenge of Iran too,’ he said.
Josh Reinstein and Christian Zionist Pastor John Hagee are well
acquainted today. At a CAC meeting in 2005, Hagee, Dr Shtern, Reinstein
and Rabbi Benny Elon – Reinstein’s spiritual mentor, a former tourism
minister and an ardent advocate of ‘transferring’ Palestinians to Jordan
– hatched a plan to set up yet another organisation, in America.
Geared towards co-ordinating the efforts of America’s myriad Christian
Zionist groups and persuading the US administration to, in Hagee’s words,
‘stop pressuring Israel to give up land for peace’, Christians United for
Israel (CUFI) would function as a Christian Zionist lobbying group on
Capitol Hill. Four hundred evangelical pastors signed up. Jerry Falwell,
Ted Beckett’s friend George Morrison of Faith Bible Church in Denver,
Gary Bauer (a member of the elite Arlington Group and head of American
Values) and Christian Right broadcaster Janet Parshall, all agreed to sit on
222 1948 onwards
its board.* Hagee appointed an American Jew, David Brog, an old hand on
Capitol Hill and a powerful organiser, as CUFI’s executive director.
President Bush personally endorsed CUFI’s grand launch in mid-July
2006, with a message of praise for its work of ‘spreading the hope of
God’s love and the universal gift of freedom’.31 A mighty gathering of
3,400 Christian Zionists from all over America in Washington, that launch
coincided with Israel’s campaign to root Iran-backed Hezbollah out of
southern Lebanon, so Hagee seized the occasion to declare Iran’s President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a ‘new Hitler’ who ‘threatens to annihilate Israel
with a nuclear holocaust’.32
With American support for Israel running at 80 per cent and President
Bush pointedly refusing to call for an immediate ceasefire, Dr Hagee and
his ‘biblical imperative’ to support Israel 33 and CUFI’s gala banquet, rally,
and day spent lobbying on Capitol Hill were all making headline news.
Hagee was profiled by the Wall Street Journal and interviewed on CNN.
His new book, Jerusalem Countdown, with its mushroom cloud cover, was
flying off bookstore shelves. His right-hand man, David Brog, gleefully
pointed out that it had taken AIPAC over fifteen years to gather 2,000 for
their annual meeting: ‘the fact that we got over 3,000 to our conference
and were turning people away – it sent a message’.34
Liberals took fright when the Nation revealed that CUFI’s leaders
had had a series of off-the-record meetings with White House officials,
including the prominent neo-con Deputy National Security Advisor for
Global Democracy Strategy, Elliott Abrams, in the past few months. Israel’s
Christian friends had reportedly urged the administration to withhold aid
from the Palestinians, give Israel a free hand in dealing with Hezbollah
and take on Iran.35
Between them, Yuri Shtern’s CAC and Pastor Hagee’s CUFI have made
a good deal of headway in the past two years. Two useful new lobbying
structures are now in place, one in the Knesset and one on Capitol Hill.
Gone are the days when Israel was forced to rely for its Christian support
on the personal intervention of the embarrassingly maverick likes of
Falwell and Robertson.
In early September 2006 the Knesset’s CAC was holding its four-day annual
get-together at a hotel in Orlando, Florida. CAC stalwarts – Reinstein,
* Pat Robertson was excluded; Hagee condemned his remarks about Sharon’s
stroke being a divine punishment for disengaging from Gaza as ‘insensitive and
unnecessary’.
Watchmen for Israel 223
Yuri Shtern and Rabbi Elon – were there. Pastor Hagee and the ICEJ’s
Malcolm Hedding were guest speakers and so was Sondra Oster Baras,
the American Israeli settler running the Israel end of Ted Beckett’s CFOIC
operation.
I first met Sondra at Ted’s suggestion, in north London one wet
November evening in 2005. She was on a speaking tour of Britain, so I
attended her engagement at the Gospel Centre Church in Wood Green
where some twenty-five people, the smallest audience she’d ever addressed,
had gathered to hear her. Undismayed by the size of the turnout, Sondra
– an excellent speaker and an intelligent and dignified person – gave of her
best, tailoring her complicated political points to the level of the audience:
‘You read the Bible? You think it’s God’s Word? OK, so we’re on the same
page,’ she began. ‘Abraham was a Zionist’, she continued, before sketching
in the biblical terms of Israel’s right to the land. Most of her talk was
devoted to what she saw as the tragedy of Ariel Sharon’s decision to uproot
the Gaza settlements. ‘If you’re saying the Jews don’t belong in Gaza,
you’re saying that the Bible’s wrong,’ she stated flatly. She reported that
there were 250,000 settlers fighting the cause. ‘If we were a million we’d
be in better shape,’ she admitted, before expressing a wish that ‘ordinary
English citizens’ would stand up and declare ‘this land belongs to the
Jewish people and to nobody else’.
Sondra and I met again in a café in West Jerusalem in the spring of 2006,
and talked for two hours before reaching a total though cordial impasse.
Instead of bible arguments about God’s covenants with Abraham, she’d
wisely resorted to political ones. She blamed my wrong-headed distrust
of Christian Zionism and the settler cause on my ‘moral relativism’, my
‘secular humanist dogma’ and my ‘political correctness’. My objection,
that she was denying me my own equally valid moral compass, cut no
ice. Sondra’s message was clear: people like me had failed to recognise
the absolute evil of Hitler in time to prevent the Holocaust. If people
like me have our way today, President Ahmadinejad of Iran will, as he
has proposed, finish Hitler’s job for him by wiping Israel off the map. By
Sondra’s standards my rejection of both Christian Zionism and Zionism
in the popular sense of the word automatically made me an anti-Semite,
an accomplice of Ahmadinejad’s.
Was it simply too late for nuance, I wondered. Did I have to choose
to stand either with Bush’s America and Israel or against them? In effect,
did I have to be an ally for Armageddon? In a post-9/11 world in which
Islamic fundamentalists were blowing up trains and nightclubs from Bali
to Madrid, did I have to love the state of Israel, right or wrong, or face
living under a Taliban-like regime? Listening to Sondra had reminded me
224 1948 onwards
Nobody could fault Corrie ten Boom, but there are some in Israel today
who fault Glashouwer and his American counterparts. Whether Jews or
Gentiles, these critics believe that defending Jews is one thing but defending
the Jews’ right to inhabit a Greater Israel at the expense of the Palestinians
and war ever after is another thing entirely. These are people who insist one
can be critical of Israel without being an anti-Semite, people who maintain
that the tightening bond between Christian and Jewish Zionists represents
a serious danger to Israelis, let alone to Palestinians and, by extension, to
the rest of the world.
Aside from the Arab Israeli in the Israeli street – the taxi-driver who
angrily asked me why the ICEJ was supporting the Israelis rather than the
226 1948 onwards
Palestinian Christians of the Holy Land, for example – the most strident
anti-Christian Zionists in Israel today are the Palestinian leaders of the
older Protestant churches in Jerusalem: the city’s Anglican and Lutheran
bishops. The most vocal is the fiery Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Riah
Abu al-Assal. On the morning I visited him in his office next door to St
George’s Cathedral, he described Christian Zionism as ‘close to being a
heresy’. Warming to his theme, he continued, ‘In the first place, Christian
Zionists are not serving Israel at all but causing great harm to the Jews
and Judaism by supporting them to continue doing the injustices they’re
doing,’ he said. ‘Second, it’s a business! They’re making money out of
this. You need to ask them how many Christian Zionist preachers they’ve
offered free tickets to Israel to if they will bring groups here.’
Bishop Riah told me that the Dean of Washington’s Episcopalian
National Cathedral had recently been offered a free ticket to Israel with
five-star accommodation in return for accepting the gift of a stone from
the Western Wall inscribed with a text from Psalm 137 to mount in his
cathedral.* ‘Scared to death’, Bishop Riah had strongly advised the dean
to turn the invitation down and sent him instead a stone inscribed ‘Peace
from Jerusalem’, in Arabic and English. Between 2004 and 2006 the bishop
incurred the special wrath of both Israelis and Christian Zionists by
granting sanctuary to Mordechai Vanunu, the Moroccan Israeli who served
an eighteen-year jail sentence for blowing the whistle on his country’s
nuclear weapons programme in 1986.
A few months after our meeting, in the wake of the Israeli–Hezbollah
conflict in the summer of 2006, Bishop Riah and the Arab leaders of
the Roman Catholic, Syrian Orthodox, and Lutheran churches in the
city clubbed together to issue the first formal denunciation of Christian
Zionism. The rare involvement of the Vatican in the matter guaranteed the
initiative international newsworthiness. The open letter said:
* ‘By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered
Zion.’
Watchmen for Israel 227
and the United States that are presently imposing their unilateral pre-
emptive borders and domination over Palestine
We call upon all people to reject the narrow world-view of Christian
Zionism and other ideologies that privilege one people at the expense
of others.
With urgency we warn that Christian Zionism and its alliances are
justifying colonisation, apartheid and empire-building.38
Like Chuck Missler and Hal Lindsey, the ICEJ’s spokesman blamed the
old Christian churches for what Christian Zionists call their ‘replacement
theology’ for teaching that the Old Testament’s promises to the Jews were
cancelled out, replaced, by the Christian New Testament’s promises to the
whole world. He charged that, between them, the old churches had thereby
fostered the centuries of anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust.
And he went further still, accusing Bishop Riah of publicly stating ‘several
times that Palestinian martyrs, including Muslim suicide bombers, receive
eternal life’.40 The bishop emailed me a firm denial: ‘This was never a
statement of mine.’
This unholy powwow is a sign that the cold war between the two
Christian camps in the Holy Land – one pro-Israel, the other pro-
Palestinian – which has existed at least since Jan Willem van der Hoeven
set up his Christian embassy in 1980, is heating up.
There had been warning signs. Two years earlier, in 2004, a pro-
Palestinian Christian group held a Jerusalem conference combatively titled
‘Challenging Christian Zionism: Theology, Politics and the Palestine–
Israel Conflict’. Addressed by academic theologians and writers from
all over the world, including America, it produced a resolution very like
the Arab church leaders’ open letter. In an introduction to the book of
the conference the Anglican clergyman, Dr Naim Ateek, went a step or
228 1948 onwards
two further than Bishop Riah Abu al-Assal. Firmly branding Christian
Zionism ‘a heresy’, he denounced what he saw as the mutually exploitative
relationship between Jewish and Christian Zionists as ‘a tragic hypocrisy’
and Christian Zionism as ‘the worst anti-Semitism one can imagine’.41
One of the conference speakers, the American-Israeli journalist and
author Gershom Gorenberg, is equally repelled and alarmed by Christian
Zionist anti-Semitism. Author of The End of Days – a book about how the
violent End Times hopes of fundamentalists of all three monotheistic faiths
centre on Jerusalem and its Temple Mount – Gorenberg has investigated
the likes of Chuck Missler and Hal Lindsey and concluded that Christian
Zionists ‘don’t love real Jewish people. They love us as characters in their
story, in their play, and that’s not who we are, and we never auditioned for
that part, and the play is not one that ends up good for us’.42 Gorenberg
asks that the rest of the world treat Israel as a nation state like any other;
he points out that Dr Herzl’s Zionism had nothing to do with religion of
any kind.
In a telephone conversation two years after the conference, he highlighted
the political implications of Christian Zionists’ anti-Semitism rather than
the never-never of their End Times story. ‘They’re steering American policy
in a direction that is very, very dangerous for Israel,’ he argued, ‘pressing for
Israel to hold on to territory when even the Israeli political middle ground
has recognised the need for some sort of pull-back.’ He pointed out that 78
of the 120 seats in the Knesset had gone to members of parties that accepted
some form of withdrawal from the West Bank in the last election.
Like many Israelis, Gorenberg has made a simple calculation: given
the falling Israeli birth rate and rising Palestinian one, it will soon be
impossible to maintain Israel as a democratic and majority Jewish state,
the safe Jewish haven it was intended to be, unless some territory, with its
Palestinian population, is ceded to a Palestinian state. Even Ariel Sharon,
the father of the settlement programme, eventually recognised that simple
demographic imperative, by dismantling the Gaza settlements in 2005. In
insisting on Israel’s right to the land God promised Abraham, Gorenberg
argues, Christian Zionists and Jewish settlers are effectively hastening
Israel’s end. What could be more anti-Semitic than that?
Returning to the Christian Zionists threat, Gorenberg supplied me with
a startling analogy: ‘Imagine you have a group of French people in France
who consider themselves incredible Anglophiles but are supporting and
funding the National Front. Would the average Brit think they were pro-
British?’
‘No,’ I answered him, ‘and there’d be a tremendous outcry, but where’s
the Israeli outcry against these Christian Zionists?’
Watchmen for Israel 229
‘You know what? I don’t think many Israelis think about them because
they’re not that much exposed to them. They just see them going round
in their tour buses, looking funny. When they’re mentioned in our press
there’s usually an underlying snicker. The average Israeli doesn’t know
what they’re all about. It’s only American-Israelis who have any kind of a
handle on these people – we know them.’
From time to time that quiet ‘snickering’ changes to an audible groan
of embarrassment – when Pat Robertson and the Bible teacher Kay Arthur
declared that God had had Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assassinated
in 1995 for his part in the Oslo Peace Accords, for example. But the
unflinching support of these influential and wealthy people for Israel’s
most unpalatable policies makes them far too valuable allies to alienate
for long, a truth amply demonstrated in 2006 when Robertson declared
Ariel Sharon’s stroke and resulting coma a divine punishment for his sin
of ‘dividing God’s land’ 43 by withdrawing from Gaza.
For a few days it looked as if the grief-stricken Israelis would register
their fury at Robertson’s crass insensitivity by cutting him out of a chance
to invest $50 million in a lucrative new tourist attraction for evangelicals:
a 125-acre bible theme park, complete with media centre, open-air church
and auditorium, beside the Sea of Galilee. But in the end, a fulsome apology
was all it took to set the project back on track. Robertson retained the Israel
Friendship Award, which the Chicago chapter of the Zionist Organisation
of America (ZOA) had given him in 2002, as well as the award he’d earned
in 2004 for bringing 700,000 Americans on Christian Zionist tours to Israel.
By the autumn of 2006 his rehabilitation was so well advanced that he was
starring in an Israeli tourism ministry TV advertisement.
Yossi Alpher, another American-Israeli, an ex-Mossad operative
and academic who now co-runs a website presenting both Israelis’ and
Palestinians’ views of the conflict, offered me different explanations for
most Israelis’ deafening silence on the subject of American Christian
Zionists. ‘First of all, these Christian Zionists support Israel in Washington
and that’s important for us, but the indifference also has a lot to do with
the ambivalence of American Jews about them,’ he told me. ‘We’re not
getting any strong message from them to stay away from these people.’
Both Alpher and Gorenberg cited what Alpher called the ‘flip-flopping’
of Abe Foxman, the head of the powerful Anti-Defamation League, as
evidence of an ambivalence towards Christian Zionism even among liberal
American Jews that has existed in the Reagan era but has greatly increased
since the watershed of 9/11. Foxman withdrew his attack on the Christian
Coalition for aiming at a theocratic state, but has remained in two minds
ever since about the high price to be paid for Christian support for Israel.
230 1948 onwards
Most Israelis can agree with most Americans on what it will take to
neutralise the wider Islamic threat to Israel and western civilisation, but
defending Israel against the Palestinians can mean one thing to Christian
Zionists and to many American Jews, but quite another to the majority of
Israelis and liberal American Jews. More Christian Zionists than Israelis
applauded the targeted assassination of Hamas’s spiritual leader in 2004,
for example; evangelicals voted 87.5 per cent in favour, the Israelis only 61
per cent. The same survey found that 90 per cent of American evangelicals
opposed ceding any land at all to a Palestinian state.44
Alpher first encountered Christian Zionists while director of the Middle
East office of the American-Jewish Committee between 1995 and 2000.
