Historical Origins of Christian Zionism

[Deborah Sharavi]

The Historical Origins of Christian Zionism

An analysis of the historical development of Christianity in the Holy
Land and of the impact of Western Christianity in particular is beyond
the scope of this research. Others however have done so
comprehensively. The wider historical development of non-Jewish
Zionism, and especially its early origins in Puritanism and
Millenarianism have also already been ably researched by others.
Critics of Christian Zionism have traced the movement as far back to
the Montanist controversy in the 2nd Century, to the Protestant
Reformation, to the Jewish mystical Kabbalist and in particular the
Revivalist, Millennialist and Apocalyptic writings which were popular
in 19th century Europe and America. Proponents insist however, that
Christian Zionism is consistent with the teachings of both Old and New
Testaments which is the source of their motivation. This chapter is
limited to an assessment of specific historical events and theological
developments which appear to have contributed to the contemporary
movement of Western Fundamentalist Christian Zionism.

It must be acknowledged that the theological interpretation of recent
historical events, especially since the founding of the State of
Israel in 1948, is made exceedingly complex and controversial since
two peoples, Jews and Palestinians, each claim the same land, endowing
the same locations with different place names and religious
significance, while at the same time promoting rival and contradictory
histories about the same events. It is consequently hard for
Christians to remain neutral and not take sides, especially when
visiting the Holy Land as tourists or pilgrims. As Bowman points out,

Most tourists, in accord with the Israel Ministry of Tourism, call the
land 'Israel', but in United Nations terminology the land is 'Israel
and the Occupied Territories'. This variance in nomenclature reflects
a deeper issue of identity; Israel and the area it occupied in the
1967 'Six Day War' constitute a deeply, and violently, divided
country.

The founding of the State of Israel in 1948, was clearly regarded by
most Zionists, whether Christian or Jewish, as signalling the end of a
2000 year exile and as the return to their promised homeland in
fulfilment of biblical prophecy and Divine mandate. Palestinians
however, regard this traumatic experience as having resulted in the
violation of their fundamental human rights to exist autonomously in
the land of their birth and forefathers. Since 1948 each community has
disputed the grounds under which the other may remain.

Examples of these contested and contradictory histories include those
of Palumbo, Antonius and Said who give a Palestinian view point, and
Tuchman and Peters who offer alternative perspectives, the latter,
overtly Zionist. Peters' thesis, for example, is that Arab population
growth in late nineteenth century Palestine was the result of
immigration from other Arab countries undermining their historical
claim to the land. This kind of assertion has been disputed by other
historians including the Israeli, Yehoshue Porath. Another historian
claims Peters' work to be propaganda based on 'spurious scholarship.'
The tension is focused on the mutually exclusive claims over
Jerusalem. Little has changed since Cragg wrote,

Jerusalem...is still bitterly the symbol of confronting defiance and
dismay, its centrality to both parties ensuring that the obdurate
loyalties it commands continue to forbid the peace to which its name
is dedicated. All visions of a federal constitution, a mutual destiny,
a bi-communal possession, have thus far been fruitless. The city
remains the indivisible, inalienable Jewish symbol Zionism cannot
allow itself to share, except in the free access of tourism and the
tolerance of religious devotion. It is, therefore, a painful sign of
irreconcilability-and steadily more so as the years pass.

2.1 The Origins of Western Christian Interest in the Holy Land

Western Christian interest in the Holy Land is closely associated with
the birth, demise and subsequent resurgence of the pilgrimage
movement. The word 'pilgrimage' comes from the Latin peregrinus which
means a foreigner or traveller, and describes a journey to some place
regarded as holy, undertaken for a religious purpose and in the hope
of receiving spiritual or material blessing.

In both Islamic and Hebrew traditions, pilgrimage is regarded as a
religious obligation imposed on the entire faith community and taught
in their sacred scriptures. For the Christian however there is no such
emphasis or requirement. Jesus taught instead that the sacred is
located not in a place but in the body of the believer, and worship is
something to be offered to God anywhere and everywhere (John 4:21-23).

In the earliest days of the Christian Church therefore, there does not
appear to have been any perceived benefit from undertaking a
pilgrimage. But the desire to visit the scenes associated with the
birth, life and death of Jesus grew partly from natural interest and
partly through the influence of superstitious beliefs the Church
inherited from the surrounding pagan religions. Initially the idea of
pilgrimage was seen as something voluntary and optional.

Vigorous opposition to the growing popularity of pilgrimages for
superstitious reasons can be found in a number of the Church Fathers.
Jerome (345-413), in common with most Protestant pilgrims today,
regarded pilgrimages to Palestine as an essential way of gaining a
greater understanding of the Bible, just as a visit to a foreign
country might enhance the appreciation of its literature. '...so we
also understand the Scriptures better when we have seen Judea with our
own eyes...'

However, Augustine (354-430), John Chrysostom (344-407) and especially
Gregory of Nyssa (335-394) recognised the dangers of locating the
sacred at particular shrines. Consequently they actively discouraged
Christians from undertaking pilgrimages to Palestine. Zander quotes
for instance, Augustine and John Chrysostom, 'God is indeed
everywhere, and he who created all things is not contained or shut in
by any one place.' 'The task is not to cross the sea, nor to undertake
a lengthy pilgrimage....both when we come to church and when we stay
at home, let us earnestly call on God.'

Despite this concerted attempt to check the growth of pilgrimages, and
dampen speculation that they were a means to salvation, the idea of
meritorious value in a journey to the Holy Land caught the popular
imagination. Few of these early pilgrims appear to have shared
Jerome's concern to study the geographical and historical context of
the Bible. Instead they were drawn by the mysterious association with
the incarnation, and with the miracles of Jesus in particular.

Empress Helena's visit to Palestine toward the end of the fourth
century ensured that a pilgrimage to the Holy Land became a
fashionable as well as a religious duty. Despite the costs, hazards
and arduous nature of such a journey, pilgrims increasingly travelled
to the Holy Land to do penance, to obtain redemption from serious
crimes, and to secure relics for their churches. In a desire to create
greater unity within his empire, Constantine did much to encourage
pilgrimages by building large churches in Jerusalem and Bethlehem
which became foci for devotion and worship. Eusebius for example,
claimed divine inspiration was behind Constantine's desire to make the
Church of the Resurrection 'a centre of attraction and venerable to
all.' Centuries later, fermenting millennial expectations and belief
in the imminent return of Christ to Jerusalem was another powerful
incentive for visiting the Holy Land. The growing passion for relics
of dead martyrs provided another motivation, in part fuelled by
commercial interest and the exploitation of a gullible populace by an
increasingly hierarchical, authoritarian, and corrupt Church.
Centuries before, Augustine had castigated this practice clearly
emerging even in his day, '...the base commercialisation...the many
hypocrites in the garb of monks, who go through the provinces...Some
sell the relics of martyrs or so-called martyrs.'

Increasingly the shrines of saints came to be seen as, 'a potentially
active source of spiritual energy.' A visit to those sites associated
with the life and miracles of Jesus Christ became therefore the
ultimate pilgrimage, and those in Jerusalem of greatest appeal. A
Russian abbot named Daniel who visited Jerusalem in 1106-7 spoke of
his joy at visiting the sites 'which Christ our God pressed with his
feet.'

2.2 The Middle Ages and the Impact of the Crusades

By the 13th century the penitential pilgrimage had become fully
institutionalised in a religious system in which good works were
esteemed more highly than ascetic practices. Several historians
examine in detail the lasting impact of the Crusades and trace the
devastating consequences of the 'sacralising' of Mediaeval European
military designs on the Holy Land.

The attempt to liberate the Holy Land from Moslem control was seen by
many as a sacred endeavour and even as a form of pilgrimage. When Pope
Urban II launched the First Crusade in 1095 he gave several reasons
for this 'holy pilgrimage'.

....each of high moral value, first to defend Constantinople and by
doing so heal the schism between East and West; second, to be a
repentant act of faith that would culminate in the moral reformation
and total renewal of Christendom; third, it was to be a mass
pilgrimage of believers united in the expectation of the imminent
return of Christ.

How far this aspiration was shared by the Crusaders themselves is
debatable. Zander seriously questions whether the Crusades ever really
had anything to do with 'defending' the Church. Robert the Monk,
commenting on Pope Urban's mobilisation speech, gave much more
provocative reasons.

Let the Holy Sepulchre of the Lord our saviour which is possessed by
unclean nations, especially incite you, and the Holy Places which are
now treated with ignominy and irreverently polluted with their
filthiness....Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that
land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves....This royal
city, therefore, situated at the centre of the world, is now held
captive by his enemies, and is in subjection to those who do not know
God, to the worship of the heathens.

For over a century, Bishops, clerics and Kings repeated the call 'to
avenge the injury which had been inflicted upon Christ.' This explains
how some Christians came to regard the land, rather presumptuously, as
their exclusive inheritance being the 'true' Israel. The theological
justification for the Crusades went through significant and
progressive stages. To begin with the motivation was simply to
liberate the Holy Land as a means of achieving salvation and of
hastening the apocalypse. Having conquered and settled the land and
created Christian kingdoms, when Jerusalem was once again threatened
by infidels, it was an opportunity for sacrifice. After Jerusalem was
lost, the Muslim presence was seen as an insult to God, and the later
Crusades were justified to avenge the injury to God. Toward the end of
the Crusading era the Crusaders saw themselves as the successors of
Israel; their duty to claim Christ's patrimony and inheritance.

Such religious arrogance and the consequent extermination of the
inhabitants of Palestine by the European Crusaders unleashed a spiral
of barbaric savagery between Jew, Christian and Muslim alike which has
fermented for a thousand years, each side locked in what Armstrong
calls 'a murderous triangle of hatred and intolerance...' Cragg draws
some important conclusions about the effect of the Crusades and their
religious imprimatur on the Arab psyche.

The Western, Latin Rome saw the Christian East in terms of judicial
dominance and ecclesiastical power....The Crusades became an enduring
symbol of malignancy as well as heroism, of open imperialism and
private piety...They left noble piles of architecture on the eastern
landscape but seared the eastern soul. They gave Arab Muslims through
every succeeding century a warrant of memory to hold against Christian
Arabs as, by association, liable to pseudo-Arabness or worse. What the
crusaders did to the eastern psyche, long outlived their tenure....
The image of them is one no century since has been able to exorcise.

2.3 The Reformation and Protestant Attitudes to the Holy Land

'All pilgrimages should be stopped' wrote Martin Luther. Luther and
other leading Reformers condemned pilgrimages because they were seen
as evidence of a Church which had relapsed into Judaistic legalism and
pagan superstition. Pilgrimages encouraged heresies and abuses
inherent in such practices as indulgences, relics, and veneration.
Luther warned that, 'The simple and superstitious are
beguiled......true Christian pilgrimage is not to Rome or Compostella,
but to the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Gospels.'

In England, Wycliffe also spoke out against the veneration of relics
and saints, a practice integral to pilgrimages, since he claimed they
perpetuated, '....a culpable blindness, an immoderate and covetous
worshipping of relics cause the people to fall into gross
error.....the practice itself is a pharisaical one.'

The Lollards who were the successors of Wycliffe, equally and
unequivocally condemned indulgences, image worship and the veneration
of relics associated with pilgrimages. In a tract entitled The
Lanterne of Light dated 1409, they argue,

...true pilgrimage is done in six manners...We are pilgrims from the
moment of birth on the way to the heavenly city; we are pilgrims when
we go to church, when we visit the poor and distribute arms, studying
holy writ and then going to proclaim it is another manner of
pilgrimage...; the sixth pilgrimage is that upon which we enter at
death 'to bliss or pain'....there is no other pilgrimage that may
please God...

Pilgrimages continued to be conducted however, by the Latin, Russian
Orthodox, Greek Orthodox and Coptic Christian communities, who
invariably stayed with members of their own faith community. The
leaders of the newly emerging Protestant sects and denominations such
as Huss, Calvin and Luther, who had no personal contact with the
indigenous Christians of the Holy Land, dissuaded their members from
undertaking pilgrimages to a region untouched by the Reformation. It
was not until the 19th Century and the combination of colonialism,
missionary endeavour, archaeological exploration and more advanced
forms of transportation, that interest in visiting the religious sites
in Palestine became popular among Protestants. However, the legacy of
the Reformation expressed in a repugnance for Catholic and Orthodox
ritual and liturgy still pervades much Protestant pilgrimage.

2.4 The 19th Century Resurgence of Western Christian Interest in
Palestine

In the 19th Century there was a considerable thawing in Protestant
attitudes toward the idea of missionary outreach as well as
pilgrimages to the holy sites. This had as much to do with changing
attitudes toward the Jews. as it did with a growing interest in the
Holy Land and things Oriental. This was part religious, part political
and largely due to a succession of archaeological discoveries in the
Near East, military adventurism and the growing number of travelogues
which fired the imagination. The relationship between 19th Century
Christian Zionism and British Colonialism will be considered
separately, later in this chapter (see 2.7).

One of the most popular travelogues was Dean Stanley's Sinai and
Palestine which went through four editions within a year of its
publication in 1856. Other authors included William M. Thackeray,
Gertrude Bell, Robert Byron, Robert Graves, Alexander Kinglake,
Rudyard Kipling, T.E. Lawrence, Freya Stark, and William M. Thomson.
However, the most influential English writer among early Arabists was
Charles Montague Doughty, an Oxford Don. Like many other European
travellers,

Lawrence, throughout his sojourn in the Middle East, was under the
spell of 'Travels in Arabia Deserta', a twelve-hundred page account of
a two-year odyssey, between 1876 and 1878...This tome, which took
Doughty a decade to write is so powerful and all-engrossing in its
effect and so completely defines the Arabs and the Middle East desert
that the book's influence on Arabists thought cannot be exaggerated.
Travels in Arabia Deserta makes Doughty, truly, Britain's first and
greatest Arabist...Doughty's book started a literary and psychological
movement among Westerners drawn to the Arabs...

