Ever curious about the eschatological implications of that Sarah Palin quote from her interview with Barbara Walters -- the one in which she said she believes that "more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead" -- I called the executive director of the Pre-Trib Research Center at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., Dr. Thomas Ice. The Pre-Trib Center is one of the preeminent evangelical institutions in this country arguing for literal Bible prophecy, and especially for pre-millenial dispensationalism, a complicated belief system that concerns the conditions that must obtain on Earth before Jesus can return ("Pre-Trib" is short for "pre-tribulation.") One of the more famous conditions, of course, is the ingathering of the Jewish people in Israel. There are hundreds of variations of Protestant prophetic belief, but the Jewish role is generally crucial; very dramatic things will happen to the Jews in these prophetic belief systems, including their conversion to Christianity and their mass death in the battle of Armageddon.
I've been writing about these belief systems for a while, and an alarm bell went off in my head when I heard Palin talk about "days and weeks." It's quite one thing to say that Israel needs settlements to contain its growing population (a belief unsupported by the facts, but I'll deal with that another time), but it's something else entirely to predict that Jews in the Diaspora will imminently be flooding the Holy Land. I asked Dr. Ice if he thought that this statement by Palin, who has been exposed to this brand of evangelical thinking in her Alaska churches, was informed by these beliefs.
"I've read that Palin has been part of an apparently unique movement I've heard of -- that her pastor, when she was in the Assembly of God, believed based on some personal revelation he claims to have gotten from God, that the Jews would move to Alaska during the Tribulation. But nevertheless, my understanding from what I've seen is that she holds fairly typical Protestant Zionist beliefs, and one of those beliefs is the regathering of the Jews in Israel."
Ice told me he believes this sort of thinking is supported by the facts. "Over forty percent of the world's Jews now live in Israel. What Sarah Palin probably believes is that this is the first regathering," when the Jews all migrate to Israel. "This is a condition for the second regathering, the regathering in belief, when the Jewish nation is converted. Then there will be the battle of Armageddon, because remember, Satan wants to wipe out the Jews to prevent the Second Coming, but Jesus comes to rescue the beleaguered Jews. We believe that the Jews are going to be converted so that they can call on Jesus to rescue them from Satan."
I asked Ice if he, like Palin, believes that in the days and weeks and months ahead, American Jews -- who make up the only sizable Jewish community still existing outside of Israel -- might move there, in order to establish the conditions necessary for the Second Coming. "The historical reason Jews move to Israel is persecution, so when persecution heats up in a country, then the Jews come to Israel," he said. "She may just have a general geopolitical belief that the world is going to be increasingly anti-Semitic."
But what about America? I asked. "In case you haven't noticed, America is becoming less Christian, more secular, and it's our Puritan roots that have kept this country from being anti-Semitic. But now look at the secular left, it's very anti-Semitic. Look at the people who are surrounding Obama. They're very anti-Semitic. Things aren't as bad as they are in Europe, but it's getting much worse." The worse it gets for Jews in America, of course, the closer we are to the Second Coming.
How common are these beliefs? I asked. "Fifty to sixty million people probably hold these beliefs," he said.
Four years after cartoons of the prophet Muhammad set off violent
protests across the Muslim world, Islamic nations are mounting a
campaign for an international treaty to protect religious symbols and
beliefs from mockery -- essentially a ban on blasphemy that would put
them on a collision course with free speech laws in the West. Documents
obtained by The Associated Press show that Algeria and Pakistan have
taken the lead in lobbying to eventually bring the proposal to a vote
in the U.N. General Assembly. If ratified in countries that
enshrine freedom of expression as a fundamental right, such a treaty
would require them to limit free speech if it risks seriously offending
religious believers. The process, though, will take years and no
showdown is imminent.
The conventional wisdom is that unlike Europe's discontented Muslims, America's Muslims are prosperous and happy, having benefited from the welcoming embrace of our "melting pot" nation. This is basically a complacent fiction. According to a Gallup poll released in March 2009, while Muslim integration in the United States has been more successful than in Europe, Muslims remain less civically engaged in American society and less inclined to view their social position positively than any other religious group.
