Pastor Hagee’s intepretation of his religious imperatives leads him to be dismissive those of us who believe the re-instatement of a Jewish nation in Israel is more than legitimate, but think a Biblical justification is at best insufficient and at worst an impediment to the cause.

I'm not sure what you mean there, Judith, by an impediment to the cause. What cause? Whose cause?

I myself believe that the historical record merely reduces down to the question of Torah. After all, the Russian and Eastern European non religious Jews of the second aliyah would hardly have chosen Zion to return to if that had not been the place of yearning down the centuries - the Jewish homeland, whose claim rests on the Torah. The historical claim is really just an indirect way of referring to the Torah, because without it and the relationship posited between the Jews and the land, there would not have been an historical presence. You can say, well this land was legitimately purchased from Arabs during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and that's true, and there are deeds for some of the land anyway, but once again, why are they interested in purchasing this particular parcel of land.

And what does self determination mean in this context?

What you are talking about - a point, perhaps, not fully communicated to the Pastor, or which he rejected on its face, is creating non-alienating speech to bring other people on board.

But I think your discomfort may be attributable to another point; whether history is revelatory of the divine will or not. In other words, is the return of Israel to Israel the outcome of a divine process, or merely the thing itself with no extra meaning embued.

Obviously the pastor believes the former to be the case. And it also explains why Ahmadinejad wants to hasten the apocalypse and, thus, destroy Israel. Because the presence of Israel in the biblical land is a direct challenge, inevitably, to Mohammedan revelation. Israel must be erased, wiped off the map, because her presence, as a historical phenomenon, is a direct challenge to their divine tradition reaching its fulfillment in time.

What you're responding to, it seems to me, is the discomfort you and others feel in seeing or admitting that God's workings are revealed in history. As though reality were embued with no other significance than the mundane, what you see is what you get. Israel's claim to the land is based on the fact that she is there and backed up by force of arms. Etc.

Or perhaps it was merely his tone that put you off, like Jimmy Carter hectoring Golda Meir about Israel being punished when its leaders were not religious, this mere decades after the Holocaust.

But, frankly, I think the secular case for Israel as a Jewish state is based on a big old lie; and there's a schizophrenic blinkered stare at its core, in not seeing that the core of the historical argument is the religious one.

Why else are Jews there today? To reverse a millenial long spiritual nostalgia.

"Ahmadinejad wants to hasten the apocalypse and, thus, destroy Israel. Because the presence of Israel in their ancient land is a direct challenge, inevitably, to Mohammedan revelation. Israel must be erased, wiped off the map, because her presence, as a historical phenomenon, is a direct challenge to their divine tradition."

That's my point. That's what happens when you argue from divine revelation. So you and Hagee says God gave us the land, and Islamists say no, God gave us the land. Neither assertion convinces anyone who isn't already in their camp.

"What you're responding to, it seems to me, is the discomfort you and others feel in seeing or admitting that God's workings are revealed in history. As though reality were embued with no other significance than the mundane, what you see is what you get. Israel's claim to the land is based on the fact that she is there and backed up by force of arms. Etc."

No, my case is based on history and culture. The only reason that is challenged is because of the 2000 year diaspora. Any other ethnic group on their ancestral grounds does not have to justify their habitation on theological grounds. Greece is Greek. Japan is Japanese. Ireland is Irish. If Jews hadn't been ethnically cleansed from our omeland at least 3 times, AND spawned 2 daughter religions whose claims depended on disenfranchising us, we would not be challenged now. Israel would be Jewish, no one would question it.

I'm uncomfortable because I don't think "God's workings through history" can be a sound basis for international policy, because if it is, the Islamists win without firing a shot. I'm not saying Hagee is wrong - maybe God is working through history. I'm agnostic on some of the claims made for God. But Hagee's argument only goes so far, and it hurts his (and our) cause to dismiss everyone with a different case to make.

To be fair to him, he was clear that his organization is single-minded about advocating for Israel and he is going to use whatever works for the people he has influence over. And good for them.

"Why else are Jews there today? To reverse a spiritual nostalgia."

That is one motive.

I want Mr Levinas-inspired Zionist Kerstein to weigh in on this.....

