U.S. Evangelical Leaders Reject Palestinian

Jerusalem – Proclaiming “an ineradicable bond between the geographical integrity of the land…and God’s promise of the land as “an everlasting possession” to the people of Israel, 26 American Evangelical pastors and lay leaders from 11 states and the District Colombia (plus a Canadian entry from British Columbia), affixed their signatures to a full-page Jerusalem Post ad flatly rejecting President Bush’s Annapolis-launched campaign to shoehorn a “Palestinian State” between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.Headlined “President Bush: There will be No Legacy” and timed for the President’s January 9-10th visit to Israel, the ad declares the creation of such an entity “detrimental to the stability or both Israel and Jordan, the peace of the Middle East and the security interests of the United States.



The signatories mirror a cross section of some of the most influential voices on the U,S.Evangelical and Pentacostal scene, including, inter alia, national media personality Dr. Michael Evans, chairman of Churches United With Israel in Mr. Bush’s home state of Texas; Tennessee Pastor Robert Upton, a major figure in the powerful Pentacostal Congress; Pastor Jim Vineyard, whose press and internet opposition to Israeli territorial concessions has attracted national attention, and White House backyard neighbors the Rev. James Hutchens of the Jerusalem Connection and Richard Hellman, head of Christians’Israel Public Action Campaign, Capitol Hill’s best known pro-Israel Christian advocacy group



Herbert Zweibon, chairman of New York-based Americans For A Safe Israel, sponsor of the ad, characterized it as a “reflection of the rising concern among Bible-oriented Christians at the negation of the Covenant, the marginalization of four millennia of Judeo-Christian civilization and the existential and geostrategic peril implicit in any decision to dismember Jerusalem and deliver Judea and Samaria into the hands of a radical Islamic nexus.”



Zweibon said he was awed by the moral courage exhibited by the signatories. “Taking issue with a president they admired and supported was no easy matter for these pastors and their congregants,” he noted, “but as Christians, addressing a professed born-again Christian, they felt obligated to tell the president that pressuring a weak and extremely unpopular Olmert government to place Israel in the direst jeopardy it has even known was morally, religiously and geopolitically indefensible. We all hope he gets the message.”