Iran, the Christian Zionists, and the American People Michael Lerner c/o The Tikkun Journal

Iran, the Christian Zionists, and the American People
Michael Lerner

I had the honor to be a guest on a very exciting PBS television show, Bill Moyers Journal, which aired October 5th. Please take time to listen to it.


I was invited to comment on a TV segment that his staff had put together about the Christian Zionist movement. What was particularly striking was how explicit and adamant the Christian Zionists were that Israel must refuse to make any deals that would lead to a transfer of land for peace. They were equally clear that the U.S. and Israel need a “preemptive” war with Iran. The Christian Zionists may be the largest element in the Israel Lobby, though they are not Jewish (and in fact, some of them believe that a Middle East nuclear conflagration might be the necessary step to bringing about Jesus’ second coming). According to some informed observers, they represent 20 million Americans (far less than the 50 million they claim, but four times as many as there are Jews in the U.S.).

The Christian Zionists, thus, are an integral and powerful part of the Israel Lobby’s campaign to stop pressuring Israel to swap land for peace and to popularize the notion that war with Iran is desirable and inevitable. This kind of rhetoric is now flowing through the Washington, D.C. news and news analysis/entertainment hub, giving the same clear signals given before the “preemptive” strike on Iraq four years ago.

While Democratic Party leaders in Congress lack the backbone to act, and the leading Democratic Party presidential candidates foresee American troops in Iraq for years to come, the American people are saying, “Get out now.” And despite all the rhetoric about funding cuts “hurting the troops,” a majority of Americans support those funding cuts and have seen through the conservative PR campaign that continues to intimidate Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and other Congressional leaders.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll revealed just how far their purported Democratic Party leaders are behind the feeling of the American public (click here to view PDF of the poll).

Unfortunately, the same clarity does not exist in regard to the possible airstrikes and war with Iran. And the Christian Zionists are an effective part of the Israel Lobby, arguing that a strike against Iran is in the best interests of both Israel and the U.S.

In Tikkun’s research, we’ve discovered that there are really three distinct elements energizing the Christian Zionists:

A strong commitment to conservative and ultra-nationalist American politics (so strong, I believe, that if the U.S. were to decide to break with Israel, this part of the Christian Zionist leadership would go along with that and drop its defense of Israeli policies).
Dispensationalist religious commitments that lead many of the Christian Zionists to yearn for a cataclysmic “end of history” eschatological war in the Middle East that will precipitate the second coming of Jesus and the Rapture in which all true Christians will go to heaven and all Jews who have not yet converted to Christianity will burn in hell for eternity.
A widespread understanding among many Christians that atonement and repentance is needed for 1700 years of murder, rape, and oppression of Jews that was frequently generated by the Church (though, of course, the Evangelicals do not recognize that church as their church). In this category are many Christian Zionists who genuinely feel terrible about what has happened to the Jews and genuinely want to help the Jewish people. Their philo-Semitism is real and sincere.
While all Christian Zionists do not hold the dispensationalist worldview, it is very widespread, even among Evangelicals who don’t identify as Christian Zionists. But while they preach this in their churches, when they come to Washington D.C. to advocate for militaristic policies, they often are quiet about their views on the hoped-for conversion of the Jews or the damnation that will follow not just for Jews but for everyone who has not yet accepted Jesus as Christ.

Many Christian Zionists hold all three positions and have never been forced to confront how unloved Jews would feel if they knew that the support they are getting from Christian Zionists was really aimed at their ultimate conversion or burning in hell. But most Jews don’t worry that the second coming of Jesus is at hand, and so they can accept the help of Christian Zionists on Israel issues without concern about ultimate motivations. My personal encounters with them leads me to believe that many of these Christian Zionists might be less enthusiastic about the leadership if they were forced to confront how unloving, how un-Jesus-like, and how offensive to Jews are the first two parts of their worldview. Their conservative leaders invite the most conservative of the Israel Lobby folks to the Christian Zionist con-fabs, and so the only Jews they ever really encounter are those who are appreciative of the blind loyalty to right-wing Israeli policies that the Jewish neocons have been trying to foster throughout the American population.