"The historical claim is really just an indirect way of referring to the Torah, because without it and the relationship posited between the Jews and the land, there would not have been an historical presence."

Yes, originally. And all of those other ethnic cultures also have mythologies which explain their connection to their lands. But over millenia, the connection accretes layers and layers of folkways and customs and language and music and foods and the rest of it, which is much more visceral than a theological assertion.

See, I'm one of those predicate theology people. I don't know whether God is actually working in history, or whether the cohesion of Jewish civilization over millenia is a result of all sorts of rituals which assume that God is working in history. The result is an ethnic culture which is grounded in a particular place, like all ethnic cultures.

Lots of Jews visit Israel and immediately feel at home, or make aliyah, who are not religious at all. Israel calls to them in their gut, as a result of the persistence of culture over generations of diaspora (including rituals like "next year in Jerusalem!" which everyone says at seder, as well as more extensive ritual and liturgy which many fewer Jews engage in).

I guess for me divine authority is the in-house position, but I wouldn't want Israel's continued existence to depend on the whole world buying into to that.

I think this merely proves my oft-mentioned thought that, whether they love or hate us, we tend to drive the Gentiles crazy. Which is not say we drive them insane, but we drive them to excess, obsession, extraordinary leaps of imagination, etc. Like it or not, we seem to be of permanent interest to the rest of the world for reasons which, in my opinion, have very little to do with who we really are as a people or a civilization. My main issue with the pastor's position here is that it reduces Israel to Torah. That is, there is a living, breathing nation here with real citizens who are real people. That should be, at the very least, an equal factor to historical or religious concerns. To reduce Israel to Torah, ironically, negates Israel itself. That is, Israel AS IT IS as a phenomenon in and of itself.

Second, to say "there is the Torah way and the wrong way" is highly problematic. Mainly because there is no "Torah way" per se. The Torah is not a philosophical document but a compendium of literature. The debate is over authorship -- divine or otherwise -- not the book itself. What is the "Torah way" for the pastor in question? As a Christian, he can't be talking about the Halacha. Is it what the Torah means in the context of the New Testament? The Torah as a historical document? As a foundational text of western civilization? Clarification is demanded. Without it, there's no there there.

As to the religious argument vs. other arguments, I think this is primarily a modernist question. The Jewish religion was not, after all, even concieved of as a religion for most of Jewish history. It was simply the revealed truth of God and the set of laws derived therefrom. In traditional Jewish terms, the division between history, politics and religion doesn't even exist. However, if we are talking about the world we live in today, clearly the Torah argument in and of itself is insufficient. At least to the degree that divine right is not of any particular relevence to a great many people. I agree that, given this fact, other arguments must be made, or not made on this basis. Personally, I tend towards the idea that Israel needs no justification. We exist because we exist and because the right to exist is a given for any person or people. On a gut level, I feel no need to make any argument for Israel's existence. The very fact that the question is asked strikes me as vaguely dehumanizing.

Unfortunately, the question is asked, and so be it. There isn't much we can do about it at the moment. That being said, I cannot stand with the idea that the Jews only came to Israel to "reverse a spiritual nostalgia". It is nothing so innocuous. We came to Israel in an act of rebellion against history itself. Not to reverse a nostalgia but to reverse the catastrophes of our history, the catastrophes that, in some measure, ARE our history. In this case, the power of Zionism is clearly that of secular messianism. An auto-messianism if you will. The Torah, therefore, is important only in that it -- along with a multitude of other texts, and the amorphous texts that are collective memory itself -- is a compendium of catastrophes and the messianic urge.

From this point of view, both the secular and religous can be encompassed. That is, whoever wishes to engage in this reversal, in this impossible return, this revolutionary desire to make whole that which history and progress have smashed, is in the same place: their face to the past, blasted backwards into the future by the force of the catastrophe. To this extent, Torah and history and elementary right are one. The rest, as the rabbi once said, is commentary.

I did a bit on this:

Christian Zionism

There have always been more than Jews in the Jewish nation.

Ans what is this about six piker? Where is my halberd?

The story in your link is beautiful, M Simon. Go read it everybody.

Thanks Benjamin for responding with alacrity. (I know that for you it is mid-afternoon. The rest of us keep odd hours.)

