The International Institute for Strategic Studies
© The International Institute for Strategic Studies
This content may be used for research and private study purposes. All rights reserved. Any substantial or systematic
reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is
expressly forbidden.
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.iiss.org/terms-and-conditions
SCROLL DOWN FOR DOWNLOADED CONTENT
The International Institute for Strategic Studies, Arundel House, 13-15 Arundel Street, Temple Place, London WC2R 3DX, United
Kingdom. www.iiss.org. Incorporated in England with limited liability under number 615259. UK registered charity 206504.
Evangelicals, Israel and US
Foreign Policy
Paul D. Miller
When John Kerry was sworn in as US secretary of state in early 2013, he
faced a daunting world. The war in Afghanistan was in its twelfth year.
Civil war in Syria was threatening to destabilise the Middle East – already
reeling from the after-effects of the Arab Spring uprisings. The inexorable
rise of China and renewed Russian assertiveness were ever-present challenges. Kerry could easily have devoted the bulk of his tenure to any one of
these problems. Instead, his first major initiative dealt with none of them: he
worked for months, successfully, to restart peace talks between Israel and
the Palestinian Authority.
Such behaviour is not atypical for American officials. During the 2012
presidential election campaign, Republican nominee Mitt Romney travelled
abroad, as has become traditional among candidates seeking to burnish
their foreign-policy credentials. But Romney visited neither US troops in
Afghanistan nor the leaders of rising powers such as India. Instead, between
stops in the United Kingdom and Poland, Romney went to Israel. The prioritisation of Israel on his itinerary was mirrored throughout the campaign
in his rhetoric. He criticised President Barack Obama for failing to support
Israel and said that ‘I will reaffirm our historic ties to Israel and our abiding
commitment to its security – the world must never see any daylight between
our two nations.’1
Paul D. Miller is a Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation and an Assistant Professor of International
Security Affairs at the National Defense University in Washington DC. He previously served on the National
Security Staff in the White House for both the Bush and Obama administrations. He is currently studying for a
Masters in Theological Studies at the Reformed Theological Seminary. The views expressed here are his own.
Survival | vol. 56 no. 1 | February–March 2014 | pp. 7–26DOI 10.1080/00396338.2014.882149
8 | Paul D. Miller
Officials from both parties treat Israel as a major concern in US foreign
policy, and candidates from both sides, but especially the Republican Party,
have been voicing their support for the country as a matter of course for
decades. (According to a Gallup poll taken in early 2013, 78% of Republicans
said that they sympathised more with Israel than with the Palestinians, compared to 55% of Democrats.2) This baffles international observers: Israel, it
seems, should hardly be among the most pressing concerns to Americans
struggling with a weak economy and deeply divided over immigration, gun
control and gay marriage. Even among foreign-policy concerns, it can be
hard to understand why Israel merits more attention than the Arab Spring,
the rise of China or the stability of Pakistan. But during the presidential
debate on foreign policy in October 2012, the two candidates spent more
time on Israel than on any of those issues.
One standard explanation is that candidates support Israel to win Jewish
votes because of their supposed influence through the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee. That explanation is unconvincing. The organisation is certainly powerful, but American Jews do not appear to be Israel’s
strongest supporters, nor do they count US policy towards Israel among
their top concerns. They are hardly a large enough constituency to explain
such persistent pandering. According to a 2012 exit poll, Jews made up 2%
of the electorate and 69% of them voted for President Obama – which was
actually the lowest percentage of the Jewish vote won by a Democratic presidential candidate in at least a dozen years. A 2012 poll by the Public Religion
Research Institute found that only 4% of American Jews said support for
Israel was the issue they were most concerned about, while 51% cited the
economy and 15% income inequality.3
In fact, the American constituency most supportive of Israel is not Jews
but fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. The support of this caucus
stems from a distinctive reading of the Old Testament and a unique eschatology (that is, a belief about death, judgement and the end of the world), in
which Israel plays a pivotal role. They believe that because God’s promises
to Abraham were literal and unbreakable, they still hold today. Therefore,
nations friendly to Israel stand to be blessed by God, while those opposed to it
court His wrath. In 2013 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that
Evangelicals, Israel and US Foreign Policy | 9
82% of white evangelicals believed that Israel was given to the Jewish people
by God – more than double the percentage of American Jews who held this
belief – and almost half of them thought that the US was not sufficiently supportive of Israel.4 These voters make up a major part of the Republican base.
White evangelicals accounted for 23% of the electorate in 2012, according to
the Pew forum, and voted in exactly opposite proportions to Jewish voters:
69% for Romney and 30% for Obama.5 The religious beliefs of evangelicals
and fundamentalists are a driving force in the Republican Party’s stance on
US foreign policy towards Israel. There really is an Israel lobby that influences
US foreign policy, but it is made up of more Christians than Jews.