‘I was very wary of the way they were spreading their funds and buying
friends, so I looked into them to see if they were breaking our law by
proselytising. But they weren’t; they showed me how, when they welcomed
their plane-loads of Russian Jews to Israel, they were only giving them
translations of our Jewish Old Testament. How could I object to that? I
even checked that they hadn’t inserted some special Christian message, but
they hadn’t. They’re clean.’
Thinking of Ted Beckett’s CFOIC, I suggested that Christian Zionist
aid to the settlements was a cause for concern, but Alpher does not agree
that those settlements are illegitimate. What ‘infuriates’ him about the
Christian Zionists is the way Israeli prime minister after Israeli prime
minister has ignored the anti-Semitic implications of their End Times
nightmare and addressed the ICEJ’s annual Feast of Tabernacles celebration
for mercenary motives.
No matter what the American Christian Zionists’ politics, however
repellent their eschatology, they remain an important source of revenue
for Israel. The year I attended the ICEJ festival the Jerusalem Post reported
that the participants had enriched Israel to the tune of some $12 million.
In the spring of 2006 CAC’s director, Josh Reinstein, estimated that of
the 280,000 tourists who had visited Israel in the previous two months,
half were pro-Israel Christian evangelicals. That year the ICEJ’s Feast
of Tabernacles netted Israel some $18 million. The planned bible theme
park by the Sea of Galilee is specifically aimed at a projected market of a
million, mostly American, evangelicals a year.
‘It’s just money,’ sighs Alpher, ‘and they’re cynical about money, like
most people are.’
chapter 10
Nobody has done more than Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein to accustom American
Jews to the novel notion of teaming up with Christian fundamentalists for
the greater glory and safety of America and Israel.
If Israelis are not receiving any ‘clear message to stay away from these
people’, as Yossi Alpher put it, that’s in large measure because Rabbi
Eckstein has been doing a first-class job of persuading his fellow American
Jews to ignore Christian Zionists’ End Times schedule and any missionary
agenda, and look instead at their no-strings-attached financial ‘blessing’ of
Israel. His Chicago-based International Fellowship of Christians and Jews
(IFCJ) raised around a quarter of a billion American Christian dollars for
Israel between 1995 and 2005.1
My first sighting of Rabbi Eckstein was at a lecture he gave to a small
group of American and Israeli Jews in the back garden of a house in West
Jerusalem one evening in September 2003. A sporty, boyish man in his
mid-fifties, with a self-deprecating manner and a nervous laugh, Eckstein’s
charisma was less blatant than that I had come to associate with leaders of
the Christian Zionist movement. I couldn’t have guessed that New York’s
Forward magazine had voted him America’s third most influential Jew a
year earlier (after neo-con Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
and Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League) but he was quick to
establish his credentials.
Set up in 1983, to build bridges between the two faiths, Eckstein’s IFCJ
has been facilitating the restoration of Jews from the former Soviet Union
to Israel since the early 1990s, but also extending a helping hand into
every area of Israeli welfare and security since around 2000. It is currently
teaching Ethiopian Jews how to drive buses and funding orphanages, soup
kitchens, battered wives’ and alcoholics’ homes, a mobile dental clinic and
protective equipment for kindergartens and buses in the settlements. It
has subsidised a fire engine and a police anti-terror unit and handed out
232 1948 onwards
hundreds of grants for new immigrants, all with a minimum of red tape
and delay. More appealingly known to Israelis as the ‘Friendship Fund’,
the IFCJ is now so visible that, as one Israeli journalist put it, it’s ‘hard
to find a cash-strapped local authority in this country that’s not supported
by contributions from devout Christians from the US via the IFCJ’.2 All
Eckstein asks on behalf of his 500,000-strong donor base is that recipients
of this largesse should know that the vast bulk of it comes from Christians
who have no missionary agenda, who simply love Jews. Plaques and
publicity are thanks enough.
What better way of breaking down the Jews’ centuries-old suspicion of
Christians? What better way of proving that the word Christian no longer
equals anti-Semitic? How better for Christians to celebrate a common
Judaeo-Christian heritage and heed God’s words to Abraham, ‘I will bless
those who bless you, and him who curses you, I will curse’? More and
more would agree; the IFCJ’s income grew by 43 per cent in 2006. Yet far
from all Eckstein’s fellow Jews see it that way. One of Israel’s founding
fathers, Dr Chaim Weizmann, had clear ideas about the right and wrong
kind of Jew; for many Jews today, whether secular or religious, American
or Israeli, Rabbi Eckstein is a menace.
Some have likened his mediation of this exchange of pecuniary blessings
on Israel for divine blessings on America to the medieval Catholic Church’s
cynical trade in indulgences. Some have objected to his ‘schnorring’
(begging or sponging) from the Armageddon crowd by skilful use of their
coded language: ‘birth-pangs’, for example, refers to the onset of the End
Times, ‘ingathering’ is more prophecy code for the restoration of the Jews
to their homeland, and so on. Others have accused him of alienating the
majority of Democrat-voting Jews in America by currying favour with a
Gentile Republican constituency which, as the author Gershom Gorenberg
points out, is currently engaged in a dangerous ‘crusade against Islam’.
Like most Jews, Gorenberg knows that ‘neither jihads nor crusades have
ever been good for Jews.’
Eckstein’s activities have bewildered Abe Foxman of the ADL: ‘We
[Jews] have a modern state with extensive social services. And we’re not
a poor people,’ Foxman points out. ‘What he’s doing is perverse. And for
the Jewish and Israeli leadership to accept his money is also perverse ...’ 3
A few rabbis and a member of Jerusalem’s city council have raised a
loud alarm, lambasting the Israeli government for abdicating many of
its responsibilities to an outside body whose work is ‘directed towards
creating dependence’ and whose politics and eschatology ‘endangers the
Jewish existence’.4
While acknowledging that ‘not everyone appreciates the work we do’,
‘Two Shining Cities upon a Hill’ 233
lobbyists have endorsed the message Bush has been getting from other
lobbies, but with added religious value. One might argue that in this Bush’s
situation is no different to Reagan’s; Reagan also surrounded himself with
neo-cons and Christian Zionists, and demonstrated far more interest in the
End Times than Bush has ever done. The difference lies in the external
circumstances. Between them, the collapse of Soviet power that left the
United States pre-eminent after 1991, 9/11, the perceived ‘clash of civili-
sations’ and Israel’s worsening reputation across most of the world during
the second Intifada are what have secured the ascendancy of Christian
Zionism so far this century.
Rabbi Eckstein can be credited with pioneering this century’s Christian
Zionist push into American and Israeli politics. Those two useful new
structures – Yuri Shtern’s CAC and Pastor John Hagee’s CUFI – are
only following where Eckstein, as an Orthodox Jew from Chicago, has
been exceptionally well placed to lead. For almost thirty years he’s been
cultivating relations with evangelicals: attending their National Religious
Broadcasters conventions, learning their language and emotional style,
and playing down the more lurid aspects of their beliefs while pushing
the blessings and curses angle. But what he calls his ‘ministry’ – more
evangelical-speak – did not take off until after the outbreak of the second
Palestinian Intifada in 2000 began blighting Israel’s economy and costing
her international sympathy.
‘Little did I know we would be so important to Israel financially,
in terms of tourism and politically, [or] that the situation would arise
when the president of the United States would be a born-again Christian
and the party in power would be Republican, and the majority of his
constituency would be these born-again folks,’ he told the Kansas City
Jewish Chronicle in 2006. ‘I didn’t know Tom DeLay [the self-declared
‘Israeli of the heart’] would become the new head of Congress.’ 6 One
can almost hear Dr Weizmann saying something very similar: ‘Little did
I know that the British War Cabinet would be staffed by bible-believing
Nonconformists, or that the Ottoman Empire would be defeated in the
First World War ...’
Eckstein might have added that he could never have imagined that a
US senator would declare 9/11 had happened because Clinton and Bush
Senior had prevented Israel from cracking down hard enough on the
Palestinians, and go on to list his most important reason for supporting
Israel as, ‘Because God said so’.7 Eckstein must have marvelled when Tom
DeLay’s predecessor as Republican House Majority leader, Dick Armey,
told a radio presenter he was ‘content to have Israel grab the entire West
Bank’ and ethnically cleanse it of all Palestinians.8
‘Two Shining Cities upon a Hill’ 235
A gathering of a few hundred of the rank and file of IFCJ’s donor base,
this three-day programme of lectures and political speeches being held in
the ballroom of a luxury Marriott hotel near the White House is a cross
between a public relations exercise and a pep rally.
On this first morning I arrive early to watch as the ballroom slowly fills
with hundreds of people sporting twinned American and Israeli flags on
their lapels. I chat to smartly dressed Christian couples who’ve travelled
all the way from Texas and California for the occasion, and to a young
air hostess from Maryland who has read all the Left Behind books. A
middle-aged woman from Indiana asks me, ‘Don’t you feel privileged that
God has chosen you for this special blessing? I can’t imagine not having a
heart for Israel!’ In the row behind me are three young men, all in suits and
ties. I discover they’re students at Christian fundamentalist seats of higher
learning who’ve been approached by AIPAC with an invitation to set up
pro-Israel clubs at their colleges. One attends Falwell’s Liberty University.
An ebullient Rabbi Eckstein bounces in to open proceedings with a
survey of the IFCJ’s triumphs to date. The organisation has spent $80
million on transporting 250,000 Russian and Ethiopian Jews home to
Israel and another $25 million on aid to Jews who remain in the former
Soviet Union. It is currently involved in 250 different projects in Israel,
and will soon be financing the transport of a recently discovered tribe of
6,000 Indian Jews to Israel. ‘The Jewish community does a lot,’ Eckstein
concedes, ‘but the two communities – Jewish and Christian – can be a
one-two punch that can qualitatively take us further’. This was the first
and last mention of charity for the next two days; politics took over.
The first speaker is an Israeli journalist who gives us a long, dry lesson
in the propaganda art of ‘talking to friends and neighbours about Israel
in a more positive light’. I note each practical point of his guide and its
glaring lack of religious content.
Eckstein leaps up to the podium again, looking embarrassed by the speaker’s
failure to mention the main and simplest reason for supporting Israel as far
as that roomful of Christian Zionists is concerned. ‘We are blessing Israel so
‘Two Shining Cities upon a Hill’ 237
we ourselves will be blessed,’ he corrects him and a woman in the row behind
me heaves a sigh of relief, murmuring, ‘Right! He gets it.’
Next up is the executive director of AIPAC, Howard Kohr, straight
off a plane from Florida. By seizing the microphone and wandering up
and down the central aisle of the room, by pitching his speech like a
fundamentalist preacher, lively and emotive, he avoids the mistakes of
the first speaker. After first attacking Europe for trying ‘to push the road
map* on’, he broaches the subject of Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons
that can reach as far as Tel Aviv and Haifa. The threat of a nuclear Iran
reminds him of the older threat of a nuclear Iraq and Israel’s controversial
pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein’s Osirak plant in 1981. Kohr
confides he has a photograph of the bombed-out Osirak, signed by Vice-
President Dick Cheney, hanging on the wall of his office and he presses
home his point with a warning that Iran needs neutralising like Osirak
because ‘Iranians have a capacity for global terrorism that is truly global’
– a notion guaranteed to appeal to the Armageddon crowd he’s addressing.
His perfectly judged parting line – ‘God bless us all for what we’re doing
here!’ – wins him a standing ovation.
Two staunchly Christian Right senators, both of them mooted as
presidential hopefuls – Sam Brownback from Kansas and Rick Santorum
from Pennsylvania – grace the podium. Brownback, CAC’s first guest to
the Knesset, who insisted on reading the Bible during a meeting with Ariel
Sharon, bullishly suggests that no one recognise any Palestinian state until
Jerusalem has been recognised as the undivided capital of Israel. Rick
Santorum uses his platform to address a chief domestic concern of the
Religious Right, abortion, before echoing AIPAC’s message about Iran
as ‘the next great threat to the United States’. Eckstein then introduces
a Reverend Glen Plummer, a prominent African-American pastor, who
speaks of a growing pro-Israel feeling among black evangelicals, a feeling
whose roots lie in their shared experience of slavery: the Jews under the
Egyptian pharaohs, the blacks under the Americans.
I want to hear what an intellectual heavyweight among Christian Zionists,
the Oxford-educated Dr Richard Land of the giant Southern Baptist
Conference, has to say. A few nights ago I attended a press conference at
which he divulged that former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres had
needed two hours to convince him of the majority Israeli view that a
Palestinian state was unavoidable given Israel’s demographic disadvantage.
* A 2003 peace plan for Israel–Palestine, brokered by the US, the UN, the EU
and Russia.
238 1948 onwards
* IFCJ has an office in El Salvador, where the average income is $3,100 p.a. Israel’s
average income is $17,000 p.a. (Netty C. Gross, ‘Theology Be Damned’, Jerusalem
Report, 11.5.2003).
‘Two Shining Cities upon a Hill’ 239
subside, he raises a burst of applause with, ‘True prince of peace that the
messiah is, he’s going to say “No Comment”!’
It seems to me that he’s acquired the facile glibness of Hal Lindsey, Chuck
Missler and Jerry Falwell during his long exposure to evangelicals, but his
high spirits are justified. To have bagged the Southern Baptist Conference’s
Dr Land, and AIPAC’s Howard Kohr and a brace of prominent Christian
Right senators for his ‘Washington Briefing’ is an impressive achievement.
He’s saving the biggest game for the closing gala banquet.
On this grand occasion I’m seated at a round table for ten, between a
woman from Illinois and another from Minnesota. None of us will be
‘stumbled’ tonight; though the decorations are sumptuous and the linens
starched a snowy white, the wine glasses are filled with mineral water.
The first political giant to speak is Republican House Majority leader
and Texan Baptist, Tom DeLay. The man who recommended himself to the
Knesset as ‘an Israeli of the heart’ in 2003 and prompted an ex-Mossad
chief to remark, ‘Geez! Likud is nothing compared to this guy’,12 DeLay is
also a reformed alcoholic, a political protégé of Dick Cheney and a spiritual
protégé of Dr Dobson at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs.
No Christian Zionist has wielded more power than Tom DeLay since
Bush’s election in 2000, and none has enjoyed better access to the president.
He was the toast of AIPAC’s annual convention in 2002, earning five
standing ovations for declaring ‘We should reject the idea that the United
States should serve in the Middle East as a disinterested negotiator’, and
for saying – although Bush had just pledged his support for a Palestinian
state – ‘I’ve toured Judea and Samaria. I’ve walked the streets of Jerusalem,
I’ve stood on the Golan Heights. I didn’t see any occupied territory. I saw
Israel!’ 13 In the summer of 2003 DeLay’s rejection of a Palestinian state
on the grounds that it would be a ‘terrorist state’ earned him a caustic
attack from the pre-eminent Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, in the
newsletter:
DeLay’s strident opposition to the road-map peace plan and his tight
discipline over the lower house’s Republican Majority which earned him
the nickname ‘The Hammer’ go some way towards explaining the lack
of progress on that peace plan after 2003. He once bragged that the
Republican leadership in the House was driving the Democrats ‘crazy’ by
making Israel ‘a fundamental component of our foreign policy agenda’.15
In 2005 he went so far as to defy Bush by pushing Congress not to allocate
any direct aid whatsoever to the Palestinian Authority, even prompting
liberal Jewish-American protest at the lengths he was prepared to go to
in order to ‘undercut American and Israeli attempts to achieve a two-state
solution’.16
But his record as a busy blesser of Israel guarantees him an enthusiastic
welcome at this do, a standing ovation before he’s even opened his mouth.
No matter that the top news story today is his indictment by a Texas court
for laundering $190,000 and conspiring to violate the state’s election law.
No matter that he will have to resign his House Majority leadership and
possibly serve a jail sentence. ‘I fear no evil, the truth is on my side,’ he
declares to this adoring audience. ‘Justice will be served!’
Former mayor of New York, bastion of American Jewry, and Republican
presidential hopeful Rudi Giuliani, whom the IFCJ is honouring with a
Friend of Israel award, is next to speak – about the impact of 9/11 on
America. ‘Americans came to understand what Israelis had been going
through for the last decades,’ he declares, knowing that no one present
will have forgotten that when a Saudi prince offered him $10 million for
repair works at Ground Zero after 9/11, Giuliani refused the gift; 15 of
the 19 suicide hijackers were Saudi citizens.
