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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Savvy salesman Rabbi Eckstein has convinced evangelicals to support Israel -- and he's hobnobbing with the likes of Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed. But what will he do if Kerry wins?
Nov 1, 2004 | For some 7 million evangelicals at 25,000 churches worldwide, Oct. 17 was the third Annual Day of Prayer and Solidarity with Israel. For President Bush's Southeastern regional campaign coordinator, Ralph Reed, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's liaison to the U.S. evangelical community, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the event was their latest attempt to rally Bush's base to the side of Sharon. To help make their point, Eckstein and Reed summoned 21 of Israel's diplomatic representatives in the U.S. to the pulpits of some of America's leading conservative churches.
In Atlanta, at the Mount Paran Baptist Church, to which Reed belongs, Israel's consul general to the Southeast, Shmuel Ben-Shmuel, shared the stage with Pastor David Cooper, author of the bestseller "Apocalypse." Meanwhile, Israel's ambassador to the United States, Danny Ayalon, traveled to Colorado Springs, Colo., to pay a visit to New Life Church and its senior pastor, Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a star in the glowing documentary about Bush, "Faith in the White House."
Eckstein was confident the Annual Day of Prayer event would keep pro-Israel pressure on Bush. "Over 30 percent of the evangelical respondents to an online survey we conducted last week said support for Israel was their number one factor in electing a president, and another 61 percent identified Israel as an important factor in their choice," he stated in a press release six days prior to the event. "This confirms what our experience tells us -- evangelical support for Israel hasn't diminished one bit. If anything, it's stronger than ever." Though evangelicals undoubtedly will vote overwhelmingly for Bush, the irony is that Jews in America, who support Israel for a different set of reasons than the evangelicals targeted by Eckstein do, are expected to vote overwhelmingly for John Kerry.
Evangelical support for Israel has increased dramatically in the past four years even as the country's international reputation has suffered as a result of Sharon's repressive, unilateral policies. To most evangelicals, Israel is "covenant land," a place granted to the Jews in God's covenant with Abraham; to many, Israel also represents the eventual landing pad for the Second Coming of the Messiah. While this scenario is not exactly friendly to Jews -- according to premillennial theology, once biblical Israel is fully resettled and Christ returns, Jews must accept him or perish -- evangelicals' theological interest in Israel renders them fervently opposed to any territorial concessions to the Palestinians and, thus, the natural allies of Sharon and his rightist Likud Party.
Rabbi Eckstein seems to have reached the apex of his lonely, 25-year-long quest to cultivate America's evangelical community as Israel's financial lifeline and most ardent lobbying bloc. Once a pariah among his peers, he has gained influence through savvy salesmanship, building his International Fellowship for Christians and Jews into a philanthropic powerhouse that donates tens of millions of dollars to Israel annually. In the process, he has forged close relationships with popular right-wing evangelical leaders such as Pat Robertson and Gary Bauer, as well as White House neoconservatives like Elliott Abrams, who is in charge of Middle East policy on the National Security Council. Together, Eckstein and his allies have played an instrumental role in pressuring the Bush administration to abandon the so-called road map to peace and defend Sharon's ham-handed handling of the occupation unconditionally.
I met with Eckstein in August at the IFCJ offices, which occupy an entire floor of a building in Chicago's Loop. Inside his office, Eckstein reclined behind a desk, looking out over the city's breathtaking skyline. Husky and youthful at 53, he looked more like a pro athlete than an Orthodox rabbi. (Think legendary Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly with a yarmulke.) He lives in Israel, where he serves as an informal advisor to Sharon, and was in Chicago to attend to business and visit his family.
During our meeting and an hourlong phone conversation the month before, Eckstein spoke glowingly about the Christian-Zionist alliance he has brokered. "With evangelicals, I haven't had to change opinions like I do with the [liberal] National Council of Churches. All I have to do is tap into their abiding love for Israel," he told me. "Since 9/11 and since the intifada, the Jewish community has become much more pragmatic; they feel Israel's survival is at stake, and they've recognized the one group that stands with us boldly and proudly is this evangelical group."
Eckstein found his calling in 1977 when he was director of inter-religious affairs for the Anti-Defamation League. When some neo-Nazis planned a provocative march in Skokie, Ill., a heavily Jewish community with numerous Holocaust survivors, the ADL sent him to Chicago to marshal Christian opposition to the march. Eckstein soon found himself in Wheaton, Ill., the epicenter of the mounting evangelical movement. It was during a meeting with the director of Wheaton College's Bible study program and the dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School that Eckstein had his epiphany about the role of evangelicals.
"The Jewish community was very frightened by this phenomenon of the rising Christian right, but I came to know that evangelicals are not bogeymen; they are simply a group of serious people who felt the pendulum had swung too far to the left and that what was needed was to return to the Judeo-Christian roots."
By 1983, Eckstein had formed the IFCJ and become a fixture at National Religious Broadcasters conferences, where he promoted tourism to the Holy Land and solicited donations for his organization. "When I started out 25 years ago, there was nobody in the field. I went to my first NRB convention and I was the only Jew there, and I went for 15 years straight," Eckstein recalled. "What I participated in spawning has kind of caught on ... Now there are 10 to 15 booths at NRB conferences selling Israeli or Jewish stuff and lots of Jews in yarmulkes walking around."
Five years later, Eckstein was in New York helping maverick Republican presidential primary candidate Pat Robertson "mitigate Jewish opposition" to his campaign -- and cultivating him and his legion of followers as supporters of Israel. In 1986, Robertson had compared non-Christians to termites deserving of "godly fumigation"; he later asserted, in the book "The New World Order," that communism was "the brainchild of German-Jewish intellectuals." But while Robertson may not be particularly fond of secular Jewish liberals, he has always been an ardent Christian Zionist who, in his preaching and pulp-prophecy books, refers to the Jewish presence in Jerusalem and Israel's victory in the 1967 war as miracles presaging the Second Coming.
In 1994, when the ADL issued a scathing report blasting fundamentalist evangelicals, and Robertson's Christian Coalition in particular, as a grave threat to Jewish life, Eckstein leaped to defend his allies. He convened a meeting in Washington between evangelical and Jewish leaders, and convinced the ADL's director, Abe Foxman, to invite Robertson's master tactician, Reed, to issue a call for reconciliation at ADL's annual conference. And in a 1995 address broadcast nationally by C-Span, Reed reassured the ADL of the Christian Coalition's commitment to a pluralistic society, recounted a moving visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem and issued a call for Jews and evangelicals to "move from confrontation to cooperation." According to Eckstein, "Reed made a wonderful impression."