By itself, the fact that religious beliefs are influencing
political convictions is neither wrong nor unwelcome.
This is hardly the first time religion has affected public
policy, and it has often been a force for good – as it was in
motivating abolitionism and the civil-rights movement.
Fundamentalists’ religious beliefs led them to be among
the first gentiles to advocate a Jewish homeland and press
the US government to recognise the new state in 1948,
The Israel lobby
contains more
Christians
than Jews
at a time when the Roman Catholic Church, by contrast, generally opposed
Zionism. But uncritically using religion for political purposes can have drawbacks: religous belief tends to be inflexible – being, by definition, dogmatic – and
can blind one to the weaknesses and faults of the agenda one is advocating.
In particular, the religiously grounded pro-Israel viewpoint distorts American
policy towards the country with an unhelpful inflexibility and exaggerates its
political importance – and, indeed, that of the whole Middle East – to the US.
The time, attention and resources that the US brings to bear on the region have
become disproportionate to the political interests that the country has there.
Fortunately, American policymakers can recognise that there is more
theological disagreement on this issue than is widely acknowledged. The
fundamentalist viewpoint does not have strong support in older Christian
theology, and emerging evangelical leaders tend not to agree with it.
Policymakers should thus feel freer to develop alternative approaches to
US policy in the Middle East based on more traditional grounds, such as
American security interests and humanitarian ideals. Although the US
10 | Paul D. Miller
should always support Israel’s right to exist, it need not support every
Israeli initiative and policy; sustain the high amount of US foreign aid to
the country; nor even spend much time worrying about what is, in reality, a
minor dispute in a strategically secondary region of the world.
The origins of dispensationalism
For most of their history, Christians have believed that God’s promises to
Israel in the Old Testament should be understood figuratively. His pledge of
a special land for Abraham’s descendants was understood as the guarantee
of heaven – the ultimate Promised Land – for all of the faithful. Christians
generally did not believe that Israel or the Jewish diaspora continued to bear
God’s special favour, nor did they look for the re-establishment of the state
of Israel or signs of the end of the world in geopolitical developments in the
Middle East. Probably the most significant engagement of Christendom with
the Middle East between Constantine and Napoleon was the First Crusade
(1095–99), the goal of which was to establish a Christian kingdom, not a
Jewish one, and to secure Christian access to the holy places of Jesus’s birth
and death. The Crusaders were not known for their concern for Jewish rights.
Dispensationalism, a school of theology that gradually arose by the
early nineteenth century, eventually introduced the idea of Israel’s unique
significance into Christian circles, especially American evangelicalism and
fundamentalism. It remains a minority view among practising Christians
worldwide, as neither the Roman Catholic nor Orthodox churches agree with
it. Dispensationalism had roots in the Reformation but only came into focus in
the teaching of an Irish preacher named John Nelson Darby (1800–82). Darby
began his career as an ordained clergyman in the Anglican Church of Ireland
but became a founding member of the Plymouth Brethren, an independent,
pietistic and anti-hierarchical Christian group that bears some similarity to
the Anabaptists of the Reformation era and present-day Mennonites.
Darby and his dispensationalist descendants argued that, throughout
history, God had related to humanity through several distinct ‘dispensations’ of grace. God made a different promise to Noah (to save him from
the flood) than he made to David (to establish his kingdom). The main distinction that dispensationalists made was between the promises made to
Evangelicals, Israel and US Foreign Policy | 11
ancient Israel and those made to the Christian Church. The Brethren’s insistence on reading the Bible plainly and literally led Darby to observe that
the book nowhere clearly said that God’s promises to Abraham in the Old
Testament had been voided or transferred to the Church (although other
theologians argued that Romans 9:8 does exactly that). If those promises
were still valid, they applied to Abraham and his descendants: Jews, not
Christians. This led Darby to make a firm distinction between Israel and the
Church, where older theologians had stressed a greater degree of continuity
between the two. Dispensationalists interpret the Bible as stating that Israel
and the Church are separate bodies; that the dispensation given to Israel
was not cancelled or dissolved by the advent of Christianity; and that God’s
promises thus apply to Jews around the world today.
That includes all the promises God made to Abraham in Genesis. In
the book, God promises, at various points, to bless Abraham, give him offspring, make him the father of many nations, bless all peoples through him
and, quite explicitly, give him a specific piece of land:
The LORD said to Abram ... ‘Lift up your eyes and look from the place
where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward,
for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever.
I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count
the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. Arise, walk
through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.’
