By Michele Chabin, Religion News Service
Thursday, November 18, 2010
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| Benjamin Netanyahu greets Pator John Hagee |
But there was another meeting on the itinerary that was a must-not-miss event for Hagee and his host: a sit-down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The fact that Netanyahu -- knee-deep in contentious talks with Palestinians over a freeze on Israeli settlement construction -- found time to meet Hagee’s contingent speaks volumes about the ties between Israeli officials and evangelical Christians.
Christian Zionist support for Israel is at an all-time high, observers say, and Israelis, American Jews, and Palestinians are all taking notice -- some favorable, some not.
While Israel has long courted financial and political support from evangelicals, many Jewish American leaders have viewed the alliance with suspicion, leery about potential proselytizing and uncomfortable with evangelicals’ domestic agenda at home.
Recently, though, the American Jewish community has found a new appreciation for evangelical support at a time of mounting international criticism of Israeli policy and financial hardships for many prominent Jewish groups.
Hit hard by the economic downturn and the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme that decimated Jewish charities, American Jewish groups are sending less money to Israel. Dozens of evangelical groups “have definitely stepped in to fill some of the void,” said Dan Brown, creator of the website e-jewishphilanthropy.com.
One of those groups is the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), a Chicago-based evangelical group that has donated as much as $70 million to Israel in 2009 alone, and another $30 million to Jewish causes in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere.
Five years ago, Hadassah magazine, a mainstream Jewish women’s magazine, rejected an ad from Eckstein’s group. But this year, after a large donation to a Hadassah-affiliated hospital in Jerusalem, Hadassah honored Eckstein's group at its annual gala.
“We still haven’t been embraced by the establishment Jewish organizations, but I do think there’s a growing admiration because we’ve been able to grow by leaps and bounds over the past three years while the Jewish federation system and other sources of Jewish philanthropy have suffered declines,” said founder Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein.
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