After
more than 30 years of organizing testimonial dinners for right wing
Israeli politicians, handing out checks to Israeli charities, and
forming alliances with conservative Jewish leaders and organizations to
support Israel, Evangelical Christians may finally be getting a piece
of the "Promised Land."

In a move geared toward solving Northern Israel's
unemployment crisis, increasing tourism to the country, and solidifying
relations with US Evangelical Christians, the Israeli government has
offered 35 acres of land on the shore of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee)
for development by Christian Evangelicals. The Israeli government is
hopeful they will build a large conference center, complete with the
requisite amenities, to attract hundreds of thousands of evangelical
tourists from the US and other countries.

According to officials at Israel's tourism
ministry, more than 400,000 Christian tourists brought $1.4 billion
into Israel in the past year.

An Audience with, and a Gift from, Sharon

In May, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and
former Prime Minister and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who
recently resigned his post due to opposition over what he called the
unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza settlements, made the offer at a
meeting with a host of evangelical leaders, which included Pastor
Sunday Adelaja of the Embassy of God in the Ukraine, Pastors Brian and
Bobbie Houston of Hillsong in Australia, Louis Cortes of Esperanza USA,
and Ted Haggard, the Senior Pastor of the Colorado Springs, Colorado,
New Life Church (website) and the president of the 30 million-member
National Association of Evangelicals (website). For more on Haggard and
New Life Church, see Jeff Sharlet's article, "Soldiers of Christ:
Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch."

Also on hand was Dr. Paul Crouch, founder and
president of the Costa Mesa, California-based Trinity Broadcasting
Network (website) -- a giant in US Christian broadcasting whose web
site claims the network is the "Largest Worldwide Religious Network" --
and Jay Sekulow, the Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law &
Justice (ACLJ - website) -- a Christian-based law firm founded by the
Reverend Pat Robertson in 1990 in order to counter the activities of
the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

According to the Daily Pilot, a newspaper covering
Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, California, Crouch makes $403,700 a year
and his wife Jan takes home over $300,000. "Both of them have an array
of perks, including a private jet. They live like Saudi Arabian royalty
in a huge mansion in the Newport Beach area."

Recently, Crouch, brought his team of lawyers into
a controversy involving charges that he had sex with former TBN
employee, Enoch Lonnie Ford. According to the New York Daily News'
Lloyd Grove, after Crouch's lawyers "sent a terse letter to the new NBC
Universal-PAX TV reality show, 'Lie Detector,' the producers shelved a
scheduled episode featuring [Ford] ... who claims to have had sex with
the 70-year-old Crouch." Ford had submitted to a polygraph examination
conducted by Dr. Ed Gelb, the show's resident forensic
psychophysiologist and the results were going to be revealed on an
episode to be aired in mid-March.

"Crouch's lawyers threatened to sue everyone except for me," the show's host, Rolonda Watts, told the Daily News.

Crouch has repeatedly denied the allegations. (For more details see Christianity Today's blog).

Sekulow, a Jew who turned to Christ, has been a
prominent spokesperson for the Christian right for more than a decade,
and is currently one of the leading supporters of Judge John Roberts,
President Bush's nominee for the US Supreme Court.

According to its website, the organization which
started up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, "has expanded its work and
reach" to include the founding "of the European Centre for Law and
Justice, based in Strasbourg, France and the Slavic Centre for Law and
Justice, based in Moscow, Russia." According to its website, the
organization "has a network of attorneys nationwide and its national
headquarters is located in Washington, D.C. -- just steps away from the
Supreme Court and Congress."

Tightening the Ties

Ted Haggard, a highly influential evangelical
leader with close ties to the Bush Administration, told Charisma, a
Christian fundamentalist-oriented magazine, that the land in question
is in close proximity to where Jesus conducted a good portion of his
ministry, including, where he may have delivered the "Sermon on the
Mount."

While the offer of land in Israel came
unexpectedly, Haggard told the Financial Times that under the right
conditions perhaps as many as one million evangelicals would visit
Israel annually.

On his blog, Joel C. Rosenberg, an evangelical
Christian who comes from an Orthodox Jewish background and the author
of two best selling books, "The Last Jihad" in 2002 and "The Last Days"
in 2003, pointed out that a "growing number of Israeli leaders want to
reach out to evangelical Christians in the U.S. and around the world."

According to Rosenberg, who served as a senior
advisor to former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky and
former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a government official
told him that "The government will provide the land, the
infrastructure, and all the zoning and other assistance required, and
will leave the design and vision of the complex to the evangelical
community. 'We don't want to interfere with the vision,'" the official
said. "We just want to help make it happen. Catholics have so many
sites here, as do the Greek Orthodox. But our best friends don't have
any [major] site they can call their own."

The Bible and Politics make Strange Bedfellows

Support for Israel by evangelical Christians grows
out of both the Biblical role that Israel plays for Evangelicals, as
well as practical political considerations.

Veteran journalist and author Frederick Clarkson
pointed out in his book, "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between
Theocracy and Democracy" (Common Courage Press, 1997), that in the
twentieth century, "most evangelicals" were
"pre-millenialists...Christians who believe it is not possible to
reform this world until Jesus returns." The Second Coming is then
"followed by a 1,000-year rule of Jesus and the Christians." That is
where "The Rapture" comes in, which Clarkson describes as "an event in
which all the saved Christians, dead and alive, are brought up into the
clouds with Jesus prior, during or after (depending of the school of
theology) a period called 'the tribulation." [more on the Rapture and Tribulations here]

In her seminal work on the rise of the Christian
Right in the United States, "Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the
Christian Right" (South End Press, 1989), Sara Diamond wrote that the
relationship between Christian evangelicals and Israel changed
considerably when "popular broadcast ministries, especially those
focused on studies of the 'end-times,' drew evangelicals to pay closer
attention to Middle East politics."

