Reporting of Federici Studies Center
About a third of diaspora Jewish migration to Israel is subsidized by U.S. evangelicals. Who thus want to hasten the advent of the Kingdom of God.
Evangelical Christians, major voters in the United States of President Donald Trump, they now finance about a third of the migration of diaspora Jews to Israel. This is revealed by the figures relating to 2017, published by the Israeli digital newspaper Ynetnews. They are 28 thousand Jews who made aliyah last year, or the ascent-return to the "promised land", at least 8.500 they benefited from funds officially raised by Christian organizations, who have become partners of the Jewish Agency with the aim of bringing the "exiles" back to the Israeli homeland. Money that doesn't just cover travel expenses, but also and above all those of inclusion in the new society, with social subsidies and aid for the construction of new houses. The two main groups of evangelical Christians committed to the Jewish cause are the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (Ifcj) e l’International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem.
The sums allocated are considerable. Only Ifcj reported to the Associated Press that it had distributed dal 2014 to date 20 million dollars for aliyah and to have donated to the Jewish Agency 188 million dollars in the previous two decades. Added to this is a similar financial commitment from the Christian Embassy, as well as anonymous contributions. «After two thousand years of persecution and oppression, today we have Christians who help the Jews. This is an extraordinary thing", he observes smugly, speaking to the Associated Press, the president of the International Fellowship, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, also member of the board of directors of the Jewish Agency.
The evangelicals, who represent the fastest growing sector of world Christianity and now dominate the Protestant family, they see in the modern Jewish State and its dominion over Palestine – over all of Palestine – the condition for the fulfillment of biblical prophecies and for the final triumph of the Kingdom of God. The alliance between evangelical Christians and Zionists has deep roots in history. He was an evangelical, lord Shaftesbury, an English aristocrat, to invent in 1839 the slogan that became the guiding idea of Zionism: «The Jews, a people without a country, for a country without a people", a phrase referring to Palestine, then a tiny province of the Ottoman Empire, which actually had its own local population. In the 1890, in the United States, Evangelical Christians formed a lobby for the creation of a Jewish state, although, at the moment, nothing came of it. Then, after long decades of hidden collaboration, they once again presented themselves as "Israel's best friends" (a definition also endorsed by the current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) starting with the first Likud government led by Menachem Begin in 1979 and over one million Russian Jews played a key role in the aliyah, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Evangelicals also constitute the 13 percent of all tourists – Jews, Christians, Muslims – who visit Israel every year. a tourism, their, which favors the holidays and sacred places of the Jewish tradition, which brings money into Israeli coffers and which completely ignores the Palestinian Christian reality of the Holy Land. The historic churches of the region, Catholic and Orthodox, they have good reasons to worry about these "missionaries" and their Christianity which exacerbates the conflict with the Islamic world. The Israeli expansionist right, however, has many reasons to thank them: for financial aid, for having contributed to the success of a person like Trump, ardent supporter of Jewish nationalism, for the political support that evangelicals continue to enthusiastically offer Israel, especially in light of the dissent that Netanyahu's policy arouses in the North American Jewish community itself.
