Crisis and opportunity: A seminal moment for American Christian Zionism

By William Mehlman, Jerusalem Representative

Americans For a Safe Israel

            As Bible-believing Jews and Christians, we share a dream of the Redemption – the establishment of God’s justice among man and nations, the day envisioned by Zecharia when “the Lord shall be One and His name One.”

            The mandatory first stage in that Redemptive process- the restoration of the people of Israel to the Land of Israel has been underway for more than 100 years.  From South Africa to Siberia, from Ethiopia to Australia, the sound of the ram’s horn summoning Jews home has been heard and responded to.  Fifty six years after its resurrection from the debris of two millennia of desolation, Israel is today the domicile of 37 percent of the world’s Jewish population.

            The Redemption, however, remains on hold.  For all the wonder attending its development, for all its scientific and technological accomplishments, for all the flowers it has caused to bloom in what was so recently a wilderness, Israel remains an inlet in a fathomless sea of Arab despotism. Even if the ancient plague of anti-Semitism had not broken out anew, even if the post-Holocaust Europe we had once counted on as an ally had not thrown its lot in with our would-be annihilators, five major wars and decades of unrelenting terrorism have left us with few illusions about our ability to bring God’s justice to a world in which God and justice have both become anachronisms.  In fact, we are too few, too divided, too aggrieved to go it alone.

            In committing our lives to the restoration of the land God promised to Abraham and his descendants as an eternal legacy, we in Israel’s national Zionist camp have provided the vanguard of the Redemption.  And the shock troops of that vanguard are the 250, 000 Jews of Judea, Samaria and Gaza who have defied every risk to body and mind, suffered every assault on their personhood that a tendentious world media has been capable of mounting to preserve for generations still to be born the territorial integrity of the Land of Israel and the sanctity of its holy places.  Vanguards, however, are only as strong and effective as the divisions backing them up.  In all of the world, there is no source for that critical support other than the American Christian Zionist movement.

            That peerless assemblage of Bible-Believers and their leaders, stretching to the four corners of the United States, has already earned a gratitude we can never recompense for its unique understanding of our mission in this land and its unwavering support of our right to exist as an undivided Jewish state with a united Jerusalem as our capital.  Your expressions of solidarity, your legions of friends and volunteers who never stopped trooping to our shores even during the depths of the terrorist depredations visited upon us will never be forgotten.  But at this juncture, with the Land of Israel threatening to be torn from our grasp in obeisance to the misguided notion that the creation of an Islamic dictatorship in its heart will bring peace to the Middle East, Christian Zionist consciousness must rise to a new level.  The price of inaction will be moral catastrophe, a total repudiation of God’s word.

            We have only the briefest window of opportunity to reverse this tragic course.  Any measure of success we achieve will depend on the Christian Zionist community’s understanding that unless it mounts a proprietary, interventionist campaign against American involvement in any plan to convert portions of the spiritual legacy it shares with Zionist Jewry into a Hamas terrorist playground, nothing will be done to stop the train.

            In a recent referendum, the 200,000 members of Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s Likud party overwhelmingly rejected his plan to uproot 25 Jewish communities in Gaza and northern Samaria.  Citing White House support, Sharon has vowed to carry out the plan, despite the referendum result.  If it is President Bush’s support he is leaning on to defy the wishes of his constituents, then it is time for Mr. Bush’s most loyal constituents, the American Evangelical community, to see that the crutch is removed.  Christian Zionist supporters of the Land of Israel have taken the first step in that direction with the initiation of a national ballot referendum of their own, which will enable millions of Bible-believing Christians to record their feelings about the creation of an Islamic beachhead  in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.  Ballots will soon be on their way to thousands of Evangelical and Apostolic churches across the length and breadth of United States.  They will be collected and tabulated and the results presented to every member of Congress, to the chairmen of both Republican and Democratic National Committees, and most particularly, to President Bush and to Senator Kerry.

            We believe the results of this referendum will make it clear to President Bush that the constituency most akin to his own moral and political views unequivocally rejects any attempt to enshrine Islamic terrorism in the Land of Israel, even as young Americans daily shed their blood to eradicate that same virulent strain in Iraq.  We trust that every Bible-believing Christian will seize the opportunity afforded by this referendum to make his/her voice heard on this critical issue.  You carry with you the hopes of so many of us in this vanguard of Judeo-Christian civilization.  Our legacy is your legacy.  Our redemption is your redemption.  Our hand is stretched out to you.