President Bush cautioned Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Monday
[April 11] against West Bank settlement growth but Sharon gave no
commitments... Sharon pledged his commitment to a U.S.-backed peace
"road map" but sent conflicting signals about abiding by its call for a
halt to Israeli "settlement activity." -- Reuters, April 11, 2005.

In
mid-February, Israel's parliament backed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's
plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements. On
March 15, Ha'aretz, a daily Israeli newspaper, reported that "Settlers
protesting the disengagement plan brought rush-hour traffic to a
standstill in south Tel Aviv... when they blocked the Ayalon Highway at
the Kibbutz Galuyot junction and placed burning tires across the road."
(According to recent newspaper accounts, the 9,000 people affected by
the removal plan will receive nearly $900 million in compensation. But
removing the settlers will not be easy, as they have vowed to stand
their ground.)

While the vote in parliament hasn't yet set off
anything other than a few disruptive demonstrations by
anti-disengagement settlers and their supporters, increased violent
resistance may be in the offing. Christian Zionists and radical
right-wing Jews appear to be getting ready to saddle up and head out to
Israel to help the settlers halt the removal, a process slated to begin
in July.

"Thousand of Jews -- and Christians, too -- are
waiting in the U.S. for the call to join the struggle of the settlers
in Gaza," Ha'aretz reported in early January. "In Gush Katif, [the
largest bloc of Jewish communities in Gaza], they expect that when the
hour of reckoning comes, Diaspora Jewry will not only send financial
aid, but will also dispatch legions of people for the violent struggle
against the government."

Many of those itching to get in on
the action in Israel have been there before, including New York City
councilman Dov Hikind and Rabbi Mordechai Friedman, president of the
New York City-based American Board of Rabbis, an organization made up
of some 1,000 orthodox clergymen. Rabbi Friedman recently said that
"hundreds if not thousands of his followers will come to Israel to
fight the plan." Friedman acknowledged that a member of the Board of
Rabbis would be going to Israel "to meet settler leaders and pave the
way for future resistance," the Jerusalem Post reported in late
December. "The government needs to protect its citizens and when they
don't the citizens can take back the government," Friedman told the
Post. "We need to paralyze the country," Rabbit Friedman said. "The
only way to do that is with means which include violence."

Gro
Wenske, head of the Norway-based Christian Bible and Israel
Organization, also pledged to participate in the resistance. She said
that hundreds of Christians from Norway will come to Israel to fight
the evacuation. And Helen Freedman, from the New York-based Americans
for a Safe Israel (AFSI), said her organization of 4,000 has already
vowed to join the fight against disengagement. "We pledged already in
November that should the disengagement come to be a reality, we will go
to assist in the resistance," she said.

According to
spokespersons for the settlers, "thousands of inquiries from Jews as
well as Christians who are waiting for the call" have been received.
Dror Vanunu, the head of public relations for Gush Katif, who recently
returned from a speaking and fundraising trip to North America, said
that both Jews and Christians contributed generously to the children of
Gush Katif. According to Ha'aretz, "they also received the blessing of
Rabbi Hershel Billet, who is known to be particularly close to
President George W. Bush."

At a May 11, 2004, prayer breakfast
organized by New York Governor George Pataki and attended by Laura
Bush, Rabbi Billet, an Honorary President of the Rabbinical Council of
America, told the audience that "It is a divine mission to eradicate
evil from the world. I believe that God has given us the courageous
president, Mr. George W. Bush, to be our commander in chief to lead us
and the world in the sacred war against the evil of terrorism."