The task of spiritual progressives is to help dislodge people whose primary motives are in category three from those whose primary motive is an attraction to category one or two. Many of the Christian Zionists in category three have never really heard the views and perspective of the many Israelis and American Jews who believe that the best way to support Israel’s survival and Jewish well-being is to end the Occupation of the West Bank and to build peace and reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians. But for those in category three who also have some openness to category one and two, the response may be something like that given by people interviewed on the Moyers show: “We’d love to see peace, but we don’t believe that that is achievable until Jesus comes back, so in the meantime we’ll just support the current leadership of the U.S. and Israel and support any militarist policy that they endorse.”

This might remind us of the urgency of our task of popularizing a more loving religious/spiritual vision. Moyers asked: “Where are the voices of spiritual progressives? Why do we only hear the voices of conservative Christians and Israel Lobby Jews?” Our challenge as spiritual progressives is to change this—and that will take hard work on our parts. But, as I insisted to Moyers, history isn’t over and we still have time to weigh in.

The only plausible way to weigh in is with a different kind of voice than that which Evangelicals have been hearing from the secular liberals and progressives. What they need to hear is precisely what we are trying to establish with the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP)—a voice that acknowledges the reality of the spiritual crisis in American society, does not attempt to reduce that crisis to a series of economic and political deprivations (though those are certainly an important part of the crisis, but not all of it), and provides Evangelicals and other spiritually hungry Americans with a worldview that takes seriously the loving, generous, and peace-and-justice seeking elements in biblical and other religious and spiritual traditions.

Why hasn’t this worked so far? Partly because the religio-phobia in the Left has marginalized our voices. Partly, because some of our most famous progressive spiritual leaders are too “realistic,” too willing to cuddle up to the powerful and tell them what they want to hear, too willing to retain liberal/progressive respectability by reframing their own religious/spiritual intuitions in the reductive one-dimensional language of the liberal/progressive policy wonks and their supporters in the media. Once they play that game, they have very little that is fresh to offer to Evangelicals and others in all the various religious and spiritual communities who are more interested in meaning than in money or immediate power. But when the NSP has spoken about the spiritual crisis, and has spoken about the need for a world based on love, generosity, awe and wonder, and recognition of the sacred dimension of human life and of the planet, we often get a terrific response, at least outside the secular left and the cynical media. Similarly, when we apply this message to the need for open-hearted reconciliation between Jews and Muslims, people immediately “get” why this is at least as important as the details of a peace proposal, and must be fostered if any proposal (like ours—see my book Healing Israel/Palestine, North Atlantic Books, 2003) is to actually work in practice. But count on the Israel Lobby to dismiss all these suggestions as “New Age psycho-babble” and to insist that the only way to make Israel secure is through military domination of Palestinians and a superior military power to all Muslim states in Asia and Africa.

Archbishop Tutu



On October 4, 2007 the Associated Press reported that St. Thomas University in Minneapolis had decided to not invite Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Prize winner for his role in challenging apartheid in South Africa, to speak on their campus. According to Doug Hennes, vice president for university and government relations, “He [Tutu] has been critical of Israel and Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians, so we talked with people in the Jewish community and they said they believed it would be hurtful to the Jewish community, because of things he’s said.”

Hennes said the University does not believe Tutu is anti-Semitic. But Hennes cited a 2002 speech in which he said Tutu criticized “the Jewish lobby.” Hennes also said Jewish groups feel Tutu has compared the Israeli policy toward Palestinians to how Adolf Hitler treated Jews. Chris Toffolo was relieved of her position as Chair of the University’s Justice and Peace Studies Program after she protested this decision and provided proof that Tutu never compared Israel to Hitler.

As editor of Tikkun, I have been hearing stories like this throughout the twenty-two-year existence of the magazine. I’ve been excluded numerous times from universities, synagogues, and sometimes even Christian churches that feel the pressure from the Jewish establishment. What makes this incident different is only that most Americans have enormous respect for Tutu (though they also have enormous respect for Jimmy Carter and that didn’t stop the Israel Lobby from effectively labeling Carter an anti-Semite) and that a courageous woman, who already had tenure and hence could preserve her income even when removed from her position heading justice and peace studies, was able to speak out of her moral outrage. Most people subject to these same pressures, including, of course, most rabbis and Jewish community leaders and media in the U.S., will rarely dare to speak out for fear that they will endanger or even lose their employment.

Good Newsflash! Thanks to outcry from members of the NSP and other progressive groups St. Thomas reversed its decision and will host Desmond Tutu. Raising our voices does make a difference, even against the Israel Lobby.

