Mainline Protestants and Israel

So enamored are today's mainline Protestant churches with the Palestinian Arab "narrative" that they seem to have altogether forgotten, or denied, their own prior history of support for Israel and Zionism. Indeed, some of them appear to be trying to derail the Zionist enterprise altogether.


The English Puritans who came to North America in the 17th century linked their fate in the New World to that of biblical Israel. By the early 19th century, the Presbyterian minister John McDonald was urging Christians to help the Jews of Old World Europe to return to Zion. Later in the 19th century, the Methodist preacher William Eugene Blackstone traveled far and wide to campaign for the same cause. Many Anglicans were similarly disposed. In Britain, Lord Balfour described himself as a "Zionist."

In March 1948, despite the persistence of anti-Semitism in the United States, fully half of Protestant Americans voiced support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.


Today, the mainline denominations, which represent a dwindling yet still influential minority of American Christians, regularly take left-wing positions on matters of both theology and politics, and their attitude toward Israel has changed decisively. Theologically, most of today's Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and others no longer believe that the Bible is the word of God or should be interpreted as literally true. The theological basis for connecting the people of Israel to the land of Israel has consequently evaporated. Politically, the institutions of mainstream Christianity have embraced much of the Left's antipathy toward Jewish national self-determination and a view of the Arab-Israel conflict in the black-and-white terms of oppressors and victims.

The results are visible in such recent initiatives as a document being circulated by Methodists that calls for boycotting goods produced in the West Bank, or the vote of the UK's Anglican Communion in favor of economic divestment from Israel.

It is true that these denominations have objective interests in the Arab world, rooted in concern for the diminishing numbers of Palestinian Christians struggling to survive in an environment of increasingly ascendant Islamic extremism. But it is also true that church activists living or stationed in the Middle East wholeheartedly endorse Arab political sensibilities and lobby aggressively inside their institutions against the Zionist enterprise. Further skewing the picture, the Geneva-based World Council of Churches, an umbrella organization of mainline church bodies, propagates a version of the Israel-Arab conflict that is insidiously damaging to Israel's survival.

Given this stacked deck, it is easy to appreciate the relief of Jewish organizations when, at a recent meeting of the policymaking body of the Presbyterian Church, a plank defaming Israel as an "apartheid" state failed to pass. But, while condescending to endorse Israel's right to exist, the Presbyterians simultaneously approved "for study" the disingenuous Kairos document—"the Christian Palestinians' word to the world about what is happening in Palestine." This document labels the Jewish presence in Jerusalem and the West Bank as "aggression," "evil," and a "sin" that must be "resisted and removed." Violence is ostensibly abjured, but "peaceful resistance" and "boycotts" are legitimized. The Presbyterians have also obliquely called for withholding military aid from Israel in order to pressure it back to the armistice lines that ended the 1948-49 war.

This "Presbyterian answer" to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has left church leaders boasting that they may have "stumbled upon a way of building peace." In fact, what they have done is to place the Jewish state unjustly in the dock and to single it out for undeserved opprobrium—an act that might more properly be considered an occasion not for self-gratulation but for soul-searching. In light of it, the wholehearted support for the Zionist enterprise coming from the vibrant evangelical wing of American Protestantism is all the more heartwarming and, politically, indispensable.

-- april 2010

Britain & Israel

Prime Minister Gordon Brown went to Buckingham Palace yesterday to ask Queen Elizabeth to dissolve parliament on April 12. New elections will take place on May 6. At the moment, the Conservative party under David Cameron is leading Brown's Labor party in the polls; the Liberal Democrats, headed by Nick Clegg, are in a strong third position


The sun may have set on the British Empire, but the U.K. continues to exercise considerable influence in the international arena. Britain is a major force in the European Union and a permanent member of the UN Security Council; it plays a leading role in NATO and the 54-nation Commonwealth. It also remains a world financial center and, through the BBC, wields considerable "soft power" worldwide.
As for its relations with Israel, trade now stands at £2.3 billion annually. But politically the country has been an indifferent friend at best, funding a dozen advocacy organizations that press Jerusalem to soften its security policies.

What would a change in government mean for British-Israel relations? Probably not a great deal—all three parties are on record as favoring Israel's withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice lines. Still, significant differences are discernible in the parties' approach.