"blasted backwards into the future" is a bit too Michael J Fox for me, also who's being driven to crazy excess now, mm?

If you listen to the audio, P Hagee actually says "the Bible way, the Torah way, or the wrong way." So for him it's all about literal interpretation of Scripture. Or picking the verses which support his position, which we all do. (The Bat Kol pronouncement on Shammai and Hillel sets a sacred precedent that you must let the verses you didn't pick keep staring you in the face.)

I was on the call with Pastor Hagee and think it should be clarified that when he said, "the Torah way or the wrong way," there was a specific context. That context is best represented by the first paragraph on the homepage of his organization (Christians United for Israel), where it says,

The Bible commands us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6), to speak out for Zion’s sake (Isaiah 62:1) to be watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem (Isaiah 62:6) and to bless the Jewish people (Genesis 12:3).

I can't speak for the pastor of course, but I'm fairly certain that he meant only that active support for Israel is the Torah way and that Christian silence would be the wrong way.

That being said, I can relate to Judith's concerns because for years I took a similar position, not wanting to get "too Biblical" because the case for Israel could be made without it, and such an approach seemed to antagonize more people than it attracted.

In my experience, though, the rational historical political approach fell apart as our enemies began to rewrite history and offer their own "narratives" as substitute. I thought I was offering pure clear historical fact (and I was) but it turned into a "he said, she said" argument that goes nowhere. The Kotel was no longer evidence of a Jewish presence in Jerusalem, it was the place where Mohammed tied his winged horse before he "took off" from the Temple Mount.

With obfuscation and outright lies being the order of the day, my "facts" crumbled into nothingness. But Jimmy Carter says... But Walt and Mearsheimer say... But Noam Chomsky says... But the imam said ... The power of lies, of sheer audacity, is so much greater than I ever expected. Jimmy Carter includes "Apartheid" in the title of his book and people clamor for it. It sells. I've come to the working hypothesis, if not conclusion, that people believe what they want to believe, and they won't buy our facts if they don't like them.

The beauty of faith is that you can't argue with it (I know, there's a flip side to that). It isn't affected by lies. It is positive and contagious. I don't think it comes down to "My Gd is bigger than yours" as much as it may come to a battle of whose faith is greater, deeper, and more lasting. It's ironic, but the Jews are trailing their daughter religionists in this regard.

In the end I believe in whatever works. If the facts are working for you, then keep up the good fight. Likewise, if it's faith in the Bible or the Torah that leads you to support Israel, then Amen to that. I agree with Pastor Hagee that we should concentrate on what we share, on our common ground, rather than on what might divide us. The fact is that evangelical Christians don't need us. But we do need them. We have a lot of enemies and very few friends. As always throughout our history, it would be better for us if we were not such a "stiff-necked" people.

Yes, people believe what they want to believe, but that does not mean we should give up on what we believe. As Echad HaAm wrote about the blood libel -- at one point everyone believed it, and every Jew knew it was nonsense. Therefore, it is indeed possible that the Jewish people are right and the world is wrong.

Again, my primary concern here is not the Torah being present in one's consideration of Israel, but Israel being REDUCED TO NOTHING BUT THE TORAH. A problem which is, of course, not by any means confined to the gentile world.

"Like it or not, we seem to be of permanent interest to the rest of the world for reasons which, in my opinion, have very little to do with who we really are as a people or a civilization."

I think the world's interest in us has a lot to do with our civilization, which is perpetuated by intentionally keeping tradition and innovation in dynamic tension. We piss off both the traditionalists (who can't stand the fact that so many of us are secular liberals) and the modernists (who can't stand the fact that so many of us insist on retaining our alliegance to the tribe), and we continue to adapt and thrive without being subsumed.

The world's interest in us also has to do with the fact that most of the world's population belongs to one of the two universalist religions which we spawned. Their scriptures have a love-hate relationship with us and their adherents do too.

As a non-Christian/non-Jew supporter of Israel this debate is quite interesting to me. I have always been fascinated by the different strands of Christianity and their view towards Israel.

Despite my distaste for some Evangelicals and their ilk the fact they support the existence of Israel is a good thing any way you slice it.

