Gentler Hagee Seen Gaining New Traction

Despite withering criticism from the leader of the Reform movement, there is growing evidence that America’s leading Christian Zionist, Pastor John Hagee, is winning acceptance in pro-Israel circles. And some politicians are taking note.

While nervously distancing himself from the controversial Hagee’s endorsement when addressing other audiences, Sen. John McCain last week raised the Hagee connection in an interview with a Jewish newspaper.

Those are only two elements in an increasingly tangled controversy that reflects bitter divisions among Jewish groups about Middle East peace — and that is colored by Hagee’s fundraising for Israel. This week the San Antonio pastor announced he is adding $6 million to the millions he has already poured into Israeli charities, much of it in the West Bank.

Nervous liberals worry that Hagee’s rhetorical shift — toning down his apocalyptic themes and moving away from outright opposition to the policies of the current Israeli government — is winning friends in the Jewish community, or at least blunting opposition.

“He has adjusted his rhetoric to win approval in the Jewish world,” said Rabbi Haim Beliak, founder of Jews on First, a Web site that focuses on church-state separation and includes harsh criticism of the Christian Zionists.

Hagee’s adjustment has even included reissuing modified, toned-down versions of his earlier books, Beliak charged.

In a Monday news conference, Hagee continued to adjust his image, saying that Christians United for Israel’s (CUFI) only “concrete action in connection to the peace process” has been “limited to asking the White House not to pressure Israel into making territorial concessions that she herself does not wish to make.”

He said the group’s “work of Christian-Jewish dialogue and reconciliation continues moving forward.”

“What he’s doing is refining his positions and the way he expresses them,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

The Jewish community’s response to Hagee and other Christian Zionists is “conflicted,” Foxman said. “Many would like to embrace him, but are hearing all kinds of talk that his support for Israel is conditional. I don’t think it is conditional.”

Hagee, he said, has “defused” some of the criticism from some in the Jewish community.

A top Jewish leader said there is a different communal calculus in the face of mounting attacks on Israel by “mainline” Protestant churches. “Frankly, we’d rather be standing up with the Presbyterians than with people who speak in tongues, but we can’t because they are more and more biased against Israel. So Hagee looks more attractive to many.”

But Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism and the leader whose speech last week touched off the latest round of Hagee controversy, said he is skeptical about the new Hagee.

“If he is adopting a new line in which he says he will defer to the wishes of the Israeli government, then we have a new reality, and I’d be delighted,” Yoffie told The Jewish Week. Rabbi Yoffie also said he would accept Hagee’s invitation for a face-to-face meeting.

But he said the fiery preacher and his fellow Christian Zionists have a “long record of very specific statements” indicating that their support for Israel is conditional on a rejection of any land-for-peace settlement with the Palestinians.

The Hagee connection to the pro-Israel cause resurfaced in late February, when the San Antonio megachurch pastor stood at McCain’s side and announced his endorsement. Also endorsing McCain: Ohio megachurch Pastor Rod Parsley, who has argued that America was created to destroy Islam in a kind of holy war to preserve Christianity. Parsley is a regional director of CUFI.

The Hagee endorsement produced a sharp reaction from a Catholic civil rights group, which claimed Hagee had slandered the church in his prophetic writings, forcing McCain to distance himself from the pastor’s views while not repudiating his endorsement.

But in an interview with the Los Angeles Jewish Journal (read it here), McCain seemed to regard Hagee as a plus with Jewish voters. Editor Rob Eshman asked McCain how he would get pro-Israel Evangelicals to support any peace agreement.

“I know they favor a peace process. I know they favor that because of my close relations with them, and pastor John Hagee ... is one of the leaders of the pro-Israel Evangelical movement in America,” McCain said.

Eshman wrote: “I started to correct him — Hagee and other Evangelicals most certainly don’t support compromise on territory or Jerusalem, and McCain must know this. That’s when I got my first taste of the famous McCain technique: I’ll-talk-so-you-can’t.”

Democrats tried to use Hagee’s endorsement — and the candidate’s initial enthusiasm for it — to offset the political problem caused by Sen. Barack Obama’s long association with a Black Nationalist pastor in Chicago, but that tactic has produced scant results.

“Relatively few Americans are aware of what Pastor Hagee’s ‘end times’ theology is,” said Kenneth Wald, a University of Florida political scientist. “So it doesn’t resonate in the way Rev. Wright’s comments resonate.”

And Hagee has been “transforming” his public persona since creating Christians United for Israel in 2006, Wald said.

“He’s stopped talking about Armageddon; he’s focusing much more on being a friend of Israel. In some segments of the Jewish community, that is having an impact,” Wald said. Hagee has also backed away from hints he would use his political muscle against any Israeli government that tried to withdraw from the West Bank.

