"One cannot read this superb book and fail to be impressed with the volatile mix of theology, politics, and antisemitism in the range of Christian attitudes displayed unfortunately even today toward Israel." Choice

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"Most helpful in debunking a wide range of stereotypes about evangelical Christians. It also provides an often incisive critique of the presumptions of liberal Protestantism." First Things

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"Marshals its arguments with a wealth of well-researched and lucidly presented material that includes interesting analyses of the influence of the Eastern Churches on contemporary Protestantism, the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church, and the relationship between Christian anti-Zionism and contemporary Islam." University of Toronto Quarterly

Paul Charles Merkley is professor emeritus, history, Carleton University, and the author of The Politics of Christian Zionism, 1891-1948.

Table of contents, Preface and Introduction

Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations


Introduction: Israel's Reappearance in the Company of Nations

1 The Birth and Early Adventures of the State of Israel
2 Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel, 1948-1960s
3 Christians in the Holy Land
4 The Palestinians
5 The Church and Islam
6 Roman Catholic Attitudes in Transition
7 Christian Zionism and Christian Anti-Zionism
8 Christian Attitudes towards Israel: The Issue in Current American Politics


Copyright Notice: Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel by Paul Charles Merkley 2001 by McGill-Queen's University Press. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Canadian copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright notice, is carried and provided that the McGill-Queen's University Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of both the author and McGill-Queen's University Press.



Preface

A few days after the manuscript for this book was taken out of my hands and turned into page proofs at the end of September 2000, the second intifada broke out. I believe that the behaviour of all the parties since then has borne out of the main features of my argument. Yassir Arafat began at once to declare openly what he previously declared only to audiences of faithful Muslims: that jihad (holy war) had begun and must continue until all of Palestine and all of Jerusalem were under Palestinian rule. The International Christian Embassy went ahead with its Feast of Tabernacles gathering in Jerusalem (October 14-20) at the very height of the riots in Jerusalem; it was attended, despite official US travel advisories, by some five thousand Christian pilgrims and was addressed by Likud leader Ariel Sharon, Mayor Ehud Olmert, and Rabbi Michael Melchior, a cabinet minister. The World Council of Churches followed its longstanding practice of adopting as its own the Declarations of the Middle East Council of Churches, which immediately assigned the whole responsibility for the violence to Israel and called upon "sister western churches [to] bring pressure to bear upon their governments, in particular those governments which play a decisive role in the affairs of the Middle East, to cause the Israeli government to halt these criminal activities and grant full and unqualified recognition to Palestinian rights, particularly the right of Arab sovereignty over occupied Jerusalem" (MECC Statement on the situation in Palestine, 2 October 2000). In the early weeks of the second intifada the rate of exodus of Christians from the Palestinian Authority multiplied; there are now many fewer Christians in the Holy Land than when I wrote the pages that follow.

February 2001

Introduction

Israel's Reappearance in the Company of Nations

"The State of Israel is a surprise, yet the modern mind hates to be surprised. Never before has a nation been restored to its ancient hearth after a lapse of 1, 897 years. This extraordinary aspect is bound to carry some shock to the conventional mind, to be a scandal to the mediocre mind and a foolishness to the positivists. It requires some reordering of some notions." - Abraham Joseph Heschel

NOVEMBER 1947:
ATTITUDES OF THE NATIONS OF THE WEST TOWARDS THE PROSPECTIVE STATE

On 29 November 1947, in a moment of time, the nations of the world recorded their conclusion that the Jews of the world could be entrusted with the responsibility of building a state, which should thereafter be the homeland of the Jewish people. For nearly nineteen hundred years previous to this moment, the people of Israel had persevered without a homeland. Though stripped of their territorial possessions and humiliated by the destruction of their Temple, scattered to all the corners of the globe, the people called "Israel" clung to their prayer, recited three times a day: that they would all be reunited "next year in Jerusalem." This prayer had prevented them from disappearing as a people - as all other communities suffering comparable experiences before and since ultimately have done. For half a century, Zionists had sought to persuade the world that this record of persistence entitled the Jews to be re-established as a people where they had begun. The world listened, and in November 1947 the world parliament agreed.

As the United Nations was approaching its decision in 1947, most of the speechmaking of politicians and diplomats, and most of the arguing of editorialists, was couched in the rhetoric of "justice." In the long background of this perception that the cause of the Zionists was "just" was the two thousand years of Jewish Diaspora, characterized by many kinds of deprivation and persecution. In the immediate background was the Holocaust. In the foreground was the reality of several hundred thousand homeless European Jews. Given that the alternative to a Jewish state in Palestine was the absorption of these hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews into gentile lands, it was not difficult to see what "blessing" Israel required at this moment, nor to appreciate that in so blessing Israel, we too - the nations of the West - would also be blessed.

As the years passed, the basic requirements of patriotism were met and exceeded by the new people of Israel (the Israelis). No longer could anyone doubt that the fundamentals of national patriotism could be quarried from the Jewish legacy (the legacy of recollection and anticipation of nationhood while living in Diaspora on the edges of everyone else's national life and culture) and fashioned into a Jewish equivalent of other people's patriotism. Many who had previously only condescended gradually developed authentic admiration for the Jews. For some, this admiration grew further as the years went by, becoming, in extreme cases, a powerful pro-Israelism - indeed, a kind of second patriotism for many non-Jews.