Israel
was very much on the minds of those who gathered at the recently
concluded annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters, the
world's largest association of Christian communicators with over 1,700
member organizations. After the Intifada began four years ago, "Israel
ramped up its campaign for evangelical support by marketing itself as
the place 'where Jesus walked' and enlisted Christian broadcasters as
surrogate propagandists," Max Blumenthal reported. "With the Intifada
now at a dead end and Israel expecting upwards of 700,000 Christian
tourists this year, tourism officials deployed to the convention exuded
a blithe, celebratory mood... "

A Budding Relationship

Christian
Zionists have been longtime and uncompromising supporters of Israel, a
relationship that has been deepening over the past three decades. For
some fundamentalist Christians, their support is motivated by a belief
in the "end-times" -- a series of events that takes place in Israel
only after the Jews have returned and solidified their hold on the
territory. Christian Zionists hold that after the final battle, or
Armageddon, Jesus will descend from Heaven and there will then be a
thousand-year reign of peace on Earth.

Sara Diamond, in her
book Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (South End
Press, 1989), maintains that "Israel holds obvious special religious
significance" for Christians. Diamond notes that historically the
relationship between Israel and U.S. Christian fundamentalists was not
always smooth sailing. That changed dramatically, however, when
"popular broadcast ministries, especially those focused on studies of
the 'end-times,' drew evangelicals to pay closer attention to Middle
East politics." Christian fundamentalists are fond of relating Bible
passages to historical and current events. The establishment of the
state of Israel in 1948, the influx of Jews from the Soviet Union, and
the 1967 Six Day War in which, Sara Diamond points out, "Israel
captured Jerusalem and began its occupation of the territories known in
the Bible as Judea and Sumaria," all feed into the current wave of
support for Israel among Christian fundamentalists.

Over the
next two decades, Jews cemented their relationship with anti-Communist
conservative Christians in part due to their mutual work on behalf of
freeing Soviet Jews. "We found that if we wanted support for Soviet
Jewry or Israel, we had to go to the evangelical community," Rabbi A.
James Rudin, the former director of Interreligious Affairs for the
American Jewish Committee, told Dan Levitas. Religious right leaders
joined marches and signed petitions on behalf of Soviet Jews and in
1974, Levitas writes, they supported the Jackson-Vanik Amendment,
"which limited U.S. trade with the Soviet Union because of its failure
to allow open emigration." Six years later, the Anti-Defamation
League's national director Nathan Perlmutter and his wife Ruth wrote
The Real Anti-Semitism in America, making "the case for a strong
evangelical-Jewish alliance, arguing that anti-Israel sentiment posed
the greatest threat to American Jewry."

At the same time, the
Likud Party in Israel was drawing closer to their right wing
counterparts in the US. According to Levitas, "Jewish-evangelical
relations had become so close by the early '80s that, immediately after
Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981, Israeli Prime Minister
Menachem Begin telephoned Moral Majority leader Rev. Jerry Falwell
before calling President Ronald Reagan to ask Falwell to 'explain to
the Christian public the reasons for the bombing' (Newsweek, December
23, 2002). That same year, Falwell received Israel's 1981 Jabotinsky
Award for his support of the Jewish state."

Building New Alliances

In
the past few years, a number of new organizing efforts have united
right wing Jews and Christian Zionists. In May 2002, Rabbi Yehiel
Eckstein (president of the International Fellowship of Christians and
Jews) and Ralph Reed (former executive director of the Christian
Coalition and current Republican Party chairman of Georgia) got
together for a new project called Stand for Israel. The organization
was modeled after the powerful Jewish lobbying group, the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and it aims to counter what
they see as media bias against Israel -- a long held belief shared by
both Israelis and Christian-right activists.

In April 2003,
more than 1,000 policymakers, Christian leaders and pro-Israel
activists gathered at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, for Stand
for Israel's Washington Briefing. House Majority Leader Tom "the
embattled" DeLay and Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos were presented
with the Friend of Israel award.

According to the Stand for
Israel Web site, the annual International Day of Prayer and Solidarity
with Israel "is the cornerstone of... [its]campaign. For three years in
a row, millions of people in tens of thousands of churches across
America and the world have expressed their support for the State of
Israel during church services, pro-Israel rallies and workshops,
uniting their voices in prayer for peace in the Holy Land."