Between 1800 and 1875, approximately 2,000 authors wrote about the
Holy Land, and by the 1830's a visit to the Near East formed part of
the grand tour taken by most young European gentlemen. The majority of
pilgrims continued to be Armenian and Greek while Protestant pilgrims,
who tended to be Evangelical, increasingly became uncomfortable with,
and vocal about, the unfamiliar style of worship they found. In
particular they found the emphasis on relics and the denominational
rivalry present at the traditional holy places in Bethlehem and
Jerusalem reprehensible. Alexander Kinglake, who wrote his travelogue
in 1835, noted this tension.

Many Protestants are wont to treat these traditions contemptuously,
and those who distinguish themselves from their brethren by the
appellation of 'Bible Christians' are almost fierce in their
denunciation of these supposed errors.

Pliny Fisk & William Thomson, among the earliest 19th century American
missionaries to the Middle East were shocked on their arrival in
Jerusalem,

...to see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the other Holy Places
guarded by a dirty and superstitious rabble of Greeks and Byzantinized
Arabs, all kissing icons and burning incense amid gold-leaf finery,
scandalised these well-bred and puritanical New Englanders. In the
eyes of the missionaries, it was the Oriental Christians-the Greek
Orthodox, the Egyptian Copts, the Lebanese Maronites, and others-who
had truly usurped the Holy Land, by emphasizing the hypnotic mechanics
of liturgy over the Word of God. The Protestant missionary animus
toward these strange eastern rite churches...was never to dissipate.

Another Beirut missionary, Margaret McGilvary, made similar derogatory
comments in the 1920's,

The Oriental Church is the canker at the heart of Christianity, and
inasmuch as it is the chief point of contact with Islam, it behooves
the Christian world to renovate the system which so unworthily
represents its cause in the Near East.

Harriet Martineau, another writer, referred to the services at the
Holy Sepulchre as '...mummeries done in the name of
Christianity....idolatrous nonsense...' It was this dissatisfaction
with the Eastern Churches' monopoly on the traditional sites and a
repugnance for their garish shrines which fuelled interest among
Evangelicals in such ventures as the archaeological work of the
Palestine Exploration Fund, the alleged discovery of the true Calvary
in 1883 by General Gordon and the subsequent funding by public
subscription of the Garden Tomb Association.

Protestant pilgrims, while not wishing to appear superstitious or
overly emotional, were nevertheless often moved by their first sight
of Jerusalem. Robert Curzon described what happened in his party.

Everyone was silent for a while, absorbed in the deepest
contemplation. It was curious to observe the different effect which
our approach to Jerusalem had upon the various persons who composed
our party. A Christian pilgrim, who had joined us on the road, fell
down upon his knees and kissed the holy ground, two others embraced
each other, and congratulated themselves that they had lived to see
Jerusalem. As for us Franks, we sat bolt upright on our horses, and
stared and said nothing, whilst around us the more natural children of
the East wept for joy, and, as in the army of the Crusaders, the word
Jerusalem! Jerusalem! was repeated from mouth to mouth; but we, who
consider ourselves civilised and superior beings, repressed our
emotions; we were above showing that we participated in the feelings
of our barbarous companions.

Curzon's account also reveals the condescending prejudice commonly
felt by Europeans toward Orientals, a related issue which will be
developed later (2.9). While the theological reservations of the
Reformers were quietly forgotten in the growing fascination with
things Oriental, the real breakthrough in the rise of popular
pilgrimage came as a result of innovations in transportation.

In 1869 the Suez Canal was opened, coincidentally the same year Thomas
Cook led his first tour group to Jerusalem, made up of 16 ladies, 33
gentlemen, and two assistants. By the end of the 19th Century, his
company had arranged for 12,000 pilgrims to visit the Holy Land. It is
not an exaggeration to say that Thomas Cook probably did more than any
other person to facilitate and shape the re-emergence of Protestant
attitudes to the Holy Land. His reputation as an organiser of
pilgrimages grew after he was invited in 1882 to arrange the visit by
Prince Edward, later Edward VII, and his son Prince George, later King
George V. In 1872 Cook wrote the following analysis of his new
enterprise.

The educational and social results of these four years of Eastern
travel have been most encouraging. A new incentive to scriptural
investigation has been created and fostered; 'The Land and the Book'
have been brought into familiar juxtaposition, and their analogies
have been better comprehended; and under the general influence of
sacred scenes and repeated sites of biblical events, inquiring and
believing spirits have held sweet counsel with each other.

In 1891 Cook's influence was further enhanced by the publication of
Cook's Tourist Handbook for Palestine and Syria. This was designed to
be read on horseback or by tent light and contained all the essential
scriptural references associated with each location visited thereby
reinforcing the educational nature and biblical basis of his
pilgrimages. Cook also pioneered what he termed, 'Biblical Educational
and General Tours' designed especially for clergy, Sunday school
teachers and 'others engaged in promoting scriptural education.'

Cook's tours were notable in that they combined visits not only to the
Holy Places and excavations, but also to Protestant missions,
hospitals and schools. This was an innovative and radical idea when
compared with most contemporary itineraries. In the port of Jaffa for
instance, which Cook used as his base in Palestine, he donated the sum
of £500 to build the Tabeetha mission school for Arab girls, later to
come under the auspices of the Church of Scotland. It is probably the
only school in the world to have been founded with the proceeds of
tourism and pilgrimages.

It is possible to gain some idea of the influence Thomas Cook must
have had on pilgrimages to the Holy Land in the fact that by 1898 his
company was the largest employer of labour in Egypt. Cook's tours
proved popular for a number of other significant reasons which have a
bearing not only on the development of Western pilgrimages in the 20th
Century, but also, ironically, on the decline in contact between
pilgrims and the indigenous Christian communities. Although there was
little difference in price between Cook's tours and those of his
competitors, middle-class Protestant clientele from America and Europe
were attracted to Cook's tours because they wanted the type of
pilgrimage, and above all, the kind of services he alone offered. For
example, payments were made in advance obviating the need for pilgrims
to carry large sums of money, and thereby risk robbery. Cook also
hand-picked and employed the 'dragomen' or local agents who in effect
became his sub-contractors. Those who were unwilling to co-operate
soon went out of business. In May 1874 they complained in a letter to
the Times that Cook had destroyed their livelihood and the local
economy, commandeering all the horses, while insisting on bringing all
his food, tents and supplies from England.

The established dragomen were put out of business almost immediately.
In May 1874 they complained bitterly in a letter to the London Times
that their living had been taken by Cook. They argued that Cook's
prices were higher than theirs, that the whole price had to be paid in
advance, that Cook commandeered all the horses in the region, and that
his agents did not provide fresh local food for their clients but
preserves brought from England. But this was exactly the point. Cook's
tourists did not want local guides who might raise the stated price at
will and whose patter reproduced what they regarded as 'pious frauds'.
They were attracted to the portable accommodation which was preferable
to convent rooms or verminous khans. Instead of suspect Oriental food,
Cook's tourists had English ham and Yorkshire bacon, pickles, potted
salmon and Liverpool sardines. Boatmen were engaged, under a Cook's
flag, to row out to the tourists on the deck of the ship and, relieve
them of Arab rabble, and conduct them through Custom house annoyances.

Because Cook's middle class pilgrims were not used to riding
horseback, in 1874 Cook contracted the German Templars to transport
his tour groups from Jaffa to Jerusalem in their rather primitive
stage coaches, further distancing pilgrims from any personal contact
with the local Christians. Whether these were an improvement on the
horse is questionable, but they were an early prototype for the modern
air conditioned coach.

Tensions over the provision and competence of local guides, the
quality of local hotels and food, the suitability of transportation
and general fear of the indigenous population are not new, nor the
product of the Intifada or Israeli security measures. These frictions
and prejudices so often present among contemporary pilgrims were
clearly evident in the 19th Century. They epitomise the inability or
unwillingness of Europeans generally, when abroad, to identify with
indigenous peoples and in the Middle East, with the Arab Palestinian
community in particular.

2.5 Prophetic and Revivalist Adventism and the Jews

Bring in Albion & Ariel; The Puritan Hope (Murray) and Bible and the
Sword (Tuchman)

It does not appear coincidental that there has been a cumulative
correlation between Christian Zionism and millennialist speculation
during the decades prior to the end of each century, especially since
the 1590's. The frequency of military and apocalyptic terminology in
the titles of popular books written by Christian Zionists since the
1980's would suggest a similar connection.

The first decades of the nineteenth century saw an increasing
dissatisfaction with the oversimplified Gospel of the earlier
evangelical movement. The quest for a more experimental faith and a
fuller biblical exegesis led to greater emphasis on the work of the
Holy Spirit, ecclesiology , and prophecy.

Theological sociologist Dr Andrew Walker has described this as PMT or
Pre-millennial tension. 'We're counting up to the year 2000 and
there's a strong apocalyptical anxiety.'

The revival during the 1790-1800 period was a direct result of the
turmoil Europeans felt in the wake of the French and American
revolutions coupled with the approach of a new century. The British,
like Europeans on the continent, began to feel that their world was
falling apart. People turned away from new secular philosophy and
political answers and embraced a more fundamentalist form of Christian
teachings that included a revived form of prophetic interpretations of
the Bible. In this troubled and uncertain climate, Christian Zionism
began to take root.

n.b. check for duplication with chapter on Irving and Darby. Summarise
here their contribution and indicate how their views will be amplified
else where.

The rise in popularity of premillennialism in the nineteenth century,
and the 'revolution' in prophetic and apocalyptic thought can be
attributed to the Scot, Edward Irving, regarded by others as the
fore-runner of the pentecostal and charismatic movements. Having
accepted a call to pastor the Church of Scotland congregation in
Hatton Garden, Iriving soon became a popular if controversial speaker.
Consequently he was invited to preach at the annual service of the
London Missionary Society in 1824, and a year later to the Continental
Society. His address on that occasion was entitled, 'Babylon and
Infidelity Foredoomed',

...in it Irving advanced the assertion that the Church, far from being
on the threshold of a new era of blessing, was about to enter a
'series of thick-coming judgments and fearful perplexities'
preparatory to Christ's advent and reign.

According to his biographer, Irving published the address
acknowledging his indebtedness to Hatley Frere, an influential
premillennialist. A year later in 1826 Irving was introduced to the
views of Manuel Lacunza a Spanish Jesuit who wrote a book under the
pseudonym of Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra, allegedly a converted Jew,
entitled, 'The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty'. Lacunza
interpreted all but the first three chapters of the Book of Revelation
as describing apocalyptic events about to happen. Irving was so
excited by Lacunza's speculations, he mastered Spanish in order to
translate and publish the work in English. Irving added a 203 page
preface to the translation in which he presented with great conviction
his own prophetic speculations about the end of the world, predicting,
the apostasy of Christendom, then subsequently the restoration of the
Jews and finally the imminent return of Christ.

When the Lord shall have finished the taking of witness against the
Gentiles...he will begin to prepare another ark of testimony...and to
that end will turn his Holy Spirit unto his ancient people, the Jews,
and bring them unto those days of refreshing... This outpouring of the
Spirit is known in Scripture by 'the latter rain'.

Irving came to have a profound influence over Henry Drummond, a
politician, banker and writer who opened his home at Albury Park,
Surrey, to Irving, M'Neile, Way, and those of like mind, keen to study
prophecy. (n.b. see work on Drummond, Irving and Darby)

The first decades of the nineteenth century saw an increasing
dissatisfaction with the oversimplified Gospel of the earlier
evangelical movement. The quest for a more experimental faith and a
fuller biblical exegesis led to greater emphasis on the work of the
Holy Spirit, ecclesiology , and prophecy. These subjects were of major
interest to such orthodox churchmen as Haldane Stewart, Hugh MacNeil,
and William Marsh, who together with Edward Irving and many others
attended at Henry Drummond's invitation the Conferences for Biblical
Study at Albury Park, Surrey, in 1826.

The influence of Christian Zionism within Anglican Evangelical circles
was boosted by the support of Charles Simeon (1759-1836), who in later
life was consumed with a passion for the conversion of Jews, looking
for 'a full and imminent restoration of God's chosen people'

Whilst Way and others evangelized on the Continent, Simeon at home
acted as a kind of one-man general staff, preaching for the Society,
recruiting workers, spreading propaganda, collecting funds, advising
on overall strategy. He did so with even more than his usual sense of
urgency. He lived to see the work prosper remarkably. An annual income
of £7,000 in 1815 was doubled by 1836. Episcopal patronage was
bestowed on the Society...In that progress Charles Simeon had no small
part.

With a growing interest in millennial speculations other writers
published similar treaties. M'Neile, looking back in 1866, in the
preface to his new edition, acknowledged how, a generation earlier,
such views were somerthing of a novelty by what he terms
'anti-restorationists'.

When these lectures were first published in 1830, the subject was
comparatively new to the Church in this country. It had no place in
the battle-field of the Reformation. It had not been discussed by any
of the theological lights of the last century. It was just beginning
to be ventilated in consequence of the labours of Mr. Louis Way and
Mr. Hawtrey; and more especially in consequence of the writings of Mr.
Faber, and the zealous advocacy of Mr. Simeon.

Dominick M'causland was another who, in 1859, published a work
entitled, 'The Latter Days of Jerusalem and Rome as Revealed in the
Apocalypse.' Another prolific writer was Benjamin Willis Newton, a
Brethren colleague of John Nelson Darby, whose books were reprinted
several times between the 1850's and 1900's.

Newton appears to have been something of a nineteenth century Hal
Lindsey, interpreting the contemporary European political scene in the
light of prophecy. He saw, for example, great significance in the fact
that one of the Rothschild's was allegedly negotiating with the Sultan
for the construction of a railway from Constantinople to Baghdad. He
believed this to be one of many signs of the impending merger of the
revived Eastern and Western halves of the Roman Empire, a 'Roman
world, from England to the Euphrates' centred on Rome. Writing in
1859, Newton comments at length on the theological significance of
geo-political developments in Europe,

The interests of France, Great Britain and Austria are more and more
felt to be identical as respects the aggression of Russia; and this
feeling Spain, Italy and Greece, will soon thoroughly share...