After Giuliani comes Israel’s ambassador to America, Danni Ayalon, an
opponent of any withdrawal from the West Bank, no matter how pressing
the demographic imperative. He clearly feels himself among friends: ‘When
some of us tend to forget our real claim to the land, you will remind
us, so keep doing that,’ he urges, before reading out a personal message
from Ariel Sharon which praises Eckstein as the initiator of the tightening
bond between Israel and American Christians. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat
senator from Connecticut, receives the IFCJ’s second Friend of Israel award
before cheerfully stating the obvious: ‘There are more Christian Zionists
in America than Jewish Zionists.’
Eckstein’s line-up of luminaries tonight indicates that he’s not only
reinforcing Christian Zionist support for the alliance with Israel in the
War on Terror but also reaching out beyond his natural white Christian
constituency to other mainstays of the Religious Right. Senators Brownback
and Santorum are both Catholic conservatives. An African-American
‘Two Shining Cities upon a Hill’ 241
* Ronald Reagan added the word ‘shining’ when running for his second term in
1984.
242 1948 onwards
America, it seems, needs only one ‘special relationship’, a point not lost
on Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to the United States between
1997 and 2003: ‘The fact of the matter is,’ Meyer has explained, ‘right now
in this crisis the United States has only one special relationship with the
world and that is with Israel. All other relationships, including [Britain’s]
with them, are in a secondary or even a third category.’ 18
For all the comfort to be drawn from that uniquely tight alliance,
an atmosphere of profound anxiety about dark hordes of anti-Semitic,
anti-American Muslims and Europeans laying siege to the high, shining
cities of America and Israel, mixed with a righteous confidence in God’s
protection of his two chosen peoples, suffuses the closing moments of
this banquet.
One of the female guests rises to her feet and starts singing, ‘While
the storm clouds gather from across the sea, Let us swear allegiance to a
land that’s free ...’ Here and there around the room a few more stand to
take up the song: ‘Let us all be grateful for a land so fair, As we raise our
voices in solemn prayer ...’ As more and more diners rose to their feet to
join in, like extras in the ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ scene in Cabaret, my
Illinois neighbour reprimands me for continuing to talk to my Minnesota
neighbour. At last, everyone is standing, hands linked, eyes wet, and voices
raised in that tuneful prayer,
precisely this pungent mix of fear, injured pride, ignorance and perceived
victimhood.
When the entire room rose to their feet to sing ‘God Bless America’ my
Minnesota neighbour was telling me about an aspect of Jewish–Christian
relations I’d been underestimating. A strange merging of evangelical
Christianity and Judaism – in essence, a simplifying process – is under
way, one that reinforces the two nations’ ‘special relationship’. A love of
the God of the Old Testament, a belief in the pre-millennial dispensa-
tionalist End Times narrative and so an overriding concern with Israel,
are the hallmarks of this synthetic movement.
An elegant young housewife with two children and a husband who loved
Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, my Minnesota neighbour had
been explaining to me how she’d fallen in love with Israel on a bible tour and
been marking the Saturday Jewish Sabbath and all the Jewish holidays ever
since. Everything Deanna said reminded me of Susan, a large and cheerful
mother of six from Ohio whom I’d encountered two years previously, while
on my ICEJ bullet-proof bus tour of West Bank settlements.
Susan and her husband had test-driven a variety of local churches before
finally deciding, in 2001, to set up their own ‘home group’ – a mini-church
of people who shared ‘a heart for Israel’. Every Saturday night six couples,
including Susan’s daughter-in-law and mother, gathered to celebrate the
Jewish Sabbath and read the Torah, just as Jews do in their synagogues,
she’d explained to me, adding ‘There’s still too much of an “us” and
“them” mentality when it comes to Christians and Jews – we have to
understand that we come out of the same root.’ Back in London a few
weeks later I’d received a booklet entitled The Quiet Revival from Susan.
I read the first page:
The tune of ‘God Bless America’ and Gary Bauer’s eloquent America and
Israel as ‘two shining cities upon a hill’ line are still ringing in my ears. But
the last had not sounded quite fresh to me. Where had I heard it before?
It transpires that Bauer recycled a keynote speech he delivered at AIPAC’s
annual convention two years previously, a speech for which he earned no
fewer than twelve standing ovations. I’m reading it over again on my way
to see him now at his American Values headquarters in a high-rise office
block in Arlington, on the south side of Washington’s Potomac River. I
can easily imagine which of his finely turned phrases won him all those
plaudits: ‘Israel and America are joined at the hip and joined at the heart’,
‘the EU diplomats and axis of weasels have cast their lot’, and so on. But
the best lines of the speech are reminding me of Josiah C. Wedgwood’s
and Orde Wingate’s virile values, and of the warrior pose struck by Rabbi
ben Tsion in the penultimate volume of the Left Behind series, and of Ted
Beckett’s recruiting sergeant, Jesus.
They [Islamic terrorists] think we are fat and weak, lazy and fearful.
They believe our civilisation is in decline and that we are ready to
crawl into a corner and die. They believe Israel is no longer capable of
producing the kind of people that disembarked from boats from war-
torn Europe and went directly to the front lines to protect the infant
modern state of Israel as its enemies tried to strangle it in its crib.
‘Two Shining Cities upon a Hill’ 247
They think America can no longer produce the kind of men we sent to
Concord Bridge, the fields of Antietam and the beaches of Normandy.
Well they are wrong! – wrong about Israel and wrong about the
United States and together, as Christians and Jews, we will show them
how wrong they are! 23
For all his bullish rhetoric, close up, in the flesh, Bauer doesn’t look in
the least battle-ready. Not just the shortest and slightest, but also the least
charismatic of all the prominent Christian Zionists I’ve encountered, he
has watery eyes and a damp handshake, I notice, before he dashes back
into his office to give another radio station the benefit of his negative
thinking on an insufficiently right-wing candidate for the Supreme Court.
His secretary apologises: ‘It’s been crazy here this morning!’
Bauer is a master of the Religious Right sound-bite and has been a
prominent fixture on the Republican Party scene since his 2000 bid for
the presidency, which hit the buffers when his campaign staff resigned
in protest at his conducting ‘ill-advised meetings’ with a young female
aide. A member of the secretive Council for National Policy and of the
inner Arlington Group, Bauer is also a leading light of Pastor Hagee’s
new Christians United for Israel lobbying organisation. I have time to note
that the volumes on the bookshelf behind me loudly proclaim his various
positions: a biography of Jerry Falwell, a work on marriage by Dr Dobson
of Focus on the Family and a copy of Professor Samuel P. Huntington’s
controversial thesis, the bible of Religious Right foreign policy, The Clash
of Civilisations.
I ask Bauer if he would call unconditional support for Israel an
‘American value’. Yes, he thinks he would, he says, especially since 9/11,
when Americans were shocked at news footage of Arabs celebrating the
attacks, while ‘in Israel they were crying with us, and a day of mourning
was declared’. On that fateful autumn morning Bauer was driving his car
75 yards from the Pentagon when the hijacked plane crashed. ‘It rocked
my car! My first thought,’ he tells me, ‘was for my daughter on Capitol
Hill but my second was, this is what Israel has been facing day after day,
and the US has sometimes been ambivalent about that.’
A Southern Baptist from Lexington, Kentucky, Bauer claims he was
ten or eleven when he first ‘felt compelled to argue’ with his anti-Semitic
Christian neighbours on the grounds that their saviour was a Jewish
carpenter. By the age of eighteen in 1964, he was an ardent fan of the
future president, Ronald Reagan, in whose administrations he ended up
working for eight years. Since 1989 he has devoted himself to Religious
Right activism for various organisations, including the lobbying arm of
248 1948 onwards
Dr Dobson’s Focus on the Family and to trying to run for president. AV’s
focus, he tells me, is ‘grass-roots emailing’ – 100,000 a day – on matters
of concern to the Christian Right, including Israel.
He offers me a proof of AV’s effective lobbying. When Israel tried to
assassinate a Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi in 2004, President Bush
and the rest of the world protested, but Bauer got to work commanding
his army to weigh in with support for Israel. Around a thousand emails
duly arrived at the White House, all threatening that if Israel was not
permitted to defend herself against terrorism as America had been doing
since 9/11, they would ‘stay home on election day’. ‘You’ll remember,’
Bauer says comfortably, ‘within a day or so the tone had changed.’ There
wasn’t a squeak out of the White House when the Israelis made their
second, successful, attempt on Rantisi’s life.
Bauer has mobilised his forces to oppose both the 2003 road-map peace
plan and Sharon’s decision to dismantle the settlements in the Gaza Strip
in 2005. Between them he, Ariel Sharon, Tom DeLay and others have been
doing everything in their power to ensure that Israel’s decades-old land
dispute with the Palestinians is treated as the heroic front line in Bush’s
global War on Terror.
Just like Rabbi Eckstein, Bauer dismisses the distasteful End Times
component of Christian Zionism: ‘When I go around speaking at
evangelical churches, that End Times scenario very rarely comes up’ is all
he has to say on the matter.
He is in a good mood, cheerful enough to share a joke with me, especially
one that enhances his image as a major player on the Religious Right. A
few nights ago, he was at home, relaxing with the cryptic crossword in the
Washingtonian, when he came across his own name, listed with those of
various other Christian Right luminaries, as one of the clues. ‘It took me
a while to work out the answer – it wasn’t neo-con, it was theo-con!’
I am grateful to him for mentioning the neo-cons. My main reason
for contacting Bauer was a wish to establish a solid connection between
Christian Zionists and the often Jewish-American neo-cons whose foreign
policy agenda has impacted so dramatically on the rest of the world since
9/11. Neo-cons, Jewish or not, characterise that agenda as ‘Wilsonianism
with a very big difference’.
It’s an agenda and style of operation that suits rank and file Christian
Zionists perfectly. For people who live in prophecy-informed expectation
that the Antichrist will arise from an international institution, the United
Nations is plain anathema, likewise the European Union. And their
Manichaean world-view and immersion in the warlike Old Testament
inclines them towards military force as a means of ensuring that their idea
of Good prevails. Millenarian Christian Zionists are as sure as political
Christian Zionists like Bauer that the Jewish-Americans whose thinking is
at the heart of the neo-con project are absolutely the ‘right kind of Jew’.
How could they not be when even the high moral tone of the neo-cons’
domestic agenda chimes with their own?
Aided by the insights of a Jewish philosopher named Leo Strauss, neo-
cons can go right along with the grand intellectual underpinning of Tim
LaHaye and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority push into politics in the 1980s,
with the philosopher Francis Schaeffer’s declaration of a war on ‘secular
humanism’. Leo Strauss wrote off the Enlightenment and had no qualms
about talking and writing in moral absolutes, about Good and Evil.
Both the Religious Right and neo-cons agree that properly God-fearing
Christians and Jews must unite in a campaign to defend Judaeo-Christian
values and rescue America from its fatal corruption by liberal Jews and
Christians. Both groups yearn for an omnipotent America, guided by lofty
absolutist ideals, and the glorious visions of real-life heroes.
Bauer brushes off my question about his neo-con connections with a
casual, ‘We go to the beach with the Abrams, and we see the Kristols.’
Elliott Abrams is Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy
Strategy and he was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s chief adviser
during the Israel–Hezbollah conflict in the summer of 2006. Bill Kristol
is the son of Irving Kristol who launched neo-conservatism during the
Reagan era, but he is also the editor of the influential neo-con organ, the
Weekly Standard, and currently a powerful advocate of America launching
a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
What Bauer crucially fails to mention is that he, Abrams and Kristol
were among twenty-five Christian and Jewish founders of Project for the
New American Century (PNAC) in 1997. A Washington think-tank with
charity tax status, PNAC describes itself as ‘a neo-conservative organi-
sation supporting greater American militarization, challenging hostile
governments, advancing democracy and economic freedom’.25 Acting as
an ideological nursery for top members of the Bush administration,* the
* Other prominent PNAC founder members include Robert Kagan, Jeb Bush,
250 1948 onwards
PNAC has been identified as the main engine behind what some in the
State Department and millions of liberals, including American Jews like
the eminent author Joe Klein, lament as the ‘Israelisation’ of America’s
foreign policy under George W. Bush.26 ‘Israelisation’, of course, amounts
to a firm adoption of Israel’s positions vis-à-vis regime change in Iraq, Iran
and Syria, an idealistic but bellicose determination to install pro-Israel,
pro-America regimes in their place.
Even better positioned than Gary Bauer to ‘bless’ Israel in accordance
with these goals was the neo-con John Bolton, the impressively mustachioed
and notoriously undiplomatic US ambassador to the United Nations in
2005–6. Bolton was shepherded into politics by Senator Jesse Helms, a
passionate Christian Zionist and a hero of Jerry Falwell’s, who once
admiringly described Bolton as ‘the kind of man with whom I would
want to stand at Armageddon, if it should be my lot to be on hand
for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in the
world’.27
Bolton is another leading light of the PNAC. As early as 1998 that
think-tank was lobbying for the removal of Saddam Hussein and insisting
that America’s policy could not be ‘crippled by a misguided insistence
on unanimity in the UN Security Council’.28 A year later Bolton was
recommending that America have nothing more to do with international
law because ‘the goal of those who think that international law really
means anything are those who want to constrict the United States’.29 A
long-serving member on the board of the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (JINSA) – a body devoted to strengthening ties between
Israel and America’s military-industrial complexes – Bolton has been
described by ZOA as ‘one of Israel’s truest friends in the world’ 30 and
presented with one of its ‘Defender of Israel’ awards. A speaker at a
meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy in 2004, he gave the
keynote speech at AIPAC’s annual convention in 2006.
Contemptuous of the United Nations, Bolton has repeatedly antagonised
the organisation since he started work there, once by declaring that there
was no such thing as the United Nations and that ‘it wouldn’t make a bit
of difference’ 31 if its 38-storey headquarters in New York lost its ten top
floors – which include the Secretary-General’s offices. Bolton has proved
himself such a good friend to Israel, on the other hand, that his Israeli
counterpart has boasted, ‘We [Israelis at the UN] are really not just five
Dick Cheney, Francis Fukuyama, Donald Rumsfeld, Dan Quayle, Paul Wolfowitz,
Charles Krauthammer and R. James Woolsey. Richard Perle, John Bolton and
Douglas Feith have been closely associated with the PNAC.
‘Two Shining Cities upon a Hill’ 251
President Bush’s dealings with Israel since 2000 – his stalling over the 2003
road-map peace plan and his 2004 acceptance that the settlements have
created ‘realities on the ground’ – have earned him the right to call himself
a political Christian Zionist, but was he also a millenarian Christian
Zionist, I wondered. Was the ruler of the world’s single superpower as
much in thrall to the nightmare of Armageddon as his trustiest Religious
Right supporters?
One afternoon in the autumn of 2005, shortly after Rabbi Eckstein’s
three-day jamboree, I sat outside a Starbucks on a windy corner a stone’s
throw from the White House, gaining a useful insight from an accredited
White House correspondent, a handsomely suited young Texan Christian
Zionist named Bill Koenig.
Koenig had first come to my attention by way of his Internet news
service which purveys ‘Christian News, reported from the White House,
focussing on Israel’. His www.watch.org scored 20.5 million hits in 2005 and
boasts subscribers in all fifty American states, including 1,500 pastors each
with church memberships exceeding 3,500. In the usual way of Christian
Zionist sites, Koenig’s offers its own peculiar slant on the world by filtering
current affairs through bible prophecy. In 2005 he was monitoring Bush,
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Olmert, Netanyahu, Pope Benedict XVI, assorted
Middle Eastern and European leaders, Tony Blair and Prince Charles.
The site listed ‘events we watch’ as ‘wars and rumors of wars, economic
news, military build-ups, difficult relations between countries, famines and
natural disasters, and drastic or record-breaking weather’.
