'Israelis' wary but welcoming of Christian Zionist festival

By ROBERT W. GEE

Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service

Friday, October 17, 2008

JERUSALEM — Janet Cain loves Israel.

"We have a root tie to Israel and the Jewish people," said Cain, a deacon at Trinity Chapel, a Pentecostal mega-church in Powder Springs, Ga.

Cain is among 8,000 evangelical Christians from 90 countries who are in Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles, an annual biblical pilgrimage festival. The weeklong gathering, which ends Sunday, demonstrates the growing strength of a Protestant movement called Christian Zionism.

It has parlayed its rising numbers, including millions in the U.S., into political influence as the notion of ceding territory in exchange for peace is becoming more accepted among Israeli leaders and residents, although the position is at odds with some fundamentalist readings of the Bible.

Christian Zionists also contribute millions of dollars to Israeli philanthropic causes and right-wing projects, including Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as to the tourist economy.

Participants in the Feast of Tabernacles were expected to spend at least $18 million in Israel. A record number of pilgrims flooded the streets in a colorful parade, singing Israeli folk songs, blowing ram horns and calling out "Shalom!"

Israel officially welcomes the gathering, its largest tourist event, and has forged ties with leaders of the movement, particularly in the U.S.

But relations at times have been strained.

"There was a certain community of interest. From the Israeli side, it was helpful to have a politically influential group supporting them in the United States," said Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli journalist and author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and theStruggle for the Temple Mount. "From the point of view of the Christian supporters, Israel was a confirmation of faith. By supporting these kind of politics in Israel, they felt like they were getting with the divine program."

Nearly three years ago, American TV evangelist Pat Robertson offended Israeli leaders by suggesting that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's debilitating stroke was divine punishment for evacuating Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. He later apologized, but Israeli officials withdrew support for Robertson's plans to build a $50 million biblical theme park near the Sea of Galilee, which would provide needed jobs to the region.

The project is now back on track, but Israeli officials are working with other evangelical leaders.

Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who succeeded Sharon and was a longtime friend of the Christian right for his staunch opposition to territorial concessions, angered evangelical bloggers last month when he said Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to reach peace with the Palestinians.

Olmert has addressed the Feast of Tabernacles gathering by video conference in past years but was not invited this year because of "all the upheaval" in the Israeli government, said Malcolm Hedding, executive director of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, a flagship Christian Zionist group that organizes the event.

Olmert, embroiled in a corruption investigation, has said he will leave office once a new government is formed.

"Israel must continue to have complete sovereignty over the city of Jerusalem," Hedding said this week. "We have serious misgivings about a two-state solution."

Christian Zionism, a stream of evangelism with roots in the 19th century, views the creation of the modern state of Israel as God being faithful to his covenant promises to Abraham, and sometimes as biblical prophecy.

The Mideast War in 1967, when Israel seized territory from neighboring Arab countries, was viewed by many Christian Zionists as a further sign of the Second Coming of Christ.

Some interpret Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threats to Israel and his defiant nuclear program to be harbingers of a final battle between good and evil.

"I do believe we are in the end times. ... He's coming. He's coming soon," said Jim Bolin, senior pastor of Trinity Chapel in Georgia, who takes church groups to Israel every year and is attending the Feast of Tabernacles.

"From a biblical reading, I don't understand how this can be divided up, parceled out," he said of the biblical land of Israel, which includes the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "It's important for me, as a Christian, that Jerusalem not be divided."

The movement has found a reliable ally in Binyamin Elon, an Orthodox Jew and right-wing member of the Knesset who once advocated the "transfer" of Palestinians to Jordan or elsewhere. Elon opposes the ongoing U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations.

Elon is chairman of the Christian Allies Caucus, a group of 14 members of the Knesset, mostly from conservative parties, who court Christian support around the world. In the U.S., a partner congressional group, Israel Allies Caucus, was founded two years ago.

"The bridge between us is the Bible," Elon said. "We have to be open to the biblical era that prophesizes the people of Israel as a source of inspiration to all the gentiles."

so-called 'Israelis' from both sides of the political spectrum are wary of the relationship, not least because a version of the Christian fundamentalist doomsday scenario has Jews converting to Christianity or perishing.

Gorenberg, the Israeli journalist, calls the belief a "fundamental denial of Judaism."

"The tremendous irony is that they profess a basic love of Israel and the Jews and ... the belief that the Jews are living in error," he said.

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