Following this logic, his colourful predictive map of the ten kingdoms
making up this revived Roman Empire, published in 1863, comprised the
then most influential countries surrounding the Mediterranean, namely,
France, Spain, Northern Italy, the Neopolitan States, Austria, Turkey,
Greece, Syria and Egypt, together with the British Isles. Allowing
himself a degree of latitude with regard to the timing of these
events, Newton asserted in 1879,

Whether it may be long and deadly; or whether the way of the Western
Roman nations may be smoothed so as for the resuscitation of the East
under their guardianship to be quietly and speedily effected, it is
impossible for us to say.

In the forward to 'Babylon: Its Future History and Doom with remarks
on the Future of Egypt and Other Eastern Countries', (3rd Edition)
published in 1890, Newton could still insist, 'On Israel, and on
Western Europe chiefly will rest the responsibility of causing the
revived Eastern Branch of the Roman World to be what it is to be.'
Just as some contemporary apocalyptic writers fear the rise of New Age
inter-faith religious unity as a sign of the coming Antichrist, so
Newton was predicting the same at the end of the 19th Century.

The result of the late war with Russia has been to bring the Turkish
dominions into recognised political connection with Western
Europe...The ancient outline of the Roman Empire will again
appear...At bottom, Mohommedanism, what is it but a sect of
Christianity? When the Papists, and the Greek church and Judaism, and
Mohommedanism, and Anglicanism, shall re-echo this sentiment, and when
it shall become governmentally adopted by the nations of the Roman
world, we shall soon see the 'Ephah' and 'wickedness', its inmate,
established in the land of Shinar.

In America, following the frequent visits of John Nelson Darby from
1862 onwards, his dispensational views about the Church and Israel had
a profound influence over leading evangelicals like D.L. Moody,
William E. Blackstone and C.I. Scofield

In 1887, William E. Blackstone, who wrote the book, Jesus is Coming,
helped to found the Chicago Hebrew Mission, later to become the
American Messianic Fellowship. In 1890, he headed the first conference
between Jews and Christians in Chicago. The following year in 1890 he
lobbied the US President Harrison with a memorial endorsed by 413
Jewish and Christian leaders calling for an international conference
on the Jews and Palestine, an event commemorated in Israel in 1965
with a memorial and a forest dedicated in his name.

2.6 British Colonialism and the Restoration of Jews to Zion

It is difficult if not impossible to separate the political aspects of
19th Century British foreign policy towards Palestine from the
theological presuppositions of some of her political leaders, notably
Lord Shaftesbury and the Clapham Sect, and later Lord Balfour.

A Jewish homeland in Palestine had been anticipated by R. Joseph ben
Caspi in the thirteenth century, and advocated by the Puritan
clergyman Thomas Brightman, as early as 1585, and by Sir Henry Finch
M.P. in 1615. Other scholars and intellectuals who espoused the idea
of the return of the Jews to Israel included John Locke, Isaac Newton,
and Rousseau although it was really not until the 19th century that
premillennial dispensationalism became systematised as a discrete
theological tradition known as 'restorationism' in which a link was
drawn between biblical prophecy and the creation of a modern Jewish
state.

Key advocates of Christian Zionism included the Rev. Louis Way, who
directed the London Jews Society from 1809, and who forcefully
articulated Christian Zionist views some ninety years before the World
Zionist Congress. Leading figures in British society who were
sympathetic to restorationism included the Duke of Kent, Bishop
Manning, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Gladstone, and that the writings
of a number of significant literary figures also reflected a sympathy
for restorationism. These included George Elliot, William Blake, Lord
Byron, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott and Robert Browning.

John Newton Darby (1800-82) who founded the Plymouth Brethren was
probably the most significant individual in the growing fundamentalist
Christian Zionist movement on both sides of the Atlantic. In America
the Bible and Prophecy Conference movement brought thousands into
contact with Darby's novel teaching about the rapture and restoration
of the Jews to Zion in the kingdom dispensation.

Lord Shaftesbury was himself 'convinced of Darby's teachings', and
subsequently campaigned, amongst other things, for a Jewish
restoration and homeland in Palestine. In 1838, for example,
Shaftesbury persuaded Palmerston to appoint the fellow restorationist
William Young as the first British vice-consul in Jerusalem. He wrote
in his diary,

What a wonderful event it is! The ancient City of the people of God is
about to resume a place among the nations; and England is the first of
the gentile kingdoms that ceases to 'tread her down'.

A year later in 1839, Shaftesbury wrote a thirty page article for the
Quarterly Review, entitled 'State and Restauration (sic) of the Jews.'
In it Shaftesbury predicted a new era for the Jews, whom he regarded
still as God's chosen people, soon to be restored to the land of
Israel. Shaftesbury insisted, '...the Jews must be encouraged to
return in yet greater numbers and become once more the husbandman of
Judea and Galilee.'

Conveniently, Shaftesbury argued for a greater British presence in
Palestine both on religious as well as political grounds, advocating
both that assistance be given for the restoration of the Jews to
Palestine and also for the founding of an Anglican bishopric and
cathedral in Jerusalem. This he saw as the means by which God would
continue to bless England as apparently promised in Genesis 12:3.

Demonstrating keen political insight, Shaftesbury saw three distinct
advantages for England in this plan, (1) England would outpace France
in the colonial competition to control the Near East; (2) England
would be insured a direct land passage to India, the 'jewel' of the
British Empire; (3) vast commercial markets would be opened for
British economic interests. It was not a mere coincidence that these
political goals matched those of the British Foreign office concerning
the Near East.

Tuchman quotes correspondence from Lord Palmerston, the Foreign
Secretary, to the British ambassador in Constantinople dated 11 August
1840, on the mutual benefit to both Turkey and Britain of allowing
Jews to return to Palestine. At the time it was British policy to
support the Turkish Empire and avoid its disintegration. Ironically,
in contrast to today, the restoration of the Jews was seen, at that
time, as an important means of sustaining the Turkish and Moslem
domination of the Middle East. Palmerston wrote,

There exists at the present time among the Jews dispersed over Europe,
a strong notion that the time is approaching when their nation is to
return to Palestine...It would be of manifest importance to the Sultan
to encourage the Jews to return and to settle in Palestine because the
wealth which they would bring with them would increase the resources
of the Sultan's dominions; and the Jewish people, would be a check
upon any future evil designs of Mehemet Ali or his successor...I have
to instruct Your Excellency strongly to recommend [the Turkish
government] to hold out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe
to return to Palestine.

Days after Palmerston sent his letter, a lead article in the Times
dated 17 August 1840, called for a plan 'to plant the Jewish people in
the land of their fathers' claiming such a plan was under 'serious
political consideration' and commending the efforts of Lord Ashley,
later Lord Shaftesbury, as the author of the plan which it argued was
'practical and statesmanlike.' Tuchman claims the article 'created a
sensation.'

Fuelling speculation about an imminent restoration, on 4 November of
the same year, Shaftesbury took out a paid advertisement in the Times
to give greater visibility to his vision. The advertisement included
the following,

RESTORATION OF THE JEWS, A memorandum has been addressed to the
Protestant monarchs of Europe on the subject of the restoration of the
Jewish people to the land of Palestine. The document in question,
dictated by a peculiar conjunction of affairs in the East, and other
striking 'signs of the times,' reverts to the original covenant which
secures that land to the descendants of Abraham.

Wagner summarises Shaftesbury's influence on the rise of Christian
Zionism in these terms,

One cannot overstate the influence of Lord Shaftesbury on the British
political elite, church leaders, and the average Christian layperson.
His efforts and religious-political thought may have set the tone for
England's colonial approach to the Near East and in particular the
'holy' land during the next one hundred years. He singlehandedly
translated the theological positions of Brightman, Henry Finch, and
John nelson Darby into a political strategy. His high political
connections, matched by his uncanny instincts, combined to advance the
Christian Zionist vision.

Like Moses, Shaftesbury did not live to see his promised land
realised, however, through his lobbying, writings and public speaking
he did more than any other British politician to inspire a generation
of Calebs and Joshuas to translate his religious vision into a
political reality.

In addition to influencing British colonial perceptions of the Near
East, Shaftesbury also predisposed the next generation of British
Conservative politicians favourably toward the World Zionist movement,
which led eventually to British support of the Jewish state.

What is not generally known is that Shaftesbury was probably
responsible for inspiring Israel Zangwell and Theodore Hertzl to coin
the myth, 'A land of no people for a people with no land.' It is
likely that they borrowed the idea from Shaftesbury, who, a generation
earlier in the 1840's cast the idea, 'A country without a nation for a
nation without a country.'

In 1865, James Finn, the British Consul in Jerusalem and another
leading restorationist, established the Palestine Exploration Fund for
the purpose of encouraging scientific exploration, archaeological
research and the mapping of the Holy Land.

One of those to take up the Zionist mantle of Shaftesbury was another
influential M.P. and evangelical Christian, F. Laurence Oliphant
(1829-1888). In 1880 Oliphant published a book entitled The Land of
Gilead, in which he reiterated the Zionist case. Oliphant's
contribution included urging the British Parliament to assist the
restoration of Jews to Palestine from Russia and Eastern Europe, and
advocating that the indigenous Palestinians be moved onto reservations
along the lines of the native Indians in North America.

By 1897 when the First World Zionist Congress met in Basle,
Switzerland, Jewish leaders in favour of a Zionist state had
sympathetic support from senior British political figures. The founder
of the Red Cross, the Swiss Christian philanthropist, Henri Dunant,
was the first Gentile to be called a 'Christian Zionist' by Theodor
Herzl, and one of only a handful to be invited to the Congress.

Finally, and probably most significantly of all, Lord Arthur Balfour
who pioneered the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which gave the Jews the
promise of a homeland, was himself also a premillennialist and
Christian Zionist. From 1905, for example, Chaim Weitzmann, then a
professor of chemistry at Manchester University, began to have regular
meetings with Lord Arthur James Balfour to discuss the implementation
of that goal. Balfour had been brought up in an evangelical home and
was, according to Wagner,

...predisposed to the Zionist positions solely on the basis of his
limited understanding of the Bible. He subscribed to a simple,
layperson's version of the premillennial dispensational theology.

Following a meeting with Weitzmann on 9 January 1906, Balfour wrote to
his wife saying that he could see, 'no political difficulty about
obtaining Palestine, only economic ones.' Weitzmann convinced Balfour
that none of the other Jewish homeland 'solutions' such as Uganda or
Argentina were tenable, and according to his niece, shortly before his
death, Balfour remarked that,

...the Jewish form of patriotism was unique....Their love of their
country refused to be satisfied by the Uganda scheme. It was
Weizmann's absolute refusal even to look at it that impressed me.

The British Colonialist presence in the Middle East, at the beginning
of the 20th Century included both those sympathetic to Zionism like
Balfour and others who for a variety of reasons had become 'Arabists.'
Kaplan terms them, 'sand-mad Britons' and includes Sir Richard Francis
Burton, Charles Doughty, T.E. Lawrence ('of Arabia'), Harry 'Abdullah'
Philby, Wilfred Theisiger, and Gertrude Bell. Ultimately, both British
Zionists and Arabists were committed to the same end - a strong
British presence in the Middle East. Kaplan draws however, an
important distinction between British and American Arabists in the
late 19th Century and early 20th.

It was the advantages of power and privilege that imperialism offered
that allowed these British men and women to work out their
personalities and fantasies upon such an exotic stage. Their myriad
eccentricities notwithstanding, men such as Lawrence and women such as
Gertrude Bell were in Araby as British government agents, and thus it
was the mechanics of imperial power that primarily concerned
them...While British Arabists were imperialists, American Arabists
were originally-and therefore, most significantly-missionaries.
Mission work defines the American Arabist, much as imperialism defines
the British Arabist...The British sought to dominate, to acquire a
culture and a terrain as one acquires a rare and beautiful book. But
Americans...sought something more tantalising. They sought to change
this terrain, to improve upon it, using their own model. They
manifested a psychology that grew out of the American Revolution.

In 1916, Thomas Edward Lawrence, at 27 and an Arabic scholar, had been
assigned to British military intelligence in Cairo, to sail to Jidda
to seek an alliance with Sherif Hussein with the purpose of ending the
unpopular pro-German Turkish occupation of the Middle East, while at
the same time guarding the sea route to British India. Although
Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom became one of the most popular 20th
Century works on the Middle East in the English language, his official
status was always that of a political intelligence officer, who in the
end did deliver the Arabs to Great Britain.

Lawrence thought as an imperialist. He favoured the Balfour
Declaration and the Zionist enterprise as a means to keep the French
out of Palestine and perhaps out of the rest of Syria. He championed
ill-fated negotiations between the Sherif of Mecca's son, the Emir
Feisal, and Chaim Weizmann (whom Lawrence genuinely admired).
Lawrence's prejudices were imperially motivated. He loathed Turks and
Frenchmen, and he respected Jews, 'the sooner the Jews farm it
[Palestine] the better,' wrote Lawrence in a letter home. In Severn
Pillars of Wisdom, he notes that 'only in...the everlasting miracle of
Jewry, had distant Semites kept some of their identity and force' in
the greater world.

'Clientitis' was a necessary fact of Middle Eastern politics in an era
when autonomous Arab states did not officially exist and when there
was no formal means by which local for tribal chiefs could express
their views or aspirations other than through sympathetic British
officers whose 'career fortunes rose and fell in direct proportion to
those of the particular tribesmen they were attached to.'

Prior to 1918, it was the belief of the Colonial Office, and
practically all the local expatriate Arabists that when the Turks had
been defeated, the direct descendants of Mohammed, the Hashemite
family of the Sherif of Mecca were the only tribe with sufficient
religious and political prestige to rule with any stability in Arabia.

Lawrence, in particular, was a person overly influenced by setting.
Among Arabs in the desert, he became pro-Arab; in Whitehall he was
pro-Empire; with Chaim Weizmann he felt himself an avid Zionist. Thus
to read the wartime missives of Lawrence, Miss Bell, and others-where,
for instance, on one occasion Arab nationalism is proscribed, while on
another Iraqi and Syrian self-rule is cheered on-is to find oneself in
a muddle. And a muddle is what the British, with assistance from the
French, made of the post-Ottoman Middle East.