Koenig is a busy man. A quick scroll through his schedule for 2006–7
reveals that he attended both CUFI’s inaugural meeting at Pastor Hagee’s
252 1948 onwards
and promote the ‘land for peace’ efforts will continue to be judged and
pay the consequences (Joel 3:2).*
Solution: The US should stop the sponsorship of the ‘land for peace’
effort and tell the world community that the US will stand with Israel
to help insure her future and that her land is not to be given to the
Palestinians, Syrians or any other Arab nation. If the United States
doesn’t do this, further devastation will come to America and any other
nation that continues exerting pressure on Israel to participate in the
‘land for peace’ process.34
* ‘I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the valley of Jehoshaphat,
and I will enter into judgment with them there, on account of my people and my
heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations, and have
divided up my land.’
254 1948 onwards
Talking Texan
not. Former House Majority leader and ‘Israeli of the heart’, Tom DeLay,
and Dr Tommy Ice at Falwell’s Liberty University, and Bill Koenig, the White
House correspondent, are all native speakers. Two Virginians, Jerry Falwell
and Pat Robertson, and two Californians, Hal Lindsey and Chuck Missler,
are fluent in the language. So is Ted Beckett from Colorado Springs, after
years spent in the Lone Star State. Ardent neo-cons, John Bolton at the United
Nations and Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon speak it exceptionally well.
President Bush himself memorably resorted to the patois of his home state
when he promised to capture Osama bin Laden, ‘dead or alive’, after 9/11.
Texan is closely related to the language spoken by members of another
pioneer-built society. Hebrew-Texan is what Israelis of the Jabotinsky
persuasion have been speaking to the native inhabitants of Israel–Palestine
for more than half a century. Avigdor Lieberman, the Soviet-born radical
right-winger whose Yisrael Beitenu party aims at an ethnically pure Jewish
state, speaks it particularly well. He has delighted the disaffected Russian
immigrants who make up the bedrock of his support by recommending that
Israel operate in Gaza ‘like Russia operates in Chechnya’ 4 and demanded
that any Arab-Israeli members of the Knesset who speak to Hamas leaders
be executed, as ‘collaborators’ were at Nuremberg. When Prime Minister
Olmert invited Lieberman to join his government as Minister for Strategic
Threats in October 2006 a writer for the liberal newspaper Ha’aretz dubbed
Lieberman himself ‘a strategic threat’ and likened him to Rasputin.5 After
Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he served as chief of staff in the late 1990s,
Lieberman is probably Christian Zionists’ favourite Israeli politician.
In 2004, it was members of Lieberman’s party – Dr Yuri Shtern* and
the young rhetorician of Chuck’s Temple Conference, Josh Reinstein; and
another noisy advocate of ridding Israel and the West Bank of its Palestinians
by transferring them to Jordan, former tourism minister Rabbi Benny Elon,
MK – who established the Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus and suggested
that Pastor John Hagee form Christians United for Israel (CUFI).
The most prominent Christian Zionist churchman in America today,
Pastor Hagee speaks excellent native Texan. Hagee has described the
Bible’s blessings and curses quote as ‘God’s foreign policy statement’ and
declared support for Israel a ‘Bible mandate’. CEO of Global Evangelism
Television Inc., whose programmes are beamed worldwide on 150 stations,
Hagee has been televangelising about blessing Israel twice a day for the
past twenty-eight years and hosting a gala ‘Night to Honour Israel’ at his
19,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio every year since 1981.
With time to kill before my appointment with the Texan oilman, I headed
to the nearest mall, to a Christian bookstore, for some relevant reading
material.
Two new works by that star of apocalypterature, the pop prophet, Jewish
convert to evangelical Christianity and wonder of the White House Joel
Talking Texan 259
C. Rosenberg, immediately caught my eye. The first, the sequel to The Ezekiel
Option, was about Israel’s decision to rebuild the Temple and the subsequent
race to prevent any Muslim locating the Ark of the Covenant concealed deep
beneath the Temple Mount. The second was a work of non-fiction in the
style of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, entitled Epicenter: Why
the Current Rumblings in the Middle East will Change your Future.
A glance at Epicenter’s list of contents revealed that Rosenberg was
confidently predicting our newspapers’ ‘future headlines’ on the basis of
bible prophecy. Before the Russo-Arab war against Israel which Ezekiel
prophesied, and which Rosenberg had described in The Ezekiel Option, he
was forecasting the discovery of vast oil reserves in Israel. After Ezekiel’s
war, Rosenberg was claiming, we would see Iraq emerging as a regional
superpower, at which point the Jews would begin rebuilding the Temple
and earthquakes and plagues would rock the entire world, and many
Muslims would convert to Christianity. All of these things, Rosenberg
was confidently predicting, had to occur before the Rapture, before the
horrendous seven years of suffering that would inexorably end in the Battle
of Armageddon and Jesus’s Second Coming.
Impressed by a male store assistant’s enthusiasm for Rosenberg’s
writings, I bought both books. The rebuilding of the Temple was the
business of my lunch meeting the following day, but the discovery of oil
in Israel was of immediate interest.
Epicenter made much of a recent flurry of news stories that the Jews
might not, after all, have been laboriously led through the wilderness
by Moses to the only Middle Eastern land without oil riches, as Prime
Minister Golda Meir once blackly joked. Rosenberg was citing Genesis
– ‘blessings of the deep that lieth under’ – and some Deuteronomy, and
a verse of Isaiah – ‘the treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret
places’ – to prove his point that there must be oil in Israel.6 It was no
surprise to discover that the Israel he’d depicted in his new novel was
already fabulously oil-rich.
For all those encouraging signs, however, for all the biblical clues and
Rosenberg’s bold imaginings, no significant oil find has yet been made.
Israel will not be self-sufficient in fuel, let alone in a position to redraw
the geo-political map by replacing the Muslim Middle East as home to the
bulk of the world’s oil reserves any time soon. Only one Israeli consortium
and two Texan Christian Zionists – one of whom I was about to meet
– were risking any investment in exploration there.
The headquarters of Ness Energy International Inc. (ness being Hebrew
for ‘miracle’) was a large single-storey log cabin, appealingly located among
some trees, by an access road off the Interstate 30.
260 1948 onwards
the way they respect family: ‘they understand lineage, the passing of the
mantle from father to son’.
A father now himself, of twin teenage sons named Joshua and Seth, Sha
proudly recounted how one of them had recently written a school essay
on the theme of ‘tenacity’ in which he’d detailed his grandfather’s and
father’s long quest to bless Israel with oil, and announced his intention to
follow in their footsteps.
‘This is a long-term project then? From generation to generation ...’
Yes. Sha inherited around 6,000 of his father’s Christian Zionist
shareholders, and explained to them that they shouldn’t invest in Ness
Energy International Inc. if they’re hoping for quick or big returns.
Reminding them that Genesis 12: 3 – blessings and curses – should be
their principal motivation, he’s tried to reassure them by explaining that
whereas his father had only his bible for a guide he, Sha, is bringing the
very latest scientific know-how to the search. ‘We just have to get the right
combination to unlock the treasure chest,’ he tells them.
‘You’re sure there is oil in Israel, in commercial quantities?’ I asked
him.
‘I’ve never doubted it,’ he said. ‘You only have to look at all the Bible
clues and at where Israel sits in that oil-rich region. It’s only now I’m
starting to ask myself why no one’s found it yet. I’m starting to wonder
if it has anything to do with the fact that the only Israeli company with
all the equipment for hire is only out to rob, rape and pillage ...’
While Sha complained that a job costing a million dollars in Texas
costs four million in Israel, I recalled Pastor Adams’s Regenerators and
the mid-nineteenth-century Christian Zionist whom Herman Melville
encountered, the collision of American dreams with harsh Middle Eastern
realities. Sha had other bitter complaints about Jewish business practices.
‘They want to be very Western in their practices, but they’re not,’ he
told me. It seemed that a Jewish-American investor in New York had
recently led him on with talk of investing millions, only to pull out at
the last minute.
‘Where do you think the oil is?’ I asked him.
Sha’s reading of the Bible, combined with his interest in history, had
convinced him there must be black gold under the southern end of the
Dead Sea, where the ancient towns of Sodom and Gomorrah stood until
the God of the Old Testament punished them for their sins of rape, sodomy
and bestiality by obliterating them in a storm of ‘brimstone and fire’.7
Brimstone is burning sulphur, so Sha believes a theory that, when God
arranged for the area to be hit by an earthquake, deposits of sulphurous
oily bitumen lying under the Dead Sea gushed up through the fault-line
262 1948 onwards
and were ignited by a stray spark, before falling back to earth in a fiery,
smothering blanket.8
‘There have got to be aromatic hydrocarbons under there,’ he told me.
‘You have to know that the inhabitants of those two places were harvesting
that pitch from the Dead Sea and selling it to the camel trains travelling
down the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea. Sodom and Gomorrah were like
the world’s first oil and gas boom towns here in Texas. They were rich!
But they fell into sin and corruption. We Texans know how easily that
can happen! People make a lot of money and there’s not a whole lot to
do with it, so they fall into sin ...’
‘How long do you think it’ll be before you strike oil, before any of your
investors see any dividends?’
‘I’m thinking it’ll be five years before we hit something big ...’
‘What are you basing that on?’
‘Nothing. I don’t have anything to base that on,’ he admitted. ‘This all
has to happen in God’s timing. Right now, we’re just taking baby steps,
but I’m not worried. I know I’m where God wants me to be right now. I
sleep well at night.’
Blessing Israel had shortened Hayseed’s life and it has already cost Sha
his marriage; like his father before him, he’s been spending long periods
in Israel. But his small staff back him to the hilt, as I discovered while I
sat in the reception area, perusing a work entitled Why Bless Israel? How
the Jewish Nation is Key to Unleashing God’s Blessings in the 21st Century
and another called God’s Word for the Oil Patch: Fuel for the Soul. A staff
member, a part-time policeman and computer wizard, approached me and
delivered a short lecture on ‘catastrophic geology theory’ before assuring
me, ‘Even if we don’t find oil in Israel, I’ll be sure that God has led me
here to Sha. For the first time in my life, I know I’m in the right place,
doing the right thing.’
As I headed south in the direction of Waco and San Antonio, I decided
that Sha Stephens’s Christian Zionism probably had as much to do with
filial piety as with boredom or fear.
Filled with monster trucks thundering to and from Mexico, the Interstate
35 was uninspiring. Once I had appreciated a sky wider than any I’d seen
since I’d lived in Russia, and amused myself by casting Texas as America’s
Siberia – same sky, same flat frontier land, equally extreme climate and
fabulous mineral wealth, same repository of virile virtues, same propensity
for lawlessness, same hostility to encroaching southern hordes (Mexicans
rather than Chinese), same gigantic distance from the nation’s capital and,
Talking Texan 263
last but not least, the same penchant for religious extremism – I was ready
to take a break.
Waco was in sight. If I came off at the next exit I could find a tourist
information office and get directions to Mount Carmel, where dozens
of members of a Christian Zionist sect called the Branch Davidians had
perished in a fire-fight with the state authorities in 1993. The episode was a
fine illustration of how easily wild bible-based imaginings about a violent
End Times can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.
The young woman in the tourist office was helpful and friendly, and
curious to know what had brought me to Texas. When I explained that I
was researching a book about people with ‘a heart for Israel’ and, though
keen to visit the site of the Branch Davidian siege, was heading to San
Antonio to see a certain pastor who had the biggest heart for Israel in all
of America, her eyes lit up in instant recognition.
‘You mean Pastor Hagee! Isn’t that man just wonderful? I watch him all
the time on television and I just read his new book, Jerusalem Countdown!
You have to read that!’
‘I’ve read it. It’s quite a picture he paints, isn’t it?’ I said, recalling the book’s
mushroom cloud cover and its call for a pre-emptive strike on Iran. ‘I hope
you won’t mind me asking, how do you come to have a heart for Israel?’
To my astonishment, there among the brochures and postcards, and
the key rings and T-shirts emblazoned with the logo don’t mess with
texas, she burst into tears. ‘I believe they’re God’s Chosen People,’ she
sobbed, ‘God can’t let anything more happen to them because he’s chosen
them, but I’m just so scared that if we get the Democrats again they won’t
defend Israel so well, and that’s going to bring suffering on America ...’
Here was proof of the crucial role fear plays in the Christian Zionist
story: if America abandons Israel, then God will cancel America’s Most
Divinely Favoured Nation status. With the mid-term elections only a
fortnight away, with Bush’s ratings plunging and the news out of Iraq all
bad, this woman and most Republican voters of the Religious Right were
expecting the Democrats to win a majority in the House of Representatives,
if not the Senate too.
‘We have to go on blessing the Jews,’ she continued, still sobbing as if
her heart would break, ‘I don’t want to be left behind when the Rapture
happens, I don’t want to suffer ...’
It seemed to me she must have gleaned her theology from Pastor
Hagee’s broadcasts and the Left Behind series. Her experience of life must
have inclined her towards the more fundamentalist, Calvinist brand of
Christianity with its emphasis on the wrath of God, rather than the feel-
good, prosperity Gospel purveyed by evangelicals Hal Lindsey scorned as
264 1948 onwards
‘ear-ticklers’. Apologising for upsetting her, I waited for her to calm down
before asking if she was a member of a church. No, she wasn’t, she told
me. Although raised a Baptist, she no longer belonged to any congre-
gation, but continued to read the Bible by herself. When I recalled Sha
Stephens mentioning that he’d also given up going to church on account
of the spirit of intolerance he’d encountered there – ‘they chew you up and
spit you out!’ he’d told me in fluent Texan – I felt surer than ever about
the important role played by the electronic and paper pulpit in the spread
of Christian Zionism.
Equipped with directions to the Branch Davidians’ Mount Carmel, I
left Waco’s tourist office, appalled by my insight into its manager’s lonely
terror.
I guessed there’d be nothing much to see and no one to talk to in the place
where, thirteen years earlier, seventy-six Christian Zionists had perished in
a raging church fire after a gun battle with the local Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI. I was merely hoping to gain a sense of
an environment that had bred a millenarianism so violent it made Chuck
Missler’s look safe.
The Branch Davidian sect can trace its origins all the way back to the
millenarian Millerite sect’s ‘Great Disappointment’ of October 1844. Out
of the Millerites came the Seventh Day Adventists, and out of the Seventh
Day Adventists came the Branch Davidians, in 1935. This tiny splinter
group arrived at a belief that the Kingdom of God would be established
in Jerusalem in April 1959. The inevitable fresh disappointment split the
sect, but didn’t dampen all its members’ yearning for the Second Coming.
During the 1960s Branch Davidians took heart from the ‘miracle’ of
Israel’s Six Day War and even opened a centre in Galilee. In the 1980s,
tensions over the leadership succession among the community living here,
near Waco, culminated in a shoot-out between the son of the widow of a
former leader, and her lover, a local handyman who’d changed his name,
from Vernon Howell to David Koresh.
After a brief sojourn in the nearby town called Palestine, Koresh
eventually triumphed and imposed a way of life on his 130-strong
community here, near Waco, that involved a mix of close bible study, target
practice with automatic machine-guns, rock music and the message that
they’d soon be departing for Israel to convert the Jews before the Battle
of Armageddon. In the belief that he belonged to the messiah’s House of
David, the polygamous Koresh set about siring as many as twelve children,
the new rulers in the Kingdom of God – the House of David.
Talking Texan 265
The clash between the Branch Davidians and the authorities came
about shortly after Koresh refused to answer a summons related to the
community’s possession of firearms. During a visit from an armed posse
from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, four BATF agents
and six Branch Davidians were shot dead. After a standoff lasting over
seven weeks, the BATF and the FBI mounted an all-out assault on Mount
Carmel. The Davidians were engaged in a ‘holy battle’ of the End Times.
The authorities were ‘the forces of Babylon’ and the government ‘evil’.
Koresh believed he was the Christ, come again. Nothing – not tanks,
search-lights, sound-bombing with deafening music, helicopters, or even
the closing off of power and water – could induce the dozens of women
and children to surrender, to betray their latter-day saviour. Twenty-one
children and more than fifty adults, including Koresh, were incinerated in
a fire that engulfed the church in which they had barricaded themselves,
with a stockpile of ‘flash-bang’ grenades. While the authorities battled
post-mortem accusations that they had started the fire, David Koresh’s
grieving mother insisted that his coffin be draped in an Israeli flag.
