JERUSALEM, Nov. 26 (UPI) -- At the end of a briefing in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, a Californian Evangelical raised an unexpected point: The house across the street. It's for sale. Aren't you concerned who will be there? It might be a security risk, she said.
The diplomat fumbled for words, the group left, and an hour later the woman returned. "We bought the house. We'll put young people there and they will pray for Israel," she said.
In the 20 years since then, Israel's ties with Evangelicals have expanded. Israeli and American-Jews who had been wary of a rightwing ally with a religious agenda, learnt to appreciate the Evangelicals' political and economic support. That friendship became doubly important to Israel during the intifada.
Last October, 3,000 Evangelicals came to Jerusalem. Waving small flags they marched down streets that in the past three years experienced some of the world's worst terror attacks. Then they boarded bulletproof busses and went to settlements in the occupied territories.
Most of these visitors, who consider themselves Christian Zionists, are Protestant fundamentalists. They believe the Jews' return to Israel, and the restoration of the Jewish state, are precursors to Jesus' second coming. They take Biblical passages literally.
"There is no question that Israel holds the title deed to the entire land promised to Abraham, from the Euphrates to the 'Brook of Egypt' just beyond present-day Gaza," David Parsons, the spokesman for the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, wrote in their periodical Word from Jerusalem.
The Euphrates flows through northern Syria and Iraq and even the most hawkish Israeli parties do not say their country's borders should stretch that far.
Parsons told United Press International: "It's up to God to keep his promises. But if we see Him do things...it's (our) duty to work with Him on it."
The Evangelicals' help is almost as old as the Zionist movement. In the 1880s, the Anglican chaplain in Vienna, William Hechler, helped the head of the nascent Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, meet the Ottoman sultan and the German kaiser. "Hechler saw Herzl and the Zionist project as ordained by God," Donald Wagner, a professor of religion and Middle Eastern Studies at North Park University in Chicago wrote in a series of articles published in Lebanon's Daily Star.
The Jewish-Evangelical ties in the United States developed in the early 1980s when the Republicans gained strength. Jews have been predominantly Democratic, liberal, concerned with civil rights. They feared the Evangelicals wanted to convert them and make America Christian, said Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, President of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
The shift began when the rightwing Americans got to counter the liberals' influence, a senior Foreign Ministry official said on condition he not be identified.
Harry Z. Hurwitz, who was advisor to the then Prime Minister Menahem Begin, recalled a rally with Evangelicals in Washington in the early 1980s.
Begin, suffering from an injury when he slipped in a bathtub, slowly crossed the hall to the platform. He received a tremendous ovation. "Tonight I know that we are not alone," he told the audience.
Parson's said there are some 400 million to 500 million Evangelicals around the world. "Tens of millions" of them favor Israel. The Foreign Ministry official estimated 85 million Evangelicals support Israel. That is more than six times the number of Jews in the world.
Their political support became extremely important because of their influence on President George Bush and his administration. President Bush is, "open to Godly counsel," Word from Jerusalem said.
Bush was adamant when Israel reoccupied West Bank towns in 2002 in an attempt to crush terrorism.
"Withdraw! Withdraw your troops immediately," he reportedly demanded.
Christian Zionists rushed to intercede. Tens of thousands of people phoned, sent e-mails and letters to the White House, and Bush did not repeat his criticism, Wagner noted.
An Israeli analyst suggested the Administration would have been more critical of Israel's settlement activity and less forthcoming with loan guarantees, if not for the Evangelicals' support for the Jewish state.
Israel sometimes used prominent clergymen and Evangelicals in prominent political positions to get its messages across, the source indicated.
Evangelicals have helped Israel elsewhere as well. The International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem says it is the world's largest Christian Zionist organization with representatives in 80 countries.
Timothy King, ICEJ's financial director, said they have "made an impact" in Micronesia and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Ninety percent of their residents are churchgoers and, "are with Israel," he added.
Those islands seem remote, but when the United States and Micronesia are the only ones to side with Israel in a U.N. vote, that support stands out.
In recent years International Christian chambers of commerce helped Israeli businessmen export their goods, King and Rahella Weinstock of the Israel Export Institute noted.
Others contribute money. Rabbi Eckstein estimated Christians donated some $100 million for various projects from teaching Ethiopian immigrants to drive busses, to funding a day-care center for children of immigrants from Argentina, and helping soup kitchens run by the Jewish ultra-Orthodox Habbad movement.
Settlers received money that enabled them to provide rapid response teams with bullet proof vests, two-way radios and beepers, said Sondra Oster Baras, Director of the Christian Friends of Israeli Communities. They helped buy a bulletproof bus for a school in the settlement of Efrat, near Bethlehem. Other contributions provided settlements with playgrounds and books.
Baras said she takes Evangelical groups to the ruins of Shilo in the heart of the West Bank. The Tabernacles were kept there. "They look up the hill and see the modern community (the settlement of Shilo) and I don't have to say very much. It's clear as day why we are there," she said.
Gradually Jews changed their attitude. Rabbi Eckstein painfully recalled being expelled from studies in a Chicago yeshiva because of his involvement with the Evangelicals. Those days are largely over.
Israelis realize they don't have many friends now when so many American liberals and Europeans consider them occupiers.
"We'll take any friend we can," the Foreign Ministry official said.
The Evangelicals have been careful about spreading their beliefs. The antechamber at ICEJ has a Jewish Menorah and Shofar on display as well as a statue of Mosses receiving the Tabernacles -- but no cross.
"Forced conversion is repulsive to us," King stressed. Eventually recognition of the true Messiah is "going to be self evident to the Jewish people," he predicted.
Dovish Israeli politicians criticized the contacts. Labor's candidate for prime minister in the January elections, Amram Mitzna, told UPI close ties were "absurd." Religious-based, rightwing support for "everything Israel does without argument.... (reflects) a warped concept," he argued.
Meretz leader, Yossi Sarid, slammed the Evangelicals' religious agenda, and the rightwing Israelis who ignore it just because they found supporters for the government's policies in the occupied territories.
However, Malcolm I. Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations told UPI: "You don't have to embrace all of their beliefs." As for their expectation that Jews would eventually accept Christ or perish he said: "In the end of days we'll worry about it."