On 2nd November, 1917, Lord Balfour, then British Foreign Secretary
made public the 'following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist
aspirations which has been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet.'

His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their
best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done, which may prejudice the
civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in
Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any
other country.

What the Balfour Declaration left unclear was the meaning of a
'national home'. Was this synonymous with sovereignty or statehood and
if so what were to be the borders? In all of Palestine or just a
portion? What was to be the status of Jerusalem? Furthermore, while it
stated that 'the civil and religious rights of the existing
population' were to be safeguarded and the territory was designated
'Palestine', there was no reference to Palestinians. 'They were an
actual, but awkward non-identity'. It was Balfour's opinion that 'the
present inhabitants' need not be consulted, either before or after.
That 90% of the population of Palestine were Palestinian Arabs of whom
around 20% were Christian seemed irrelevant to the politicians and
Zionists who had another agenda. So the awkward questions were left
unanswered and it is these ambiguities which have plagued Middle East
peace negotiations and divided Christians ever since. According to
Wagner,

This single declaration gave the Zionist movement its first political
legitimacy in history and created a platform for its leaders to
accelerate colonization of Palestine.

In a speech made at the London Opera House celebration of the Balfour
Declaration on 2nd December 1917, Lord Robert Cecil claimed that it
marked not the birth of a nation but,

...the rebirth of a nation...I believe it will have far-flung
influence on the history of the world and consequences than none can
foresee on the future history of the human race.

A week later, on the 9th December 1917, British troops occupied
Jerusalem, 'and the Holy City passed into Christian hands for the
first time since the rule of Frederick II as King of Jerusalem.' Her
future, 'now lay with the Western powers and was to all intents and
purposes bound up with the question of harmonising their interests in
Palestine as a whole.'

General Edmund Allenby however, broke with more than military custom
when he walked into Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate in order to
identify with Jesus Christ, two days later on December 11th 1917. In a
speech given later that day Allenby indicated something of his own
respect, and his administration's intentions regarding the toleration
and protection of the religious rights of the indigenous population.

Since your city is regarded with affection by the adherents of three
of the great religions of mankind, and its soil has been consecrated
by the prayers and pilgrimages of multitudes of devout people of these
three religions for many centuries, therefore do I make known to you
that every sacred building, monument, holy spot, traditional shrine,
endowment, pious request, or customary place of prayer, of whatsoever
form of the three religions, will be maintained and protected
according to the existing customs and beliefs of those to whose faith
they are sacred.

It was clearly Allenby's desire to maintain good relations with both
Arabs and Jews. Ironically it was actually the Mandate officials who
encouraged the early development of indigenous Arab churches,
especially among the Anglicans, and fixed the rights and
responsibilities of the various denominations with regard to the
sacred shrines. However, Anglo-French diplomacy and strategic self
interest concerning the possession of territory gained from the Turks
led to duplicity over the Balfour Declaration, and partisan support
for the Jews.

The League of Nations mandate was a double blow to the Arabs because
it not only denied them their promised independence, despite their
having assisted in the overthrow of Ottoman rule, but endorsed a
Jewish national homeland on what had once been Arab soil. In 1917 when
Allied forces overran Damascus, helped by Lawrence's Arab guerrillas,
the British and French divided their spoils of what had formerly been
the Ottoman territory of Syria into six different zones.

A sliver of northern Syria was amalgamated into a new Turkish state
that Mustafa Lemal Ataturk was beginning to carve out of the rump of
the old Ottoman Sultanate. Southern Syria was split into two new
British territories, a mandate in Palestine (which the British
promised twice over, to the Jews and to the Arabs) and a kingdom in
Transjordan ruled by one of Lawrence's World War I allies, Abdullah,
the brother of Feisal and the son of the Sherif of Mecca. Eastern
Syria became part of British Iraq. The French got the hole in the map
that was left, which they in turn subdivided by proclaiming an
enlarged Lebanese state, known as Grand Liban, in order to strengthen
their friends, the Maronite Christians, who would now have a large
Sunni Moslem population under their thumb. Meanwhile, Lawrence's World
War I comrade-in-arms Feisal the son of the Sherif of Mecca, required
a reward for his services; so the British set him up as the king of
Syria in 1920. His kingdom lasted a hundred days until the French
forced him out. Lawrence and company then proceeded to dump Feisal on
Iraq, where his Hashemites from western Arabia enjoyed no local
support.

David Lloyd-George, who became Prime Minister in 1916 shared similar
views to those of Shaftesbury, Oliphant and Balfour, although his form
of Christian Zionism was, according to Wagner, more 'ardent'.
Lloyd-George was brought up by an uncle, Richard George who was also a
lay preacher in a millenarian Baptist church. Lloyd George later
described his strict evangelical education,

'I was brought up in a school where there was taught far more about
the history of the Jews than the history of my own land.'

Christopher Sykes, the son of Sir Mark Sykes who co-authored the
secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 which dismembered the Ottoman
Empire between Britain, France and Russia, was also one of
Lloyd-George's biographers. Sykes wrote that prior to the Paris Peace
Accords, signed in 1919, various advisors had tried unsuccessfully to
brief Lloyd-George on the issues relating to the Palestine settlement
but that he was not able to grasp the issues,

...largely because he could not move beyond the Christian Zionist
worldview of his youth. When briefed repeatedly on the contemporary
geography of Palestine, Lloyd-George insisted on reciting from his
memory of childhood Sunday school lessons the biblical cities and
lands of bible times, some of which no longer existed.

Thus, Balfour and Lloyd-George, probably two of the most influential
British political leaders of the First World War years, were basically
committed to Christian Zionism. Their support for the World Zionist
Movement was a direct result of their evangelical upbringing. These
views,

...facilitated the British colonial predisposition toward Zionist
interests and the disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people
following World War I.

It was inevitable that there would be an Arab backlash and
consequently Britain placed severe restrictions on Jewish emigration
right up to the declaration of independence in 1948 thereby inciting
antipathy and terrorist attacks from both sides. The 1936 Peel
Commission which had recommended the partition of Palestine between
Jews and Arabs stated,

The partition of Palestine is subject to the overriding necessity of
keeping the sanctity of Jerusalem and Bethlehem inviolate and of
ensuring free and safe access to them for all the world. That is 'a
sacred trust of civilisation', a trust on behalf not merely of the
peoples of Palestine but of multitudes in other lands to whom these
places, one or both, are Holy Places...

The professed reason given then for the partition of Palestine was the
maintenance of free access for Western pilgrims rather than with
settling any territorial rights or providing safeguards for the
indigenous communities. Sir Walter Shaw of the British Colonial Office
made a more realistic and perceptive appraisal of the situation,

To the Arabs it must appear improbable that such competitors (Jews)
will in years to come be content to share the country with them. These
fears have been intensified by the more extreme statements of Zionist
policy and the Arabs have come to see in the Jewish immigrant not only
a menace to their livelihood but a possible overlord of the future.

The indigenous Christians are now living with the consequences.

2.7 Anglican Israel and the Influence of Episcopal Church in Palestine

In the 19th Century, coinciding with world-wide Western missionary
endeavours, improvements in transportation, and paralleling European
Colonial expansion in this strategic staging post to Africa and Asia,
there was a renewed interest in Palestine among the major Protestant
denominations. At the beginning of the 19th Century the only
representatives of Western Christianity to be found in Jerusalem had
been the Franciscans and only the Orthodox and Armenian traditions
were resident in significant numbers. From the mid 19th Century,
Protestant denominations began to found their own churches, not so
much from a separatist spirit but because of the animosity and
ostracism of the Eastern traditions. Their reformed theology, emphasis
on personal conversion and lay leadership were anathema to Eastern
Orthodoxy.

This ecclesiastical fragmentation coincided with increasing inroads
from Western Europe into the politics, economy, and culture of the
Ottoman caliphate and of those parts of it which enjoyed varying
degrees of independence. After the arousal that accompanied Napoleon's
invasion of Egypt, the Western scramble for influence, and competition
to wield it, quickened in the apparent, or actual, deterioration of
Ottoman imperial competence in the nineteenth century.

The Church Missionary Society (CMS) was among the earliest to show an
interest from 1821, but it was the London Jews Society (LJS) who
established the first permanent mission station in 1831. Their aim was
the conversion of Jews to Protestant Christianity. The British Consul
was also the first to be appointed in Jerusalem in 1838, and the
Anglican church, Christ Church, was dedicated in 1845.

A Protestant bishopric under joint British and Prussian auspices had
been founded in 1841. Solomon Alexander, the first bishop and a former
Jewish rabbi did not survive long in the post and was succeeded by
Samuel Gobat, a Swiss Lutheran. The arrangement with Germany then
lapsed and the bishopric became solely Anglican in 1881. Initially
Alexander and Gobat co-operated with the Eastern Churches,
concentrating on the circulation of the Scriptures and opening what
were termed 'Bible schools'.

As Eastern Christians bought the Bibles and sought help in reading
them, teachers were supplied and more schools opened. The first two
CMS missionaries arrived for this purpose in 1851 and were based in
Jerusalem and Nablus. The local leadership of the Eastern Churches
felt threatened and excommunicated those who read the Scriptures
offered by the Anglicans.

Consequently Bishop Gobat felt compelled to protect them and from the
1860's small Anglican congregations based on a loose parish structure
and led by Palestinian clergy were formed in Jerusalem, Nazareth,
Jaffa, Haifa, and Salt. The transition from a colonialist Anglican
church dominated by expatriates to a Palestinian Anglican church was a
significant but slow process which is still continuing. According to
Bishop Rennie MacInnes, writing in 1925,

The work of the CMS in all its missions is to train those who join her
in the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, with the
ultimate object of aiding in the establishment of a self-supporting,
self-governing and self-extending system.

The self-governing Palestine Church Council, also known as the
Episcopal Evangelical Church in the Holy Land was officially
established in Jaffa in 1905. By then it already included twenty
Palestinian clergy serving in Jaffa, Kefr Yasif, Bir Zeit, Ramleh,
Shefaamr, Nablus, Acco, Salt, Nazareth and Jerusalem. However, it was
not until 1958 that the first Palestinian Bishop was appointed.

For all their will to autonomy, the local recruits to Protestant
mission were beholden in various ways to its Western sources,
beneficiaries of its educational investments and conditioned by the
vicissitudes of external politics.

However far this process of assimilation has come and still needs to
go, is a matter of healthy debate within the Diocese. Unfortunately
this commitment has sadly been misunderstood and maligned by many,
especially by Christian and Jewish Zionists.

Crombie's partisan history of the Anglican Church in the Holy Land, in
keeping with the provocative title 'For the Love of Zion', is an
example of this. While its sub-title Christian Witness and the
Restoration of Israel, makes an assumption as to what Christian
witness should lead to or support, Crombie never clarifies his
geographical definition of Zion and therefore where this 'restoration'
is to take place. Throughout the book however, he is patently
unsympathetic to the present indigenous Anglican leadership, and the
claim of the Palestinians, supported by the UN, to the Occupied
Territories. The final chapter of his book is entitled 'The antithesis
of Alexander - a PLO Bishop'. The book, not surprisingly, has aroused
a good deal of criticism among leading Palestinian Anglicans.

I found reading it that it was written by a person who really harbours
resentment against the Arabs and against Palestinian Christians... it
reflects his prejudice, his resentment, his deep dislike of the local
Christians as if they really have nothing to say. Anything that Jews
do somehow is always put in the right light and anything Arabs would
do is somehow always judged as being wrong.....why doesn't he see the
presence of so many Zionist Bishops and clergy, those are OK but once
you have any person who loves the land God has chosen to give him, an
indigenous Palestinian, that's taboo.

The same kind of Zionist prejudice from a Jewish perspective can be
seen in the views of Teddy Kolleck the mayor of Jerusalem. In 1992 he
criticised the leadership of the Church of England for allowing the
Diocese in Jerusalem 'to fall into the hands of the Arabs.'

The termination of the British Mandate in 1948 further accelerated the
transition from expatriate to Palestinian control of Anglican mission
schools, hospitals and other church assets. The elevation of the
Anglican episcopate in Jerusalem to the status of an archbishopric in
1957 and its renaming as the 'Episcopal Church in the Middle East' was
another important step in this process of naturalisation.

2.8 American Arabists and Changing American Attitudes to Israel

Robert Kaplan in The Arabists, traces how a small but powerful elite
of families and friends came to dominate America's relations with the
Middle East for over a century, and in particular their perceptions of
Jews and Arabs. Known as 'Arabists,' they had gone 'ethnic' immersing
themselves in Arab life and culture and enjoying privileged access to
the ruling Arab families. They served as educators, military attaches
and diplomats, perpetuating both the Western romance with Arabia while
at the same time playing a seminal role in the growth of Arab
nationalism.

They were descended from the first Americans to travel to what became
Lebanon and Syria, the missionaries, scholars and explorers, an
extension of the ruling WASP of 19th Century America, but without the
imperialist and colonialist agenda which drove much of European
interest in the area. These men and women dominated American policy
and shaped American perception of the Arab world until World War II.
From the late 1940's, coinciding with the birth of the State of
Israel, a significant change occurred in the US diplomatic corps,
which reflected the country's new ethic and social diversity. Kaplan
describes the impact of this change within the State Department,
particularly marked since the 1970's, showing how the rise of Irish
Catholics, Jews and Harvard experts within the diplomatic service
loosened the grip of Arabists on Middle East diplomacy, and upon
American attitudes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the early part of
the 20th Century American perceptions were very different. For the
grown children of those missionary families, returning to Lebanon as
Foreign Service officers and educationalists,

Syria constituted much more than a home. It was almost a transplanted
version of New England itself, a glorified tableau of Ivy League
Brahmins, each with a foothold in the Lebanese mountains, a magical
kingdom of Protestant families brimming with a spirit of adventure,
rectitude, and religious idealism, where the twentieth century would
not fully arrive until 1948. When it came, it came with a vengeance.

