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News sources are filled daily with threats of nuclear holocaust since the election of a right-wing Muslim government. The Iranians are desperately developing nuclear warheads to fit their 1,300-mile range boosters, homing in on their primary target, Israel.
In nearly every public communication Osama bin Laden makes, he asserts that the reason al-Qaida is bent on driving the United States out of the Muslim world is because of our support of Israel.
Yet not one American in 1000 knows why we support Israel over the Arabs. So said Jimmy Carter in his first Presidential campaign. That's still true. This column seeks to promote a better understanding of our national involvement in the whole 58-year old fracas. It's hard to be seen as anti-Zionist without being accused of being anti-Semitic, yet even many Jews are anti-Zionist. I am neither.
Zionism is the belief that the Jews should have their own homeland (generally in the Mideast). Some Zionists are motivated by religion; others for purely secular reasons.
This is a fascinating story, mixing some of our presidents' personal religious views, foreign policy and politics.
Christ foretold the destruction of Jerusalem in his generation in Matthew 24. His prophecy was fulfilled in 70 A.D. by the Romans, who controlled the land until Rome fell.
Zionism is based on the assertion that the conquest of Israel by Rome was unjust. It was taken over by the Turks, who held it until the end of World War II. Since Turkey was an ally of defeated Germany, the land became a British protectorate.
The founder of the Zionist movement was Theodor Herzl, a Jewish Viennese journalist who sought a homeland for European Jews to escape anti-Semitism in Europe in the late 1890s. Its earliest opponents were Jews, some because they were concentrating on waiting for the Messiah. Most wealthy American Jews opposed it until 1912, when jurist Louis Brandeis, a friend of Woodrow Wilson's and later a famed Supreme Court justice, became a Zionist.
Zionism suddenly had a friend in the White House. Wilson was the son of a Presbyterian minister and was emotionally drawn to the plight of the Jews after World War I. He wrote: "To think that I, the son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people."
In 1917 British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Arthur Balfour proposed in the Balfour Declaration that Britain work for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. This was Zionism's first major 20th-century triumph.
After World War II, the modern state of Israel was created by the United Nations in 1948. Proponents, including the United States, were motivated mostly by guilt for not coming to the Jews' aid during the Holocaust.
The night he signed the U.N. declaration on behalf of the United States, President Truman wrote in his diary, "I am particularly proud to have had a role in the creation of the modern state of Israel, because I have always believed, as my mother taught me, that the Bible teaches a return of the Jews to Israel, in our time."
At that time 93 percent of Palestine was owned by Arabs; 7 percent by Jews. The ensuing 58 years of violent conflict was inescapable.
Reagan, another president with particular sympathy for Israel learned at the knee of his mother, believed the Battle of Armageddon would take place in his time. When he was governor of California, he made many remarks similar to those of Wilson and Truman.
"Everything is falling into place," Reagan once said, "It can't be too long now. Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God's people. That must mean that they'll be destroyed by nuclear weapons...."
The specter of a president with his Bible in one hand and the nuclear trigger in the other has to be disconcerting to even the most ardent Reaganite or Bible-believer.
This isn't a religious or political column. To the best of my ability, I've simply tried to show how we got here so that President Carter's statement about the "one American in 1000" won't be so true in the future.
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