Approached down a narrow, pot-holed road at sunset on a fine autumn
evening, Mount Carmel seemed a tranquil spot. A couple of Wacans had
parked their SUV by the reed-fringed nearby river and were unloading
fishing rods. Under a wide, darkening sky, the only other sounds were
those of crickets and birds. But there were, after all, some Branch Davidian
things to see.
A few feet away from an untidy tangle of undergrowth and charred
debris marking the site of the mini-Holocaust stood a new cream-painted
church. An elegant plaque in front of it expressed thanks to ‘the many
volunteers and benefactors who have faithfully answered the Spirit’s call to
rebuild upon the ashes’. The final words were in Hebrew, ‘Tzernach yahveh
Tzedekenu’, translated as ‘The Branch, the Lord of our Righteousness’, the
Old Testament line that had given the sect its name. Nearby was another
plaque commemorating the four BATF agents. A little distance from that
was yet another memorial stone. Donated by a survivalist group called the
Northeast Regional Militia of Texarkana, it listed all the names of the
incinerated sect members, including two foetuses.
Further down the track was a scattering of one-storey houses, each
guarded by an angry dog, and another church, with the lamb of yhwh
badly painted in red by its door. The Branch Davidian sect appeared to
have survived its self-inflicted mini-Armageddon, but only just.
Joe’s Crab Shack, the fish-restaurant in San Marcos where I’d arranged to
266 1948 onwards
lunch with the expert on the past, present and prophesied future of the
Jerusalem Temple, wasn’t hard to find. And I had no trouble recognising
Doctor Randall Price from the author portraits on the covers of his many
books, and from his World of Bible Ministries website.
A tall and formal man, Dr Price looked and sounded like an academic,
but a prosperous one, judging by the elegant cut of his tweed jacket. The
income from his twenty books, his teaching of theology, biblical studies and
biblical archaeology at three seminaries and a Christian university, and his
frequent forays to Israel, both as a professional archaeologist and as a leader
of Christian Zionist tours, were adding up to a more than decent living. Not
a Texan-speaker, so neither as alarming nor as amusing as Ted Beckett, for
example, Price began by patiently lecturing me on bible prophecy. My efforts
to halt him, in much the same way as I had tried to halt Chuck Missler during
our showdown chat, were similarly frustrated. An attempt to throw him off
balance by talking a little Texan to him – ‘But of course the Jews are God’s
Chosen People and the centre of Bible prophecy because they wrote the
Bible! There was never any chance that they’d be writing about the nation
of the Laplanders as God’s Chosen People, was there?’– utterly failed.
Price couldn’t, or wouldn’t, look at it that way. A fervent Bible-believer
who claimed to be interpreting prophecy in ‘a consistently grammatical,
historical, and literal manner’,9 how could he take that giant step back, out
of his oxymoronically fact-based faith? His vision of the End Times was
standard millenarian Christian Zionist. He could imagine a day when the
Rapture whisked away the top echelons of Judaeo-Christian governments
and opened the way to Ezekiel’s war between Russia and the Muslim
nations and Israel, a conflict in which, as he put it, much of the Muslim
world would be ‘nullified’. He forecast that the Antichrist, posing as a top
diplomat who offered peace to Israel, would encourage Israelis to let down
their guard. Just like Missler, Robertson and Joel Rosenberg, he was sure
that Evil incarnate would soon be setting up its headquarters in Babylon,
the ‘commercial centre of the End Times’.
‘But what about that Temple?’ I asked him.
In Dr Price’s expert view the establishment of the Israelis’ sovereignty
over Jerusalem would not be complete until they exercised full control of the
Temple Mount. ‘While Jews are forbidden to pray up there on the Temple
Mount, Israel doesn’t have the sovereignty she claims. Without control of
the Temple Mount and a new Temple, Isaiah 2: 2 can’t come to pass.’ *
* ‘It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the
Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above
the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it.’
Talking Texan 267
Price believed that the Israelis’ August 2003 decision, that Jews must be free
to visit the Temple Mount, constituted a significant step in the direction
of Armageddon and the Second Coming. He’s cautiously enthused in one
of his books:
Will [that decision] lead to other stages that will, in turn, conclude with
the rebuilding of the Temple?
If so, then these are exciting times in which to live, for we may very well
witness the happenings that will climax in this momentous event.10
Agreeing that the cause of the Temple was very dear to Christian
Zionists, he told me that the Temple Mount Faithful Movement (TMFM), a
small group of Israeli religious extremists intent on rebuilding the Temple,
was ‘98 per cent funded by American evangelicals’.
The TMFM’s campaign to force a change in the status quo in the
world’s most bitterly contested slice of real estate has already cost lives.
On 2 November 1990, the organisation’s second demonstration provoked
such a storm of fearful fury among Palestinians that some 3,000 converged
on their Haram al-Sharif and began pelting Jews praying below at the
Western Wall with stones. Israeli police counter-attacked first with tear
gas and then rubber bullets, but finally with live ammunition. By the end
of the day, seventeen Arabs were dead.
The TMFM’s leader, Gershon Salomon, was unrepentant. Only regretting
that Muslim blood had defiled the Temple Mount, he proclaimed that the
following year he’d be hiring a helicopter to airlift a specially dressed first
cornerstone of the new Temple directly into place. He was prevented from
doing any such thing, but he was allowed to demonstrate, a right he has
retained. Later that year, Salomon appeared as a guest on Pat Robertson’s
700 Club show, telling American evangelicals that the fight over the Temple
Mount was ‘a struggle for the redemption of the world’.11
Since 1990, Salomon has skilfully reinvented himself as a lively speaker
at prophecy conferences and churches all over the United States; Ted
Beckett heard him speak at Pastor Haggard’s mega church in Colorado
Springs in 2000, and may have contributed to Salomon’s Temple collection.
According to a website report of his last fund-raising visit to the US, in
the autumn of 2006, Salomon was moved to tears by the sight of women
donating their gold and silver jewellery to the cause.12 As I write, that
website is advertising a ten-day ‘Biblical Tour and March to the Temple
Mount’, featuring a visit to some Syrian bunkers on the Golan Heights,
a meeting with Sondra Oster Baras in her West Bank settlement and a
Temple Mount Faithful march around Jerusalem.
268 1948 onwards
In the past five years, Salomon has stepped up his campaign by regularly
loading two vast cornerstones of the new Temple, weighing 6.5 tons, on to
a flat-bed truck decked out in Israeli flags and banners. Driving it slowly
around Jerusalem, he uses a megaphone to exhort his fellow Israelis to
reclaim the Temple Mount.
Dr Price admitted he was ‘frightened by some of the positions of the
Temple Mount Faithful’, but he fully endorsed his friend Salomon’s efforts
to make ready for the great rebuilding with his cornerstones, his architect’s
plan of the Temple, his ritual vessels and priest’s robes. He reminded me
that TMFM was not the only Israeli group preparing the way for a new
Temple. The Temple Institute, located in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s
Old City, whose exhibition of carefully replicated vessels and garments I’d
visited while on Chuck Missler’s Holy Land tour, is even further advanced
in its preparations. Similarly reliant on American evangelicals for funding,
though not as provocatively urgent about its business as the TMFM, the
twenty-year-old Temple Institute has hit international headlines with its
quest to breed a perfect heifer whose ritual sacrifice will supply the ashes
necessary for the purification of, first the builders, and then the future
priests of the Temple. According to divine instructions detailed in Numbers
19, the animal must be without a single blemish and red from head to toe.
If there were nine such heifers between the late thirteenth century bc when
Moses lived and the destruction of the Second Temple in ad 70, there have
been none at all in the intervening almost two thousand years.
In full agreement that the Temple will never be rebuilt without the
birth of such a beast, a few Christian Zionists have been lending a helping
hand.
In 1990, Clyde Lott from Mississippi, a Pentecostalist preacher and
breeder of Red Angus cattle, visited the Temple Institute and told its
Orthodox rabbis that their best chance of breeding a kosher red heifer
lay with him shipping two hundred of his best breeding cows to Israel,
at a cost of $2,000 a head. They discussed where to raise the herd and
considered the biblical suitability of the Golan Heights and the West Bank
settlement of Shiloh but four years passed before one of the institute’s
rabbis visited Lott at his Mississippi ranch, inspected his stock and found
it good. And still the negotiations went on.
By 1998, Lott had decided that Israel needed, not 200, but 50,000 Red
Anguses and had set up a charity devoted to blessing Israel with an entirely
fresh national herd. Touring the country like Hayseed Stephens, he spoke at
churches, prophecy conferences and on Christian TV, collecting Christian
Zionist dollars wherever he went. Donors were invited ‘to sponsor the
purchase of “1 red heifer – $1,000.00”, a half-heifer or quarter, or “1
Talking Texan 269
* Jewish interest in rebuilding the Temple is growing. A May 1983 poll found that
only 18 per cent of Israelis wanted a new Temple. On 18 July 2002 the Jerusalem
Post reported that 53 per cent of Israelis – 87 per cent of religious Jews, most
Sephardi Middle Eastern Jews and 63 per cent of Russian Jews – favoured the
idea.
270 1948 onwards
The Battle for the Last Days of the Temple. I had studied its photograph
of him smilingly shaking hands with Rabbi Benny Elon, mainstay of CAC,
leader of the radical right-wing National Union Party (which boasts seven
seats in the Knesset) and author of a peace plan that involves clearing
the West Bank of Palestinians by transferring them all into neighbouring
Muslim countries. An ‘Arab Palestinian state never was and never will be!’
is Elon’s catchphrase.16 A firm favourite with American Christian Zionists,
Elon has adopted a speaking style that skilfully blends American televan-
gelist with a hint of Fiddler on the Roof’s winsome Topol. Hammering
home the ‘blessings’ and ‘curses’ idea, he casually demolishes a main tenet
of Christian belief; the way he tells it, the Jews and Israel – rather than
Jesus – are the only ‘Way’ by which Christians could ‘come to God’.17
That photo alone demolished Dr Price’s prefatory claim to have treated
the Temple question, in all its political, historical and prophetical aspects,
with objectivity.
It had struck me then that Christian Zionism and academia make
uncomfortable bedfellows, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that Price was
as anxious as his fellow academic and friend, Dr Tommy Ice at Liberty
University’s Pre-Trib Research Center, to distance himself from Texan-
talkers like Pastor Hagee, Chuck Missler, or Bill Koenig, the White
House correspondent, whom he’d recently encountered at a prophecy
conference.
I went on the attack: ‘Dr Price, I hope you won’t mind my being frank,’
I began. ‘I understand that you see yourself as a more reputable, serious
sort of Christian Zionist. What I can’t understand is what you’re doing
sharing platforms with people like Koenig, and Hal Lindsey who calls for
the obliteration of Syria, and Missler who says Islam’s “Satanic”? You
know everything that’s written and said about Israel–Palestine is read and
heard in the Middle East, that words can be a matter of life and death
out there. Your words may not be quite as inflammatory as Missler’s or
Koenig’s, but from an outsider’s point of view you’re all “blessing” Israel
on the basis of your particular understanding of a religious text ...’
Dr Price looked taken aback, though whether by the vigour of my
assault or its content, I couldn’t say. It transpired that, though he wouldn’t
apologise for his Christian Zionism, he did understand the power of his
words. A Jordanian acquaintance had warned him that the contents of
his books were infamous enough in Muslim Jordan to make it dangerous
for him to visit that country. Now he admitted to a worry that my book
might endanger him.
‘If you have to fault me for something,’ he said, defensively, ‘you can
fault me for my following of the Bible.’
Talking Texan 271
I went back on my Texan offensive: ‘But the Bible says “blessed are
the peacemakers”, doesn’t it? By encouraging people to view everything
happening in the Middle East as the fulfilment of prophecy, you and all
those “wackos”, as your friend Dr Ice calls them, are doing everything in
your power to curse peacemakers.’
‘There are greater issues than peace,’ was his answer.
I might have hit back hard again with ‘Try telling that to the majority
of Palestinians and Israelis! It’s their country, not yours to meddle in with
your dream of war.’ I might have said a lot of things, but I’d have been
missing his point if I had.
Peace couldn’t be Dr Price’s Christian priority because the combined
forces of bible prophecy, 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Iran’s
nuclear ambitions have hurled him and millions like him back to Munich
1938. Christian Zionists like Price are now more receptive than ever before
to the sound of alarm bells rung by Jews whom history has taught to
expect and prepare for the very worst, by Jews who dare not risk being, as
Joel C. Rosenberg put it, ‘blindsided by evil’ again. The West Bank settler
Sondra Oster Baras had rung those bells during our long talk in that
West Jerusalem cafe. Netanyahu’s new refrain was ‘It’s 1938 – and Iran is
Germany’, only worse, because where Hitler started a war and then built
a nuclear weapon, Iran is going nuclear before the war starts.18
In Dr Price’s eyes, anyone refusing to combat the grand evil of Islamic
fundamentalism with pre-emptive strikes against Muslim countries, anyone
seeking to resolve the Israel–Palestine conflict by insisting Israel abide by
UN resolutions and give up land is another Neville Chamberlain.
Our three hour-long lunch over at last, he politely walked me out to the
parking lot, anxiously repeating that if I had to fault him on anything,
it should be on his faithful adherence to Bible truth. I made him no
promises.
Relieved to be alone again, I retuned the car radio away from a Christian
station that was urgently calling for a national revival before the onset of
Armageddon, and sped on down the freeway, towards San Antonio and
Pastor Hagee.
Right where my map said Pastor Hagee’s church should be, on the north
side of the junction of San Antonio’s outer loop and Stone Oak Parkway,
was a gigantic, pale stone complex of buildings without many windows;
a military or police academy, or perhaps a prison, I decided. I passed by it
again, and again, searching for a cross, checking and rechecking the map,
before finally spotting a tall column at the top of which was a sign saying
272 1948 onwards
real angry that we stopped before Baghdad. This President Bush’s finished
that job, so I’d vote for him again if he could run again.’
‘But the war in Iraq’s not going well, is it?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘but that’s because we’re holding back. We’re not going
in there hard enough. I’m talking annihilation! I don’t like killing women
and children but that’s the only way you win wars. It’s gotta hurt them!
A man with twenty-four kids – you know how they breed out there – he
can afford to lose a couple ...’ I recognised these sentiments as a bald
statement of the average Christian Zionist’s position with regard to the
war they backed so sturdily; President Bush, they suspect, was browbeaten
by politically correct liberals into exercising restraint when all-out force
was what was needed to get the job done.
‘And how should Iran be handled, d’you think?’
‘Excuse me, ma’am, while I check out what this guy wants – I don’t
recognise his car or his face,’ he said, before leaning out of his window to
interrogate the husband of a woman who worked in Hagee’s office.
‘You were asking about Iran,’ he continued. ‘We need to make a glass
bowl of Iran.’
‘Sorry?’
‘We need to nuke that country!’
It was a while before I worked out that when radioactive material reacts
with sand it produces glass. Thanking him for the ride, I headed towards
the entrance he indicated, for my meeting with his equally trigger-happy
pastor.
Just to the left of the door was what looked like a portion of Jerusalem’s
Western Wall, with large enough cracks between each block of limestone
for the Christian Zionist faithful to insert their prayer requests, just as
Orthodox Jews do in Jerusalem. Its inscription was pray for jerusalem
– they shall prosper that love thee.19
Pastor Hagee was lucky to be an American living in the twenty-first
century. He’d have been burnt at the stake in Elizabethan England, branded
with a J for ‘judaiser’ or hurled into prison by King James I, and consigned
to a lunatic asylum by George III, I thought, as I walked down a corridor
lined with framed portraits of each of Israel’s prime ministers towards a
suite of offices. There I found another photograph: a large full-colour one
of Hagee posed with the disgraced House Majority leader Tom DeLay, in
front of Capitol Hill.
