Christians Building Walls Instead of Bridges

In the history of walls, few have ever achieved the height, length and human
misery of the “Concrete Curtain” laid in the Promised Land of Israel.
Under the leadership of Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, and now
Bibi Netanyahu again, the nation-state of Israel has carved out prime real estate for itself
by building a twenty-seven foot concrete wall that meanders through the land and lives of
four-million Palestinians, taking the best of their inheritance and compressing them into
three disconnected islands of human misery.
Higher than the Berlin Wall and projected to stretch some 400 miles, the Concrete
Curtain may be one of the most egregious violations of human rights in modern history,
built with the complicit approval of the American government and the overt pressure of
the Evangelical Christian Right.
The Concrete Curtain is a political and religious statement of enormous
proportions, failing to register with American Evangelicals who blissfully worship under
the authoritarian leadership of tele-Zionists and preachers who not only monopolize the
airwaves but who have positioned themselves as players in Republican Party politics.
“We must kill them before they kill us” is the mantra of these Evangelicals who
have built their own wall of separation between the American Dream and the human
misery of other Christians in far away places. While they praise God for His blessings on
America, they use those blessings to fund illegal settlements on the West Bank and to
lobby for the ancient national boundaries of Israel that are destined to trigger the Battle of
Armageddon and force Jesus to come back on their timetable rather than God’s.
Military force being an ineffective deterrent to terrorism, the US and Israel now
turn to building walls to protect themselves against outsiders – Israelis in Palestine and
the U.S. along our southern border. Walls built to keep others out, however, have exactly
the opposite effect. They imprison the builders and embolden those outside to new and
exciting challenges. Fear builds the wall, while the challenge to scale the wall becomes a
metaphor of hope for the oppressed. In the Information Age, the notion that you could
contain the human spirit with a wall is reflective of a medieval mindset in a nuclear age.
Besides being a colossal waste of time and resources, it is lunacy of the highest order.
We in America have come to accept such lunacy as national security.
As Westerners, and particularly as Western Christians, we bear much of the
responsibility and, indeed, much of the shame that comes from an attitude of armchair
compassion for one race over another in a place we are not obligated to live.
We can argue as to whether the new boundaries of Israel, as defined by the
meandering Concrete Curtain, are inviolate because of God’s promise to Abraham (Gen
17:6-8). We can argue as to whether Jesus is yet to return, whether He is here already or
whether He is spiritually present but physically absent. We can argue whether millions
of the Jewish people have or have not already become Christians, beginning with the Day
of Pentecost, when three thousand Jews became converts (Acts 2:41).
What Christians cannot disagree on is this:
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the
Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly
 with your God (Micah 6:8 NIV Version).
There is no justice in pushing the Palestinian people into oppression because of a
biblical border dispute. There is no justice in preferring one brand of Semite over another
– European Jew over Palestinian Arab. There is no justice in stirring up war in the
Middle East in order to escalate the final Battle of Armageddon, wherein those refusing
to accept Christ are obliterated. There is no justice in using tax-free revenues of non-
profit para-church ministries to fund illegal settlements of secular or religious Jews on the
West Bank in order to drive out its long-term residents.
There is no mercy in stepping on the necks of Palestinian Christians by American
Christian Zionists. There is no mercy in dehumanizing Palestinians as faceless terrorists,
all. There is no mercy in praying for the nation of Israel to crush the people of
Palestine . There is no mercy in elevating the nation-state of Israel over human rights.
As for “…walking humbly with your God,” one thing that faithful Muslims, Jews
and Christians alike share in their doctrines is a professed belief in the sovereignty of
God. Zionism, Christian or Jewish, and Islamist Jihad is the height of arrogance because
it is tired of waiting for God and has decided to take matters into its own hands
To sacrifice on the altar of our peculiar theology the lives and human rights of
Muslims and fellow Christians in Palestine is a crime of immense proportions.
I stand with President Jimmy Carter in my conviction that Israel has a right to
exist within recognized borders and to be accepted by Palestinians and all its Arab
neighbors. The Palestinians, as well, are entitled to the right of return to their homeland.
The killing of either, however, cannot be condoned or ignored by church or government.
Both Palestinians and Jews must live according to international law and conscience and
must be judged impartially.
Since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has had no enforceable borders. Borders
are now emerging as a result of the four-hundred mile concrete barrier through the West
Bank and East Jerusalem that has all the earmarks of political apartheid and Manifest
Destiny.
Four obstacles have prevented the world from reacting with force to the Israeli
Occupation. The first is the enormous residual guilt from the Holocaust. The second is
the realization that to take on Israel militarily would be no romp in the desert. The third
is that the pre-’67 borders made absolutely no logistical sense; they left Israel extremely
vulnerable to attack by the Arab states. The fourth is that the Occupation of the territory
has been spun as a defensive action – protecting Israeli citizens from terrorism.
The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids the settlement of people in militarily
occupied territories, thus rendering the settlements on the West Bank and Gaza a
violation of international law. Christian Zionists in America have played a key role in
encouraging and financing those settlements, both in violation of international law and in
violation of the spiritual law of honoring political authority as being God-ordained.
The so-called “Two-State Solution” as envisioned by the UN Partition in 1947 has
given free reign to Israel to grab as much land as possible so as to render statehood for
Palestinians a practical impossibility. Palestinians now find themselves locked behind a
twenty-seven foot security barrier in a number of inaccessible and unconnected islands.
They can neither pass freely into Israel , nor can they pass freely into Jordan , Egypt ,
Lebanon or Syria .
They are a people without national citizenship or international credentials.
With the election of George W. Bush as President through the support of the
Christian Right, Tim Le Haye and Jerry Jenkins published their Left Behind Series of
novels that sold over seventy million copies.
Politically, Christian Zionists believe that the Bible, or their interpretation thereof,
supersedes even the government of the United States . Islam is considered a satanic
religion, and therefore its destruction is justified; the Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the
Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem must be torn down in order for the Temple to be
rebuilt and for Jesus to return.
Every event in Israeli life is sifted through a biblical lens and interpreted as a
mandate on US foreign policy. Peace initiatives are openly condemned. Elected officials
are cowed into submission by the unholy alliance between American Christian Zionists
and AIPAC, the Israeli lobby.
While Pat Robertson and the late Rev. Jerry Falwell were known to have bandied
about the support of one hundred million Evangelicals for the Christian Zionist cause, the
hard core is more likely between twenty-five and thirty million. Author Grace Halsell
(Forcing God’s Hand), who calls the movement “a cult,” estimates that it is led by eighty
thousand pastors, disseminated by one thousand Christian radio stations and one hundred
Christian TV stations.
Jerry Falwell had consistently put pressure on Presidents Clinton and George W.
Bush to refrain from complying with the Oslo Accords. Author Stephen Sizer references
a 1999 Washington Post interview in which Falwell is quoted as saying that pressing
Israel to withdraw from the West Bank “…would be like asking America to give Texas
back to Mexico to bring about a good relationship. It’s ridiculous!”
Evangelical churches are persuaded to “Adopt-a-Settlement” and to support
“brave new Jewish settlers” living in Israel . Christian Friends of Israeli Communities
(CFOIC) claims that thirty-nine illegal Jewish settlements have been adopted by over
fifty churches worldwide. ICEJ is reported to have provided financial support for
projects within the Jewish settlements, including “bullet-proof vests to strengthen the
resolve of settlers living among what it describes as ‘3 million hostile Palestinians.’”
International law and individual justice are secondary to these advocates of God’s
ownership of the land. Evangelist Pat Robertson is known for his statement that Israel ’s
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was payback from God for withdrawing in 2005
from Gaza in accordance with the 1978 Camp David Accords.
John Hagee, in 2006, was able to bring together some four hundred Christian
evangelical leaders, reportedly representing as many as thirty million Christians, for a
“Summit on Israel.” Its purpose was to prevent the Bush Administration from pressuring
the Israelis into turning over more land.
"Think of CUFI as a Christian version of American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC)," the powerful pro-Israel lobby, Hagee told
The Jerusalem Post in an interview a few days before the early February
summit. "We need to be able to respond instantly to Washington with our
concerns about Israel . We must join forces to speak as one group and
 move as one body to [respond to] the crisis Israel will be facing in the near
future."
While Hagee wouldn't spell out which particular crisis he was
concerned with, he did tell the Israeli newspaper that "'the Bible issue,'
namely what he considers to be the mistaken policy of trading parts of the
biblical Land of Israel for peace," was at the top of CUFI's list.
The question hangs in the air, “What does the Lord require of you, O man?” The
answer is far removed from preparing the Mount of Olives for the descent of Christ.
What is required of us is universal – “…to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk
humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8b).