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Christian leanings at the Jerusalem Post
The strange and uneasy embrace between the Jewish state and America's evangelical right is being tightened. At the beginning of next year Israel's oldest English-language paper, the Jerusalem Post, is to launch a Christian edition. The Post, a widely respected paper until it fell into former owner Conrad Black's clutches, is seeking to bolster its North American circulation by building on the blossoming relationship between the Israeli right and Christian fundamentalists.

The relationship is not an easy one. Bush-backing evangelists are among Ariel Sharon's best friends in a hostile world. The politics mesh easily but underpinning them is a belief among the fundamentalists that the revival of the Israeli state is a precursor to the Second Coming. And with that goes a desire to get Jews to recognise the First Coming and save themselves from eternal damnation. Israel passed laws against that kind of evangelising decades ago, but these days the Jerusalem Post, like the government, is less concerned with the hereafter than the here and now.

The paper is getting together with the International Christian Embassy (ICE) in Jerusalem - an organisation that says it exists to "comfort Zion" and "declare the purpose of God to the Jewish people" - to publish a monthly Christian edition from January principally aimed at American fundamentalists.

"The content is going to be jointly put together by the Jerusalem Post and the International Christian Embassy," says the Post's editor, British-born David Horowitz. "It'll be things like archaeology and tourism and ideological arguments and dilemmas and so on. Obviously, when your predominant mindset is a Jewish audience there are different stresses that go into providing content, whereas if you're doing it for a Christian audience there are going to be very different emphases and different focuses."

The Post's brand of politics should appeal to the targeted audience with its emphasis on the shortcomings of negotiations over tanks. But the paper even surprised some of its own readers last year with a leader calling for the assassination of Yasser Arafat. Its columnists spend a good deal of time insisting that there never was a country called Palestine, and therefore never should be, on the same comment page that each day states the paper is published by the Palestine Post Ltd.

But Horowitz recognises that an overt relationship with the evangelists is a tricky one. "The International Christian Embassy has been operating in Israel for many years and they are very aware of the framework. There are laws in Israel against giving inducement to people to convert and that organisation has operated within the framework to the satisfaction of the Israeli government. That is actually very important to me."

The Israeli government has good reason to be pleased. The ICE today launches a campaign against the growing support within the Presbyterian and other churches to divest from Israel in protest at the occupation. ...