(Genesis 13:14–17, English Standard Version)
In the nineteenth century, dispensationalists regularly predicted that
God would fulfil his promise to Abraham by re-establishing a literal state of
Israel in the Holy Land, a remarkable claim to make several decades before
the First Zionist Congress in 1897. Some even became actively involved in
founding the Zionist movement to hasten the Second Coming; one, William
Blackstone, was honoured by Israel in 1956 for his devotion to its cause.
Timothy Weber, a former professor of Church history at the Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary, has written that ‘dispensationalists at that
time seemed more eager for Jews to move back to Palestine than did Jews
12 | Paul D. Miller
themselves.’6 After Israel was established in 1948, dispensationalists understood the event to be a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy and the new state to
bear God’s special favour. Dispensationalists, then and today, ‘maintain that
Israel is still a unique national and ethnic group in the sight of God. National
Israel is still expected to enjoy the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promises of
the land,’ according to Vern Poythress, professor of New Testament interpretation at the Westminster Theological Seminary.7
Such favour has straightforward implications for the other nations of the
world: if you want to be on God’s side, be nice to Israel. God told Abraham
that ‘I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonours you I will
curse’ (Genesis 12:3). Poythress has criticised this view: ‘people who believe
that the political state of Israel will be vindicated [by God] ... may erroneously conclude that their own government should now side with the Israeli
state in all circumstances’.8
The rise of dispensationalism in America
Darby tried unsuccessfully to disseminate his views in the US during several
missionary trips in the 1860s. Dispensationalism only became a mainstream
phenomenon, with tens of millions of followers, in the twentieth century
through two authors and one event. The first author was Cyrus Scofield, an
American Presbyterian theologian, whose Scofield Reference Bible was first
published in 1909. The book disseminated a dispensationalist interpretation
of the Bible in simple terms that made it accessible to millions of readers
in the newly assertive fundamentalist churches around the country. (The
first volume of The Fundamentals, from which fundamentalists proudly took
their name, was published the following year.) The Scofield Reference Bible
taught generations of laymen and preachers to read their Bibles through a
dispensationalist framework. It is still in print today.
The second author is Hal Lindsey, a Christian writer and conservative commentator. Lindsey’s 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, sought to interpret
global developments through the theological framework of dispensationalism.
Taking the establishment of Israel in 1948 as the start of the final countdown to
Armageddon, Lindsey offered readers a tour d’horizon of world events, placing
the Cold War, the Six-Day War, 1960s counterculture and the Vietnam War,
Evangelicals, Israel and US Foreign Policy | 13
among other events, within a single, coherent vision.9 The book was appealing because it purported to explain both obscure passages of the Bible that
have long stumped theologians and equally baffling world events that were
clearly beyond the grasp of American policymakers. In Lindsey’s framework,
Israel will have the misfortune of hosting the battle of Armageddon, with all
its attendant destruction, but Jews can take heart in the knowledge that, if
they survive, they will be saved by converting to Christianity. The book was
the bestselling non-fiction book of the 1970s and has sold, according to some
estimates, 35 million copies in 54 languages, founding a genre and spawning
scores of copycats.10 Lindsey continues to offer his theological reading of world
events on his television show, The Hal Lindsey Report. In 2008 he suggested that
Senator Obama, as he then was, might be the Antichrist.11
Dispensationalism continues to be a popular topic among readers. It
provided the framework for the Left Behind series: 16 fantastically popular
books, published between 1995 and 2007, which depicted the end of the
world, played out according to a dispensationalist script. In the novels,
Israel is supernaturally protected from a Russian invasion, duped by the
secretary-general of the United Nations (who is also the Antichrist) and
hosts the (literal) battle of Armageddon and the millennial kingdom of Jesus
upon his return. The books sold over 63m copies worldwide.12
Between Scofield and Lindsey was, of course, the founding of Israel. The
unlikely return of a political entity called ‘Israel’ to the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean nearly 2,000 years after the abolition of the Roman province
of Judea seemed nothing short of miraculous, and was taken as a clear confirmation that those who had predicted Israel’s return long before it was
remotely possible had been right. ‘The one event which many Bible students
in the past overlooked was this paramount prophetic sign: Israel had to be
a nation again in the land of its forefathers,’ Lindsey wrote.13 The establishment of the modern state of Israel gave dispensationalism a major boost
to its credibility and brought it into the mainstream. According to the Pew
Forum on Religion and Public Life, 44% of Americans, including 82% of
white evangelicals, believe that Israel was given to the Jews by God.14
Dispensationalism continues to have a following among pastors and
serious fundamentalist theologians. John MacArthur, who has served as
14 | Paul D. Miller
pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, since 1969,
is a self-proclaimed dispensationalist. He is the president of the Master’s
College, a reputable undergraduate university, and the Master’s Seminary,
a graduate school that specialises in theology and grants doctorates. His
sermons, talks and writings are widely distributed through a variety of
media, and include scores of books of Bible study and Biblical commentary.