Labor: Brown has close personal ties to the Jewish community; his father, a Presbyterian minister, was chairman of the Church of Scotland's Israel Committee. Foreign Minister David Miliband is a non-practicing Jew who recently ordered an Israeli diplomat expelled in connection with Israel's alleged forging of British passports in the assassination of Hamas arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Justice Secretary Jack Straw has refused to modify the country's Universal Jurisdiction law, invoked to threaten visiting Israeli officials with arrest on "war crimes" charges. The Labor party essentially accepted the Goldstone Report on the 2009 Gaza war. Last week, Britain merely abstained in the UN Human Rights Council vote demanding that Israel pay reparations to Gaza.

Several Labor back benchers are notorious Israel-bashers. Gerald Kaufman has compared IDF soldiers to Nazis; Martin Linton warned that Israel's "long tentacles" could warp the outcome of the coming elections. A group with the name Labor Friends of Israel has called on the government to pressure both Israelis and Palestinians "evenhandedly."

Liberal Democrats: Clegg has urged Britain to stop selling weapons to Israel. MP Paul Rowen is one of parliament's most ardent supporters of the Palestinian cause. And former MP Jenny Tonge, now in the House of Lords, declared it was worth investigating whether IDF aide workers in Haiti were actually harvesting organs for transplant. On the plus side of the ledger, the party recently authorized a support group to foster better relations with the Jewish community.

Conservatives: The tone of party pronouncements on Israel are notably sympathetic. William Hague, a former party leader and now Shadow Foreign Secretary, criticized Labor for not voting against the Goldstone Report. There are promises to modify the Universal Jurisdiction law.

Britain's Jewish community of 300,000 souls holds sway in perhaps a half-dozen of the country's 646 constituencies. While there are just four Muslim MPs, politicians are mindful that the overall Muslim population stands at 2.4 million. Most Jews will likely vote their economic and social interests, though a vocal minority can be expected to support the Tories purely because of Labor's shabby treatment of the Jewish state.

-- April 2010

Meeting Israel Prize Winner Hanoch Bartov

To judge by the many prestigious awards his country has bestowed upon him, and by his prolific output—including ten novels, six collections of short stories, and three books of essays—the eighty-four-year-old Hanoch Bartov should need no introduction. And yet, outside Israel, this master of Hebrew style and quintessential son of the Jewish people and the Jewish state is relatively little known.

One can only hope this will change now that Bartov is about to receive his country's highest honor, the Israel Prize, to be awarded at a nationally televised ceremony on Independence Day, April 20. Informed of the prize, the voluble octogenarian cracked that, although arriving "a little late," it at least provided "scientific proof that there is life after death."

Born in Petah Tikvah to immigrant parents in 1926, the young Bartov preferred burying his head in a book to playing sports. He received a religious education but left school at fifteen to become an apprentice diamond polisher. At seventeen, he joined the Palestine regiment that later became the Jewish Brigade, a formation tardily authorized by Winston Churchill toward the closing stages of World War II.

At war's end, Bartov remained in Europe, where he helped to seek out surviving Jewish refugees and transport them "illegally" into Palestine. Twenty years later, his experience would provide material for a novel, The Brigade, one among the few Bartov works available in English.

Back in Palestine, Bartov spent several semesters at the Hebrew University before being abruptly called up in 1947 to serve in the Haganah during Israel's War of Independence. Thereafter, his career as a writer, which included decades as a columnist for Maariv as well as the steady production of distinguished works of fiction and non-fiction, began in earnest.

When did you first see your name in print?

I started writing as the result of an army bet when I was nineteen. It was a very short story about unrequited love, a subject troubling me at the time. It took me a while to figure out where to send it, but six or seven weeks later a check arrived for a little over a pound—a lot of money at the time.

I was not yet a writer, but I was writing. I'd caught the bug.

Unlike many Israeli writers, you insist on calling yourself a "Jewish writer."

One of my formative experiences was serving in the Jewish Brigade in Europe. A second, after the War of Independence, was living in Jerusalem's German Colony where my wife and I were surrounded by Holocaust refugees rebuilding their lives. After my experiences with the survivors, I dropped my exclusively "Israeli" identity. If I was not foremost a Jew, what did I share with these people who had gone through the hell of the Holocaust?