But there were many others whose picture of the Jews was not improved by Israel's persistence. Resentment began to intrude into many hearts where condescension had reigned before. There were many who simply never came to terms with the picture of the triumphant Jew. This company included those whose anti-Semitism had not been set aside when the question had been "Should the Jews be allowed to try to make a State in Palestine?" but was only momentarily forgotten, or repressed, or denied, or transmuted tentatively into condescension. As the years passed - as the Israelis drove out their enemies and expanded their boundaries, making life less than everything it might be for Arabs who were reluctant to leave or unable to leave and unwilling to accept the status of a minority - anti-Semites began to resort to old habits of mind, simultaneously coining new vocabulary to conceal their primitive disdain for the Jews. In this new world - where "Israel" was not a thing of the past or a thing of the future or a "metaphor" for all kinds of things, but a living, breathing state - anti-Semitism took on a new life as "Anti-Zionism."

CHRISTIAN ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE CREATION OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL

For most Christians, the argument-from-justice for the creation of a Jewish state had been, in 1947-48, as compelling as for most others, but not necessarily more so. For some Christians, it was, in one sense, harder to decide in favour of Zionism than it was for the non-Christians or post-Christians. Once the world acknowledged the existence of the Jewish state, it would be welcoming back onto the track of world history a national polity with the same name and the same religion as that which had been ushered off that track by the concerted effort of the Roman Empire nearly nineteen hundred years previously. At that earlier moment, when the nations had dismissed Israel into political oblivion and the Jews had entered upon their apparently perennial destiny as a scattered people, the Church was ready with the explanation of their Messiah, and proof of Christianity's claims to succession to the promises made to Abraham in the Book of Genesis. Thus, when Israel reappeared among the nations in a moment of time in the character of a State, the problem of the relationship between the destiny of the Jews and the destiny of the Church had to be restated. From one point of view, it became simpler; from another, more complicated.

Many Christian people in 1948 said that the logic that brought the State of Israel into being that year ran much deeper than any of the causes and concerns espoused by the politicians in their national political counsels or at the UN - deeper, even, than any of the causes or concerns that the politicians knew the names for. These were the Christian Zionists. To them it was no coincidence that in the earliest months of the Cold War it was on that issue, and only on that issue, that the superpower antagonists were agreed. Nor did it come as a surprise to them that the consensus among the nations that originally "legitimized" the creation of the state broke down immediately afterwards and never returned. If the nations united behind this cause in 1947-48 it was because their politically self-interested arguments and their ephemeral rhetoric were really serving a cause that had always been the drivewheel of history, if only one had the eyes to see. If the nations fell to gnashing their teeth against the State of Israel once it came into the world and began to demonstrate a capacity for self-preservation that other nations envied but could not fathom, then it proved that the friendship of the nations was not an essential element in Israel's strength - that the nations were helpless to defy the announced will of God. To these Christian Zionists, no less than to many religious Jews, Israel's coming-to-being constituted proof of the faithfulness of Scripture. Likewise, Israel's ability to survive without the goodwill of the nations must be understood as something foretold in Scripture, and thus impossible for the nations to prevent.

In 1947-48, that part of the Church in the West that is today called "fundamentalist" or "evangelical" was overwhelmingly supportive of the Zionist solution to the Jewish problem. The rest of the Protestant church (what is generally spoken of today as "the mainstream") was mostly well disposed, but with many dissenters. The Roman Catholic church had powerful objections but did not feel able, in the light of the general humanitarian advantage that the Jewish cause briefly held in the immediate wake of the war, to compel nations with Roman Catholic populations to oppose.

Yet almost immediately after the initial decisions were taken, these latter two constituencies (mainstream Protestants and Roman Catholic) shifted into the ranks of those denouncing the new state - and eventually became overwhelmingly hostile. Had the voting on the partition of the Palestine Mandate taken place five or ten years later, the Jewish state would not have come into existence.

Even in 1947-48, when the desperate circumstances of the European Jews disposed most American politicians and most Church leaders to endorse the Zionist solution, there was a formidable opposition. In the forefront were spokesmen for the Protestant missionary societies that had worked with creditable success among the Arab populations of the Middle East for over a century. In the United States, they were allied with anti-Zionist Jewish organizations, notably the American Council for Judaism. Virginia Gildersleeve, then President of Barnard College and a member of the board of the American University in Beirut, was perhaps the most influential leader of this Christian anti-Zionist lobby. In her memoirs, Professor Gildersleeve recalls: "It was not until the middle of World War II, that I began to realize the critical strategic importance of the Middle East to my country from a military and political point of view," and she thereupon concluded that it was essential that the US not be won by the cause of Zionism, "a movement which was to plunge much of the region into war, sow long-lasting hatred and make the Arabs consider America not the best-liked and trusted of the nations of the West...but the most disliked and distrusted." In 1948 she helped found the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land and became its chairman. Later the CJPHL was merged into the American Friends of the Middle East, which remains an active anti-Israeli lobby. The AFME spoke bitterly of the leverage that Jewish money had over public opinion and policy making in the US but was not above accepting subsidies from Aramco, the Saudi-US oil combination. Senatorial Investigations of CIA activities undertaken in the 1970s disclosed that AMEF was among the many volunteer organizations of the Cold War years that had been secretly subsidized by the intelligence agency. This should not have been hard to guess, given that its executive secretary at the time was none other than Kermit Roosevelt, known to be the CIA's principal operative in the Middle East. Over the next few years, Gildersleeve appeared before congressional committees and lobbied policy makers, in which efforts she was joined by several other prominent Protestant figures, including Harry Emerson Fosdick, Henry Sloane Coffin, Dorothy Thompson. In the face of all this pressure, President Harry Truman and his principal political advisers remained committed to Israel. Notwithstanding the embarrassing fact of Arab refugees and stories of Israeli harshness in dealing with Arab terrorists, the Arabs, lost the contest for public opinion because of their unwillingness to compromise - indeed, their refusal even to talk to Israelis. The anti-Zionists were simply outgunned in those early contests for public support. And down to 1967 their credibility seemed to decline further as Arab hostility to Israel persisted.