Like Scofield, MacArthur has published his own study Bible. MacArthur
has been less politically engaged than were fundamentalists such as Jerry
Falwell and Chuck Colson, but for that reason his influence and reputation
have endured, and even grown, in fundamentalist and evangelical circles.
MacArthur’s website includes a sermon series on the future of Israel,
which ‘looks at highly detailed prophecies about Israel that came true, prophecies yet to be fulfilled, and the unique measures God will take to preserve
His chosen people during the explosive, deadly period known as the Great
Tribulation’.15 In October 2012, MacArthur reiterated his long-standing belief
that the nation of Israel continues to exist by providential decree because
God has determined a future day in which he will save the nation [of]
Israel, he will bring salvation to that nation. That’s why they still exist. God
made no such promise to other ancient nations that surrounded Israel.
You’ve never met an Amalekite ... [But] there are 15 million Israelites in the
world because God has a promise to fulfill in the future.16
MacArthur explained that Biblical prophecy (in Zechariah 12) indicates
that the world will turn against Israel in the end of days, ‘so we aren’t surprised that Israel suffers and struggles’. In what is probably a reference to
Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood’s electoral victory in Egypt, he added,
‘nor are we surprised that there is an amassing force in the Middle East
setting its target towards Israel’.17
Declining support for dispensationalism
It would be wrong for policymakers to ignore such claims simply because
the reasoning is religious. The separation of Church and state does not
mean that religiously informed arguments are banned from public debate;
Evangelicals, Israel and US Foreign Policy | 15
such a rule would have destroyed the civil-rights movement in its infancy.
Similarly, it may be tempting to say that American policymakers are unable
to discern the truth of dispensationalist claims and, therefore, should lay
them aside when calculating the national interest. That response is too clever
by half: many policymakers are themselves faithful believers in one religion
or another and regularly consult their religious convictions in formulating
conceptions of justice and equity. Those who sincerely believe that America
will be safer if it is friendly to Israel can, and should, continue to make the
argument in the public sphere.
Of course, they should do so openly, with the understanding that most
Americans do not share their theological convictions. Critics may be alarmed
that 44% of Americans believe God gave Israel to the Jews, but in a democracy the majority have their say. And all Americans should at least be aware
that dispensationalism is an aberration in the history of Christian thought
and does not have strong support from that religion’s greatest thinkers.
Neither Saint Augustine nor Thomas Aquinas – nor Martin Luther nor John
Calvin – read scripture the way that Darby and his followers did. Augustine
argued that the Church was the heir of God’s promises to Israel, and that
those promises should be understood figuratively rather than politically:
If we hold with a firm heart the grace of God which has been given us, [then]
we are Israel, the seed of Abraham: unto us the Apostle says, ‘Therefore
are you the seed of Abraham.’ Let therefore no Christian consider himself
alien to the name of Israel.18
Thomas Aquinas made the same argument in his commentary on the
Romans nine centuries later. (Their view is not without its critics, however,
who argue that it is disrespectful towards Judaism by contending that the
Church has in effect replaced Israel.) Neither Augustine nor Aquinas read
Biblical prophecy as anticipating the re-establishment of an earthly state of
Israel, nor would they have believed that such a state had any theological
implications for Christians.
Dispensationalism,
at
any
rate,
may
have
passed
its
prime.
Dispensationalists have never agreed on how to interpret world events, who
16 | Paul D. Miller
the Antichrist is or when the Second Coming is to happen. Too many of
their conflicting predictions have been falsified by the passage of time. The
establishment of Israel was a boon for the prophecy-interpretation industry
and spawned an entire genre of books, but it has not been succeeded by the
sequence of events that dispensationalists expected. ‘Progressive’ dispensationalist theologians, such as Craig Blaising of the Southwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary, have recognised the weaknesses of earlier formulations of their framework and inched closer in recent decades to the traditional
Christian view.19
Prominent Christian spokespeople no longer make support for Israel
a major part of their pitch. Rick Warren, founder and senior pastor of
Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, is a leading figure in the
evangelical megachurch movement. He hosted a ‘Civil Forum on the
Presidency’ with both presidential candidates in 2008 and was later invited
to give the invocation at President Obama’s first inaugural. Warren is not a
dispensationalist and has publicly criticised the tendency to focus too much
on the interpretation of end-times prophecies. Similarly, Russell Moore – a
Southern Baptist theologian and pastor who was recently named as the new
head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist
Convention’s public-policy advocacy and lobbying arm – has criticised the
dispensationalist framework and its implications for US foreign policy:
The impact of dispensationalism on fundamentalism and evangelicalism
has often resulted in an almost unqualified support for Israel, spurred on
by popular apocalypticism among the evangelical grassroots constituency.