Walt & Mearsheimer, Congressman Moran


The week before, Washington was reeling from another such manifestation of power by the Israel Lobby. The Israel Lobby (see our Sept/Oct 2007 issue) not only managed to get most editorialists and book reviewers to vigorously deny the Mearsheimer/Walt thesis (that, in regard to Middle East issues, AIPAC and related groups exercise disproportionate power), but simultaneously got leaders of both major political parties to publicly denounce Congressman Jim Moran for daring to criticize AIPAC in the pages of this magazine. When I pointed out to various reporters who were writing stories about the attack on Moran that there are dozens of powerful lobbies that get criticized all the time, but only an attack on AIPAC is a news story and only an attack on AIPAC unites Republicans and Democrats in derision against the critic, they simply refused to mention this in their stories, thereby once again confirming the Israel Lobby’s amazing media power.

Here’s what happened: House Republican Chief Deputy Whip Eric Cantor, responding on September 18 to Moran’s Tikkun interview, likened Moran to Adolph Hitler. “Unfortunately, Jim Moran has made it a habit now to lash out to the American Jewish community. I think his remarks are reprehensible, I think his remarks are anachronistic, and hearken back to the day of Adolph Hitler, of the others, Mein Kampf, of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, other sources that have become reference to now, I’m sorry to say, a resurgent anti-Semitic sentiment worldwide.” And House Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer issued a statement which seemed to add to the witch hunt by stating that Moran had claimed that “the Jewish community controls the press, the media, the Congress, and other institutions” and that therefore Moran “certainly oughtta retract remarks, and indicate he believes that he was inaccurate on the facts.”

Congressman Moran said no such thing.

Similar charges were made in a letter signed by 14 Jewish Members of the Democratic Caucus, and in numerous editorials and articles, most of which gave little opportunity for the perspective of the peace forces to be aired.

Tikkun readers: you yourselves have read precisely what Moran said. Compare that with what is being claimed that he said in the numerous assaults on him in the media and in the Congress. That these distortions get represented as facts is a powerful vindication of the theory that the Israel Lobby has amazing and disproportionate power in the media and in the ways of thinking of our government.

Of course, none of this is shocking for those of us who have met with our elected Congressional leaders to present Tikkun’s “progressive middle path” to Middle East peace, an approach that is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine and that supports the settlement roughly along the lines of the Geneva Accord (return to pre-1967 borders with minor border changes to allow Israel to keep the Jewish quarter and the Western Wall in Jerusalem and adjacent settlements close to the ‘67 borders in exchange for an equal amount of Israeli land being ceded to the new Palestinian state, reparations for Palestinian refugees, ending the teaching of hate against the other in the media and schools and religious institutions of both communities, and a Truth and Reconciliation process). What we’ve heard back is “We agree with you completely, only we don’t dare say that publicly for fear that we will be targeted by AIPAC-related PACs when we seek reelection.”

Their fears will be dramatically reinforced if Jim Moran loses his bid for reelection in 2008, an obvious possibility as the Israel Lobby gears up to demonize Moran in the eyes of constituents. It is precisely that he said nothing unreasonable or false that makes this case so important for the Israel Lobby, because if they can succeed in showing once again that anyone who says the Israel Lobby has disproportionate power will lose their elected position, they can once again silence all major critics. And, of course, in the process they prove the truth of the very point the critics are being punished for having stated aloud.

As I argued in the last issue of Tikkun, this is not in Israel’s best interests, nor in the interests of the Jewish people. Jewish political correctness enforced in this way will backfire on the Jewish people just as other forms of “political correctness ”have backfired on those who have advocated for them.

M.J. Rosenberg, Director of the Israel Policy Forum’s Washington Policy Center, makes a related point in an article entitled “Lobbying Yes…but is it Pro-Israel?” published in Israel’s premier newspaper, Ha’aretz. Rosenberg reviews some of the major foci of AIPAC’s lobbying in the U.S. and shows that many of the policies AIPAC supports have been very detrimental to the well-being of Israel. Perhaps you remember when Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives had to buy full page ads in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times to make a point the media was totally obscuring in the summer of 2006: that Israel’s war in Lebanon was not only immoral but also self-destructive. Today there is almost no one in Israel or even in the more-right-wing-than-thou-Jewish-establishment who denies that the war was a mistake, but at the time it was impossible to get the media (much less any Congressperson) to quote the voices of spiritual progressives who were making this point. M.J. Rosenberg brings numerous other examples as well.