In the Middle Ages the term 'Arabist' referred to a physician who
studied Arab medicine. In the 19th Century it was also used of a
student of Arab culture or language. From 1948 and the founding of the
state of Israel the term Arabist quickly became a pejorative term for
anti-Semitism. In the words of Richard Murphy, a former ambassador to
Syria and Saudi Arabia, the term 'Arabist' came to describe,

'he who intellectually sleeps with Arabs,' someone, that is, assumed
to be politically naive, elitist, and too deferential to exotic
cultures. The word almost presumes guilt. The very syllables resonate
with sympathy and possession-of and with the Arabs-in a way that a
word like Sinologist does not.

Early American missionaries to Lebanon and Syria included Bill
Stoltzfus, Arthur & Ray Close, Talcott Seelye, David Zimmerman, and
David & Grace Dodge.

In marked contrast to the conduct of European colonials....imperialism
and commercial exploitation were entirely missing from the baggage
carried by the missionaries in Lebanon. Nor did the Americans even
present a threat to the local religious culture, as the missionary
colonies in India, China, Burma and Siam would. For if truth be told,
compared with the missionaries in the Far East, who won over
significant numbers of Chinese to Protestant Christianity, the
American missionaries in the Middle East were complete failures. The
intractability of Islam quickly forced them to give up any hope of
converting souls to Christ...It would be only as purveyors of Western
education that the Americans in Lebanon were to succeed. And for that
the local Arabs would learn to love them.

The American Great Awakening fired enthusiasm for missionary work
abroad and in the Middle East, a friendly agreement reached in the
1870's between three American denominations saw the Congregationalists
take responsibility for Turkey, the Presbyterians for Egypt, Syria and
Iran and the Dutch Reformed Church for the Arabian Gulf.

One could even date the beginning of the American Arabist tradition to
1827, when Eli Smith, the Connecticut Yankee from Yale, struck out
from the relative safety of a nascent mission community in Beirut for
the surrounding mountains, to live for several months with the Moslem
and Druze villagers, studying their language.

What made the contribution of American missionaries to the education
of Arabs distinctive was their commitment to do so, at least
initially, in Arabic. They wanted to convert from within in
partnership rather than as Colonialists from the outside. Unlike the
Jesuits who ran the French Catholic Schools, and who consequently
attracted Arab families who wanted their children to receive a Western
education, the American missionaries tried to avoid creating an elite
who in the end would be divorced from their own culture. How far they
succeeded is questionable. Hourani regards the ethos of such foreign
academic institutions as causing 'social and psychological
displacement' for Arab children learning a curriculum essentially
'alien' to their own.

In The Arab Awakening, the standard treaties on Arab nationalism,
George Antonius, an Arab Christian, offers a more positive assessment.

The educational activities of the American missionaries in that early
period had, among many virtues, one outstanding merit, they gave the
pride of place to Arabic....In that, they were the pioneers...the
intellectual effervescence which marked the first stirrings of the
Arab revival owes most to their labours.

Daniel Bliss and David Dodge founded the Syrian Protestant College in
Beirut in 1866, and while acknowledging the failure of previous
American missionaries to convert Jews and Moslems or even the Eastern
Orthodox, was nevertheless committed to teaching Arabs 'the Protestant
values of democracy, hard work, and free intellectual enquiry.' The
College actively encouraged discussion and free thinking on matters
such as politics providing a fertile seed bed to Arab nationalism.

Despite the 'truncation' of Syria by British and French imperialism,
Dodge, was still optimistic for the realisation of Arab nationalism,
and under his leadership, the teaching staff, unlike the French Jesuit
College, became internationalist, including many Arabs, Americans and
Europeans.

AUB...became the heart of an Arab nationalist awakening... a world for
whom the State of Israel was a provocative remnant of British
colonialism, just as Maronite-dominated Lebanon was a remnant of
French colonialism...AUB became, in a political-cultural sense, more
influential that either the British or French governments in the
Middle East; a startling achievement considering that the American
government had recently retreated from the region and had no presence
to speak of.

But the dream of cultivating the inverse of colonialism was shattered
by the outbreak of World War I when the traumatic effects of European
geo-political power struggles and colonial rivalries spilled over into
the Holy Land. The vision of the American missionaries for a 'a
borderless Arab nationalism' in which Syria followed the model of the
United States becoming a liberal democracy was not shared beyond the
majority Sunni Moslems, least of all by the Maronites, Druze, Greek
Orthodox, Jews or Armenians living in uneasy co-existence.

During the First World War, besides the relief work of the Syrian
Protestant College, the American missionaries in Syria, received the
enormous sum of sixteen million dollars from churches in the United
States for their work in feeding and clothing poor Arabs.

But while the British and French were drawing lines on the map and
switching rulers around like chess pieces, the American Protestants
were suffering alongside the victims of famine and massacre, which
were the mundane consequences of World War I. While Britons like
Lawrence, Philby and Miss Bell were falling in love with Arabs, the
missionaries were learning-more than they ever had before-what it
actually felt like to be like an Arab....in the hospices and soup
kitchens of World War I Syria, far from the tents of kings and the
power centers of London...

In 1919, aware that the British and French were undermining his goal
of self-determination in Syria, Woodrow Wilson sent Charles Crane, a
wealthy American Arabist as head of the King-Crane Commission to
investigate the wishes of the indigenous people. Reservations
expressed by Arab leaders and expatriate Americans led Cranes
Commission to recommend the abandonment of American support for a
Jewish homeland, that further Jewish immigration be severely
restricted and America or Britain govern Palestine.

While Crane went on to help finance the first explorations for oil in
Saudi Arabia and the Yemen, his admiration for Hitler's Germany 'the
real political bulwark of Christian culture', and of Stalin's
anti-Jewish purges in Soviet Russia, led his biographer to describe
his later life as dominated by,

...a most pronounced prejudice...his unbridled dislike of Jews.' Crane
'tried...to persuade ...President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to shun the
counsels of Felix Frankfurter and to avoid appointing other Jews to
government posts.' Crane 'envisioned a world-wide attempt on the part
of the Jews to stamp out all religious life and felt that only a
coalition of Moslems and Roman Catholics would be strong enough to
defeat such designs.' In 1933 Crane actually proposed to Haj Amin
Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, that the Mufti open talks with
the Vatican to plan an anti-Jewish campaign.

It is significant that The Arab Awakening by George Antonius was
funded by and dedicated 'To Charles R. Crane, aptly nicknamed Harun
al-Rashid affectionately.'

The reasoning behind opposition by American missionaries to the
founding of the state of Israel is a complex one. In 1948, weeks
before the founding of the State of Israel, Bayard Dodge retired from
AUB for Princeton in New Jersey. In April he wrote a watershed article
in Readers Digest entitled, 'Must There Be War in the Middle East?'

This six-thousand-word article, while forgotten and obscure, is the
definitive statement of American Arabists on the birth of Israel.
Though he cautioned, 'Not all Jews are Zionist and not all Zionists
are extremists,' for Dodge the Zionist movement was a tragedy of which
little good could come. Dodge was not anti-Semitic....Dodge's argument
against Zionism rests, not on the politics of the movement, but on the
Arabs' opposition to it, which in Dodge's view made the Zionist
program unrealistic and therefore dangerous. Years and decades of
strife would, Dodge knew, follow the birth of the Jewish state. As a
result, wrote Dodge, 'All the work done by our philanthropic
non-profit American agencies in the Arab world-Our Near East
Foundation, our missions, our YMCA and YWCA, our Boston Jesuit college
in Baghdad, our colleges in Cairo, Beirut, Damascus-would be
threatened with complete frustration and collapse...so would our oil
concessions,' a scenario that Dodge said would help Communist Russia.
Dodge then quoted a fellow 'American Middle East expert' as saying
that 'they [the Russians] intend to get many thousands of Russian
Communist Jews into the Palestinian Jewish State.' Though Dodge made
passing reference to the Holocaust (barely three years old at the time
he wrote the article), he appeared oblivious to its psychological and
historical ramifications upon the European Jewish refugees in
Palestine. While admitting that the Arabs would never countenance a
Jewish state, Dodge nevertheless exhorted Jews to lay down their arms
and talk to the Arabs. The article ends with a quote from the Bible,
'Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of
Hosts.' Dodge did not seem aware that the death-camp-haunted Jews of
Palestine read the Old Testament with different eyes from those of a
Protestant missionary.

Kaplan argues that Dodge's views were representative of the wider
expatriate and missionary community of Beirut who believed the US,
British and Russians morally and politically wrong to railroad the
partition of Palestine through the United Nations. Richard Crossman,
the MP who was a member of the Anglo-American team investigating the
Palestine crisis in 1947, observed that the American Protestant
missionaries, 'challenged the Zionist case with all the arguments of
the most violently pro-Arab British Middle Eastern officials.' Based
on the perceptions of Bill Stoltzfus, who during his diplomatic career
had been US Ambassador to six Arab countries, Yemen, Bahrain, the
Y.A.E, Qatar, Oman and Kuwait, Kaplan concludes,

..the American community on Lebanon was almost, to a man,
psychologically opposed to the State of Israel. But very few went over
the line into anti-Semitism.

Furthermore, President Harry Truman's foreign policy advisers were
opposed to the proposal to recognise the state of Israel which they
saw as a threat to maintaining good relations with the strategic
oil-rich Arab nations, at the very time America was engaged in a race
to thwart Soviet hegemony. In his memoirs Truman claims his State
Department specialists were opposed to the idea of a Jewish state
because they either wanted to appease the Arabs or because they were
anti-Semitic, a charge many disputed claiming Truman was playing
domestic politics, more concerned for the growing influence of
American Jews than the advice of his Foreign Service professionals.

Sympathy for the Arabs and Palestinians in particular, continued among
American Foreign Service officials working in the Middle East. Wat
Cleverius, an Arabist, was transferred from Saudi Arabia to Tel Aviv
in 1969, as economic officer, was responsible for US charities working
among Palestinians, including CARE, Catholic Relief and Lutheran World
Service, following the annexation of the West Bank by Israel. Looking
back over three years work he wrote,

By the time I left Israel in 1972, I had begun to witness enormous
corruption on the part of the Israeli civil-military establishment on
the West Bank, in the form of humiliations, physical intimidation, and
petty bribes that Arabs had to pay Israeli officials. Old Arab men
were made to kiss the asses of donkeys in front of their families.
Once the Likud came to power in 1977, they really promoted the head
crunchers. They put the toughest and poorest Iraqi Jews and other
Sephardim [Oriental Jews] in the West Bank, in order to really beat up
the Arabs.

American Foreign policy under Presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, John
F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson tended to favour maintaining the
status quo in the Middle East combining,

...emotional sympathy toward Israel-albeit in varying
degrees-friendship toward the Arabs, and, most important of all, a
desire to avoid conflict.

The Six-Day War was bad news for Arabists. 'Israel was strengthened,
Arab states were humiliated, and US embassies in Arab countries were
closed, forcing many an Arabist to switch careers.' The seismic effect
of the Six-Day war changed more than the borders of Israel. Her
perceived US strategic value in the Middle East coincided with Richard
Nixon's election as President. Critical of the State Department and
FSO's, Nixon believed,

...an astonishing number of them have no obvious dedication to
America. ..and evinced 'an expatriate attitude.' Even worse in Nixon's
eyes, FSO's were the kind of people likely to be Democrats. Nixon was
also a cold warrior who saw the Middle East, not in its own terms, but
in terms of the world-wide struggle against the Soviets...now
irrevocably in bed with the Arabs, making Israel a valuable Cold War
asset.

Nixon chose Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Germany, to head
the National Security Council. According to Kaplan,

While previous administrations sought to avoid conflict in the Middle
East, Nixon and Kissinger saw the imminent threat of confrontation as
a series of opportunities for rearranging the pieces of the
Arab-Israeli puzzle more to America's liking....with American Jews
proud and energised as a result of Israel's war victory, Nixon saw
Middle East negotiations as a loser in domestic political terms...In
other words and put crudely, the relationship between the American
president and the American Jewish community now loomed larger than the
relationship between Arabists and their personal connections in the
Levant.

Arabists like Andrew Killgore, for example, who gave 25 years to
serving in the US Foreign Service in many Arab countries, found
himself, in 1974, when he expected to be named ambassador to Bahrain,
exiled to the embassy in New Zealand. 'I thought that...I'd never get
a good job [in the Arab world], because the Zionists, in my view, had
it in for me at that time.' Regarding Kissinger, Killgore, who in 1977
became US ambassador to Qatar, was even more outspoken,

Henry, of course, was just a fifth columnist, as far as I am
concerned. He was working for the Israeli's...Henry's real objective
was to get out of the Middle East the Arabists that the Zionists
didn't like. Because Henry was not so crypto-he just was Zionist.

Following his retirement in 1980, Killgore went on to publish The
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, in which in 1987 and 1988 he
made the following provocative statements,

It is wrong and perverse for fanatical elements within the two and a
half percent of our population who are Jewish to hold Congress
hostage...America must regard the Israeli progression from penetration
to direction of U.S. foreign policy as the work of a master criminal.

1970 saw a coup attempt against the pro-Western government in Jordan
by the PLFP and Syria, which, in the eyes of the U.S., would have only
benefited the Soviets.

Nixon and Kissinger faced a stark realization, only Israel could save
the king of Jordan and preserve the balance of power in the region.
The threat of Israeli military intervention caused the Syrians to
retreat, allowing King Hussein to crush the Palestinian guerrillas in
what came to be known as the Black September War.

The U.S.-Israeli strategic relationship was born amid the ashes of the
failed fedayeen revolt. In the three years leading up to the 1970
Jordan crisis, annual U.S. military aid to Israel averaged under $47
million. In the three years succeeding the crisis, the annual aid
averaged over $384 million.

The influence of AUB on the post-war Arab world can be measured by the
fact that at the Charter meeting of the United Nations in 1945, AUB
graduates outnumbered those of any other university on the world. By
the late 1960s, the faculty were pro-Palestinian, anti-Nixon and
antiwar, and drew parallels between American imperialism in Vietnam
and Israel.