Believing that the nation’s reestablishment in Palestine in 1948 was a
fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, many in the new Christian right
political movement have translated their theological understanding into
support for Israel as a key component of their political worldview.20
Moore’s predecessor at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission,
Richard Land, regularly espoused the pro-Israel dispensationalist viewpoint during his 25 years representing Southern Baptists in Washington
DC.21 Moore does not share such views. His theological work does not, in
Evangelicals, Israel and US Foreign Policy | 17
his own words, ‘give such a blanket endorsement of the present Israeli state,
at least not on the basis of Biblical prophecy’.22
A chance to debate US policy on Israel?
Since the 1970s, support for Israel has become an article of faith in conservative Christian and Republican circles. Major figures of the Moral Majority,
the Christian Coalition of America and their broader movement – including
Falwell, Colson, Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson – echoed similar views on
Israel and its central place in Christian theology and US foreign policy. The
US needed to support and protect Israel to stay on God’s good side and
ensure national blessing, they argued. Through the substantial number of
voters following them on television and in print, they sought to influence
political attitudes in the Republican Party and eventually set the agenda for
Republican candidates seeking their endorsement.
Their strategy worked. Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid
in history. Since 1951, the US has given Israel around $193 billion in economic and military aid – the vast bulk of it since the Camp David Accords
in 1978.23 That is not simply more than any other country; it is more by a
very wide margin. The second-highest recipient, Egypt, has received $118bn
over the same period, just 61% of Israel’s total. Israel has received more
money than Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan combined; more than Vietnam
during the decade-long US reconstruction and counter-insurgency effort
there; and even, astonishingly, more than all of Europe under the Marshall
Plan.24 There are good strategic and moral reasons to support Israel, but it
is unclear if this extent of unhesitating diplomatic, military and economic
assistance to the country is proportionate to the United States’ interest there.
It is politically difficult to even raise the subject, as Texas Governor
Rick Perry discovered during a Republican presidential-campaign debate
in 2011. He claimed that ‘the foreign aid budget in my administration, for
every country, is going to start at zero dollars,’ and that he would approve
aid on a case-by-case basis only when US interests were directly at stake. He
won strong applause for his flinty stance, but was immediately challenged
by a questioner, who asked if he would include Israel in that reassessment.
Perry haltingly said ‘yes’, before assuring the audience that Israel would
18 | Paul D. Miller
continue receiving aid from a Perry administration. Afterwards, Perry was
severely criticised by the conservative media for suggesting that the US cut
aid to Israel.25
Among gentiles, Israel policy has become a cultural wedge issue that
signals one’s tribal loyalties; it is a proxy for one’s broader world view.
Being pro-Israel conveys sympathy for the conservative, evangelical
agenda. In this environment, questioning US policy towards Israel means
risking one’s credentials as a conservative, a foreign-policy hawk or even a
Christian. This sort of environment causes public debate to stagnate: even
conservatives and evangelicals should recognise that it is unhelpful for their
intellectual vibrancy to wall off an entire policy position from examination
and scrutiny. As Weber has written, ‘when evangelicals force all the complicated issues in the Middle East through the tight grid of their prophetic
views, they can lose the ability to think critically and ethically about what is
really going on there.’26
Fortunately, the environment appears to be changing. If dispensationalism is fading as a force among evangelicals and fundamentalists, and
therefore within the Republican Party, foreign-policy professionals have
an opportunity to ‘think critically and ethically’ about US policy towards
Israel. Given this chance, what should US foreign policy towards Israel be,
as it gradually comes unmoored from its theological heritage?
A beneficial alliance
Firstly, the US should continue to recognise that Israel has an ironclad right
to exist. The principle of self-determination has been enshrined in international law since the end of the First World War. Jewish efforts to achieve
self-determination naturally emerged from the community of Jews who had
immigrated freely and (mostly) legally to Ottoman Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Jewish people’s ancient connection
to the land and, after the Holocaust, their indisputably precarious position gave their efforts further credibility and urgency. The UN recognised
Israel’s right to exist when it approved a partition plan for British-controlled
Palestine in 1947 and, again, when it accepted Israel’s application for membership of the organisation in 1949.
Evangelicals, Israel and US Foreign Policy | 19
The US is also right to support Israel’s continued political and economic
development. Israel is rated ‘free’ by Freedom House, with the highest
possible score for political rights and the second-highest for civil liberties.