For those of us who love Israel and wish to see it remain secure and strong, and who know that the path to such strength and security is a just settlement of the Palestinian struggle and a strategy of generosity toward other Arab and Muslim states, one reason to be passionately critical of the Israel Lobby is that it does so much damage to Israel (and, along the way, to the best interests of the Jewish people and the U.S.) by legitimating the Strategy of Domination at precisely the moment when the world needs the Strategy of Generosity.


Steve Zunes's Article in this Issue of Tikkun

And it is this last point that makes me unable to endorse fully Steve Zunes’s approach (please read his article, page 47). Zunes argues that it is not the Israel Lobby but the powerful American economic and political elites who shape American policy and are doing so in regard to Iraq and Iran. As I made clear in my article last issue, I agree with Zunes’s insistence that the Iraq War was not brought to us single-handedly by the Israel Lobby, much less by the Jewish people (those two are not the same: many American Jews feel that the Israel Lobby does not accurately reflect their own views about politics and foreign policy). And I made the same critique of Mearsheimer and Walt that he makes here: that the power of the American economic and political elite is by far the most significant factor in shaping American foreign policy, not the power of AIPAC or the Israel Lobby. That elite follows similarly misguided policies of economic and political domination all around the world, and would seek to do so even if there had never been any Jews in the U.S. in the past 231 years, and even if there had never been a state of Israel. Those on the Left who like to blame Israel for the Iraq war and for every other evil U.S. corporations, media and military perpetrate around the world are deeply mistaken, and these mistakes often aid and abet anti-Semitism.

However, Zunes doesn’t seem to recognize the significant role the Israel Lobby does play in helping to develop the ideologies and mass support for the Strategy of Domination and for many other elements in contemporary thought that have become the “common sense” of media pundits, political activists, and many ordinary citizens—ideas which provide the indispensable foundation for making these wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, the whole fantasy of a “war against terror”) seem plausible. It is this central intellectual “background condition” which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the militarists in both parties to create a public ready to believe that the only “realistic” way to deal with antagonists around the world is to dominate them before they dominate us, and hence to take preemptive strikes in Iraq, Iran, and maybe in Syria, Pakistan, Bolivia, Cuba, or Venezuela.

As I detail in The Left Hand of God, the Domination Strategy for homeland security has deep roots in the patriarchal assumptions that have governed human societies for most of the past several thousand years. But militarist/patriarchal/domination theories of the world were under severe attack in the 1960s and early 1970s as counter-cultural visions began to rattle the walls and pillars of Western societies. It took a powerful rebound from the religious right combined with an intellectually sophisticated assault on progressive ideas to hold back and undermine the hopeful “left hand of God” world-views that were becoming almost hegemonic in the women’s movement, the gay movement, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, and the counter-culture.

That intellectual assault was provided primarily by Jewish neocons like Norman Podhoretz, William Safire, Irving (and later William) Kristol, Martin Peretz, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, Leon Wieseltier, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Leo Straus, Henry Kissinger, and Elliot Abrams. Many neocons freely admit that their worldview was shaped around the need to defend Israel from assault by critics on the Left and from the growing credibility that “left hand of God” perspectives were gaining in the 1960s and early 1970s, undermining America’s desire to rely on militarism and, hence, in the eyes of the neocons, undermining the likelihood that the U.S. would continue to provide the military protection that Israel needed to protect itself from the hostile Arab world. It never occurred to these neocons, whose worldview became dominant in the leadership of AIPAC in the next several decades, that Israel might take a totally different approach to its security, acknowledging the suffering of the Palestinian people and taking steps to alleviate it (e.g. a massive building campaign in Gaza and the West Bank to replace the slums and repair the inhumane conditions in which Palestinians were forced to live when Israel refused to let them return to their homes inside the pre–1967 borders. Israel could have built high quality housing, sanitation, health care, and economic infrastructure. It could have taught Arabic as a required language in Israeli schools and Hebrew in Palestinian schools so that communication would be easier. And it could have begun a systematic repatriation of refugee families at a level of, say, 20,000 families a year), and it could have encouraged the economic development and high levels of employment in the West Bank and Gaza. This would have done more to undermine the popularity of extremists than the systematic arrests without charges, torture, targeted assassinations, and construction of Israeli settlement on Palestinian land.