I agree with the sentiments about Madman Imadinnerjacket and his view that Israel's existence is obstacle to Islamic hegemony.

Precisely, Yael.

What happens when the Arabs remove Jewish historical presence from the Temple Mount by destroying the archaeological record of Jewish presence entirely - which is a work in progress right now. Or when Arafat argues to Bill Clinton that the Jews never had a presence at Temple Mount. Thank God Clinton disputed Arafat on that face to face, but, then, he is a Christian, and this undercuts his faith tradition as well - but when our entire historical presence is purposefully destroyed, in a few more centuries, it will be harder to make that case for Temple Mount at least on empirical grounds.

As for disputing the archaeological record, that turns out to be an ideological tool as well in the hands of Palestinian and other ideologically anti Israel archaeologists. For example, there's the case of the Palestinian professor up for tenure at Barnard, Nadia Abu el-Haj, who purports that the entire record has been manipulated by ideologues, as indefensible a position as possible. And yet she is up for tenure at an Ivy League University.

True, there always has been a Jewish presence in the land, but for centuries upon centuries, before the return, it was tiny. So the case is not the same as Greece or Turkey or Italy, whose populace never left their country.

And after the Bar Kochba revolt, when the Romans sowed the land with salt, which turned it infertile, many of the remaining Jews chose to exile themselves, because Israel had become, purposefully, a destitute place, after having been a bread basket. The truth is we were free to return after that en masse. We didn't. History intervened to keep us away.

So I don't the case from history is as straightforward as you are making it out to be - Greece to the Greeks, Japan to the Japanese, Ireland to the Irish. As I said, these groups never left their land en masse because history intervened against them. You can't extrapolate neatly from them to us. There is no DNA that proves our connection to the land. Moreover, I imagine a certain number of Jews who did remain assimilated or were forcibly converted to Islam over the centuries and are present today in the Palestinian population. So on that basis, they have the same "connection."

Returning to the homeland is unique in history. In fact, Benjamin's formulation of a rebellion against history works very nicely; but you can hardly use that as a proof for our right to return that you can hold out to the world. And expect that that will sway them.

Excellent post and discussion -- one of your very best.

I don't think there's an answer, unfortunately. Or maybe it's fortunate. As someone said above, whatever works for you.

I'm delighted to have evangelical Christians on our side. I absolutely loved the story cited in M.Simon's post. They deserve thanks, and the more public, the better. Not that I agree with their worldview or for that matter with the worldview of those who rely entirely on (the Jewish) God for their rationale. But everyone is welcome. We're all joining the same battle, and it is a good one, even a holy one.

"There is no DNA that proves our connection to the land."

There is, though. Most Jews have the same DNA markers as Arabs who used to identify as south Syrian and now call themselves Palestinian, and you can pretty much track the progress of the diaspora via DNA. Then there's the famous kohein marker.

All this about the Temple Mount destruction also proves my point. They are trying to erase us by destroying factual evidence of our actual presence. If all that counted was a decree from God, why would they care if there are artifacts demonstrating our history there?

You can apply the same values to this as to Holocaust denial. We have a so-called archeologist up for tenure who practices Holocaust denial, who practices Stalinist manipulation of history for ideological purposes.

Let's name it what it is. A decree from God makes facts irrelevant, and then it's just your word against mine.

The reasons why Jews were forced to leave over and over are also part of the history. The only reason our connection to the land is in dispute is because our history isn't linear. But we can educate people about our connection to the land by teaching our history and countering the attempts to erase it.

Your average secular Joe who doesn't have a dog in the fight isn't going to be impressed with anyone's ex-cathedra pronouncements. Although most people don't care about history either. The Israel Project did some focus groups about what messages work; I'll try and get that material - I forget what they said does work, but neither God nor history are high on the list.)

Maybe the way God works in history is through these efforts, through the work of our hands.

I don't think the DNA proves a connection to the land, it proves a connection to each other. We also invaded it at one point, driving more original inhabitants out.

So without the foundation myth, the noble lie, that is to say, the culture of Torah (meaning the entire tradition it gave birth to) and the civilization it produced, I dont see we would be able to argue for a legal foothold.

Most nations that leave for 2000 years, don't then get a chance to say, ahem, guys, this is our homeland whether you like it or not. The population simply dissipates wherever it migrates.