Washington has long recognised the value of supporting democracies abroad
as a key element of fostering a stable, peaceful international system. Israel
is the only truly stable democracy in the region stretching from Gibraltar
to Islamabad (Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Iraq, Libya and Pakistan may, or
may not, take advantage of their opportunities to build on new democratic
institutions in coming years). Israel is thus a uniquely valuable partner for
American efforts to support democracy.
The US should recognise that Israel’s value as a trading partner is disproportionate to the relatively small size of its economy. Although its
GDP is only around $250bn, it has a rich-world GDP per capita, a highly
educated workforce and a sophisticated, knowledge-based economy that
specialises in industries such as aviation and medical electronics. As such,
it is more economically integrated with the West than its neighbours. The
United States’ trade with Israel reached $36bn in 2012 – more than that
with Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Tunisia combined – and
almost one-third of Israeli exports head to the US market.27 Israel is the
United States’ third-largest customer for weapons sales, accounting for
$36.2bn of purchases since 1950, according to the US Defense Security
Cooperation Agency.28 Although the Israeli market is too small to count
for much in the United States’ massive, $14-trillion economy, its position
as the economic bright spot in a generally stagnant region makes it worthy
of US investment.
Finally, Israel is a natural ally in the United States’ efforts to prevent Iran
from acquiring a nuclear-weapons capability, limit Tehran’s influence and
deter or respond to Iranian aggression. Israel is more directly endangered
by Iran’s bellicosity than is the US, and perceives a much higher degree of
threat from Tehran’s growing regional power. Israel is probably, therefore,
a more active and reliable ally against Iran than the United States’ European
partners. US and Israeli intelligence reportedly collaborated on efforts to
sabotage Iranian nuclear facilities through cyber attacks in recent years –
which seems to have been an economical and low-risk means of slowing
20 | Paul D. Miller
(albeit temporarily) Iran’s enrichment of uranium. Israel is almost certainly
the country with the strongest interest and political will to contribute to
such efforts.
Reassessing US support for Israel
None of these benefits suggest that the US should overlook the disadvantages of its current policy towards Israel. The US can and should maintain
support for Israel’s existence; its efforts to defend against terrorism and
Iranian nuclear blackmail; and its good-faith diplomatic efforts to reach
peace settlements with Syria and the Palestinian Authority. But supporting
Israel in these ways does not require unconditional support for the country
or a blanket endorsement of Israeli behaviour. In particular, the US does not
need to sustain its high levels of foreign aid to Israel; tolerate Mossad’s long
history of espionage against American targets; play a direct role in brokering agreements between the Israelis and their neighbours; or even care very
deeply about the Israel–Palestine dispute.
The level of US aid to Israel is out of all proportion with the country’s
place among American strategic interests: Israel is important, but not more
important than all of Europe in the wake of the Second World War. The
US certainly has interests in the Middle East – including those relating to
counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism and the stability of world energy
markets – but they do not outweigh American interests in Europe or East
Asia. Those theatres are home to the United States’ largest trading partners,
most powerful allies and strongest competitors. Even South Asia may be
of greater importance than the Middle East; contrary to the typical narrative, the former rather than the latter is the locus of international terrorism
and nuclear proliferation. In the twenty-first century, US security will be
enhanced or threatened in the European and Asian theatres to a far greater
degree than it will be in the Middle East.
Within the context of US policy towards the Middle East, it may be that
US aid to Egypt and Israel is the price that the US pays for regional stability, but surely it is aid to Egypt that contributes more to this goal. Israel has
little incentive or desire to provoke conflict with its neighbours; it does not
need American money as a national bribe to keep it from invading other
Evangelicals, Israel and US Foreign Policy | 21
states. Most American assistance to Israel – an average of 70% since Camp
David, but rising to 98% in 2011 – is military aid, specifically the waiving of
payments for foreign military-financing contracts.29 In recent years, much of
this has helped to build Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defence system.30 The US
should simply stop issuing waivers and accept payment, converting aid into
trade. Israel is, after all, the richest country to which the US gives foreign
aid. As the third-largest buyer of US weapons, Israel has demonstrated that
it can afford to pay. Increased payments from abroad will provide a needed
fillip to the US defence industry, which has been weakened by sequestration and is threatened by future US defence cuts. Washington, meanwhile,
should reserve foreign aid for poorer states.