The mass appeal of the Strategy of Domination has been dramatically reinforced by the ability of the Israel Lobby and its allies in the universities, media, and Congress to shut out of debate the Strategy of Generosity. The Lobby’s success in pushing out of the national debate any serious consideration of an alternative paradigm based on caring and generosity is then cited as proof that anyone who is committed to rethinking the paradigm must her/himself be “out of touch” and so deeply “unrealistic” that they need not be given serious political attention. Presidential candidates like Kucinich and Gravel are not refuted in argument—they are simply ignored by the “realistic” media.

Still, the NSP and Tikkun believe that this dynamic can be broken and a new paradigm can become a popular alternative. The paradigm of generosity and caring for others has deep roots not only in our religious and spiritual traditions (or more precisely, in those parts of the tradition that I call “the left hand of God”), but also in our own experience of human relationships. Yet, each of us—yes, dear reader, you and me also—has our own doubts, so fully have we also been influenced by the “realists” and their doubts that human beings can ever sustain a logic of love and caring and generosity.

It would be crude and mistaken to blame the Israel Lobby alone for the prevalence of the Domination Strategy. But it is also misleading to underplay its importance in helping to shape the worldview that gives popular support to militaristic approaches to resolving foreign conflicts. They have a significant and disproportionate role in shaping the public discourse and in discrediting views like those expressed by Congressman Moran when he supported Tikkun’s strategy of generosity and the centrality of talking to one’s opponents rather than developing plans for our country to bomb and kill them.

These issues are being played out again in the increasingly likely (though not inevitable) coming attacks against Iran. When Moran and others sought to have the House Armed Services Committee pass an amendment requiring the president to receive explicit Congressional approval before taking any military action against Iran, it was the Israel Lobby Members of Congress who passed the word that AIPAC opposed that amendment (doing so in a manner clandestine enough to allow AIPAC deniability, something it cannot have in regard to the Iraq war, support for which was explicit in the statements of their national leadership).

And it is Senator Lieberman, a powerful voice for the Israel Lobby in Congress, who is leading the charge for military attacks on Iran and for still defending the wisdom of the Iraq war.

The alternative to the Israel Lobby

All the more reason, then, to lament the inability of groups like Brit Tzedeck v’Shalom, Americans for Peace Now, Rabbis for Human Rights, the Israel Policy Forum, the Religious Action Center of the Union of Reform Judaism, and the Churches for Middle East Peace, to work together to create a powerful challenge to the Israel Lobby and to AIPAC.

And that has led Tikkun to once again take the role being the primary interfaith alternative to the Israel Lobby. This alternative has to be interfaith and not only Jewish because:

The Israel Lobby play a major role in shaping American foreign policy that in turn impact on the lives of all Americans, and so all Americans have a stake in the outcome.
Christians are right to feel guilt about having abandoned the Jewish people in the past, but that’s not a good reason to avoid critiquing destructive aspects of Israeli policy. The Israeli Lobby’s policies are bad for the world, for the U.S., and also for Jews and Israel itself. This is an issue for all Americans.
The Christian Zionists play a major role in giving the Israel Lobby visibility and political power. So Christians who understand that Israel’s interests would be far better served by a voice supporting a strategy of generosity rather than militarism need to join with people of other faiths to support this peace-oriented strategy.
The pressure of Jewish “political correctness” is so overwhelming that most Jews are afraid to stand up to it, as are many Christians. Even the peace-oriented organizations like Brit Tzedeck v’Shalom rarely join in public critique of the Israel Lobby and have been notably silent in defending Congressman Moran. If we have to wait for the Jewish community to launch an effective counterforce to the Israel Lobby, we will be waiting for many decades. Jewish progressives need and deserve the support of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and the many atheists, agnostics and secular people who recognize the great danger posed to the Jewish people, to Israel, to the U.S. and to world peace should the policies and worldview of the Israel Lobby continue to predominate in shaping the discourse of American politics.
But continue it will, until a powerful counter-voice can command the attention and loyalties of a significant section of the American public. I was one of many who were disappointed when the philanthropist George Soros decided against putting significant money into the creation of such an alternative voice, even though the voice that was being considered would have only been for Jews and hence excluded the activities of our interfaith NSP. And I see the direct consequences of the absence of that alternative in the way that the major candidates for president in the Democratic primaries continue to compete for who can most slavishly subordinate themselves to the AIPAC line on Middle East issues.

For these reasons, the NSP will function as that interfaith alternative, despite the fact that we have no significant financial backing for this enterprise and hence can only expect limited impact. But there needs to be such a voice, and for the time being, we are it. Are you with us?

Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun, and chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives