A Pre-Convention Open Letter To CUFI

For those who do not know, CUFI stands Christians United For Israel and is, according to its website, the largest American group that supports Israel. CUFI was born from  John Hagee's ministry. Hagee is the senior pastor of a megachurch in San Antonio, Texas called Cornerstone Church. His church is a charismatic, fundamentalist church that serves as a base for his TV ministry.

CUFI runs many pro-Israel events and has an annual convention in Washington, D.C. every July. This year's convention is from July 22-24. The convention has speakers who talk about Israel's history, where they are today, negative claims about Israel which CUFI calls 'myths," the threats to Israel, and Iran. Key events include A Night To Honor Israel and a mass lobbying of Congress.

CUFI's commitment to Israel stems from reliance on Dispensationalism in understanding eschatology. Dispensationalism, which compared to the other three schools of eschatology, is a young school that combines premillenialism and viewing Israel as having a central role during the end times as God's chosen people. Premillenialism states that Jesus's return occurs at the beginning of His thousand year reign on earth.

Dear CUFI,

I won't be able to stand outside to handout Christian objections to your views as I have done the last couple of years so I want use this open letter to make a request. Please stop. Please cease and desist from your activities. Why should you discontinue? There are multiple reasons why and each of these reasons has strong biblical support. Because of the kind of support you are giving to Israel, you are doing great harm both to Israel and the Gospel, which you claim to believe in and represent.

I know how you will reply to my request. You will say that you are obeying God and His Word by supporting Israel. But is that really the case?

Consider your literal interpretation of the Bible that drives your view that Israel is to have that piece of land forever. You get that from your literal interpretation of Genesis. And, perhaps you have a fear that if Israel loses the land, then people would find it more difficult to believe that the Bible is true. But consider how your literal interpretation of the Old Testament contradicts the literal interpretation of the New Testament. Take Galations 3:7 for example. There Paul says that the true descendants of Abraham are those who imitate his faith by believing God's Word. So the true connection to Abraham isn't by the flesh and ancestry but by believing God's promise which is a work of God alone. We see that theme in other parts of Galations as well as Romans and John 1. John wrote in John 1:12 that those who believe do so because of God, not because of themselves. This is because our salvation is accomplished solely by the God (Ephesians 2:8-9). In contrast to this, ancestry is viewed as the work of man and the flesh.

No doubt you will eventually bring up Romans 11 where Paul rhetorically asks whether God has left his people. And you will remind me of part of Paul's answer. The part you remember is where Paul emphatically says "NO!" And you are right to quote Paul here. But what you neglect to mention is how Paul shows that God has not rejected his people. God shows his forever bond with Israel through preserving a remnant of believers (Romans 11:4-5). So what proves God's faithfulness to Israel isn't the giving of land but by keeping faith alive in SOME of the physical descendants of Abraham.

But what we have here is not just a Biblical version of the game Battleship where each of us lists the scriptures that support our personal views here. We have something far greater at stake. For I hope to show that your beliefs about both Israel and our duty toward them leads us to gravely sin against God.

The first way in which those who have your views of Israel commit serious sin against God is that your views promote tribalism and tribalism always leads to an array of serious sins. Tribalism occurs when group loyalty trumps commitment to principles and morals. This is evident in how those who uncritically support Israel endorse theft of land along with the abuse and killing of people. Think about this, you are encouraging Israel's stealing of the land and killing its inhabitants because of group loyalty, because of tribalism. In America's cities, we would call this a gang mentality. 

These sinful ways in which Israel treats the Palestinians are obviously worse than tribalism but it tribalism that is the motivation for and enabler of these sins. How Israel treats the Palestinians should give you enough reason to repent, but you support this because you say that the Jews have a higher right to land than those who had been living on the land for centuries. Here, you are encouraging us to show here is preference, preference for Jews over Arabs some of whom are your brothers and sisters in Christ. Showing preference is forbidden in James 2:8-9 and Galations 3:26-29 destroys all reasons for showing favoritism.  

Tribalism also encourages pride in those who belong to the in-group. Pride naturally occurs as those in the in-group compare their position with the less fortunate and they invariably, on a personal level, take some degree of credit for their good fortune. We should note that Romans 3:27 states that faith is pride's kryptonite. We should also note how negatively the Bible speaks of pride. And we should note how Paul voids himself of any pride in his nationality because the significance he found in Christ both is superior to and contradicts it (Philippians 3). 

Some of you will respond by saying that to not support Israel is to repeat the oft-repeated sin of anti-Semitism. Certainly anti-Semitism should never be tolerated--we should note here that Palestinians are Semites too. In fact, we should note that much of the blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be laid at the door of the Church in Europe as its anti-Semitism became a driving force for both some of its own most despicable sins and a model for Israel's sins against nonJews in Israel and Palestine. This has created a chain of abuse where how the Jews were treated in Europe became both a driving force and model for how some Israel treats nonJews in Israel and Palestine. And what we should note about Christian Europe's anti-Semitism that it was horrible and without excuse even before the Holocaust, let alone including it.

History shows that this victimizing the other as one has been victimized is an all too human trait. We are all easy prey to this temptation. Israel does not have a monopoly over passing sin on to the next group. See how some Palestinians have treated Israelis, for example. Here we should note that tribalism blinds us to our part in any cycle of abuse. Here, tribalism ensures that we can only see the wrongs done to us. American Christians who feel persecuted by atheists and other sinners provide another example of how tribalism enables us to see ourselves only as victims and never as victimizers.

So are we only left with 2 choices of supporting the Palestinians or of supporting Israel? People of conscience of all faiths can pick a third option by being as willing to speak against Israel's sins against the Palestinians as they are eager to speak against the sins of Palestinians against Israel. To show preference for either group is to sin as we find ourselves driven to embrace moral relativity, a moral relativity that causes some to wink at some horrendous abuses as long as they are practiced by those in our gang. Moral relativity says that right and wrong depends on who does what to whom. But the first loyalty of all people of conscience must be principles and morals and not partisanship regardless of the who does what to whom.

Finally, below is a list of past posts from this blog as well as articles mentioned on this blog that provides Biblical challenges are listed below. Please read at least a few of them.

Past blog posts on Israel includes:

1. Has Israel Become America's Pope
2. Another Look At Israel And Palestine
3. Reviewing Brickner Vs Piper Discussing Israel And Palestine
4. Conversing With CUFI In D.C.
5. A Review Of Redeeming The Promised Land

Other articles referred to in this blog:

1. An Open Letter to Evangelicals and Other Interested Parties: The People of God, the Land of Israel, and the Impartiality of the Gospel
2. Redeeming The Promised Land
3. Are Palestinians The Victims Of Anti-Semitism

Conversing With CUFI In D.C.

From July 15 to July 17, I spent my time handing out Christian articles on Israel to those attending the Christians United For Israel (CUFI) conference at the Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The articles I distributed consisted of An Open Letter To Evangelicals And Other Interested Parties: The People of God, the Land of Israel, and the Impartiality of the Gospel (Open Letter), Are All Wars Gang Wars (All Wars which can also be found on this blog here), Are Palestinians The Victims Of Anti-Semitism? (Are Palestinians), and Redeeming The Promised Land (Redeeming). The first 3 articles were written by Christians, two of them by myself, while the last article was written by a good friend who is Jewish. In addition, you can read a review of the last article here. I met my goal in terms of how many handouts I gave out as well as I engaged in several very educating discussions.

For those not familiar with CUFI, it is a Christian organization run by televangelist and megachurch minister, John Hagee, that promotes a Christian Zionist point of view. Christian Zionists are Christians who support Israel as being a Jewish state. Generally speaking, those in CUFI give blanket support to Israeli policies towards the Palestinians.  There are exceptions, however. One person I spoke to objected to Israel giving back the settlement portion of Gaza.

My experience in both distributing the handouts and participating in conversations confirmed that, like most other groups, CUFI is not a monolith. There were people who were genuinely interested in the articles and what I was saying, there were those who took handouts to prove to themselves that they were openminded and would read "anything," there were those who were not interested in taking handouts or in discussing the subject, and there were those who showed hostility by calling me names or, as one lady proudly did, took a handout in order to rip it up in front of me.

Except for a young woman, who reminded me of my daughter because she appeared to enjoy rational discussion, the discussions were troubling. Why? It was because most would so self-assuredly give me false information that served as the grounds for their beliefs. Beliefs such as there were no Palestinians until the Jews arrived, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) bought the land from the Ottoman Empire, and that every time that the Bible mentions Israel, it means both the people and the land together. In addition, some said that the land belonged to the Jews because the Jews had simply lent the land or had it taken away from them. To be precise, the Jews were taken away from the land by the Romans and so the question becomes why make the Palestinians pay such a heavy price for what the Romans did. In addition, the Jews were not the first inhabitants of Palestine.

To answer a couple of the above statements, one only needs to go to Jewish sources. In fact, because of anti-Arab prejudice, Jewish sources are the only ones that are acceptable to some. The population of Palestine at the beginning of Modern Zionism was approximately 475,000 with 400,000 being Muslim and there were over 40,000 Christians. There were Jewish residents some of whom were citizens of the Ottoman Empire. This is all according to conservative Israeli historian, Benny Morris. As for the purchase of the land, much of it was bought from Arab farmers, some of whom were absentee landlords, according to Tom Segev's One Palestine Complete. Some of that land was lived on by tenant farmers who were then evicted, sometimes violently. And the fact that purchases made by the JNF took place long after the beginning of the British Mandate prove that the seller was not the Ottoman Empire. We should also note that the JNF sold the land it purchased to Jews only. Some take that for granted, and so it means nothing. I cannot react the same way since I grew up in a Philadelphia suburb where it was illegal to sell one's hous to a non-caucasion.

Finally, one only needs to read Romans 9-11 as well as Galations 3-5 to understand that what is bound with the people of Israel in the New Testament is ancestry, not the land. We will deal with those scriptures later. In fact, the only time that any of the epistles make such an association is when they refer to the past. Most of those instances are in the Gospels but even they do not always associate the people of Israel with the land.

But a more disturbing part of the discussions was the varying degrees of racism against Arabs and Muslims which was expressed. Not all prejudicial statements were made by hateful people. In fact, most people who made mildly racist statements did so because of their favoritism toward Jews rather than out of animosity against Arabs. Some commented that the Jews deserved the land more than the Palestinians because they were far more productive. Almost all stated that the Jews deserved the land because God gave it to them. However, there was one person who regarded the Palestinians as animals and who was in favor of the IDF shooting Palestinian women and children. Please note that this person's view was an extreme exception.

Of the people I talked to, a few stated that the Jews had a superior character to the Palestinians. The reason? Palestinians, and other Arabs, resort to terrorism while, like America, Jews do not--an assertion not supported by history. Here, group loyalty blinded these people from the faults of their chosen idols. So the fact that some early Zionists wanted to ethnically cleanse the land of Arabs or that the IDF shoots at Palestinian women and children could easily be explained away. What these people were not aware of was that Jewish terrorists attacked both the British and Arab Palestinians. Of course, Israel was not their only hero. As I was explaining how the 9-11 atrocities were preceded by our government imposed sanctions on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, the person responded by saying sanctions are diplomatic attempts and that the deaths of the children were due to Saddam Hussein's non-cooperation rather than the sanctions. Even past officials from the Clinton Administration do not believe that. So what I was dealing with here was the failed attempts by people to resolve the dissonance caused by sins committed by their idols.

Again, when I spoke to people about the desire of some, not all, early Zionists to ethnically cleanse the land of Palestinians, many became apologists. They defended this aspiration with two reasons. First, they cited the persecution that the Jews had received in Europe. Second, they claimed that Arabs hated Jews and so removing Arabs was a necessity. History does not support their reasoning with regards to Arab hatred being to the extent that they must be removed. The old settlement Jews (Yeshuiv) were preyed upon by Bedhouin raiders, who were equal opportunity robbers, but they were not a reflection of all Arabs in the region. Yes, there was some Moslem animosity against Jews as Jews were treated as second class citizens. But that problem was being addressed by the Ottoman Empire. Here, the culprit seemed to be widespread tribalism  and, according to Morris, xenophobia, traits that were universal then almost as much as they are now.

One problem with saying that one group deserved to rule the area over the other is that both Palestinian Arabs and Zionist Jews mirrored each other to a significant extent. Both looked at Palestine, particularly Jerusalem, as a holy place in which to live and to defend. Both had been oppressed for centuries and were looking to nationalism as their relief. And if supporters of Zionist Jews say that it is understandable for Jews to ethnically cleanse the land of Arabs to feel secure, then why should we be surprised that perceptive Arabs would feel and act defensively when their homeland is being invaded by Europeans?

The traits that caused friction between the two groups were shared and not just by them but by most of the world. European empires subjugated people from Asia and Africa in order to exploit them for profit. In America, the land was being ethnically cleansed of its indigenous population and its Black population was sorely oppressed as well as Black labor was being exploited through the prison system. America also began to acquire colonies, such as the Philippines, because the American government did not think that people of color were capable of governing themselves and there was profit to be found.

But what needs to be said concerning Jews and Arabs is just because an action is understandable does not imply it is justifiable. Many, but not all, Jews and Arabs have treated each other horribly throughout the period of Modern Zionism. Fear or opportunism justified initial attacks by both groups while vengeance, whose alias was self-defense, justified retaliation. In reality, animosity fueled attacks can never be vindicated except in the eye of the actor. Israel was granted nationhood with questionable borders because of the population distribution and then there was ethnic cleansing by Israel and rebellion by Palestinians who see no reason why Europeans should be given their land. After that there is the attempted five nation Arab invasion and then one war and attempted domination follows another. Since that initial attempted invasion, Israel has initiated violence the majority of times and they did so because they could but there was a context. And there were times when the Arabs attacked first as well. So Christians must ask themselves why they must take sides when some in each group want to dominate the other while there are many Jews and Arabs who embrace tolerance and abhor what is being done in their respective names.

This brings us to the promises of God to Israel regarding the land. Those who share CUFI's theology regarding Israel do so because of their understanding of eschatology (study of the end times). They adhere to the Dispensational School of eschatology. They pride themselves on not compromising God's Word by interpreting the Bible as literally as possible. Thus, when God promises that the land will be given to Abraham and his descendants forever, they believe that it is their duty to help Israel reclaim it and sometimes they believe this regardless of the moral price Israel must pay in their treatment of the Palestinians.

The problem for Dispensationalists is that they have failed to recognize that they cannot literally interpret the New Testament in the same way as they interpret the Old Testament and keep their particular eschatological beliefs when it pertains to the promises made to Abraham. The promise to Abraham was that his descendants would forever inherit the land that was specified in the Old Testament provided they were circumcised. But to Paul, the true Jew is one who has received an inner circumcision of the heart rather than an outer circumcision of the flesh (Romans 2:28-29). Likewise, the true descendants of Abraham who are of the true Israel are the children of the promise rather than the children of the flesh (Romans 9:6-8). A parallel to this reasoning is Paul's distinction between the true descendants of Abraham who believe in the Gospel vs. those who rely on works (Galations 3:6-10, 19).

Dispensationalists, like those from CUFI, would call the above "Replacement Theology," but such is a misnomer. This is because when Paul talks about the role of the Church, he is not talking about the Church replacing Israel. Rather, he is talking about the Church being the union of believing Gentiles and believing Jews (Israel) who, together, as one body, become the heirs to the promises made to Abraham (Romans 11:11-24; Galations 3:-26-29). And if we, both believing Jews and Gentiles, will inherit the promises made to Abraham, then those promises made to Abraham will come to us sooner or later and we will receive them through faith rather than by force.

Dispensationalists, like those from CUFI, would protest quoting Paul as saying that God has not given up on Israel (Romans 11:1-4). But there, Paul proves that God has not given up on Israel by showing that a remnant of Israel has maintained faith--for Paul, it was faith in Christ, during Elijah's time, it was not bowing the knee to Baal. It is a remnant that proves Paul's point here, not the whole nation. Again, Dispensationalists, like those from CUFI, will then quote Paul saying that the "gifts and promises of God are irrevocable" (Romans 11:26). But Paul says nothing about the land here. Rather, the Jews are loved because of the fathers, that is those who were the Children of the Promise. And they are, according to Paul, brought back to God's mercy by believing in Christ rather than retaking the land.

As stated before, one cannot consistently apply the same degree of literal interpretation to the New Testament as Dispensationalists do to the Old Testament and be consistent. That is because both the promises made to Abraham are now interpreted by the work of Christ and God's calling is no longer limited to the physical descendants of Abraham only. And we might also add that the Promised Land is a land that has expanded to include the new Earth that comes with the new Heaven (Revelation 21:1-2).

But something else must be said about CUFI and other Christian "supporters" of Israel. What CUFI wants Christians and Jews to do is to further the world's pandemic of tribalism--what can be called a gang mentality in America. Tribalism does not recognize absolute values. Rather, what is right and wrong here is determined by who does what to whom. CUFI, and other Dispensational Christians encourage Israel to go beyond self-defense to blatant immoral violence and theft. Rather than sacrificing liberty for security, CUFI and others tell Israel that it must sacrifice morality for security. The end result is a forever king of the hill battle in a world where proliferation is inevitable. This gang war allows for past wrongs to sow the present seeds of hatred leading to a future harvest of atrocities. Such will only cause Israel's demise as it has the brought the demise of all others who have played this game. If CUFI really wants to help Israel, then it will challenge Israel to balance self-defense with morals. And we must also apply the same warning to those who attack Israel as well as to ourselves for our polices.