Israel also has a long record of spying on the US. American officials do
not openly discuss this uncomfortable aspect of the US-Israeli relationship, and official documents rarely cite Israel as a counter-intelligence
threat. Nonetheless, reports occasionally surface (as they did last summer)
of American officials’ private frustrations with Israel’s alarmingly aggressive espionage, both in the US and against American targets abroad.31 Such
espionage is probably motivated, firstly, by a desire to discern American
policymakers’ true intentions towards Israel because Israeli officials are
insecure about whether the US would stand by its ally in an all-out war
with its neighbours. Secondly, Israel may undertake industrial espionage
to help its small economy stay commercially competitive, particularly in
the defence-technology sector. That it is fairly normal for states to spy on
one another is true but beside the point: Israel is one of the worst offenders,
after China and Russia, in stealing American secrets. Nor is Israel’s espionage excusable because it means no harm to the US: Israeli intelligence
may be penetrated by Iranian or Chinese agents who know that they can
get American secrets without the hassle of hacking into the CIA. And, on
grounds of principle, the US should insist that the largest recipient of its
foreign aid refrains from stealing secrets, lest this undermine other allies’
confidence in American competence.
Finally, American policymakers’ time and attention seems disproportionately taken up with worrying about a region that is, in truth, secondary
to worldwide American interests. Some critics argue that US policy towards
22 | Paul D. Miller
Israel is unfair and hypocritical because the country flouts the liberal principles that the US professes to care about in its dealings with the Palestinians.
Whether that is true is irrelevant: many political relationships are characterised by unfairness, but not all of them are relevant to US national security.
The question is not whether the Israeli-Palestinian situation is fair – the US
is not the global umpire of fairness – but whether Washington needs to care
about it at all.
Some foreign-policy analysts have concocted a convoluted explanation
that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict poisons relations with the rest of the Arab
world, which takes out its frustration on America. Peace between Israel and
Palestine is the master key to unlocking regional stability across the Middle
East, they argue, and the US must become directly involved as an honest
broker. But, as Aaron David Miller argued in a piece recounting decades
of attempts to be that honest broker in high-ranking positions at the US
Department of State,
in a broken, angry region with so many problems – from stagnant,
inequitable economies to extractive and authoritarian governments that
abuse human rights and deny rule of law, to a popular culture mired
in conspiracy and denial – it stretches the bounds of credulity to the
breaking point to argue that settling the Arab-Israeli conflict is the most
critical issue, or that its resolution would somehow guarantee Middle
East stability.32
Israel is not the only US ally to have a territorial dispute with a neighbour or a separatist movement within its (de facto) borders, but Washington
did not so extensively involve itself in the disputes between the UK and the
Irish Republican Army; Spain and Euskadi Ta Azkatasuna (ETA); Canada and
Quebec; or Greece and Turkey over Cyprus. It seems baffling that the president of the United States must become personally involved in the minutiae of
Israeli settlements in the West Bank. President Bill Clinton’s intensive effort to
broker peace in the final months of his presidency was noble but also, perhaps,
un-presidential. Americans tend to read something unique, portentous and
epic into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is time for US policymakers to see
Evangelicals, Israel and US Foreign Policy | 23
the conflict for what it is: a fairly typical territorial spat between a microsovereignty and a failed state that Americans can safely ignore.
American policy towards the Middle East has often been a haphazard
blend of hard-headed realism about oil, idealistic humanitarian concerns
and dispensationalist theology. The result has not served American interests well. As the popularity of dispensationalism wanes, policymakers can
and should continuously re-evaluate the US stance towards Israel and the
broader Middle East. There is no easy solution to the difficult set of problems in the region, but in coming years the debate should move closer to the
typical conflict between realists and idealists. In other words, the US can
start treating Israel and the Middle East as a normal country and region of
the world, and develop its foreign policy accordingly.
Notes
1
Harriet Sherwood, ‘Romney on
Foreign Policy: View from Israel and
the Palestinian Territories’, Guardian, 8
October 2012, http://www.theguardian.
com/world/2012/oct/08/romneyforeign-policy-israel-palestinian.
2 Lydia Saad, ‘Americans’ Sympathies for
Israel Match All-Time High’, Gallup, 15
March 2013, http://www.gallup.com/
poll/161387/americans-sympathiesisrael-match-time-high.aspx.
3 ‘2012 Fox News Exit Polls’, Fox
News, http://www.foxnews.com/
politics/elections/2012-exit-poll;
Public Religion Research Institute,
‘Survey: Chosen for What? – Jewish
Values in 2012’, 3 April 2012, http://
publicreligion.org/research/2012/04/
jewish-values-in-2012/.
4 Pew Research Center, ‘A Portrait of
Jewish Americans’, 1 October 2013,
Chapter Five, ‘Connection With and
Attitudes Toward Israel’, http://
www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/
5
6
7
8
9
chapter-5-connection-with-andattitudes-towards-israel/. See also
a 2005 poll on the same subject,
Pew Research Center, ‘American
Evangelicals and Israel’, April 2005,
http://www.pewforum.org/2005/04/15/
american-evangelicals-and-israel/.