Diamond credits Hal Lindsey, author of "The Late
Great Planet Earth," with adding "Israel's security" to the Christian
Right's list of political concerns.

In 1988, at the National Religious Broadcasters
convention, Israeli government and military officials held a private
briefing for Christian media preachers. That meeting was organized to
"tell the untold story about the situation [between Christian
evangelicals and Israel] and counteract distortions currently being
presented in the media."

Ten years later, then Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu addressed an American group in Washington called Voices
United for Israel. Most of the 3,000 in attendance were evangelicals,
including Ralph Reed, then the executive director of the Christian
Coalition and other prominent members of the fundamentalist Christian
community.

Over the past few years, a number of veteran
Christian right leaders have joined forces with Jewish conservatives to
launch pro-Israel organizations. Gary Bauer -- the former head of the
Family Research Council, who now runs a group called American Values --
joined forces with Rabbi Daniel Lapin, head of the conservative Jewish
organization, Toward Tradition, to form the American Alliance of Jews
and Christians. Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the
Christian Coalition, who is currently running for the Lieutenant
Governor of Georgia, joined with Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the president
of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, to launch
"Stand for Israel."

According to press reports, Stand for Israel is a
project they hope will have the same political impact as the powerful
Jewish lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC).

Will the need for tourist dollars overcome
suspicions that many Jews in Israel harbor about evangelical
Christians? How will Palestinians react to a proposal that encourages
tourism by a group that has been outspoken in its opposition to
President Bush's Road Map to peace in the Middle East?

"Evangelical Christians are highly motivated with a
sincere feeling of connection to the land of the Bible. They will be
interested in investing in a project they can identify with in Israel,"
Ari Marom, an Israeli official in charge of tourism marketing in the
US, told the Financial Times. "The need and desire to strengthen our
relationship with the evangelical community and encourage them to visit
and support Israel not just from afar but up close, cuts across party
lines."

Opposing the 'Road Map' while Encouraging Evangelical Tourists

Since President Bush introduced his "Road Map to
Peace in the Middle East," a significant number of evangelical
Christians have been unalterably opposed to it. According to the
Financial Times, "some prominent US pastors are unyielding towards
Palestinians' own yearning for statehood and have joined settler groups
in Israel in campaigning against Sharon's plans to withdraw from the
Gaza Strip."

In 2003, at an Interfaith Zionist Leadership Summit
in Washington, DC, a number of Christian right organizations including
Americans for a Safe Israel (website), Gary Bauer's American Values
(website), The Apostolic Congress (website), the Christian Broadcasting
Network (website), the Christian Coalition of America (website), the
Religious Roundtable, and the Zionist Organization of America
(website), came together to develop a strategy for opposing the "Road
Map.

The Action Alert invited participants to: "Come if you are ready for action:

1) To oppose rewarding murderous Palestinian
terrorism with statehood -- mocking our own war on terror and
ultimately encouraging renewed Arab aggression against an Israel made
invitingly vulnerable;

2) To expose how President Bush's stated policy of
June 24, 2002 specifying essential pre-conditions for support of
Palestinian statehood has been seriously undermined, eroding America's
credibility and debasing our enduring national interest;

3) To lay bare the inherent absurdity of our State
Department promoting a Road Map to Arab-Israeli "Peace" from a Quartet
whose other three members -- Russia, the E.U. (France and Germany) and
the U.N. -- repeatedly disparage U.S. interests and are demonstrably
hostile to Israel;

4) To document the responsibility of Iran, Syria,
Libya and Saudi Arabia for supporting Islamic terrorism; 5) To combat
media ignorance and bias in Middle East coverage and virulent
Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic agitation on campus; and

6) To solidify and chart future strategy for the emerging alliance of Jewish and Christian Zionists."

"We [Israel and the Palestinians] need to learn how
to co-exist. When there is a peaceful resolution to the conflict,
pilgrims will come," Riah Abu el-Assal, the Palestinian bishop of the
Anglican Church in Jerusalem said. "They always have. We don't need to
give out pieces of land."

"While I don't know the particulars of the Israeli
government's offer, I have long been an advocate for the Israeli
government encouraging significant numbers of evangelical Christians to
move to Israel and make the Holy Land their permanent home," Rabbi
Shmuley Boteach told Media Transparency via email.

Rabbi Boteach, a nationally syndicated radio talk
show host, the author of 15 books, and a syndicated columnist, believes
that while Israel should always maintain "a sizable Jewish majority,"
evangelical Christian immigrants should be welcome in Israel as long as
they "respect the integrity of the Jewish faith by foreswearing the
proselytization of the Jewish population."

Concerned about security and the "well-being of the
State of Israel," Rabbi Boteach said that "There is no better way to
demonstrate this then to have a few hundred thousand evangelicals
making Israel their home, and serving in the Israeli army to save the
Middle East's only democracy from destruction at the hands of the many
Arabs who have fought for its destruction."

"I certainly don't expect to see large-scale
immigration of evangelicals to Israel," 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," told Media
Transparency. "Nor, for that matter do I expect to see them eschew
proselytizing, "since that is a core value."

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