Zionists, Jews Say Gaza Withdrawal Doesn’t Fit With Prophecy

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) For the past 30 years, Bob Lang says, he has believed God to be close at hand as Lang worked alongside other Jewish settlers in claiming the land of the Bible. But now, he’s pleading with God to not be so distant. That’s because Israel’s planned removal of as […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) For the past 30 years, Bob Lang says, he has believed God to be close at hand as Lang worked alongside other Jewish settlers in claiming the land of the Bible. But now, he’s pleading with God to not be so distant.

That’s because Israel’s planned removal of as many as 9,000 settlers from Gaza in mid-August seems irreconcilable with Lang’s belief that God ordained these Jewish settlements to prosper. It’s raising a vexing question for people everywhere who regard the state of Israel as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. If God ordained these settlements, then why would God allow them now to be uprooted?


“When it’s our own government saying, `Let’s just take the Jews out,’ it’s very hard for us to see that as God’s will,” says Lang, a New York native who now lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat, near Bethlehem. He says he’ll publicly protest the Gaza pullout until “God stops it from happening” and the government aborts the plan. But if disengagement does indeed occur, he says, turmoil for believers may be just beginning.

“There’s no question that if this happens … then it will cause on an individual level, if not a group level, a difficult problem to put together our theological beliefs with our reality on the ground … . There would be a crisis of faith.”

Jewish settlers aren’t the only ones struggling to reconcile this historic episode with their worldviews. From factions of religious Jews in Israel and the Diaspora to Christian Zionists who believe the gathering of Jews in the Holy Land is helping prepare the way for the Messiah’s return, the Gaza pullout represents a problematic detour from what they thought was God’s plan.

As the day of reckoning for Gaza settlements approaches, these believers are debating whether the pullout derives from human sin or divine mandate from a God whose ways can be mysterious.

Some are refusing to think about it at all. Those include many pro-settlement Israeli teenagers who tend to “act impulsively” and “see things in black and white,” according to Regina Stein, a scholar of Jewish history and the national director of Jewish education at Hadassah, a women’s Zionist organization based in Washington, D.C.

“I’m concerned they have not been prepared for the disengagement, prepared in the educational and psychological sense,” Stein says. “Some of them are still in denial that it’s going to take place at all, (believing) `God won’t let it happen’ (or) `God wants us to oppose it.”’ If the pullout does occur, she says, this group is apt to feel “total betrayal by God.” Out of this spiritual crisis, she fears, “there could be violence.”

For those who dare ponder the theological implications, theories are flying as to why God would let it happen. Christian Zionists, for instance, have urged Israel to retain Gaza settlements as a divine gift to be defended, but they are now theorizing that God might have reasons for allowing the withdrawal to occur.


“A holy God also placed conditions on the Jewish people’s right to actually reside in all the land,” writes David Parsons, spokesman for the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, the world’s largest Christian Zionist organization, in a May essay titled “Patience is a (Zionist) Virtue.” “Obedience would always mean enlargement of Israel’s borders within the land entrusted to her, while disobedience meant `trouble in her borders’ (Ezekiel 11) and ultimately exile.”

Parsons was not available to explain how particular acts of “disobedience” in Israel might relate to the Gaza pullout, but the Embassy’s director in Washington, D.C., Susan Michael, offered some thoughts.

“Israeli society has plenty of pockets of sin and people who don’t honor God in any way,” Michael says. “The message (in a Gaza pullout) is there is only one thing to do and that is to turn to God.”

For prophecy believers, scripture sanctions Israel’s claim to Gaza as well as the West Bank, which many in this camp discuss in biblical parlance as Judea and Samaria. They point for instance to Genesis 15:18: “The Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, `To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.”’

This Holy Land of the Jews surely includes Gaza, according to Efrat settler Jack Kern, who notes, for example, that Gaza was where Samson tore down the pillars of the Philistines. To withdraw from settlements there, he says, would be to defy God in a way that bodes poorly for Israel’s future.

“This was God’s given land, and we don’t accept the idea that somebody could just take it upon themselves to give it up to anybody else,” Kern says. “We claim the fact that (in 1967 these lands) fell into our hands was divinely inspired. The fact they are being given up is an act of certain people.”


Other critics of the withdrawal, however, posit that God is indeed behind the withdrawal, albeit for reasons largely incomprehensible. One possibility: God might want Israel to focus on more strategically and religiously significant territory, according to Rabbi Gerald Meister, adviser on Israeli-Christian affairs for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“I see the hand of God in all of this, even though there is a glove on the hand at times,” Meister says. “We know from scripture … God tells us, `I will veil my face.’ He doesn’t hide. He doesn’t disappear. But sometimes we don’t see him in the midst.”

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM HERE)

In reconciling theology with reality, believers in biblical prophecy have an “ingenious” knack for adapting to current events while keeping their worldview intact, according to Paul Boyer, professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an expert on contemporary prophecy belief.

For instance, when the Cold War ended, prophecy believers who had wrongly predicted an apocalyptic showdown with the Soviet Union simply shifted their sights to other apparent enemies of God, Boyer said.

Still, if developments in the Middle East continue to create cognitive dissonance by diverging from the historical narrative believers are expecting, the consequences could be expressed politically.

“They’re speaking now of leaders being deluded, not sinful,” Boyer says. “But if the (Bush) administration (begins) to push for withdrawal from the West Bank, we’ll see tension. It could lead to a fracturing of the religious right’s support for Bush.”


(END OPTIONAL TRIM HERE)

For now, Christian Zionists are invoking another passage in scripture. Joel 3:2 reads, “I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the valley of Jehoshaphat, and I will enter into judgment with them there … . They have divided my land.”

Whom believers will ultimately hold accountable for this alleged infraction remains to be seen. That there will be judgment, however, seems to many a certainty.

“Gaza could pass in and out of Jewish hands two or three more times before this is all over,” Parsons writes. “But we must never lose sight that God is still in control. He is dealing with his people to bring them to their glorious national destiny, and he is setting up the nations for the ultimate and just judgment of God.”

KRE/RB END MACDONALD

Editors: Check the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for photos to accompany this story. Search by slug.

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!