Hillel Halkin, who translated one of your books, has said that you were among the first in Israel's literary establishment to write in the language people actually spoke.

Yes. Though I employ linguistic allusions to Torah and Mishnah, I don't go in for flowery usage or images. I'm not a fan of post-modern writing, either. I write what I see.

Which authors would you recommend to someone who wants to start exploring contemporary Hebrew literature?

First, read my books!

What book would I find on your bedside table?

Josephus' The Wars of the Jews. It's really about the wars among the Jews. An ancient book, but I read it to understand the tragic parallels with our own times.

You are a man of the Left.

I am Left, but left alone. My Left was shattered many decades ago by the revelations about the crimes of Stalin. Nowadays, I find the Meretz party to be irrelevant, and Labor is led by a millionaire [Ehud Barak], a bourgeois par excellence.

Where does that leave you?

Adhering to certain values that, if besmirched, would make the Zionist enterprise meaningless. Israel needs to be a society based on justice and honesty, the values propagated by the ancient Hebrew prophets. We used to be egalitarian, but we've become a plutocracy. There is a shocking disparity of income. I was disillusioned with Communism, but I remain a social democrat—an old-fashioned socialist.

What do you make of Israel's anti-Zionist Left?

You're speaking of the Left in academia. They are mere curiosities. They lead comfortable lives and mouth platitudes.

In retrospect, was Israel's founding generation mistaken in aiming to create a "new Jew?"

Before the Holocaust, the idea of creating a Jew with none of the baggage of the Diaspora seemed reasonable. But after the loss of Europe's authentic centers of Jewish life, the situation changed. We in Israel did not appreciate how much, and regrettably we allowed our children and grandchildren to grow up Jewishly illiterate

What is the way forward?

It's not religious extremism, though frankly I prefer the [fanatical ultra-Orthodox and anti-Zionist] Neturei Karta types to the Hebrew-speaking post-Zionism crowd. Why? Because after a generation or two, there's a chance the ultra-Orthodox may become heretics, but they'll still retain enough of their heritage to stay Jewish, whereas those who are Jewishly illiterate will be lost forever.

Getting back to literature, in the last ten years you have published two novels, a long novella, and a collection of essays. What next?

I'm not comfortable talking about work in progress. But I do have a project that's been in the works for several years. Now that I've won the Israel Prize, I feel duty-bound to finish it.

As for my recent fiction, I continue to grapple with the Israeli-Jewish connection, tackling it from different angles. For instance, in 2006 I published Beyond the Horizon, Across the Street [Mi-hutz la-Ofek, Me`ever la-Rechov], a work that took me twenty-eight years to complete. I don't really call it a novel because it deals with an actual family and I let their story speak for itself.

They were from Kovno, in Lithuania: very Zionist, speaking Hebrew and always intending to come to Palestine but never succeeding. During the brief Soviet occupation [June 1940–June 1941] before the Nazis invaded, they were able to send two of their sons here. I met one of them in the Jewish Brigade, and the other I knew later in Jerusalem. Miraculously, the family back home survived the Holocaust; they were reunited by our Jewish Brigade, and the entire family--the youngest boy was thirteen--made it to Israel. Both the adult sons fought in the War of Independence, but tragically the older one was killed in action. The parents lived well into their eighties with all of these memories.

For me, this is a saga that mixes Jewish and Israeli fates. In what sense? You never know whether you are going to survive or die.

--April 2010

Making Tzipi Livni Look Good

I can't say I am disappointed in Shaul Mofaz of Kadima since I did not have high expectations of him in the first place.

But his intemperate piece in yesterday's Maariv and his remarks on Israel Radio today about the Im Tirtzu movement are nevertheless notable.

Mofaz thinks it is "thuggish" to call attention to a political culture at Ben-Gurion & other universities which creates a safe haven for Israelis enablers of the boycott of Israel movement.

Yet speaking out of both sides of his mouth he also said that anti-Zionist lecturers should not be employed. Huh?

I have nothing against employing anti-Zionists. But when you reach a tipping point and the anti-Zionists set the tone for an entire department and even a campus, something is terribly wrong.