Hagee was running a few minutes late, I was told; he was with a
Belgian journalist, and an Australian film crew was next in line. An
274 1948 onwards
anxious assistant was opening one door to bustle people into his inner
sanctum, and another to bustle them out again. ‘Only twenty minutes,’ she
muttered, when at last I entered a dim-lit room lined from floor to ceiling
with bookshelves, complete with a ladder to reach the highest tomes.
A wider, shorter version of Jerry Falwell with a cheery smile, metal-
rimmed spectacles and short grey hair, Hagee rose, affable and welcoming,
from behind a gigantic wooden desk. He bid me be seated opposite him,
in one of two lower chairs, placed on either side of a lower table. I was
back in Russia again, where every state official I’d ever met had asserted
his power and dignity in the same furniture arrangement.
‘Victoria! My youngest granddaughter’s name!’ he said, pointing to his
screen-saver’s fuzzy image of a newborn.
Good, I thought. Hagee was a Christian Zionist in the entertaining
style of Ted Beckett, not another Dr Price who’d waste my precious twenty
minutes on Bible chapter and verse. But we were soon losing time on
pleasantries. It was a while before I could get him off the subject of his
family and the fact that he was the forty-seventh Hagee to preach the
Word of God.
I heard about his first visit to Israel in 1978, about how he’d gone
there a tourist and left a Zionist, equipped with a stack of books and a
Jewish prayer shawl, and overpowered by the thought that ‘If you take
away the Jewish contribution, there would be no Christianity’. He told me
that he’d had three meetings with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and
known every one of his successors. He explained how the international
outcry following Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s nuclear facility at Osirak in
1981 had inspired him to hold a first ‘Night to Honour Israel’ here in San
Antonio. I learned that the previous year’s event had been held in Israel,
for a change, on an Israeli air-force base. He’d followed it up with a speech
to the Knesset, he said, in which he’d pledged evangelicals’ unwavering
support for Israel and told his audience that ‘If America forces Israel to
give away part of the land of Israel to the enemies of Israel, then the
judgment will come to America.’ 20
Hagee often talks Texan; he’s told his Cornerstone congregation that
Israel is entitled to be ‘ten times’ the size it is today – from the Nile to the
Euphrates.21 Since time was short, I talked some Texan too: ‘Pastor Hagee,
I’ve read your Jerusalem Countdown. Could you explain what a Christian
pastor of a church in Texas is doing discussing the details of Iran’s nuclear
capability with anonymous Israeli sources, and then calling for a war
against Iran in a best-seller with a mushroom cloud on its cover?’
Hagee told me about his ‘very dear friendship’ with Benjamin Netanyahu
who’d been guest of honour at his 2001 Night to Honour Israel and about
Talking Texan 275
* Hagee has imagined the Rapture in his Attack on America: ‘homes of believers
will stand empty, with supper dishes on the dining tables, food bubbling in the
microwave and water running in the sink’.
276 1948 onwards
it has to be rebuilt? Revelation 21: 2 says the New Jerusalem will descend
from heaven, ready-made, and that’s where Jesus’s governmental facilities
on earth will be ...’
‘But what about the Antichrist? Doesn’t he have to be worshipped in
a new Temple?’
‘He doesn’t need any temple! He can erect an image of himself up there
on the Temple Mount any time he wants,’ said Hagee, with a grin.
‘What?’ I laughed. ‘Right there, beside the Dome of the Rock?’
‘That place’ll be destroyed in an earthquake!’ he chuckled.
us, ‘You’ll never be the same once you decide to stand up and speak up
for Israel!’
At last, he introduced the evening’s star guest, CUFI board member and
‘one of the great voices in America for the values that make this nation
great – Gary Bauer!’
The final speaker of Eckstein’s ‘Washington Briefing’ banquet, the coiner
of the ‘two shining cities upon a hill’ line, Bauer was on top rhetorical
form again. After telling us how correct President Bush had been to call
Islamic fundamentalism ‘Islamo-fascism’, he identified the enemy’s goal as
the ‘destruction of Judaeo-Christian civilisation’ and plunged us all back
to 1938 by conjuring up a darkened Europe in which ‘the snake-head of
Jew hatred has slithered out from under its rock’. Bauer earned a standing
ovation for telling us he yearned for a prime minister of Israel to stand up
and simply say ‘this land is ours because God gave it to us’. His well-worn
bluster about the enemy being badly mistaken in doubting Americans and
Israelis had the stomach for a fight won him another, and his trusty old
‘two shining cities upon a hill’ line a third.
Pastor Hagee lightened the load of righteous foreboding that had
descended on that giant auditorium by promising us a fun-packed weekend.
Blessing Israel was not all gloom and doom. Outside in the parking lot,
near the Israeli trade tent and the fair rides and bouncy castles he’d laid
on for the kids, we’d find twelve Jewish Feast of Tabernacles booths – each
of them manned by members of the different Jewish tribes into which he’d
divided his congregation. There’d be candy-floss for sale in one, cookies
in another, burgers in another ...
While hordes of children frolicked outside in the parking lot, enjoying the
warm sunshine and the Feast of Tabernacles fast food, more than 5,000
adults who’d paid $25 each for the privilege of attending a three-hour-long
‘Middle East Briefing’ patiently waited in line to pass through airport-style
security checks, before taking their seats in the church.
A former CIA director, a member of that neo-con nursery PNAC and
an ardent advocate of the war against Iraq and even of bombing Syria,
Jim Woolsey was first to speak. Likening Israel’s position as an ally in
the Middle East to that of Britain in Nazi Europe in 1940, he explained
that ‘Israel is our essential ally in an essential part of the world that has
turned to totalitarianism.’ He didn’t mention God or prophecy once.
Nor did the next speaker, a lively Lebanese Christian, who preferred to
call herself a ‘Lebanese Zionist’. Instead, Brigitte Gabriel energised the
audience with hair-raising tales of her family’s ill-treatment at the hands
Talking Texan 279
of Muslims, before tenderly recounting her discovery that Jews were ‘able
to love and show compassion to their enemy’. Her angry demands that we
all ‘throw political correctness in the garbage where it belongs’, understand
the danger presented by Hezbollah’s eleven US cells and start ‘tackling
the cancer killing our country’, were greeted by a storm of applause and
whistles.
Lieutenant-General Moshe Ya’alon, chief of Israeli intelligence under
Yitzhak Rabin and the man responsible for putting down the second
Intifada of 2001 to 2005, had been flown from Israel to tell us ‘this war
is about values – they sanctify death, we sanctify life; we like knowledge,
they like ignorance’. That went down well, and there were anguished
cries of ‘No! No!’ when he mentioned that the European Union was still
trying to pressure Israel into trading land for peace in order to provide
Palestinians with a state. A loud chorus of cheers greeted his promise of
‘another round’ in Israel’s summer war against Hezbollah. ‘Where are the
Europeans today?’ he asked with a final flourish. ‘Sleeping, like before
World War Two!’
‘Europe is not only sleeping,’ Dr Joseph Ginat, a Jewish-American
speaker, corrected him, ‘Europe is in a coma!’ Why? Because ‘it has given
up its Christian identity’. A second Arab speaker, a member of the PLO
turned Christian Zionist, named Walid Shoebat, whose works I’d seen on
sale at the Hal Lindsey prophecy conference in Minneapolis a year earlier,
made a speech as emotively Zionist as Brigitte Gabriel’s. Shoebat won a
standing ovation for denouncing Muslims in general and his own father in
particular as liars, and for quoting Joel’s prohibition on Jews ceding any
of their promised land.22
Chilled by all that hatred, nauseated by a surfeit of propaganda, I
escaped out into the sunshine. Three male members of the church’s tribe
of Shimon were doing a brisk trade in chopped barbecue sandwiches.
One told me that he didn’t know the rights and wrongs of developments
in the Middle East but he did trust Pastor Hagee ‘to work out what is
God’s will in the matter’. I asked him how easy it was for him to access
Hagee in person, and discovered that the Cornerstone boasts a military-
style hierarchy and discipline: ‘Simple!’ he said. ‘There’s only two guys to
get by: the leader of my tribe and one other.’ I spotted and greeted the
policeman who wanted to make a glass bowl of Iran. A man dispensing
bottled water, a retired bank manager from the Midwest and a member
of Hagee’s CUFI, told me he was waiting for Hagee to indicate – by email
announcement – which way to vote in the forthcoming mid-terms.
While I munched on my sandwich and watched a display of Israeli
dancing, it occurred to me that American Christian Zionism’s influence
280 1948 onwards
might be negligible were it not for the fact that so many of its noisiest
exponents were implicitly trusted churchmen. Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye,
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were all pastors. Even the not so charismatic
Dr Randall Price co-pastored at San Marcos’s Grace Bible Church.
There were all kinds of power on display at Hagee’s 25th Night to Honor
Israel. Guest of honour and keynote speaker was Malcolm Hoenlein,
head of the most powerful Jewish organisation in America, a person
once described as ‘the most influential private citizen in foreign-policy
making’.25 Why should Hagee even think of changing his tune when he’d
recently convinced no less a person than the Executive Vice-Chairman of
the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations
(CPMAJO) that his blessing of Israel was a boon?
Hoenlein’s presence there that night counted for as much as Hagee’s
meetings with White House officials and President Bush, and Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert’s visits to Cornerstone. The most energetically
committed of the fifty-one Jewish groups making up Hoenlein’s CPMAJO
happen to be the most hawkishly Zionist, and Hoenlein is their able
and tireless champion.* Where AIPAC concentrates its pro-Israel efforts
on Congress, Hoenlein has excellent access to the executive branch of
government. His organisation represents a fourth powerful pro-Israel lobby
at the White House, to add to those of the Christian Zionists, the neo-cons
and AIPAC. Hoenlein is as convinced as Netanyahu and President Olmert
that President Ahmadinejad of Iran represents as great a threat to Israel
and the rest of the democratic world as Hitler ever did. Just like them,
Hoenlein believes that America must be prevented from soliciting Iran’s
and Syria’s help with the pacification of Iraq. The price Iran would exact
for that urgently needed co-operation would be the freedom to continue
to develop her nuclear capability. Israel first, but the rest of the world in
time, would pay the price for that compromise, they believe.
With popular disgust at the failure of the neo-con project in Iraq looking
set to decide the mid-term elections in favour of the Democrats in a
fortnight’s time and all appetite for reordering the Middle East at the barrel
of a gun fast dissipating, it was perhaps not so surprising that Hoenlein had
travelled all the way to San Antonio. He’d come to rally members of the
one sizeable non-Jewish constituency in the world that could still be relied
* The organisation represents 1.5 million Reform Jews and 1.5 million
Conservative Jews, whose combined liberal weight is outweighed by that of
600,000 Orthodox Jews and numerous smaller right-wing organisations, such as
the Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA) and Friends of Likud.
282 1948 onwards
on to urge war and more war, to support a Greater Israel, to see things the
neo-con, the President Bush, the right-wing Israeli, way.
A sober, elegant speaker, Hoenlein began with a joke and moved on to
profusely thank Hagee’s wife, Diana, for recently leading ‘thousands of CUFI
members’ to the UN building in New York to picket President Ahmadinejad.
He was at pains to point out that Israel’s war against Hezbollah was part
of a necessary war against Ahmadinejad, whose famous talk of wiping
Israel off the map had turned it into a war that involved everyone because,
as everyone knew, ‘those who hate the Jews never stop there’.
If Hoenlein was a big catch, Pastor Hagee had plenty of other reasons
to be joyful that night. ‘God TV’ was broadcasting the entire occasion live,
worldwide. He had video footage of the Vice-Prime-Minister Shimon Peres
describing his activities on Israel’s behalf as ‘the best help Israel could have
hoped for’, and some more, of Benjamin Netanyahu, reminding everyone
that ‘the rise of the Jewish state would not have been possible without
Christian Zionism’. To cap it all, he had cheques totalling $7 million to
donate to worthy Israeli causes, including half a million for the West Bank
settlement of Ariel, a million for Jewish immigration from the former
Soviet Union and Ethiopia, and $3 million for an orphanage.
And, as if all that weren’t enough, he had a packed programme of
entertainment in store for us. It kicked off with the ‘Star Spangled Banner’
and the Hatikvah, but that was only the start. Dancers dressed in stetsons,
Davy Crockett hats and red neckerchiefs cavorted about the stage singing
‘Next Year in Jerusalem’. Hagee Junior sang us a ‘song of Zion’. Two
soldiers, one in US army camouflage, the other wearing a prayer shawl
over his uniform, walked to centre-stage, shook hands and embraced.
The auditorium lights went off and the entire choir processed around the
church with candles, while a God-like, disembodied voice boomed ‘Every
drop of Jewish blood is sacred.’ Diana Hagee made a brief appearance
dressed in the colours of the Israeli flag.
At last, it was Hagee’s turn to speak. After recalling that he’d sent
out 150 invitations to his first Night to Honor Israel and received only
one reply, he told us that God had now performed a ‘major miracle’ by
facilitating Nights to Honour Israel all over the US and even Canada.
A Toronto event had raised half a million dollars for Israel. Next, he
reiterated his wish to see Israel repeat its attack on Osirak in the shape
of an attack on Iran.
For Pastor Hagee there was no more righteously Christian way of
addressing the complex tragedy of the Middle East, and no better means
of assuaging the sad terror that God might no longer be blessing America,
than by talking Texan.
Talking Texan 283
‘So here’s the scene: in Israel, a stalled Zionist project, in the United
States, a neo-con administration around a born-again president and
a mobilised and growing Christian Zionist population – courted
assiduously for years by Binyamin Netanyahu.
‘It is clear to many people that the influence of the Zionist project on
the ideology, the attitude and the modus operandi of the United States
is doing major harm to the entire world. This can be seen in its most
flagrant form in the actions and preaching of the Christian Zionists in
the United States, this very active population of some 30 million who
actually yearn for and work towards promoting Armageddon and the
end of the world.’ 5
Part One
Chapter 1: ‘One Book of the Whole Bible’
1. Henry Finch, The World’s Great Restauration or the Calling of the Iewes and
(with them) of all the Nations and Kingdomes of the Earth to the Faith of
Christ, London, Edward Griffin, 1621, p. B4.
2. Joseph Hall, The Revelation Unrevealed, London, John Bisse, 1650, p. 103.
3. Ibid.
4. Finch, op. cit., title page.
5. Barbara Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age
to Balfour, London, Phoenix Press, 2001 (1956), p. 80.
6. Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-century Revolution,
London, Allen Lane, 1993, p. 5.
7. J. F. McGregor and B. Reay, eds, Radical Religion in the English Revolution,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 2.
8. L. Tomson, trans., The New Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ Translated out
of Greeke by Thedore Beza etc., London, Christopher Barker, 1596.
9. Ibid., pp. 181–2.
10. Finch, op. cit., p. B5.
11. Isaiah 49: 6.
12. Tuchman, op. cit., p. 121.
13. Revd Alexander Grosart, ed., Life and Works of Robert Greene, Vol. 1, 1881–6,
Huth Library or Elizabethan–Jacobean unique or very rare books.
14. L. Stephen and Sir S. Lee, eds, Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 1, 1917,
entry for Henry Finch.
15. David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England,
1603–1655, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982, p. 23.
16. Franz Kobler, ‘Sir Henry Finch (1558–1625) and the First English Advocates of
the Restoration of the Jews to Palestine’, Jewish Historical Society Transactions,
Vol. 16, 1945–51, p. 111.
Notes to pages 34–41 291
17. Douglas J. Culver, Albion and Ariel: British Puritanism and the Birth of Political
Zionism, New York, Peter Lang, 1995, p. 127.
18. Hall, op. cit., p. 6.
19. Katz, op. cit., p. 109.
20. F. D. Dow, Radicalism in the English Revolution, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1985, p. 62.
21. Thomas Draxe, The World’s Resurrection or the Generall Calling of the Jews,
London, 1608, p. 51.
22. Ibid., p. 77.
23. Ibid., p. 88.
24. Culver, op. cit., p. 78.
25. Thomas Brightman, A Revelation of the Revelation, etc., Amsterdam, 1615,
p. 549.