Besides, you seem to be conflating two things. The kinds of discourse one uses to convince others that Israel has a right to the land, and an argument that one might oneself believe. I think these matters are quite distinct and one should keep them separate from each other.

Obviously I agree that if it is one's intention to speak convincingly to others, history as representative of the divine will is not the argument to wield; although, OTOH, I think it would give someone like Hegel pause, with his notion of the History of Religion forming a dialectic that shows the revealed truth of Chrisitianity as its end, because he could no longer write off Judaism way down in the dialectical spiral as easily as he did, not once Israel had returned from exile to return to the land.

And quite a bit of our current intellectual tradition is derived from Hegel, one way or another, often in a manner quite unbeknownst to the person throwing around the argumentation. It's quite essential, certainly, in much modern Protestant theology.

On the other hand, Joe Schmo, himself, at least in the past, identified culturally as Christian; even today, he is likely to be a secular Christian.

Moreover, I don't believe the destruction of the artefacts from the Temple Mount proves your point at all; all it proves is that certain Arabs are quite willing to use anything, anything at all to bend truth, whether of an historical nature or any other kind, to make it fit their ideology. It's no surprise to find Arafat at the helm of this sort of endeavour, with his communist training teaching him how to propagate propaganda of any sort that was useful to him, where the only thing that matters in the end is winning.

This is just another example of the myth of Jenin and the al Durah affair and Israeli "apartheid", in a different medium than media. Make shiite up and sell it to the world. And the world, being what it is, consumes it.

But this is entirely ancillary from the argument as to what forms the basis of our relationship to Israel.

"I don't think the DNA proves a connection to the land, it proves a connection to each other."

They can trace it back to the area now encompassed by the nation of Israel.

"We also invaded it at one point, driving more original inhabitants out."

But they aren't around anymore and we are.

"So without the foundation myth, the noble lie, that is to say, the culture of Torah (meaning the entire tradition it gave birth to) and the civilization it produced, I dont see we would be able to argue for a legal foothold."

My case for continuous definable ethnic culture includes Torah and the civilization it produced. Torah is embedded in that, I think that is Benjamin's position also.

"Most nations that leave for 2000 years, don't then get a chance to say, ahem, guys, this is our homeland whether you like it or not. The population simply dissipates wherever it migrates."

But we didn't dissipate. We repurposed our temples as home altars and our sacrifices and prayer services and made the whole enterprise portable, but with an almost 1-to-1 correspondence with the attributes we could no longer express. Then we coated the whole thing with intense yearning and pleading for return. And then we kept trying to go back for 2000 years.

IOW we went to a lot of trouble to keep the connection in the face of humungous obstacles.

If we hadn't done that for centuries, anything miraculous about the rebirth of Israel would be for nought, because we wouldn't be in a position to make use of it and more than that we wouldn't care.

I am willing to call that God's hand in history.

My point about the Temple Mount et al is that there is actual physical evidence of our ancestry there which Arafat et al have to destroy. Your average secular Joe doesn't like historical artifacts being destroyed, even if he doesn't plan to learn about the cultures they belong to. Blowing up those Buddhist statues was the worst Taliban PR blunder ever. Millions of civilized Westerners who were mildly distressed by their misogyny got really upset by the Buddha bombings.

I think if the gutless Israeli government had publicized the Temple Mount razings there would have been a scandal. But they appeased instead.

I don't agree that there is one argument for ourselves and one for the gentile world. That is contrary to the entire Zionist project: to stand for ourselves as ourselves from a position of power, that is, from a revolutionary position. I am not the first to call Zionism a rebellion against history, Ben-Gurion wrote an entire essay on it; but the point is that Zionism as a restorative-revolutionary movement is not alien to non-Jews. Religious and secular gentiles can sympathize with the primal urge to RETURN and to RESURRECT. Maybe some people need history as a context, or religion or politics, but the primary motivating force is the same. I think what I have described is inclusive and not exclusive. Which is one of the primary aspects of Zionism: to become universal through the particular. To become part of the whole by becoming wholly ourselves. How can others respect us if we do not first respect ourselves. "If I am nothing to myself who will be for me?"