David Dodge, acting president of AUB and the great-grandson of its
founder Daniel Bliss, was ironically the first American to be taken
hostage in Lebanon following Israel's invasion in 1981. On being
released a year later, Dodge gave the following explanation for his
abduction,

We condoned Israel's invasion of Lebanon and my kidnapping was in part
due to the actions of Israel and U.S. support of Israel. Yes, I feel
more strongly than ever that American policies in the Middle East are
not even-handed enough.

Another American missionary taken hostage in 1984, Ben Weir and his
wife Carol were highly critical of American policy in the Middle East.
Weir was a lecturer at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, an
ecumenical Seminary committed to training Protestants for ministry in
the Arab world. Without the kind of government backing available to
AUB, NESTB was even more dependent on and integrated within the
indigenous Moslem Arab culture. Kaplan argues, 'The Weirs represented
the extreme evolutionary offshoot of the American missionary adventure
in Lebanon...' David Long, an American State Department Arabist, was
responsible for liaising with the Weir family in the negotiations to
get Weir released. He wrote later,

The Weirs treated me and the State Department as the enemies, even
though we were their government, trying to help get Ben Weir
released...Carol Weir and her church group had this holier-than-thou
attitude toward the U.S. government. They didn't even want the CIA to
debrief him when he was released, even though the debriefing could
have helped other hostages. To them, the CIA and the Israelis-not the
kidnappers were the enemy.

In any country, changes in foreign policy will invariably reflect, to
some degree, changes in domestic perceptions of the world. Kaplan
explains how in the 1970s and 1980s, in regard to the Arab-Israeli
conflict, a gulf emerged between the experiences of the American
expatriate missionary-diplomatic community living in the Middle East
and American public opinion back home.

The historic relationship between a group of privileged Americans and
the educated stratum of Arabs in Greater Syria was just not something
that an increasingly ethnic and middle-class society in the United
States was even aware of or to which it could easily relate. Regarding
Israel, while those like Dodge, Seelye and Mrs. Weir were in a unique
position to witness the very worst aspects of the Israeli national
character, Americans at home could identify with positive aspects of
Israeli life more easily than they could with anything going on in the
Arab world, especially in blood-spattered Lebanon. For all its faults
and crude tactics, even AIPAC was psychologically closer to mainstream
America than the AUB crowd was.

America's desire to be 'even-handed' is typified by the continued
presence of an embassy in Tel Aviv and a consulate in East Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem consulate is the most controversial U.S. diplomatic
mission in the Middle East, if not in the world. It represents the
Arabist frontline against the pro-Israel section of the State
Department, as represented by the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, forty-five
minutes away with no crossing points in between.

The consulate building in Arab East Jerusalem was a rebuke to the
State of Israel. It was, to all intents and purposes, an American
embassy located on territory controlled by the Israeli government. But
the consulate did not recognise the Israeli government in Jerusalem,
nor did it primarily deal with Israelis, its main purpose was to deal
with Arabs in Jerusalem and the West Bank under Israeli military rule.
Because the United States did not recognise Jerusalem as Israel's
capital, the consulate tried to insist that when the U.S. ambassador
to Israel visited Jerusalem from Tel Aviv he should not fly the
American flag on the hood of his limousine. Jerusalem was the
consulate's turf, not the embassy's. The consulate in East Jerusalem,
a graceful old stone building near the mediaeval Arab souk, was Araby,
while the embassy, situated on a noisy and garish street in the heart
of Jewish Tel Aviv, clearly was not. A war raged between the two
installations.

Ironically, pro-Zionist Senator Bob Dole has recently introduced
legislation to the American Senate which requires the US Embassy to be
rebuilt in Jerusalem by 31 May 1999, and authorising $100 million for
'preliminary' spending in the next 3 years. On 24th October 1995 he
stated,

Israel's capital is not on the table in the peace process, and moving
the United States embassy to Jerusalem does nothing to prejudice the
outcome of any future negotiations.

Marshall Wiley, was a US diplomat in Iraq, Lebanon and Israel from the
early 1950s. In 1981, then the US ambassador to Oman, he resigned from
the US Foreign Service because he opposed the aggressive support for
the State of Israel given by the incoming Reagan administration. This
was his outspoken assessment of Israeli policy toward the
Palestinians.

Among the things I remember are the old Arab villages from the
pre-1948 era that the Israeli's had bulldozed....The previous
conquerors didn't displace the population the way the Israelis
displaced the Palestinians. There was some resentment on my part
toward Israel, because the viewpoint I had gotten in Israel was
exposed as false when seen from the Arab side. The Palestinians lived
in miserable conditions. Israeli colonialism is, in my view, worse
than that of the [Ottoman] Turks.

In what was becoming an increasingly pro-Israel administration, in
1989 Wiley went further arguing,

Israel is only about 2 percent of the [Middle East] population, and
because of their support for that 2 percent, we're willing to alienate
the goodwill of the other 98 percent, which have most of the land area
and most of the resources, which, I think, in terms of our national
interest, is a mistake.

Ironically it was Moshe Dayan, the hero of Israel's Six-Day War, who
recognised the value of American Arabists to Israeli security when he
said, '..the more friends and influence America has in the Arab world
[and elsewhere], the more secure Israel will be.'

2.9 Orientalism and European Cultural Imperialism

Western Christians have, for many generations, appeared to share with
the Jews not only a cultural antipathy toward Palestinians in
particular but also pejorative political assumptions about Arabs
generally. Edward Said claims this prejudice, or 'Orientalism' is
representative of a peculiarly European way of dealing with
foreigners. In his book, Orientalism, he eloquently demystifies
romantic European notions of the Orient, exposing the reality and
intensity of European hostility and cultural imperialism toward the
East in which the strengths of the West are magnified and contrasted
with the supposed weaknesses of the Orient.

Such bias and contrived generalisations have had the effect of
polarising West from East, limiting the 'human encounter between
different cultures, traditions and societies.' At its most mundane it
surfaces in views and phrases that highlight the fact that Arabs are
different from Europeans, whether in skin colour, dietary preferences
or personal habits. At a more profound level Orientalism has also had
a profound and lasting impact upon American and European foreign
policy.

Kinglake, in his unorthodox and frank impressions of the Middle East,
Eothen, first published in 1844, contains an early example of
Orientalism.

A man coming freshly from Europe is at first proof against the
nonsense with which he is assailed; but often it happens that after a
little while the social atmosphere of Asia will begin to infect him,
and, if he has been unaccustomed to the cunning of fence by which
reason prepares the means of guarding herself against fallacy, he will
yield himself at last to the faith of those around him; and this he
will do by sympathy, it would seem, rather than from conviction.

Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, written nearly a century later,
contains 'perhaps the most famous Arabist analysis of the Arab mind,
considered brilliant by some and racist by others.'

In the very outset, at the first meeting with them, was found a
universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its
limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic form...They were a
people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the
world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt,
our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical
difficulties, our introspective questionings...They were at ease only
in extremes. They inhabited superlatives by choice...they never
compromised, they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions
to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity...They steered
their course between the idols of the tribe and the cave.

Said offers more recent evidence from an essay by Dr Henry Kissinger
entitled 'Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy'. In it Kissinger
relies on what linguists refer to as 'binary opposition', in which,
like Orientalists, he divides the world into two halves, the developed
post-Newtonian and the developing pre-Newtonian world.

And like Orientalism's distinction Kissinger's was not value-free,
despite the apparent neutrality of his tone. Thus such words as
'prophetic,' 'accurate,' 'internal,' 'empirical reality,' and 'order'
are scattered throughout his description, and they characterise either
attractive, familiar, desirable virtues or menacing, peculiar,
disorderly defects. Both the traditional Orientalist...and Kissinger
conceive of the difference between cultures, first, as creating a
battle front that separates them, and second, as inviting the West to
control, contain, and otherwise govern (through superior knowledge and
accommodating power) the Other.

Said gives further examples of 'respectable' Orientalism in the
writings of Harold Glidden, an advisor on American foreign policy to
the United States Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and
Research, whose views were published in the American Journal of
Psychiatry in February 1972.

...it is a notable fact that while the Arab value system demands
absolute solidarity within the group, it at the same time encourages
among its members a kind of rivalry that is destructive of that very
solidarity; in Arab society only 'success counts' and 'the end
justifies the means'; Arabs live 'naturally' in a world 'characterised
by anxiety expressed in generalised suspicion and distrust, which has
been labelled free-floating hostility'; 'the art of subterfuge is
highly developed in Arab life, as well as in Islam itself'; the Arab
need for vengeance overrides everything, otherwise the Arab would feel
'ego-destroying' shame. Therefore, if 'Westerners consider peace to be
high on the scale of values' and if 'we have a highly developed
consciousness of the value of time,' this is not true of Arabs. 'In
fact,' we are told, 'in Arab tribal society, strife, not peace, was
the normal state of affairs because raiding was one of the two main
supports of the economy.'

Probably the most disastrous recent example of Orientalist attitudes
determining foreign policy decisions would be the failure of the
United States and the Western Alliance to take seriously Saddam
Hussein's expansionist intentions. April Glaspie, the US ambassador to
Iraq, and significantly the first woman ambassador in the Middle East,
made two fundamental errors, prior to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait which
are inherent flaws common to Arabists, and yet ironically at the same
time are typical of Western Orientalists.

..first, what was required in this situation was not so much tough
talk as straight talk. She was not straight with Saddam. Whatever may
have been Washington's official position at the time, an Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait was going to result in some sort of strong U.S.
response-common sense would tell you that-and she failed to point this
out to him. Second, here was an area specialist who completely
misjudged the overall situation, as Gertrude Bell had misjudged it
with King Feisal and as the missionaries had repeatedly misjudged it
with the Sunni Arab nationalists, all misjudgements that stemmed from
the hubris that allowed Westerners to think that they could modify the
behaviour of another culture and shape it in their own perfect image.
Saddam could be moderated if only he had the right incentives, like
nonlethal military equipment...

In April 1991, April Glaspie appeared in public for the first time
following the invasion of Kuwait, to testify before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee.

Sydney Blumenthal of the New Republic notes that she appeared 'without
makeup or jewellery; her long grey hair was pulled back and her dress
absolutely plain. Her puritan austerity suggested virtue.' Indeed, she
looked every inch the missionary.'

For the Orientalist the West is seen as liberal, peaceful, rational
and capable of embracing 'real' values whereas the Oriental is not.
Kenneth Cragg who has lived in the Middle East for many years, and has
closely identified with the Arab culture, both Moslem and Christian,
concurs with Said's criticism of Orientalism, for its 'crude
stereotype imaging of the East', and for being,

....a gross form of Western superiority complex, expressed in a
literature and a scholarship that imposed its own false portrayal on
the East and refused to care sensitively for the East's own evaluation
of itself. By distortion it had its own way with its eastern versions
and made these the instrument of control and, indeed, of
denigration....19th and 20th century Western Orientalism is thus found
uniformly culpable, and a conniver with misrepresentation.

This indictment of the West falls as much upon the Church as it does
upon politicians since it has contributed to the divisions among
Protestant Christians in places like Jerusalem where Hebrew-Messianic
believers and Zionist Christians gravitate toward Christ Church,
Palestinians and their supporters to St George's, while pietistic
Evangelicals invariably end up at the Garden Tomb. Each community
tends to worship in isolation, attracting their own following in
varying proportions from among pilgrims. Edward Said, although himself
a nominal Anglican, crystallises the issue at a more profound level.

I consider Orientalism's failure to have been a human as much as an
intellectual one; for in having to take up a position of irreducible
opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own,
Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to
see it as human experience.

Eber concedes that it is perhaps inevitable that we find it hard to
cope with the 'foreign' because of the weight of our emotional
'baggage' carried when travelling abroad, since we cannot avoid
'refining and redefining ourselves, confirming and reconfirming our
individual and collective identities' in the light of this encounter.
Nevertheless it is, she argues, '....only by examining and becoming
aware of our own internal voice-overs and editing processes can we
bring into sharper focus the images that we see.' Similarly Cragg
calls unambiguously for 'imaginative, uninhibited and uninhibiting
sympathy between Arab and Western Christians'

These are however lone voices and there remains a pervasive and
arrogant racism implicit in much that goes under the name of Christian
pilgrimage since the presence of a Palestinian Church is ignored or
denigrated, and their continued existence threatened. This is the
result not only of historical processes, but is also compounded by
theological controversies concerning the Holy Land, the rights of its
citizens and future in God's purposes.

2.10 The 20th Century Revival of Fundamentalist Christian Zionism

In the latter part of the 19th Century, J.N. Darby's dispensationalist
views had a profound effect on evangelicalism in the United States.
Among those who came under his influence were Dwight L. Moody, C. I
Scofield and William E. Blackstone. Moody went on to found the Moody
Bible Institute, Scofield to produce his annotated Scofield Reference
Bible, and Blackstone to publish a best-selling book entitled 'Jesus
is Coming' in which they asserted Zionism to be the fulfilment of
biblical prophecy. In the early 20th Century, however,
dispensationalism, now virtually synonymous with fundamentalism,
became preoccupied with refuting the threat of theological liberalism,
so that the interest in Zionism appears to have waned.

During the 1940's both prior to and after the founding of the state of
Israel, liberal Protestant Christians such as Reinhold Niebuhr were
the principle allies of Israel. However with the annexation of the
West Bank in 1967, Liberal Protestants and organisations such as the
World Council of Churches increasingly distanced themselves from
Zionism, while at the same time fundamentalism grew both in political
power and identification with Israel.

In a detailed history of the rise of twentieth century American
right-wing fundamentalism prior to 1970, entitled 'The Politics of
Doomsday', Erling Jorstad traces the anti-modernist, anti-communist
and anti-foreign agenda of the movement. There is significantly,
however, no reference to Israel. Similarly, George Marsden's
historical overview of the rise of fundamentalism and evangelicalism
in America between 1870-1930, shows that despite some evidence of
anti-Semitism, there was little interest in contemporary Israel. The
1967 Six Day War and its aftermath appears to mark a watershed in
Evangelical Christian interest in Israel and Zionism. For example,
Jerry Falwell did not begin to speak about modern-day Israel until
after Israel's 1967 military victory.