26. Ibid., p. 551.
27. Ibid., p. A4.
28. Ibid., p. A3.
29. Finch, op. cit.
30. Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, London, Fourth Estate, 1997,
p. 160.
31. Thomas Fuller, Pisgah Sight of Palestine and the Confines Thereof with the
History of the Old and New Testament Acted thereon, London, John William,
1650.
32. Wilfrid R. Prest, ‘The Art of Law and the Law of God: Sir Henry Finch
1558–1625’, in Donald Pennington, ed., Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in
17th-century History Presented to Christopher Hill, Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1978, p. 115.
33. J. P. Kenyon, The Stuarts: A Study in English Kingship, London, Fontana/Collins,
1979 (1970), p. 31.
34. Culver, op. cit., p. 101.
35. Kobler, op. cit., p. 114.
10. R. C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop, Vol. 1, Boston, 1869, p. 430.
11. Ibid., p. 235.
12. Shalom Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American
Imagination, Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 2004, p. 29.
13. Young, op. cit., p. 250.
14. Zakai, op. cit., p. 65.
15. Mather, op. cit., p. 79.
16. Ibid., p. 80.
17. Ibid., p. 266.
18. E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of
the Puritans to the Civil War, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2003, p. 27.
19. Ibid., p. 32.
20. William J. Scheik, ed., Two Mather Biographies: Life and Death and Parentator,
Cranbury, NJ, Associated University Presses, 1989, pp. 41–2.
21. Ibid., p. 9.
22. Mather, op. cit., p. 12.
23. Revd D. de Sola Pool, Hebrew Learning among the Puritans of New England
prior to 1700, New York, Publications of the American Jewish Historical
Society, 20, 1911, p. 55.
24. Ibid., p. 57.
25. Young, op. cit., p. 133.
26. Richard W. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War,
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 45.
27. Evangelical Repository, VII, Vol. 1, August 1816.
28. De Sola Pool, op. cit., p. 60.
29. Ibid.
30. Deuteronomy 28: 64.
31. John Freely, The Lost Messiah: The Astonishing Story of Sabbatai Sevi, whose
Messianic Movement Emerged from the Mysticism of the Kabbalah, London,
Penguin-Viking, 2001, p. 68.
32. Reiner Smolinski, ed., The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather, Athens, GA,
University of Georgia Press, 1995, p. 23.
33. Goldman, op. cit., p. 132.
34. Smolinski, op. cit., p. 68.
35. Scheik, op. cit., p. 127.
36. Smolinski, op. cit., p. 27.
37. Ibid., p. 29.
38. Ibid., p. 30.
39. Mel Scult, Millennial Expectations and Jewish Liberties: A Study of the Efforts
to Convert the Jews in Britain, up to the mid-Nineteenth Century, Leiden,
E. J. Brill, 1978, p. 50.
40. Stephen Sizer, Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon?, Leicester, Inter-
Varsity Press, 2004, p. 150.
41. Acts 10: 34–5.
Notes to pages 51–9 293
43. John Pollock, Moody: A Biography, Grand Rapids, MI, Baker Books, 1997
(1963), p. 23.
44. Sandeen, op. cit., p. 173.
45. James F. Findlay, Dwight L. Moody: American Evangelist, Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1969, p. 409.
46. Ibid., p. 253.
47. Dwight L. Moody, New Sermons, New York, Henry S. Goodspeed, 1880, p. 535.
48. Jane Lampman, ‘The End of the World’, Christian Science Monitor, 18.2.2004.
49. Pollock, op. cit., p. 41.
50. Ibid., p. 146.
51. Ibid., p. 142.
52. Darby, op. cit. Vol. 2, p. 193.
53. Ibid., p. 398.
54. Genesis 22: 17.
55. Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Politics of Apocalypse, The History and Influence of
Christian Zionism, Oxford, One World, 2006, p. 99.
56. Yaakov Ariel, On Behalf of Israel: American Fundamentalist Attitudes towards
Jews, Judaism and Zionism 1865–1945, New York, Carlson, 1991, p. 179.
57. Timothy P. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became
Israel’s Best Friend, Grand Rapids, MI, Baker Academic, 2004, p. 26.
58. Topeka Daily Capital, 27.8.1881.
59. Dr C. I. Scofield, Prophecy Made Plain: Addresses on Prophecy, London,
Pickering & Inglis, n.d., p. 12.
60. Ibid., p. 60.
61. Ibid., p. 128.
62. Ibid., p. 113.
63. Revd C. I. Scofield, DD, ed., The Scofield Reference Bible, New York, Oxford
University Press, 1909, preface.
64. William E. Cox, An Examination of Dispensationalism, Philadelphia, PA,
Presbyterian & Reformed, n.d., p. 56.
65. James Barr, Escaping from Fundamentalism, London, SCM, 1984, p. 6.
66. Ibid.
67. www.amfi.org/errandboy.htm
68. William E. Blackstone, Jesus is Coming, London, Fleming H. Revell, 1908,
p. 235.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Zechariah 13: 8.
72. Persecution of the Jews in Russia 1881 (reprinted from The Times), London,
Spottiswoode, 1882, p. 13.
73. A. E. Thompson, A Century of Jewish Missions, Chicago, Fleming H. Revell,
1902, p. 273.
74. Hilton Obenzinger, ‘In the Shadow of “God’s Sun-dial”’, Stanford Electronic
Humanities Review, Vol. 5, issue 1, 27.2.1996, p. 6.
75. Ibid., p. 14.
76. Ibid., p. 9.
77. Ibid., p. 10.
78. Davis, America and the Holy Land, pp. 15–17.
298 Notes to pages 97–107
79. Adam M. Garfinkle, ‘On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase’,
Middle Eastern Studies, London, Oct. 1991, n. 4, p. 539.
the Creation of the Modern Middle East, London, Phoenix Press, 2000 (1989),
p. 274.
37. Raphael Patai, ed., Herzl Year Book: Essays in Zionist History and Thought,
Vol. 4, New York, Herzl Press, 1961–2, p. 234.
38. David Pileggi, The Meeting that Changed the World, http://www.c4israel.org/
articles/english/e-u–00–1-pile-meetchangworld.htm
39. Michael Polowetzky, Jerusalem Recovered: Victorian Intellectuals and the Birth
of Modern Zionism, Westport, CT, Praeger, 1995, pp. 57–8.
40. http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/news/041004a.asp (accessed 24.8.2005).
41. Laurence Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, Edinburgh, William Blackwood &
Sons, 1880, p. 503.
42. Margaret Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant, Edinburgh,
William Blackwood & Sons, 1891, Vol. 2, p. 169.
43. Albert M. Hyamson, British Projects for the Restoration of the Jews, London,
1917, p. 30.
44. Henry Finch, The World’s Great Restauration or the Calling of the Iewes and
(with them) of all the Nations and Kingdomes of the Earth to the Faith of
Christ, London, Edward Griffin, 1621.
45. L. Oliphant, op. cit., p. 293.
46. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, London, Wordsworth, 1996 (1876), p. 445.
47. Ibid., p. 393.
48. Ibid., p. 668.
49. Ibid., p. 669.
50. ‘Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming’, Westminster Review, Oct. 1885, p. 455;
George Eliot, quoted in Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,
Grand Rapids, MI, William B. Erdmans, 1994, p. 143.
51. Ibid., p. 121.
52. Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams, George Eliot: Her Jewish Associations – A
Centenary Tribute, London, Jewish Historical Society of England Transactions
1974–1978, 1979, p. 59.
53. Spectator, 9.9.1876.
54. Ruth Levitt, George Eliot: The Jewish Connection, Jerusalem, Massada, 1975,
p. 149.
55. Abrahams, op. cit., p. 60.
56. Polowetzky, op. cit., p. 92.
57. Abrahams, op. cit., p. 54.
58. Polowetzky, op. cit., p. 79.
59. Ibid., p. 80.
60. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1949, p. 143.
61. Ibid., p. 144.
62. www.zionism-israel.com/hdoc/Montagu_balfour.htm
63. Fromkin, op. cit., p. 294.
64. Blanche E. C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour, London, Hutchinson, 1939,
p. 325.
65. Ibid., p. 86.
66. Weizmann, op. cit., p. 200.
67. Ibid., p. 226.
68. Fromkin, op. cit., p. 298.
300 Notes to pages 117–27
69. Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate,
London, Abacus, 2001 (2000), p. 36.
70. Jill Hamilton, God, Guns and Israel: Britain, the First World War and the Jews
in the Holy Land, Stroud, Sutton, 2004, p. x.
71. Trevor Wilson, ed., The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott, London, Collins, 1970,
p. 27.
72. Ibid., pp. 22–3.
73. Daphna Baram, Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel, London, Guardian
Books, 2004, p. 30.
74. Ibid., p. 38.
75. Fromkin, op. cit., pp. 269–70.
76. Wilson, op. cit, p. 255.
77. Ibid., p. 306.
78. David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, Vol. 2, New Haven, CT,
Yale University Press, 1939, p. 721.
79. Michael J. Pragai, Faith and Fulfilment: Christians and the Return to the
Promised Land, London, Valentine Mitchell, 1985, p. 87.
80. Fromkin, op. cit., p. 287.
81. Ibid., p. 247.
82. Segev, op. cit., pp. 37–8.
83. Ibid., p. 45.
84. Weizmann, op. cit., p. 20.
14. Hilton Obenzinger, ‘In the Shadow of “God’s Sun-dial”’, SEHR, Vol. 5, issue 1,
27.2.1996, p. 12.
15. Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, 1917–1956, London, Cresset
Press, 1959, p. 52.
16. Josiah C. Wedgwood, The Seventh Dominion, London, Labour Publishing, 1928,
p. 120.
17. Josiah C. Wedgwood, Memoirs of a Fighting Life, London, Hutchinson, 1941,
p. 8.
18. Joshua B. Stein, Our Great Solicitor: Josiah C. Wedgwood and the Jews,
Selinsgrove, PA, Susquehanna University Press, 1992, p. 16.
19. Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate,
London, Abacus, 2001 (2000), p. 337n.
20. Ibid., p. 138.
21. Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, New York, W. W. Norton,
2001 (2000), p. 13.
22. Stein, op. cit., p. 37.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p. 38.
25. Ibid., p. 39.
26. Ibid., p. 2.
27. C. V. Wedgwood, The Last of the Radicals, London, Jonathan Cape, 1951,
p. 244.
28. Ibid., p. 122.
29. Ibid., p. 55.
30. www.haydid.org/update1121.htm
31. Norman Rose, ed., Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale, 1936–1947, London,
Valentine Mitchell, 1973, p. 23.
32. Ibid., p. 175.
33. Ibid., p. 171.
34. Trevor Royle, Orde Wingate: Irregular Soldier, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1995, p. 110.
35. Ibid., p. 127.
36. Ibid.
37. Stein, op. cit., p. 79.
38. C. V. Wedgwood, op. cit., pp. 193–4.
39. Leonard Mosley, Gideon Goes to War: The Story of Wingate, London, Hamish
Hamilton, 1957 (1955), p. 58.
40. Stein, op. cit., p. 143.
41. Genesis 12: 3.
42. Victor E. Marsden, The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of
Zion, Clwyd, British Patriot Publishing, 1978, p. 44.
43. Ibid., p. 99.
44. Carey McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America, Little,
Brown, 1949, pp. 37–8.
45. Weber, op. cit., p. 140.
46. William Vance Trollinger, God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern
Fundamentalism, Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, p. 78.
47. Ibid., p. 151.
302 Notes to pages 140–56
Part Two
1. Grace Halsell, Forcing God’s Hand: Why Millions Pray for a Quick Rapture
– and Destruction of Planet Earth, Washington, DC, Crossroads International,
1999, p. 5.
2. www.beliefnet.com/story/208/story_20828_1.html
16. Ibid., p. 7.
17. Ibid., p. 165.
18. www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48226
19. www.hallindseyoracle.com (accessed August 2006).
20. J. G. Melton, P. C. Lucas, and J. R. Stone, eds, Prime Time Religion: An
Encyclopedia of Religious Broadcasting, Phoenix, AZ, Oryx Press, 1997, p. xi.
21. Schedule picked up by author in Revd Falwell’s St Thomas Road Church,
Lynchburg, Virginia.
22. Melton et al., op. cit., p. 57.
23. David Brog, Standing With Israel: Why Christians Support the Jewish State,
Lake Mary, FL, Front Line, 2006, p. 139.
24. Brenda E. Brasher, ed., Encyclopaedia of Fundamentalism, New York,
Routledge, 2001, p. 296.
25. Michael Massing, ‘The End of the News?’, New York Review, 1.12.2005.
26. www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030210-1.html
27. Genesis 12: 3.
28. Amos 9: 15.
29. Chris Hedges, ‘Soldiers of Christ II’, Harper’s Magazine, 30.5.2005.
30. Byron York, ‘Does Pat Robertson Matter?’, National Review, 25.8.2005.
31. Wikipedia entry for Hal Lindsey.
32. John Hagee, Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, Lake Mary, FL,
Front Line, 2006, p. 13.
33. Ibid., pp. 13–15.
34. Ibid., pp. 28–9.
35. Ibid., p. 108.
36. Ibid., p. 113.
37. Ibid., p. 101.
38. Ibid., p. 119.
39. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0607/16/lkl.01.html
40. ‘Is this the Start of World War III?’, Jerusalem Post, 17.7.2006.
41. Brog, op. cit., p. xiii.
42. Ibid., pp. 143–4.
43. Ibid., p. 151.
44. Ibid., p. 154.
45. Ibid., p. 256.
46. Norman Birnbaum, ‘Is Israel Good for the Jews?’, The Nation Online, 5.8.2006.
47. Norman Birnbaum, ‘Israel on the Potomac: Power under Pressure’, Open
Democracy Online, 25.1.2007.
48. Ibid.
49. Pat Robertson, The End of the Age, Dallas, TX, World Publishing, 1995, p. 22.
50. Ibid., p. 333.
51. Ibid., p. 335.
52. Ibid., p. 364.
53. Ibid., p. 372.
54. Henry Finch, The World’s Great Restauration or the Calling of the Iewes and
(with them) of all the Nations and Kingdomes of the Earth to the Faith of
Christ, London, Edward Griffin, 1621.
55. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last
304 Notes to pages 167–84
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Joel C. Rosenberg, The Ezekiel Option, Carol Stream, IL, Tyndale House, 2005,
p. 391.
37. Irwin Stelzer, ed., Neo-Conservatism, London, Atlantic Books, 2004, p. 105.
38. http://electronicintifada.net/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/19/5643
39. Jerusalem Post, 5.9.2006.
40. Jeremy Reynalds, ‘Arab Church Leaders Reject Christian Zionism’, ASSIST
News Agency, 12.9.2006.
41. Naim Ateek, Cedar Duaybis and Maurine Tobin, eds, Challenging Christian
Zionism: Theology, Politics and Israel/Palestine Conflict, London, Melisende,
2005, p. 17.
42. CBS, 60 Minutes, 8.6.2003, ‘Zion’s Christian Soldiers’.
43. Larry B. Stammer, ‘Evangelical Leaders Criticize Pat Robertson’, Los Angeles
Times, 7.1.2006.
44. http://ifcj.convio.net/site/survey?ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_VIEW_
REPORTS&SURVEY_ID=1180
Illustrated, 18.9.2006.
21. Sarah Pulliam, ‘Volcanic Response: Jews for Jesus Takes to New York City
Streets’, Christianity Today, 25.8.2006.
22. Larry Dorfner and Ksenia Svetlova, ‘Messianic Jews in Israel Claim 10,000’,
Jerusalem Post, 29.4.2005.
23. http://ouramericanvalues.org/press_release_article.php?print=true&id=040303
24. Irwin Stelzer, ed., Neo-conservatism, London, Atlantic Books, 2004, p. 9.
25. www.newamericancentury.org
26. Michael Lind, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of
American Politics, New York, Basic Books, 2003, p. 140.
