November 15, 2006
Premillennialism: Good for the Jews? II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:50 AM EST Josh Zeitz wrote yesterday about what he considered “a fascinating article in today’s New York Times about evangelical Christian support for Israel.” I must confess that I didn’t find this article fascinating. For one thing, the enthusiasm for Israel among some evangelical Christians is very far from news, and I found myself wondering why The New York Times was reporting this fact as if it were news. I have a suspicion that this remarkably well-covered story is again news because a recent theory—the one about the Jews, via the Israel lobby, having gotten us into Iraq, and being the puppeteers behind the Bush administration—looks a tad implausible in the wake of the election returns. And if you want to tar the Israelis with being backed by people Times readers are unlikely to find appealing, the evangelicals may seem a promising replacement for Jewish neocons and the Israel lobby, about whose vast powers a great deal has recently been written.
The omnipotent-Jewish-neocon theory recently surfaced in an essay by Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer, which has received a fair amount of press. Unfortunately for the coarser versions of this view, 88 percent of American Jews just voted Democratic, and if almost all of the Jews vote Democratic, it is hard to understand how the neocons and the Israel lobby control their puppets; political lobbies are normally powerful if and only if they can deliver votes. Of course, one can attempt to explain American support for Israel as the result of the power of the Really Rich and Really Cunning Jews, but since some of those folks are people like George Soros, who just spent a lot of money to elect Democrats, the theory of plutocratic Jewish dual loyalists running America looks less than plausible. So if you want to impugn the Israelis in the eyes of liberals, maybe it’s time to tag them with being the allies of another group detested on the left, the evangelicals.
In fact, there is a possible explanation for broad American support for Israelis other than hardcore Christian millenarian zealotry: On balance, many Americans may acknowledge Israel’s faults but still prefer the Israelis to their regional enemies, who have a number of profoundly unattractive qualities. In that case, evangelical Christians may have various motives for supporting the Israelis, some theological, some not, and the ones that are not may also explain non-evangelical American support for Israel. And in fact, a fair number of liberals, like many other Americans, share in that off-and-on, but usually on, support for the Israelis. If you really do not like the Israelis—and they are not the flavor of the month among most people who cover them, and have not been for a while now—attempting to wedge the liberals apart from the Israelis seems to be a very durable instinct.
Now here’s a piece of what I do consider news: Yesterday Iran publicly hanged a gay man, Shahab Darvishi, on the charge of “lavat,” which means sodomy. Publicizing this fact would probably remind my fellow liberals that we have a few enemies in common with the Israelis, and it might make some of us wonder whether the Iranian regime is the sort of crowd one wants to see armed with nuclear weapons—and if not, what we think a prudent American government might have to do about that possibility. As it happens, the public hanging of Shahab Darvishi did not make today’s New York Times. Yet that groundbreaking piece on the fact that evangelicals support Israel ran to something like 1,650 words.
It is probably worth remembering that last week Israel had a gay rights march, a very big one, in Jerusalem. I know people who will be tempted to say, with some malicious amusement, that American evangelicals back Israel, and oppose Iran, only because they are ignorant of such facts. On the strength of my very modest acquaintance with my evangelical countrymen, however, my guess is that many of them support Israel, and detest the Iranian regime, because they are aware of facts of this kind, rather than in spite of them, for in addition to being evangelicals, they are twenty-first-century Americans. What does puzzle me is why some of my friends spend a deal more time and energy excoriating the Israelis than they do reviling the Iranian government. Investigating that one might also be worth 1,650 words in the Times.
|