Falwell changed completely. He entered into politics and became an
avid supporter of the Zionist State...the stunning Israeli victory
made a big impact not only on Falwell, but on a lot of
Americans...Remember that in 1967, the United States was mired in the
Vietnam war. Many felt a sense of defeat, helplessness and
discouragement. As Americans we were made acutely aware of our own
diminished authority, of no longer being able to police the world or
perhaps even our own neighbourhoods...Many Americans, including
Falwell, turned worshipful glances toward Israel, which they viewed as
militarily strong and invincible. They gave their unstinting approval
to the Israeli take-over of Arab lands because they perceived this
conquest as power and righteousness...Macho or muscular Christians
such as Falwell credited Israeli General Moshe Dayan with this victory
over Arab forces and termed him the Miracle Man of the Age, and the
Pentagon invited him to Vietnam and tell us how to win the war.

The combination of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the
capture of Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967, and the defeat on both
occasions of the combined Arab armies, increasingly came to be seen as
significant fulfilment's of biblical prophecy by a new generation of
American and European dispensational premillennialists.

Coincidentally and very significantly, the New Scofield Reference
Bible, a revision of the 1917 version, edited by Dr. E. Schuyler
English and a team of dispensationalists including John F. Walvoord,
was published in 1967 which, given its timing, must have fuelled
interest in Christian Zionism. Ironically, English had edited a young
person's version of the Scofield Bible, entitled the Holy Bible,
Pilgrim Edition, some twenty years earlier, in 1948. It is interesting
to note that the popular edition of the Scofield Reference Bible was
published in 1917 coinciding with the Balfour Declaration and in the
words of Lord Cecil, 'the rebirth of a nation'; the youth edition of
Scofield with the War of Independence in 1948; and the 'new' edition
of Scofield with the Six Day's War of 1967.

Billy Graham's father-in-law, Nelson Bell, the editor of the
prestigious and authoritative mouthpiece of conservative
Evangelicalism, Christianity Today, appeared to express the sentiments
of many American Evangelicals when, in an editorial in 1967 he wrote,

That for the first time in more than 2,000 years Jerusalem is now
completely in the hands of the Jews gives a student of the Bible a
thrill and a renewed faith in the accuracy and validity of the Bible.

The most influential of all Fundamentalist writers is Hal Lindsey. He
has been described by Time Magazine as 'The Jeremiah for this
Generation', and by his own publisher as 'The Father of the Modern-Day
Bible Prophecy Movement.' Lindsey is a prolific writer, with no less
than eight books dealing with the end times, his own radio and
television programmes, seminars, Holy Land Tours, and for $40 per
year, his monthly International Intelligence Briefing.

Lindsey's most famous book, The Late Great Planet Earth has been
described by the New York Times as the '#1 Non-fiction Bestseller of
the Decade.' It has gone through more than 100 printings with sales,
by 1993, in excess of 18 million, with a further 30 million copies in
31 foreign editions. Despite dramatic changes in the world since its
publication in 1970, most significantly, it remains in print in its
original unrevised form. Lindsey has, perhaps not surprisingly, since
become a consultant on Middle Eastern affairs to both the Pentagon and
Israeli Government.

This particular kind of reading of history, coloured by a literal
exegesis of selected biblical scriptures, is dualistic, triumphalist
and confrontational. Lindesy's latest book, The Final Battle, includes
the statement on the cover "Never before, in one book, has there been
such a complete and detailed look at the events leading up to 'The
Battle of Armageddon.'" It asserts that the world is degenerating and
that the forces of evil manifest in godless Communism and militant
Islam are the real enemies of Israel. Various speculative apocalyptic
scenarios are postulated, centred upon a great battle at Megiddo
between massive armies that will attempt but fail to destroy Israel.
These will only hasten the return of Jesus Christ to be the King of
the Jews who will rule over the other nations from the rebuilt Jewish
temple on the site of the destroyed Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem will be the spiritual centre of the entire world...all
people of the earth will come annually to worship Jesus who will rule
there.

One of the reasons fundamentalists appear so enthusiastic about such a
terrible scenario may have to do with their doctrine of the secret
rapture. Just before the final conflagration they believe Jesus will,

...'rapture' true Christians into the upper air, while the rest of
humankind, was being slaughtered below. 144,000 Jews would bow down
before Jesus and be saved, but the rest of Jewry would perish in the
mother of all holocausts.

Authors such as Lindsey also Goldberg, a professor of Theology and
Jewish Studies at the Moody Bible Institute, offer detailed
illustrated plans ostensibly showing future military movements of
armies and naval convoys leading up to the battle of Armageddon.

The Moody Bible Institute and Dallas Theological Seminary have played
no small part in promoting a Fundamentalist and Zionist eschatology
among thousands of American ministers and missionaries. Charles Dyer,
a professor of Bible exposition at Dallas even includes photographs
allegedly showing Saddam Hussein reconstructing Babylon to the same
specifications and splendour as Nebuchadnezzar. Dyer warns that this
is evidence that Hussein plans to attempt to repeat Nebuchadnezzar's
conquest of Israel, the only Arab ever to have done so. 'The Middle
East is the world's time bomb, and Babylon is the fuse that will
ignite the events of the end times.'

An indication of how seriously Fundamentalists take the military
aspect of their apocalyptic scenario can be seen from the content of
the itinerary used by Jerry Falwell in his Friendship Tour to Israel
in 1983. It included meetings with top Israeli government and military
officials and an,

.....On-site tour of modern Israeli battlefields...Official visit to
an Israeli defence installation...strategic military positions, plus
experience first hand the battle Israel faces as a nation.

The demise of the Soviet Union, the rise of militant Islam, the
'success' of the Allies in the Gulf War, and the approaching third
millennium have only fuelled more imaginative speculations among
Fundamentalists, while the same anti-Arab prejudices and Orientalist
stereotypes persist.

Long ago the psalmist predicted the final mad attempt of the
confederated Arab armies to destroy the nation of Israel...The
Palestinians are determined to trouble the world until they repossess
what they feel is their land. The Arab nations consider it a matter of
racial honour to destroy the State of Israel. Islam considers it a
sacred mission of religious honour to recapture Old Jerusalem.

Following the Gulf War, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism hired the
Fundamentalist musician Pat Boon to promote pilgrimages in North
America through a series of costly advertisements in Evangelical
journals and on television. According to Wagner there are a number of
Evangelical Christian Zionist leaders even more right wing than
Falwell and Robertson, who in the 1980's had direct access to Reagan
and the White House. These include Terry Risenhoover and Doug Kreiger
who were very influential in gathering American support for the Jewish
extremist organisation, the Temple Mount Faithful. These particular
Christian and Jewish Zionists believe that the Moslem Dome of the Rock
must be destroyed and the Third Jewish Temple built in order to ensure
the return of Jesus.

To such Fundamentalists the existence of a Palestinian Christian
church is either ignored completely, or maligned as theologically
Liberal and spiritually dead, an irrelevancy in the inexorable
movement of world history leading to the imminent return of the Jewish
Messiah. Basilea Schlink, for example, berates the Palestinian
Intifada as 'terrorism....aimed solely at destroying Israel.' Her
uncompromising views are typical of many other Zionists who elevate
the State of Israel to a privileged status far above any human
sanction or criticism.

Anyone who disputes Israel's right to the land of Canaan is actually
opposing God and his holy covenant with the Patriarchs. He is striving
against sacred, inviolable words and promises of God, which He has
sworn to keep.

The founding of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem in 1980
represents in some senses the coming of age of Christian Zionism as a
high profile concerted international movement. The ICEJ was opened
with the express intention of bringing comfort and support to the
Jewish people and the State of Israel. It was built at a time when
other governmental embassies were being moved out of Jerusalem to Tel
Aviv in protest at Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem. Their
promotional material includes the following explanation.

When the vision of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem was
first given it was expressed in the following concerns; to care for
the Jewish people, especially for the newborn State of Israel which
includes standing up for the Jews when they are attacked or
discriminated against, and for Israel to live in peace and
security....to care that the world wide body of Christ will be rightly
related to Israel in comfort, love and prayer for her well-being, to
care for the nations whose destinies will be increasingly linked to
the way in which they relate to Israel, the care and preparation for
the coming of the Lord.

Among other things the work of the ICEJ specifically includes
promoting Zionist pilgrimages, and imposing a Zionist agenda on
pilgrimage itineraries. ICEJ are not alone in offering explicit
support for Israel. Doug Kreiger, an Evangelical Fundamentalist listed
over 250 pro-Israel evangelical organisations operating in America and
founded between 1980-1985

2.11 The Coalition of Religious and Political Zionism

There are a number of similarities between 19th century British and
20th Century American attitudes to Israel. In both, as the
international power broker of their day, the blend of religion and
politics became inextricably entwined. In the closing decades of the
19th and early 20th Century, there was a convergence of British
strategic colonial interests and Christian Zionism within significant
segments of the intellectual and political intelligensia. Likewise
current American foreign policy in the Middle East largely coincides
with that of the powerful Christian Zionist lobby. Both parties, now
as then, favour a strong and dominant pro-American presence in the
Middle East whether for pragmatic reasons of military strategy, or
because it conforms to their particular eschatology. Among a consensus
of American Christian Fundamentalist leaders, these twin motives,
religious and political are unashamedly connected and intrinsic to a
predicted apocalyptic scenario which one writer has gone so far as to
describe as, 'Operation Desert Storm II.'

In 1976-77 several events occurred simultaneously which had the effect
of accelerating the influence of Christian Zionism as a political
phenomenon in America.

A religious and political marriage was consummated between American
Zionist organisations, Israeli leadership, and Fundamentalist
Christian Zionists.

In 1977 the Likud party under Menachem Begin came to power on an
expansionist Zionist platform using biblical phraseology to justify
the settlement of the West Bank. It was Begin for example who first
renamed Israel and the Occupied Territories as Judaea and Samaria. In
America the Jewish lobby realised the potential significance of wooing
the political endorsement of the powerful 50-60 million Evangelical
block vote through their fundamentalist leadership. With this in mind,
in 1979, the Israeli government honoured Jerry Falwell with the
Jabotinsky Award in appreciation of his support of Israel. They also
provided him with a Lear jet to assist in his work on their behalf.

The downfall of President Carter, in part due to his support for a
Palestinian homeland and consequent loss of the Fundamentalist block
vote; the exploitation of the media by a group known as 'Evangelicals'
Concern for Israel' including well known figures as Pat Boone and
Vernon Grounds; the rise of Moral Majority as a political campaigning
organisation under Jerry Falwell; and the election of Ronald Reagan as
a President who publicly subscribed to a Fundamentalist premillennial
dispensational theology, all combined to give a considerable boost to
the Zionist cause. In the 1980 presidential elections, Wagner claims
that 80% of Evangelicals supported the conservative wing of the
Republican party, and Ronald Reagan in particular.

The election of Ronald Reagan ushered in not only the most pro-Israel
administration in history but gave several Christian Zionists
prominent political posts. In addition to the President, those who
subscribed to a futurist premillennial theology and Christian Zionism
included Attorney General Ed Meese, Secretary of Defence Casper
Weinberger, and Secretary of the Interior James Watt....Once the
Reagan Administration opened the door, leading Evangelical Christian
Zionist televangelists and writers were given direct access to the
President and cabinet members. Rev. Jerry Falwell, Christian Zionist
Televangelist Mike Evans and author Hal Lindsey among them.

'White House Seminars' became a regular feature of Reagan's
administration bringing Christian Zionists into direct personal
contact with national and Congressional leaders. In a conversation
reported in the Washington Post in April of 1984, Reagan told the
chief Israeli lobbyist, Tom Dine,

You know, I turn back to the ancient prophets in the Old Testament and
the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if-if
we're the generation that is going to see that come about. I don't
know if you've noted any of these prophecies lately, but believe me
they certainly describe the times we're going through.

For Fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell and Mike Evans, America is
seen as the great redeemer, her role in the world providentially and
politically preordained. The two nations of America and Israel are
like Siamese twins, linked not only by common self interest but more
significantly by similar religious foundations. Together they are
perceived to be pitted against an evil world dominated by Communist
and Islamic totalitarian regimes antithetical to the values of America
and Israel. So for example, Mike Evans, founder and president of
Lovers of Israel Inc, in the following quotations from his book,
Israel, America's Key to Survival, almost mimics and plays on the
apocalyptic scenario of Benjamin Netanyahu, offering 'biblical'
grounds for their countries mutual survival.

If America goes down, then the whole world goes down. Nothing will
remain of the world. If America was not around, the Soviet Union would
take over the world in three days. Their goals are to destroy
America...to destroy it...to reduce it to nothing; and they feel they
can effectively do it through terrorism.

Only one nation, Israel, stands between Soviet-sponsored terrorist
aggression and the complete decline of the United States as a
democratic world power...Surely demonic pressure will endeavor to
encourage her to betray Israel. This must not happen. Israel is the
key to America's survival. For God has said of the nations who will
oppose Israel, "Yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted...I will
bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curseth
thee..."(Isa.60:12; Gen. 12:3)...As we stand with Israel, I believe we
shall see God perform a mighty work in our day. God is going to bless
America and Israel as well. It is not too late. I believe this is the
greatest hour to be alive, and the key is unity, standing tall,
proclaiming with a voice of love our commitment to the House of
Israel, and to the God of Israel.

Similarly, Ramon Bennett, author of 'Saga: Israel and the Demise of
the Nations' and spokesman for Arm of Salvation, a Christian Zionist
organisation based in Jerusalem, emotively dedicates his book, 'To the
men of the Israeli Defence Force who display immense courage when
facing impossible odds. To the grieving parents, wives, children,
sweethearts, sisters and brothers and friends, whose tears have
watered the parched earth of Eretz Yisreal.'

The International Christian Embassy, Jerusalem has, since 1980, become
the semi-official voice of this coalition of Christian religious and
political Zionist organisations, frequently cultivated, exploited and
quoted by the Israeli Government when ever a sympathetic Christian
view point is needed to enhance their own policies, and rebut Western
criticism. For example, in October 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu the
Israeli Prime Minister spoke at the Jerusalem 3000 rally organised by
the International Christian Embassy, Jerusalem, to support Israel's
sovereignty over Jerusalem. Following the provocative opening of an
underground tunnel by the Israelis from the Western Wall through the
Moslem Quarter, he was cheered when he insisted the tunnel, 'is open.
It will stay open. It will always stay open.'