27. Ibid.
28. Wikipedia: John Bolton.
29. Anti-war.com, 27.9.2006, ‘John Bolton and US Lawlessness’ by Jon Basil Utley.
30. Counterpunch.org 27.07.2006, ‘John Bolton’s Dual Loyalties’ by Tom Barry.
31. Ibid.
32. Ha’aretz, 5.3.2006.
33. William Koenig, Eye to Eye: Facing the Consequences of Dividing Israel,
Alexandria, VA, About Him Publishing, 2004, p. 9.
34. Ibid., pp. 28–9.
35. Ibid., p. 351.
36. Ibid., p. 353.
37. Ibid., p. 356.
38. Ibid., p. 358.
39. Ibid., p. 354.
40. Ibid., p. 359.
14. Rod Dreher, ‘Red Heifer Days’, National Review Online, 11.4.2002.
15. Sarah Posner, ‘Pastor Strangelove’, The American Prospect Online Edition,
6.6.2006.
16. Speech given at Jerusalem Summit Europe, 28.1.2007 at Methodist Central Hall,
Westminster.
17. John 14: 6.
18. Peter Hirschberg, ‘Netanyahu: It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany: Ahmadinejad is
preparing another Holocaust’, Ha’aretz, 14.11.2006.
19. Psalm 122: 6. Authorized Version.
20. Etgar Lefkovits, ‘Bibi: Evangelicals Are Israel’s Best Friends’, Jerusalem Post,
8.11.2005.
21. http://www.jewsonfirst.org/06cprint/cornerstone_print.html
22. Joel 3: 2.
23. Rabbi Barry Block, ‘Be Wary of Evangelical Support for Israel’, Jewish
Standard, 13.7.2006.
24. Rabbi Haim Beliak and Jane Hunter, ‘Christian Zionism Raises Questions
among Jewish Community’, San Antonio Express, 20.10.2006.
25. Michael Massing, ‘Deal Breakers’, American Prospect Magazine, March 2002.
Afterword
1. Ron Kampeas, ‘Falwell Left Jews with Mixed Feelings’, The Jewish Week,
18.05.07.
2. Zev Chafets, A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists and
One Man’s Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance,
New York, HarperCollins, 2007, pp. 207–8.
3. ‘Doing it by the Book’, Economist, 3.3.2007.
4. Badih Chayban, ‘Nasrallah Alleges “Christian Zionist” Plot’, Daily Star,
Lebanon, 23.10.2002.
5. http://zionism-israel.com/israel_news/2006/11/egyptian-view-of-israel-heart-of-
matter.html
6. www.opendemocracy.net/articles/ViewPopUpArticle.jsp?id=1&article
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Index
67–8, 70, 72, 81, 83, 85, 187, 239, 254, 257, 263, 273, 275–6,
204, 215, 232, 240, 286 279, 282–3
Eastern Orthodox 11, 19, 67, 72, 94 Church of England 29, 31, 32, 34, 63,
Reformed (Protestant) 22, 31, 32, 98, 99, 123
44–5, 68, 70, 83, 85, 87, 98, Restorationist leanings of 101, 123
125, 138, 142, 162, 182, 202, Churchill, Winston 116
244 Clifford, Clark 142–3
Baptist 90, 92, 140, 161, 177, 181–2, Clinton, President Bill 159, 166, 193–4,
186, 206, 238, 239, 247, 264 234, 285
Calvinist 29–32, 62, 91, 162, 263, 286 Clinton, Hillary 166, 179, 289
Evangelical 6, 41, 54–5, 65–6, 68, 82, Cold War 145, 154, 156, 178, 201, 206
85, 89, 92, 99, 178, 184, 190, Concerned Women for America 183
196–7, 201, 202, 207, 224, 230, Conference of Presidents of Major
233, 238, 243, 263, 268, 274, American Jewish Organisations
286 (CPMAJO) 281–2, 288
Methodist 54, 76, 123 Colorado Springs, CO 201–11
Mormon Church of the Latter Day Cotton, John 42–5, 47, 48, 123
Saints 76–7, 285 Council for National Policy (CNP)
Nonconformist 117–19, 122, 128, 197–200, 207, 247
132, 234 Policy Counsel 199
Pentecostal 206, 268 Cromwell, Oliver 31, 35, 46
Seventh Day Adventists 264 Crowley, Reverend Dale 146
Unitarian 55, 82, 117–18 Culture Wars (USA) 151, 161
Christians United for Israel (CUFI) Cyprus 106, 110
221–2, 234, 247, 257–8, 275–9,
282, 286 Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) 154,
Christian Zionism 2–3, 6, 226, 228 183
and ‘Council for National Damascus Incident 68
Policy’(CNP) 197–200, 250, Darby, John Nelson 61–3, 67, 75, 77,
285 80–8, 104, 123, 145, 150, 256
and financial support for Israel 211, Darwinism 84, 87
212, 231–2, 234, 267–8, 282 Dayan, General Moshe 133, 189, 209
and Holy Land tours 1–23, 149, 160, DeLay, Tom 220, 233, 234, 239, 248,
192, 224, 226, 229, 243, 266 257, 273, 284
and Likud 190–4 Deutsch, Emmanuel Menachem 113
and militarism 11, 14–15, 156–8, Dickson family 78, 83, 104
162–3, 168–71, 178, 181, 185–6, Didion, Joan 171–2
188–93, 201–2, 205, 215, 226, Disraeli, Benjamin (‘Dizzy’) 109–10, 114,
249, 274 119
millenarian aspect of 3, 146–7, 216, Tancred 109, 119
248, 251, 288 Dobson, Reverend James (see Focus on
and ‘Moral Majority Inc.’187 the Family) 200, 207–9, 239, 247,
and Republican Party 184–200, 221, 248
233–4 Dome of the Rock 1, 18, 269, 277
and Israeli settlements 3, 187, 191, Draxe, Thomas 35
193, 210–12 The World’s Resurrection or the
and US foreign policy 5, 172–6, 178, General Calling of the Jews 35
184, 187, 193–5, 220, 222, 238, Dreyfus Affair 100
Index 325
Jenkins, Jerry B. (see also Tim LaHaye) Koenig, Bill 161, 251–5, 257, 270
167–72, 173, 176, 207 Eye to Eye 252
Jerusalem 1, 17–23, 87–93, 120, 123, Israel: The Blessing or the Curse? 253
187, 189, 193, 216, 218, 237 Kohr, Howard 237, 239
Jerusalem Summit 216–17 Koresh 264–5
Jewish Institute for National Security Kristol, Bill 249
Affairs (JINSA) 250 Kristol, Irving 188, 249
Jews
American 81, 120, 129, 138, 141, 143, LaHaye, Beverly 183
147, 188–90, 217, 221, 229–30, LaHaye, Tim 146, 167–75, 181, 183,
231, 240, 248, 249, 255, 275 186–8, 197–200, 249, 280
ancient Israelites 27, 31, 32, 39, 41–3, The Battle for the Mind 186
45–6, 120, 128, 131 and ‘Council for National Policy’
anti-Zionists 115–16 197–200
British 51, 68, 69, 109, 118 Left Behind series 167–72, 192, 197,
conversion of 7, 23, 36, 37, 38, 45, 202, 207, 236, 245, 246, 263
48, 49, 51, 53, 62, 64, 71, 77, Land, Dr Richard 200, 237–9
94, 104, 123, 124, 219, 230, Laud, Bishop William 39
235, 264, 276 Lazarus, Emma 113
distrust of Christian Zionists 164–6, League of Nations 129, 248
188, 228–30, 269 Lebanon 157, 162, 175, 193, 208, 215,
European: eastern 46–7, 52, 53, 54, 222, 235, 256, 284, 287
67, 69, 79, 99, 103, 107, 111, Left Behind series see LaHaye, Tim
113, 120, 160; western 46–7, Leonardini, Barry 233
53, 67, 69, 99, 100, 115–16 Evangelicals, Zionists and Secular
restoration to Palestine of 36, 37, 45, Neo-Cons 233
51, 56, 60, 64, 66, 67, 77, 87, Lewes, Henry 113
92, 93, 99, 104, 111–12, 117, Lewis, David A. 191
121, 123–8, 153, 182, 218, 231 Liberty University 177–84, 191, 236, 257,
Jews for Jesus 244 270
Jews for Judaism 244 Lieberman, Avigdor 257
Jordan 16, 17, 131, 168, 219, 221, 270 Lieberman, Joe 240–1
Judaisers 23, 32–3, 273 Likud Party see Israel
Judaism 85, 86, 109, 115, 226, 243–4 Limbaugh, Rush 173, 199
Christian debt to 30, 109, 111, 116 Lind, Michael 256
Orthodox 96, 98, 111, 160, 190, 234, Lindbergh, Charles 138
268 Lindsey, Hal 146, 149–58, 160–1, 163,
Reform 95–6 170, 172, 174, 178, 179, 188, 191,
Jurieu, Pierre 55, 58 202, 205, 227, 228, 235, 239, 255,
257, 263, 280
Kadima Party see Israel The Late Great Planet Earth 154–7,
Kalischer, Zwi Hirsch 114 162, 163, 178, 243, 252, 259
Derishat Zion 114 The 1980s: Countdown to
Kett, Francis 32, 117 Armageddon 157, 187
Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali 179, 284 There’s a New World Coming 156–7
Klein, Joe 250 Lloyd George, David 66, 107, 110, 114,
Klein, Morton 286 116–22, 140, 145
Knesset see Israel and Zionism 118–22
328 Index
Ottoman Empire (Turks) 2, 27, 36, 45, Project for the New American Century
51, 52, 67, 68–9, 71, 74, 82, 93, (PNAC) 249–50, 278
95, 105–7, 110–11, 119, 121, 124, prophecy conferences 58–61, 65, 86–7,
125, 234 127, 149–54, 181, 183–4, 189, 252,
Overcomers 79 268, 270
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Palestine 27, 45, 51, 57, 73, 105, 110, 136–8
119, 121, 129, 135 Puritans 30–3, 35, 39–50, 63, 65, 67,
British Mandate era 89, 108, 128–37, 117, 128, 184, 241, 256, 286
141, 142, 206
Palestine Place 64 Rabin, Prime Minister Yitzhak 158, 229,
Palestinian’s 279
Arabs 2, 3, 6, 12, 17, 19, 72, 80, 95, Rantisi, Abdel Aziz 248
121–2, 129–31, 152, 179, 192, Rapture 4, 5, 7, 11, 12, 17, 62–3, 84, 90,
205, 208, 213, 216, 219, 220, 92, 93, 112, 125, 138, 139, 151–4,
221, 225, 228, 230, 234, 253, 161, 163, 167, 174, 178, 182, 183,
267, 271; independent state for 187, 189, 238, 245, 258, 259, 263,
6, 40, 211, 221, 228, 230, 237, 275
239–40, 252–3; second Intifada Reagan, President Ronald 146, 156, 159,
of 196, 197, 217, 234, 279 163, 187–8, 192, 202, 229, 234,
Christians 11, 67, 147, 158, 192, 208, 241n, 247, 249
214, 226–8 Reed, Ralph 233
Palmerston, Lord Henry 66–70, 276 Regenerators 74–7, 203, 261
Parshall, Janet 191, 221 Reinstein, Josh 20, 220–1, 257, 275, 288
Parsons, David 218, 219 Religious Right (USA) 5, 14, 20, 21,
Peres, Shimon 237, 282 146, 149, 153, 164, 166, 167, 172,
Petra 93, 94, 189 173, 178, 183–9, 194–200, 202,
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 205, 209, 217, 220, 224, 237, 245,
5, 196–7 247–51, 275, 276, 284
Philips, Howard 198 Restorationism 23, 51–72, 73, 77, 83,
philo-Semitism 19, 68, 113, 128, 166 94–7, 98, 102, 114, 116–17, 135
Plummer, Reverend Glen 237, 241 Riah, Bishop Abu al-Assal 226–8
Plymouth Brethren 61, 62, 81, 86, 132 Rice, Secretary of State Condoleezza
Posner, Sarah 199 249, 251
Powerscourt Castle Prophecy Riley, Reverend William Bell 138–9, 195
Conferences 60–1, 86, 183 The Protocols and Communism 138
Powerscourt, Lady Theodosia 60–1, 63 Wanted – A World Leader! 138
pre-millennial dispensationalism 61–3, Road to Jerusalem 245–6
85, 87, 89–94, 109, 124–6, 139, Robertson, Pat 66, 110, 146, 158–60,
145–6, 155–6, 182, 188, 190, 243, 166–7, 174, 179, 184, 187, 188,
256, 286 191, 193–8, 202, 205, 209, 217,
Pre-Trib Research Center 181, 183–4, 219, 222, 229, 233, 238, 257, 266,
252, 270 267, 280
Pre-Trib Study Group 183–4 and the Christian Coalition 194–7
Price, Dr Randall 266–71, 274, 276, 280 Christian Broadcasting Network
The Battle for the Last Days of the (CBN) 158
Temple 270 The End of the Age 166–7, 174
Priestley, Joseph 55–6, 117 The New World Order 195
330 Index
A Natural History of Enthusiasm 83 Way, Lewis, 51–5, 57, 67, 68, 70, 92, 96,
Temple Mount 1–3, 7, 18–19, 20, 166, 102, 123, 128, 143, 287
174, 187, 189, 209, 220, 228, 259, Weber, Timothy P. 188
266–9, 272 On the Road to Armageddon 188
rebuilding of Temple 4, 7, 18, 21, Wedgwood, Colonel Josiah C. 128–36,
36, 56, 62, 94, 97, 101, 168, 144, 152, 168, 246
208, 220, 258, 259, 265, 268–9, Weinberger, Caspar 188
276–7 Weizmann, Dr Chaim 114–22, 127, 131,
Temple Mount Faithful Movement 133–5, 142, 191, 232, 234
(TMFM) 267–8 Trial and Error 116, 142
Temple Mount Institute 18, 268–9 Welles, Orson 156
ten Boom, Corrie 225, 260 Weyrich, Paul 187, 197
Texas 147, 194, 206, 209, 236, 252, Whitman, Walt 89
256–83 Wilberforce, William 54, 65
Tribulation 4, 62, 63, 91, 93, 94, 104, Wilhelm, II, Kaiser 101–3, 105–6, 121,
126, 127, 138, 139, 152, 174, 182, 125–6
189, 216, 238, 245 Wilson, President Woodrow 122, 125,
Troup, Kimberley 213 137, 140, 248
Truman, President Harry S. 66, 140–4, Wingate, Orde 132–5, 144, 189, 246
145, 238 Winthrop, John 40, 41, 49, 241
Tuchman, Barbara 116 Wolff, Joseph 58, 60, 65
Bible and Sword 116 Wolfowitz, Paul 191, 231, 284
Twain, Mark 76 Woolsey, Jim 250n, 278
Wooton, Pastor Willy 241
Unger, Craig 185 Wordsworth, Dorothy 59
United Nations (UN) 2, 10, 11, 141–3, World Wars
146, 167, 182, 190, 192, 193, 213n, First 110, 118–22, 124–7, 185, 234
219, 249, 250, 254, 257, 282 Second 39, 183, 206, 225, 279
Unity Coalition for Israel 161
Ya’alon, General Moshe 279
van der Hoeven, Willem 214–15, 225, Yale University 44
227 Yisrael Beitenu Party see Israel
Vanunu, Mordechai 226 Young, William 67, 70–1
Vatican 226
Vester, Mrs Valentine 79–80 Zangwill, Israel 72
Victor, Barbara 217 Zell, Mark 210
Victor Emmanuel II, King 104 Zionism 2, 23, 97, 101, 104–8, 112–16,
Victoria, Queen 68, 110 118, 127–36, 139, 140–1, 212, 220,
Viguerie, Richard 187, 198, 200 225, 228, 240, 281, 284, 286, 287,
von Eulenberg, Ambassador 105–6 289
Zionist Congresses
Waco, TX 263–5, 288 1897 103
Wagner, Cosima 116 1903 107–8,
Washington, George 96 Zionist Organization of America (ZOA)
Washington, Dr Raleigh 245–6 183, 221, 229, 250, 286
Watt, James 188