Last summer, he told a Washington audience that he would support Israeli government policy “as long as it does not violate Biblical principles.” Among the principles he has written and spoken about: his claim that Israel has a “Bible mandate” to Gaza and the West Bank and that “the nation of Israel should keep it now and forever.”

But in a press conference on Monday the Texas preacher said that while he and other Christian Zionists have “grown skeptical of territorial concessions ... CUFI’s fundamental philosophy from day one has been that Israelis and Israelis alone have the right to make the existential decisions about land and peace.”

Some of Hagee’s repositioning has provoked anger in Evangelical circles. His latest book, “In Defense of Israel,” had to be quickly revised because some Evangelical leaders said it promoted a “two-track” scheme for salvation in which Jews do not necessarily have to accept Jesus Christ as messiah — which some fellow evangelicals say was a rejection of the messiahship of Christ.

Some critics argue that Hagee’s new tone is just a gambit to defuse concerns about the motives behind his support for Israel.

Hagee’s 18,000 member church “still hews to the doctrine of dispensationalist premillennialism,’” said Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli journalist whose book “The End of Days” took a critical look at the emerging alliance. “His church’s statement describes the standard dispensationalist doctrine on the End Times.”

But the pastor “has learned that outside of his subculture, these ideas put people off — especially Jews,” Gorenberg said. “However, even the language he uses at the CUFI site makes it clear that he believes that Israel has a divine mandate to keep all the land.” Gorenberg argued that if Hagee has actually changed his views, “his church’s Web site would look different.”

But some liberal Jewish leaders worry that Hagee’s toned-down message, his focus on fighting anti-Semitism and containing Iran, his continuing fundraising for Israeli charities and the Jewishly connected public relations firm he is using have combined to soften resistance to his pro-Israel outreach.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the Reform leader, attributed Hagee’s growing acceptance to two factors: his keynote speech to AIPAC last year, which legitimized him in the eyes of many, and the allure of CUFI’s Night to Honor Israel events.

In his speech to the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Rabbi Yoffie warned that alliances with Hagee could isolate the Jewish community because of the pastor’s harsh positions on other faith groups – and hurt Israel because the “vision” of many Christian Zionists “rejects a two-state solution, rejects the possibility of a democratic Israel, and supports the permanent occupation of all Arab lands now controlled by Israel.”

Another motive for Rabbi Yoffie’s speech, Reform insiders say, centered on concerns expressed by some movement rabbis that they were being pressured by local pro-Israel groups to endorse or participate in CUFI’s “Night to Honor Israel” events.

Rabbi Yoffie urged rabbis not to participate because participation will “drive away our allies. And I cannot accept the argument from Jewish leaders that they can endorse CUFI events, appear as speakers at these events, accept CUFI money, and still distance themselves from the positions that CUFI embraces.”

One rabbi who has appeared at one of the Christian Zionist galas last year now agrees.

Rabbi Jack Moline, spiritual leader of a Conservative synagogue in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Va., and a leading church-state separation activist, stunned many colleagues when he agreed to join CUFI leaders on the podium at last year’s CUFI gala in that city.

During the event a CUFI leader told him “when Jerry Falwell died, the mantle was passed on to John Hagee,” Rabbi Moline said this week. “If that’s the case, I am grateful to Rev. Hagee for his support of Israel, but I’m with Eric Yoffie; we have to be deeply suspicious of him.”

While many of CUFI’s positions are not beyond the pale, he said, some Night to Honor Israel events are dominated by those with extreme views — including a speaker at last year’s Alexandria event who accused the Olmert government of “ethnic cleansing” when it removed Jewish settlers from Gaza.

“I would not go back to an event like that without more confidence it would stay on message: just support for Israel,” Rabbi Moline said.

But CUFI leaders believe they have a receptive audience in Jews who reject the peace initiatives of the past 17 years and more mainstream leaders who worry about fading support for the Jewish state among “mainline” Christians.

“Hopefully, there is more acceptance of Dr. Hagee,” said Dr. James Hutchens, a CUFI regional leader. “But it’s no secret that Christian Zionists have common cause mostly with those who base their support for Israel on staying in Judea and Samaria and Gush Katif, and basing that on the Bible. Where there is not that kind of view, we are probably not going to get much acceptance.”

I never listen to Hagee, so I have no idea what he has said about this issue. Nevertheless, I have never heard a Christian who supports Israel say they would STOP supporting Israel if that nation chose to give up some land. They might be disappointed in Israel (I know I would be), but that's not the same as withdrawing support.

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