Evangelicals Volunteer on West Bank Because the Bible Says So
This screen shot shows and even more sensationalisty twist. Par for the course. Either they have to sell newspapers or slam us revenants.
I hope that endears us to the liberal, humanist, multiculturalists out there.
Excerpts:
Psagot, West Bank — It is a typical, even stereotypical, West Bank settlement scene: bearded young men pruning vines while enthusing about the Chosen People’s God-given right to this region. But in this case it is Jesus, and not Jewish identity, that animates these tillers.
...Now, the settlers have international harvest help of their own. The young Christians working in the Psagot Winery’s vineyards near Ramallah in mid-March were members of HaYovel. Last year, this Tennessee-based evangelical ministry started a large-scale operation to bring volunteers to tend and harvest settler grapes. They attach epic importance to their work.
“When you see prophecy taking place, you have the option to do nothing or become a vessel to it,” said volunteer pruner Blake Smith, a 20-year-old farmer from Virginia. HaYovel preaches the old-school ideology of Religious Zionist settlers with one innovation: a sacred role for Christians.
The group’s members believe that the establishment of the State of Israel, its subsequent conquering of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and specifically the flourishing of agriculture in the occupied areas are fulfillments of biblical prophecies. Like many settlers, HaYovel cites a prophecy by Jeremiah that refers to the Samaria region of the West Bank: “Again you shall plant vines on the mountains of Samaria.” And like them, HaYovel believes that the settlement movement will help to bring the Messiah to Jerusalem — the only difference being that the volunteers anticipate a second coming.
But these Christians also focus on a prophecy rarely cited by settlers [but I do], who tend to place ideological value on using only avoda ivrit, or “Hebrew labor,” whenever possible. “And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and foreigners shall be your plowmen and your vine-dressers,” Isaiah prophesized to the Israelites. HaYovel...has made reverence of settlers into a central religious virtue.
“Being here, we just want to serve — and to bless the Jewish people in building up the land,” said Joshua Waller, a HaYovel ministry leader...“We are not here to teach anything, just to learn,” Joshua Waller said shortly before the talk began.
To some of the volunteers, becoming settler laborers is a way of righting a historical Christian wrong. “This is a crazy time,” said Joe Trad Jr., a 23-year-old college dropout from Missouri. Over 2,000 years of contention, he said, “we saw Constantine and the Holocaust. Yet today, in this spot of the world, you have Christians and Jews for the first time with the same goal.”...
...Tommy Waller visited Israel for the first time in 2004, and resolved to start an initiative to help settler farmers. He set up HaYovel and began bringing small delegations to the West Bank in 2006 — the same year that he left the Amish community. Last year, he expanded the operation, bringing in 300 instead of his normal retinue of fewer than 100. He hopes to reach 400 this year.
...The group does have some opponents who fear that HaYovel is not honest when it denies any missionary agenda. Shlomo Aviner, chief rabbi of Beit El, rejects any joint Jewish-Christian ventures. [Har Bracha Rabbi] Eliezer Melamed, a hard-liner who has sworn not to accept Christian donations for his yeshiva, had ruled that HaYovel is “not working to convert us, God forbid, rather, to strengthen us.”
...Settler wineries are flourishing. Eshkol Hazahav, one of Israel’s most prestigious wine-tasting competitions, awarded West Bank settlement wineries a record seven of its 50 prizes in 2010. But settler wineries tend to be smaller than those on the other side of the Green Line that divides the occupied West Bank from Israel’s pre-1967 boundary. The settlers complain that margins can be tight — especially as many of them, for ideological reasons, refuse to employ Palestinians, who will generally work for less money than Jews.
HaYovel’s volunteers work for long stints, sometimes up to three months, providing hundreds of hours of free labor at the busy seasons of the grape-growing year. They choose vineyards, and only vineyards, to deploy their help because farming them is particularly labor-intensive, and because they are mentioned specifically in biblical prophecy. In the latest trip, which ended on March 20, 35 volunteers pruned a total of 100 acres of vines at Psagot, Shiloh and elsewhere. “It takes a lot of expenses off farmers, who are struggling in this area,” said Nir Lavi, owner of the Har Bracha Winery.
The HaYovel faithful are well aware of strong anti-settlement lobbies among both Jews and Christians...HaYovel responds to such viewpoints with two words: covenant and prophesy.
Tommy Waller insists that his ministry bears no antagonism toward Palestinians, whom it wants to see living peacefully in the West Bank. But he insists that the biblical promise to give the Israelites the Land of Israel, and various prophecies, justify Jewish rule there. Given the significance of West Bank sites to Jewish history, he argues that demanding an end to Jewish rule in the West Bank is akin to “anti-Semitism.”
“If you take away Shechem [Nablus], Beit El, Shiloh and Hebron — places where Jewish identity came to being,” asked Waller, “is there still a Jewish identity?”
Jabotinsky once spoke of how he longed for his fellow Jews to have, at times, a "goyische kop".
How right.
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P.S. I'm trying to leave this comment there:
As a supporter of Tommy's effort, may I point out that the challenge for the Rabbis in this age of 'on the edge of Redemption' is the phenomenon of the "foreigner' who will be coming to Jerusalem (Isaiah 2:2-3), who will accompany (Isaiah 56:3; 6) as well as the verses in Isaiah 60 - "3 And nations shall walk at thy light, and kings at the brightness of thy rising. 4 ...they all are gathered together, and come to thee; thy sons come from far, and thy daughters are borne on the side. 5 ...the wealth of the nations shall come unto thee. 6 ...they shall bring gold and incense, and shall proclaim the praises of the LORD... 10 And aliens shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee; for in My wrath I smote thee, but in My favour have I had compassion on thee. 11 Thy gates also shall be open continually, day and night, they shall not be shut; that men may bring unto thee the wealth of the nations, and their kings in procession. 12 For that nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted...16 Thou shalt also suck the milk of the nations, and shalt suck the breast of kings; and thou shalt know that I the LORD am thy Saviour, and I, the Mighty One of Jacob, thy Redeemer."
This is a complex issue but the point is that we can cooperate, within defined areas of activity. Those who honor us, and the successes we have had, and see in these occurences Divine inspiration, are to be welcomed for we are all Bible believers which makes us closer to a more moral, a more just life for all mankind. And part of that is the reestablishment of Jewish spvereignty in the homeand which is in the territory that was intended: Judea, Samaria and Gaza. We work with what we have been blessed.
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