Pew Research Center, ‘How the
Faithful Voted: 2012 Preliminary
Analysis’, 7 November 2012, http://
www.pewforum.org/2012/11/07/
how-the-faithful-voted-2012preliminary-exit-poll-analysis/.
Timothy P. Weber, ‘How Evangelicals
Became Israel’s Best Friend’,
Christianity Today, 5 October 1998,
http://www.christianitytoday.com/
ct/1998/october5/8tb038.html.
Vern S. Poythress, Understanding
Dispensationalists (Phillipsburg, NJ:
P&R Publishing, 1993), p. 12.
Ibid., p. 32.
Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970).
24 | Paul D. Miller
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Rapture Ready, ‘Hal Lindsey’, http://
raptureready.com/who/Hal_Lindsey.
html.
Amy Sullivan, ‘An Antichrist Obama
in McCain Ad?’, Time, 8 August 2008,
http://content.time.com/time/politics/
article/0,8599,1830590,00.html.
Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left
Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days
(Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House,
1995).
Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth, p. 43.
Michael Lipka, ‘More White
Evangelicals than American Jews say
God gave Israel to the Jewish People’,
Pew Research Center, 3 October
2013, http://www.pewresearch.org/
fact-tank/2013/10/03/more-whiteevangelicals-than-american-jews-saygod-gave-israel-to-the-jewish-people/.
John MacArthur, The Future of Israel
(Panorama City, CA: Grace to You, 2012).
John MacArthur, ‘John MacArthur
on the Middle East and the Future of
Israel’, Grace to You, 11 October 2012,
http://www.gty.org/blog/B121011.
Ibid.
Saint Augustine, ‘Exposition on Psalm
114’, New Advent, http://www.
newadvent.org/fathers/1801114.htm.
Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum,
Kingdom through Covenant: A BiblicalTheological Understanding of the
Covenants (Wheaton, IL: Crossway,
2012). Chapter Two summarises the
history of dispensationalist theology
and concludes that the new wave
of ‘progressive’ dispensationalist
theologians have moved far closer to
traditional ‘covenant’ theology.
Russell D. Moore, The Kingdom of
Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective
(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), p. 72.
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Deborah Caldwell, ‘Why Christians
Must Keep Israel Strong’, Beliefnet,
www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/
Christianity/2002/06/Why-ChristiansMust-Keep-Israel-Strong.aspx.
Moore, The Kingdom of Christ, p. 72.
US Agency for International
Development, ‘U.S. Overseas Loans
and Grants, Obligations and Loan
Authorizations’, http://gbk.eads.
usaidallnet.gov/.
The Marshall Plan disbursed
$13.3bn between 1948 and 1952,
according to the George C. Marshall
Foundation. That is equivalent
to about $130bn today, according
to the US Department of Labor’s
inflation calculator. George C.
Marshall Foundation, ‘European
Economic Cooperation Countries
and Marshall Plan Payments’,
http://www.marshallfoundation.org/library/documents/
European_Economic_Cooperation_
Countries_Marshall_Plan_Payments.
pdf.
‘Perry: Start Foreign Aid at Zero
Dollars; Newt: Sometimes Stay
There’, Talking Points Memo,
12 November 2011, http://
talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/
perry-start-foreign-aid-at-zero-dollarsnewt-sometimes-stay-there.
Weber, ‘How Evangelicals Became
Israel’s Best Friend’.
CIA, The World Factbook, https://www.
cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/; US Census Bureau,
‘Trade in Goods with Israel’, http://
www.census.gov/foreign-trade/
balance/c5081.html.
Historical Facts Book (Washington DC:
US Department of Defense, 2012),
Evangelicals, Israel and US Foreign Policy | 25
http://www.dsca.mil/sites/default/
files/historical_facts_book_-_30_
sep_2012.pdf.
29 Ibid.
30 William J. Broad, ‘Weapons
Experts Raise Doubts about Israel’s
Antimissile System’, New York
Times, 20 March 2013, http://www.
nytimes.com/2013/03/21/world/
middleeast/israels-iron-domesystem-is-at-center-of-debate.
html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&.
31
Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo,
‘US Sees Israel, Tight Mideast Ally, as
Spy Threat’, Associated Press, 28 July
2012, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/
us-sees-israel-tight-mideast-ally-spythreat.
32 Aaron David Miller, ‘The False
Religion of Mideast Peace’, Foreign
Policy, 29 April 2010, http://www.
foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/19/
the_false_religion_of_mideast_
peace#sthash.VPoK4sGU.dpbs.
26 | Paul D. Miller