Re: What kind of pig are you to question if the victims of ethnic cleansing are being gracious enough when they concede 80% of their homeland?
Christian Zionism and American Foreign Policy: Paving the Road to Hell in Palestine
by Lawrence Davidson
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The Zionist Connection
The same Protestant fundamentalists who sought (and still seek) to redeem the Holy Land through missionary work as well as bringing the world the blessings of the American way of life, had (and still have) a fascination with the Jews. This is because many of these evangelicals were (and still are) true believers in the biblical prophecy that speaks of the return of the Jews to Palestine as a necessary precondition for the second coming of Christ. In his book The Roots of Fundamentalism, Ernest R. Sandeen captures the importance of this connection when he tells us that many Protestant fundamentalists “watched in fascination the formation of Zionism under Theodor Herzl and the meeting of the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897....Almost instinctively [they] grasped the significance of Allenby's capture of Jerusalem and celebrated the event as the fulfillment of prophecy.” Thus it was that, by 1917 and the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, most American Protestants who concerned themselves with the Holy Land were enthusiastic supporters of the right of the Jews, led by an active Zionist movement, to "return home."
In terms of altruistic imperialism, the Zionists soon became perceived as a major force for the physical redemption or modernization of Palestine, as well as the realization of prophecy. They won support in the United States by claiming to be acting in a traditional American style. For instance, American Zionists quite purposely drew parallels between the American pioneer experience and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s representatives of the Zionist Organization of America placed articles in strategic American newspapers describing the Zionist “pioneers” as modern day versions of America’s “brave and religiously pious settlers.” Here are some quotes from one article that appeared in the New York Times on June 11, 1922. “These immigrants to Palestine are indeed the Jewish Puritans.” Their settlements are “the Jamestown and Plymouth of the new House of Israel.” They are “building the new Judea even as the Puritans built New England.” The settlers are like the “followers of Daniel Boone who opened the West for American settlers” while “facing the dangers of Indian warfare.” In the process “the Jews are bringing prosperity and happiness in Palestine.”
As the Zionists opened the Holy Land for settlement, the natives, the indigenous Arabs (both the Muslim majority and what American Protestants considered the “pseudo” Christian Arabs of the Greek Orthodox and Catholic “degenerate churches”), became less noticed by American and other observers except in as much as they stood in apparent opposition to redemption and modernity alike. This took the form of a process of “perceptual depopulation” that erased the demographic and cultural/religious realities of Palestine. It was a form of ethnic cleansing at the conceptual level.
Impact on US Foreign Policy
In the 20th century, the impact of these interlocking religious and imperialist-colonialist lines of thinking on U.S. government policy begins with Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was easily persuaded by Louis Brandeis to support the Balfour Declaration because of, in part, the President’s belief in biblical mythology. As he told the Zionist leader Rabbi Stephen Wise in 1916, “To think that I, son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.” Most of the American Presidents who followed Wilson were similarly pro-Zionist. However, for the men in the White House there were sometimes countervailing international pressures that limited their ability to make too public a pro-Zionist display. For instance, Woodrow Wilson was a Christian Zionist but, during World War I, he could not be as forthright about it as he might have wished because to do so would have alienated the Turks and risked the ruin of the American missionary presence in the Ottoman Empire. Just preceding and during World War II, Franklin Roosevelt, who was sympathetic to the Zionists without being religiously motivated, agreed with the State Department that too much of a public pro-Zionist display would unsettle the Middle East and perhaps drive the Arabs into alliance with the Axis Powers. After World War II, presidents such as Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson (who likened the Israelis to 19th century “Texans fighting Mexico”), and Ronald Reagan (who had made references to Israel’s foes in terms of biblical prophecies) continued to have a basically romanticized biblical understanding of Palestine and Israel. However, even while faced with the issue of oil, they tended to be increasingly forthright in their support for Israel. Their Christian Zionist sentiments merged with the political and financial strength of the Zionist lobby to produce overtly pro-Zionist pronouncements and policies.
Congress, on the other hand, never suffered the occasional restraints felt by the executive branch. Their politics were wholly local and, very early on, the American Zionists had made themselves a force in the domestic politics of America. Thus, by 1922 Congress had passed a joint resolution in support of the Balfour Declaration and from that point on the legislative branch never looked back. They supported the Zionist interpretation of events during the 1929 Arab uprising in Palestine and the rebellion of the late 1930s. Even during World War II, when Roosevelt and the State Department were trying to keep the Arabs from deserting the British-American cause in the Middle East, Congress repeatedly tried to pass pro-Zionist resolutions calling for open Jewish immigration into Palestine.
There were varied factors that reinforced this enthusiasm for Zionism: anti-immigration sentiment among constituents during the depression and post World War II years (that led American leaders to support Palestine, rather than the U.S., as a destination for Jewish refugees), a mixture of post-war guilt and humanitarian sympathy with the Jews as victims of the holocaust, and the sheer financial and organizational clout of America’s Zionist organizations. However, the effectiveness of all these factors was underpinned by the reality that a large number of Americans, who think little of foreign policy unless it can be linked to their everyday lives, had already been conditioned to view Palestine in romanticized biblical terms. In other words, for many American Protestants (to say nothing of the American Jews) Israel was, and is still, an extension of Sunday School, and in this mythologized form does touch their lives. As Lyndon Johnson once told a meeting of B’nai B’rith, “The Bible stories are woven into my childhood memories as the gallant struggle of modern Jews to be free of persecution is woven into our souls.” Add to this Christian Zionist predisposition an updated version of the bipolar world view wherein Israel is seen as “the only democracy in the Middle East” and a Western civilizational outpost that is allegedly “just like us,” and you get the acquiescence of many contemporary Americans to U.S. support for Israel that, between 1948 and 2001, totaled some 91 billion dollars.
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