Recently,
Rabbi Eckstein lashed out at mainline Protestant denominations over
their failure to "stand alongside" of Israel in solidarity. "At the
same time that we're seeing the results of 25 years of efforts in
bringing together Jewish and evangelical groups in support of Israel,
we're also facing the sobering reality of mainline denominations not
only turning their backs on Israel, but lining up to viciously attack
the only Middle Eastern country with democratic values and practices,"
wrote Eckstein in a News Release dated March 7.

Gary Bauer, a
prominent evangelical leader and head of the Christian right group
American Values seconded Eckstein's views: "Mainline Christian groups
need to be held accountable for their irresponsible, unjust attacks on
Israel," he said. "These church bureaucrats do not speak for American
Christians... Rabbi Eckstein does a real service by speaking out on
this issue, just as The Fellowship does by bringing Jews and
evangelicals together in support of Israel."

One of the
Religious right's favorite Jews, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, the president of
the conservative Jewish organization Toward Tradition, got together
with Bauer in early 2002 to found the American Alliance of Jews and
Christians (AAJC). According to its Web site, the AAJC's Board of
Advisers includes Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Bauer,
Charles Colson of Prisin Fellowship Ministries, Rev. Jerry Falwell,
Rev. Pat Robertson, Pastor Rick Scarborough, Rabbi Barry Freundel,
Rabbi David Novak, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Michael Medved, and John
Uhlmann. According to Rabbi Lapin, "Let us remember that friendship is
a two-way street. American Christians consistently stand by Israel, and
while they ask nothing in return, they deserve friendship and support
from American Jews. Christians seek an America that is strong both
morally and materially, as do Jews, and such an America is the best
friend Israel can have."

On Valentine's Day, Rabbi Lapin, who
is a major opponent of same-sex marriage, displayed his solidarity with
the Christian right by being a featured speaker at a sports arena in
North Little Rock, Arkansas, where Governor Mike Huckabee and his wife
became the most high-profile converts to the covenant marriage cause.

In
one of Toward Tradition's seminal essays entitled "Enemies or Allies?
-- Why American Jews Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love
Conservative Christians", David Klinghoffer writes that American Jews
need to wake "up to the blessing... of political friendship with
America's conservative Christians."

Klinghoffer argues that
not only it is wrongheaded and politically stupid for Jews -- a
minority -- to be hostile to conservative Christians -- the majority --
"it is in the interest of Jews and Christians to think of themselves as
civic partners in the great project of renewing American civilization."

And in a June 2002 piece in National Review online Klinghoffer
suggests that "At a minimum, Christians can reasonably ask that groups
like the ADL, the American Jewish Congress, and Wiesenthal Center lay
off a bit. In exchange for their vital support of Israel, at least
until the Mideast crisis has subsided, let [Abe] Foxman et al. declare
a moratorium on bashing Christians."

How does the Christian
Zionists' support for Israel play in country? For the answer to that
question we turned to Gershom Gorenberg, the associate editor of The
Jerusalem Report and the author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and
the Struggle for the Temple Mount. "To the extent that Israelis are
aware at all of these people, they are most likely to know of them as
giving to philanthropic projects," Gorenberg told me in an e-mail
interview. "My guess is that only the wonkish class -- some
journalists, politicos and foreign policy people -- pay significant
attention to the political tie, which gets occasional reporting in
Ha'aretz. And within those groups, the feelings are split on left-right
lines."

Gorenberg pointed out that "US Jewish radical right
groups have a very bad image here [in Israel] -- a combination of
resentment of the radical right with a generalized dislike of people
who don't live here, don't serve in the military, don't take the risks,
then try to force Israel to take their positions."

The
American-born Israeli journalist, who is an associate at the Center for
Millennial Studies at Boston University, added that "the protest
movement against the Gaza withdrawal has already managed to portray
itself as radical and to alienate much of Israeli society, including
the moderate right, due to calls for soldiers to refuse orders and to
use of Holocaust imagery. My guess is that if soldiers have to drag
foreigners out of houses in Gaza, the general public reaction will be
absolute fury."

* * *

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime
observer of the conservative movement. His Working For Change column
Conservative Watch documents the strategies, players, institutions,
victories and defeats of the American Right.