Not surprisingly the 1993 Peace-Accord signed by the Israeli
Government and the PLO has been sharply criticised by Christian
Zionist groups who see it as a threat to the realisation of Eretz
Israel. In particular they have opposed the handing back of the West
Bank and the threat to the status of the Jewish settlements. For
example, Theodore Temple Beckett, Chairman of the Christian Friends of
Israel Community Development Foundation, as well as President of the
Colorado-based Foundation for Israel, has initiated an
'adopt-a-settlement program among American Evangelical Churches. The
Jewish town of Ariel has already been adopted by Faith Bible Chapel in
Denver. By the end of 1995 it was Beckett's expectation that around 70
Jewish settlements would have been adopted by churches,

...with larger churches adopting larger settlements and smaller
churches adopting smaller settlements and giving all a morale boost to
show them they are not alone and are loved by many.

On the 21st December 1995, just hours before the Israeli's handed over
administrative responsibility for Bethlehem to the Palestinian
National Authority, the Voice of America radio station carried a news
report claiming some Evangelical Christian groups had called for a
boycott of Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem in protest.

Nine Christian Organisations have called their faithful not to go to
Bethlehem this Christmas, to protest the transfer of the City to
Palestinian rule. One of those Groups is called Bridges for Peace. Its
Director is Clarence Wagner.

'There are millions of Evangelical Christians and other Middle East
Christians who are concerned about the fact that Bethlehem has been
unilaterally turned over to the Palestinian Authority, which is under
the aegis of the PLO, and therefore has placed Bethlehem under Muslim
control. Historically, Islam has not respected Christian holy sites.
And here, Manger Square, the birthplace of Jesus, one of the holiest
shrines in Christianity, is sort of quietly being turned over to a
Muslim authority and no one is saying anything like, 'What will this
mean for the future?...We have no idea what the experience under the
PA will be, particularly if more fanatical Islamic Fundamentalism does
increase in the years to come.'

...But the Latin Patriarch of the Holy Land, Michel Sabbah, who is
Palestinian, said he welcomes the transfer of authority in Bethlehem
and Mr. Arafat's plan to attend Midnight Mass. He says, religion and
politics have always been linked in the Middle East and this is an
opportunity to make that linkage in a positive way. Patriarch
Sabbah...sharply criticizes those who are calling for a boycott of
Bethlehem this Christmas.

'They are our brothers, every human being is our brother, but they are
coming from abroad and they are bringing in the country feelings from
abroad which do not correspond to the views and to the needs,
spiritual and human, of the Land. This Land needs reconciliation. So,
this is what we need, and not people coming from outside to tell us to
boycott this and boycott that.'

The International Christian Embassy, quoted in the Sunday Times, on
Christmas Eve 1995 predicted that the celebrations that night would,
'...look more like Arafat's birthday than that of Jesus.' Ray
Borlaise, writing in the Prayer Bulletin of Intercessors for Britain
in January 1996, made similar criticisms of the transfer of power in
Bethlehem, but apparently on sound theological grounds,

It is plain from Zechariah 12 that Jerusalem will become a contentious
issue leading to conflict. Many feel that Ezekiel 38 & 39 will take
place in the last days and will be a conflict between Islamic
countries and Israel. There may be previous skirmishes before that
battle takes place on the 'mountains of Israel' - some areas of which
have just been handed over to the Palestinians. We sense that the
peace may falter causing Samaria and Judea to pass back into Jewish
hands. Will God allow Bethlehem, the burial place of Rachel, the town
of Ruth and the birth place of David (let alone that of Jesus) to
remain in Arab hands when it was promised to Abraham, Issac (sic) and
Jacob as an eternal inheritance? (Genesis 17)

Borlaise, in one short paragraph, makes a number of typical Christian
Zionist assumptions which will be explored in more detail in a later
chapter. He assumes, for example, that selectively chosen ancient
Hebrew writings relate directly to contemporary events, and will
thereby some how determine future events, conveniently ignoring other
prophetic passages in which God warns of the expulsion of the Jews
from the land as and when they fail to act righteously and with
justice. It is also interesting that Borlaise not only refers to the
Occupied Territories, as 'Judea and Samaria,' but also assumes that
because Bethlehem had an historical significance in Jewish history
between 3,500 - 2000 years ago, contemporary Jewish people have some
divine right to occupy and confiscate the land of those living there
prior to 1967.

A notorious example of this relates to the confiscation of Palestinian
owned land at Abu-Ghoneim mountain, located at the northern edge of
Beit Sahour on the traditional site of the Shepherds Fields, which was
ratified by the Israeli Supreme Court on December 4th 1994. Local
Christians see this particular Jewish settlement project, called Har
Homa, as one of the most serious and dangerous, not only because the
building work involves the destruction of several ancient Christian
shrines, but also because it demonstrates a flagrant State-initiated
contradiction and judicially-ratified disregard for both the text and
spirit of the Peace Accord signed a year earlier.

At the Third International Christian Zionist Congress, held in
February 1996 under the auspices of ICEJ, the following resolutions
were passed unanimously indicating the explicit religio-political
agenda of ICEJ.

Further, we are persuaded by the clear unction of our God to express
the sense of this Congress on the following concerns before us this
day,

1. Because of the sovereign purposes of God for the City, Jerusalem
must remain undivided, under Israeli sovereignty, open to all peoples,
the capitol of Israel only, and all nations should so concur and place
their embassies here.

2. As a faith bound to love and forgiveness we are appreciative of the
attempts by the Government of Israel to work tirelessly for peace.
However, the truths of God are sovereign and it is written that the
Land which He promised to His People is not to be partitioned... It
would be further error for the nations to recognize a Palestinian
state in any part of Eretz Israel.

3. To the extent the Palestinian Covenant or any successor instrument
calls for the elimination of Israel or denies the right of Israel to
exist within secure borders in Eretz Israel, it should be abolished.

4. The Golan is part of biblical Israel and is a vital strategic asset
necessary for the security and defense of the entire country.

C. The Islamic claim to Jerusalem, including its exclusive claim to
the Temple Mount, is in direct contradiction to the clear biblical and
historical significance of the city and its holiest site, and this
claim is of later religio-political origin rather than arising from
any Qur'anic text or early Muslim tradition.

7. While Gentile believers have been grafted into that household of
faith which is of Abraham (the commonwealth of Israel), replacement
theology within the Christian faith, which does not recognize the
ongoing biblical purposes for Israel and the Jewish People, is
doctrinal error.

8. Regarding Aliyah, we remain concerned for the fate of imperiled
Jewish People in diverse places, and seek to encourage and assist in
the continuing process of Return of the Exiles to Eretz Israel. To
this end we commit to work with Israel and to encourage the Diaspora
to fulfill the vision and goal of gathering to Israel the greater
majority of all Jewish People from throughout the world.

Under Netanyahu's influence, the Israeli government remains
enthusiastic to nurture the support of Christian Zionists. Exploiting
the association of Megiddo with the apocalypse, Israeli planners and
architects, with Netanyahu's blessing, have began creating a three
dimensional 'virtual Megiddo'. While some critics have described it
'Apocalypso', Israeli officials are keen to capitalise on the millions
of additional visitors, 'expected to flock to mark the end of the
millennium in gloomy style.' Ze'ev Margalit, the official in charge of
the development claimed, ...the beauty of this place is that it has a
6,000-year history that can take people back to the dawn of
civilisation, a vibrant present and an apocalyptic future. Anxious to
avoid creating a 'Disneyland of the apocalypse', Margalit added,
'There are a lot of different ideas on how to deal with this. It is
easy to get kitsch and we must avoid that. So we will leave a lot to
the imagination.' Keen to encourage greater numbers of Christians to
visit Israel leading up to the Millennium, Netanyahu has recently
taken part in programmes broadcast on Evangelical radio stations.

Boosting evangelical tourism dovetails with his plans to deepen
Israel's ties with leaders of America's Christian far right, many of
whom are sympathetic to Zionism...Netanyahu has a long history of
nurturing these ties. He believes the conservative Christian influence
in American public opinion, and particularly within the Republican
party controlling congress, can be used to counter liberal Democrats
such as President Bill Clinton, who want Israel to cede land to the
Palestinians.

n.b. Further Examples; Jerusalem 3000 campaign; Tunnel under the
Moslem Quarter

2.12 A Preliminary Critique of Christian Zionism

Armstrong is not alone in tracing in Western Christian Zionism
evidence of the legacy of the Crusades. Fundamentalists have, she
claims, 'returned to a classical and extreme religious crusading.'
Ruether also sees the danger of this kind of Christian Zionism in its,
'dualistic, Manichaean view of global politics. America and Israel
together against an evil world.'

This 'simple dualism' and 'highly dogmatic thinking' is something a
number of sociologists have observed as common to much American
Fundamentalism in particular.

It is so; God chose the Jews; the land is theirs by divine gift. These
dicta cannot be questioned or resisted. They are final. Such verdicts
come infallibly from Christian biblicists for whom Israel can do no
wrong-thus fortified. But can such positivism, this unquestioning
finality, be compatible with the integrity of the Prophets themselves?
It certainly cannot square with the open peoplehood under God which is
the crux of New Testament faith. Nor can it well be reconciled with
the ethical demands central to law and election alike.

The Middle East Council of Churches (MECC), representing the
indigenous and ancient Oriental and Eastern Churches, has been highly
critical of the activities of Christian Zionists, and the ICEJ in
particular. They assert, for instance, that the ICEJ has aggressively
imposed an aberrant expression of the Christian faith and an erroneous
interpretation of the Bible which is subservient to the political
agenda of the modern State of Israel. Indeed they represent a tendency
to,

...force the Zionist model of theocratic and ethnocentric nationalism
on the Middle East...(rejecting)..the movement of Christian unity and
inter-religious understanding which is promoted by the (indigenous)
churches in the region. The Christian Zionist programme, with its
elevation of modern political Zionism, provides the Christian with a
world view where the gospel is identified with the ideology of success
and militarism. It places its emphasis on events leading up to the end
of history rather than living Christ's love and justice today.

In 1988 the MECC went further insisting that Christian Zionism had no
place in the Middle East and should be repudiated by the universal
Church because it was 'a dangerous distortion' and significant shift
away from orthodox Christocentric expressions of the Christian faith .

(This is) ...a fundamental disservice also to Jews who may be inspired
to liberate themselves from discriminatory attitudes and thereby
rediscover equality with the Palestinians with whom they are expected
to live God's justice and peace in the Holy Land.

Although ICEJ's support for Israel is primarily political, MECC has
been concerned more with its theological basis, and ICEJ's attempt to
sacralize a political ideology beyond human criticism or ethical
standards and to treat the security of a Jewish State within the
entire land presently occupied as a fundamental axiom of their
supra-historical eschatology. The declarations following the first,
second and third Christian Zionist Congresses, organised by ICEJ in
1985, 1988 and 1996, according to MECC, show a significant shift away
from orthodox Christocentric expressions of the Christian faith. Based
on the writings of ICEJ's spokesman, Rev. Jan Willem van der Hoeven,
MECC argue that the 'Christian Zionist',

......is placed in a reductionist eschatology by engaging in actions
designed to bring 'comfort and support' to modern political Israel.
Accordingly, Jesus is de-emphasised, as is His death and resurrection,
while salvation and judgment are redefined.... Christians will be
judged solely according to their actions on behalf of the state of
Israel. True Christians are those who leave their Gentile background
and become 'Israelites of God'

It is therefore perhaps not surprising that among the Middle East
churches generally, Christian Zionism is regarded as a devious heresy
and an unwelcome and alien intrusion into their culture, which
advocates an ethnocentric and nationalist political agenda running
counter to their work of reconciliation, and patient witness among
both Jews and Moslems. As one leading Anglican cleric described it,
'Making God into a real estate agent is heart breaking...they are not
preaching Jesus any more.' They are, in the words of another
Palestinian clergyman, 'instruments of destruction' Another senior
churchman was equally forthright,

Their presence here is quite offensive....projecting themselves as
really the Christians of the land... with total disregard for the
indigenous Christian community.

Similarly outspoken criticisms of the Israel Trust of the Anglican
Church (ITAC) have been made by Palestinian Anglican clergy.

CMJ are propagating Zionism rather than Christianity. It is working
against the interests of the Anglican Church in Israel.

Essentially, Christian Zionism fails to recognise the deep seated
problems that exist between Palestinians and Israelis; it distorts the
Bible and marginalises the universal imperative of the Christian
gospel; has grave political ramifications and ultimately ignores the
sentiments of the overwhelming majority of indigenous Christians. It
is a situation that many believe Israel exploits to her advantage,
cynically welcoming American Christian Zionists as long as they remain
docile and compliant with Israeli government policy. Consequently,

Local Christians are caught in a degree of museumization. They are
aware of tourists who come in great volume from the West to savour
holy places but who are, for the most part, blithely disinterested in
the people who indwell them. The pain of the indifference is not eased
insofar as the same tourism is subtly manipulated to make the case for
the entire legitimacy of the statehood that regulates it.

Cragg offers this astute critique of Christian Zionism,

The overriding criteria of Christian perception have to be those of
equal grace and common justice. From these there can be no proper
exemption, however alleged or presumed. Chosenness cannot properly be
either an ethnic exclusivism or a political facility.

Christian Zionism appears, at least in the eyes of its critics, to
offer an uncritical endorsement of the Israeli political right and at
the same time shows an inexcusable lack of compassion for the
Palestinian tragedy. In doing so it has apparently legitimised their
oppression in the name of the Gospel.

Is such a condemnation of Western Christian Zionism legitimate? The
task of this thesis will be to examine in detail the various forms of
Western Fundamentalist Christian Zionism, to appraise their
theological interpretation of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and to
assess their political impact on the indigenous Palestinian Church.

This material forms part of my doctoral thesis. A copy with footnotes
is available on request

http://www.virginiawater.co.uk/christchurch/articles/history.html