Tonight, on HBO, an absolutely riveting documentary on Mumbai. It's hard not to avert your eyes at times. Tunku Varadarajan describes better than I could one particularly horrible scene, one that has embedded in it a deep truth about the genocidal anti-Semitism of jihadists:
This is not a documentary for the young to watch, or even for those adults who crumble easily. How to process the telephone conversation between Wasi and the gunman holed up in Mumbai's Chabad House, where a few American Jews are held hostage? Wasi says: "As I told you, every person you kill where you are"--referring to the Jewish building--"is worth 50 of the ones killed elsewhere." Later, as Indian army commandos close in on the building, Wasi, watching the scene on TV in Pakistan, fears that the last surviving gunman there will be taken alive. So he orders him to shoot the last two Jewish hostages forthwith: "Yes, sit them up and shoot them in the back of the head." The gunman, now weak with hunger and thirst, obliges. We hear a shot. Wasi does, too--he is on the line. What about the second shot, he asks. "I got them both," he is told, by the gunman.
Those who say they are for a two-state solution also somehow always find a reason why, in this case, the US should bow to Israel again. Take my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg who - surprise! - writes this:
"It doesn't matter, then, if the Israelis build 900 housing units in Gilo or 900 skyscrapers: Gilo will be kept by Israel in exchange for a one-to-one land swap with Palestine. All "settlements" are not created equal: Better for the Obama Administration to talk tough to Israel about the settlements ringing Nablus, for instance, because these are communities whose existence makes it impossible to create a contiguous, viable Palestinian state."
In any case, who is talking about bowing to Israel? When any other American ally disagrees with Washington, does Andrew attack it so viscerally? Anyway, he's missing the point: Gilo isn't a settlement; no American administration has ever considered Gilo a settlement. Officials of the Palestinian Authority have recognized that Gilo will be part of Israeli West Jerusalem in a final status agreement, as part of a one-to-one land swap. I'm simply arguing that the focus of negotiations, and of American policy, should be on creating a viable, contiguous Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. This means, among other things, pressuring Israel to make concessions on West Bank settlements. Gilo is irrelevant to this cause, since it's not even in East Jerusalem.
For a more even-handed and reasonable understanding of what's happening on the West Bank today, see this David Ignatius column today:
I have a suggestion, drawn from a visit here and several days of conversations with Israeli, Palestinian and U.S. officials: Follow the lead of Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority and the man who's largely responsible for Ramallah's turnaround. He has drawn up a plan for a two-year transition to statehood. The United States should endorse this goal, explicitly, and call for an immediate start to negotiations about the details.
"Fayyad is the only game in town, but his plan isn't sustainable without a political process," says Martin Indyk, who heads the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution and organized a three-day conference in Jerusalem to discuss U.S.-Israeli issues.
Israelis may balk at some aspects of Fayyad's state-building plan, but that's what negotiations are for. It's a better alternative than the recent proposal from Abbas's allies for the United Nations to declare Palestinian statehood, which Netanyahu rightly rejects as a unilateral move. And it's certainly a better alternative than just letting the problem fester, which only benefits Hamas, the extremist group that controls Gaza.
I read the same article in Ha'aretz yesterday, and had the same disbelieving, angry reaction that you apparently did. So here's my question -- do you think that either the Israeli government, or Israelis in general (most of whom, I know, really don't get or care about American-style "progressive Judaism") understand how bad this looks to many American Jews?
No. I'm overgeneralizing here, but Israelis have never been very good at understanding how they appear to the outside world. I don't think they care very much, to tell you the truth. If they did, they wouldn't allow their police to arrest Jewish women for wearing prayer shawls.
The news that 1,500 ultra-Orthodox Jews ransacked a newly-opened Intel factory in Jerusalem over the weekend -- because it stayed open on Shabbat -- is terribly disturbing, especially considering that Intel and companies like Intel are proving to be Israel's economic salvation, as Dan Senor and Saul Singer point out in their excellent, "Start-Up Nation," about which you can read more here. Israel-Intel employees described the events as a "pogrom" and had already installed a barbed wire fence around the factory in preparation for something like this. Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, who mediated talks with representatives from both sides, has proposed a compromise that would require only 60 non-Jewish workers to work on Saturday, but it hasn't been finalized yet, and the clip below suggests that reason was abandoned long ago.
The UK's ambassador in Washington, Nigel Sheinwald, doesn't know, either, but thinks it's a good thing:
It seems an immutable law of Hollywood that the finest baddies in
American film are always played by Brits. I'm not sure exactly why -
there is nothing inherently menacing, I think, about an English
accent. But whatever the reason, I have spotted a cinematic trend here
that builds on this fine tradition: British vampires.
