Questions raised as evangelicals emerge as key patrons for Jews resettling
Israel’s founding fathers, who etched a commitment to encouraging Jewish immigration into the declaration of independence, might be surprised to find that, seven decades later, the state is relying on Christians to fulfil that promise.
What was once a strictly Jewishfunded mission is increasingly being bankrolled by evangelical Christians. Israel’s Christian allies now fund about a third of all immigrants moving to the country, according to a tally by the Associated Press.
The figures reflect the ever tightening relationship between Israel and its evangelical Christian allies, whom Israel has come to count on for everything from political support to tourism dollars.
“After 2000 years of oppression and persecution, today you have Christians who are helping Jews,” said Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a group that raises money from evangelical Christians for Jewish causes. “This is an amazing thing.”
Israel has long depended on diaspora Jewish communities, especially in the United States, for donations and to lobby their local governments on its behalf. But evangelical communities have become increasingly important.
Israeli charities raise millions of dollars from Christians around the world, and evangelical Christians make up 13 per cent of all tourists to Israel. A parliamentary caucus works with evangelical legislators around the world to foster support for Israel.
Israelis can also thank white evangelicals for helping to put US President Donald Trump, an ardent supporter of Israel’s nationalist Government, in the White House.
“Israel has no better friends, I mean that, no better friends in the world than the Christian communities around the world,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Christian media summit in Jerusalem last year.
European and American Jewish philanthropists championed immigration to Israel, known as “Aliyah”, or ascending, even before the creation of the state in 1948, by working to settle Jews in what was then Ottoman and British Palestine. In the decades after independence, the Government partnered with Jewish groups to organise dramatic airlifts of Jews from troubled countries.
Christian support for the Aliyah largely began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and has grown in recent years as American Jews have redirected charitable donations to niche causes. That has forced nonprofits to expand their pool of benefactors.
“We don’t see any reason why not to rely on help, including donations, from all our friends around the world, be they Jewish, Christian or others,” said Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency, a nonprofit that spearheads Jewish immigration to Israel.
The Israeli Ministry of Aliyah and Immigrant Absorption, however, said it has no ties to Christian groups.
Of the more than 28,000 Jews who immigrated to Israel last year, at least 8500 arrived thanks to Christian donations, according to official figures and numbers provided by the Fellowship and Jerusalem’s International Christian Embassy, another prominent group that raises money from evangelicals. The Jewish Agency receives additional undisclosed funds from other Christian donors, meaning that share could be even higher.
Not everyone is pleased. Some in Israel are suspicious that the evangelical embrace stems from a belief that the modern Jewish state is a precursor to the apocalypse — when Jesus will return and Jews will either accept Christianity or die.
Liberal Jews, who make up the majority of the American Jewish community, bristle at the evangelicals’ ties to the political right and their support for Israel’s settlement enterprise in the West Bank, a major sticking point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group in