How The American Religious Right Is Making The Middle East Peace Process Impossible

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We’ve got the Bible. That’s our proof

Think Progressive

How The American Religious Right Is Making The Middle East Peace Process Impossible

EFRAT, OCCUPIED WEST BANK — Oded Revivi leaned back in his chair, pausing to think during an hour-long discussion with a group of American journalists in October. ...

After a few moments, he leaned forward to answer a question: How does he justify the existence of his settlement in the Palestinian territories, which the United Nations believes is illegal under international law and which the United States government says is illegitimate?
“I specifically do not choose to start with the biblical argument,” Revivi, who is an Israeli Jew, said. “But when [Former Israeli Prime Minister] Menachem Begin met with different leaders of the world, negotiating with them on all the different parts of Israel, he said basically, ‘We’ve got the Bible. That’s our proof.’ He’s right.”

When defending his community, Revivi may prefer legal arguments to religious ones. But the offhand reference to holy scripture shared by both Christians and Jews hints at a longstanding — but often unreported — transnational religious connection: Begin, Israel’s sixth prime minister, is credited with cementing the relationship between Israel and Evangelical Christians in the United States, openly courting the support of what are often called “Christian Zionists.”

To see evidence of this legacy, one need only look down the road. Efrat is home to the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation, an organization that regularly hosts evangelical groups and leaders from the United States.

Taken at face value, conservative Christian support for Israeli settlements seems innocuous, or at the very least unsurprising — after all, the same land was Jesus’ home too.

But over the past few decades, the American Religious Right’s actions in the region have extended far beyond the broad consensus endorsing Israel’s right to exist, morphing instead into a form of faith-based activism that makes the area’s multitudinous issues more complicated. Often with the blessing of conservative politicians, funders, and pundits, right-wing Christian and Jewish groups in the United States have consistently offered financial assistance for the construction and maintenance of settlements in the West Bank that international law says are illegal, as well as lending support to fringe “outposts” that even the Israeli government often does not formally recognize. These constructions are passionately opposed by Palestinians, the international community, and the United States, which has repeatedly called them a “barrier to peace.”

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http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/11/10/3720765/religious-right-israeli-settlements/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tptop3&utm_term=4&utm_content=5