(When I reviewed <https://louisproyect.org/2021/01/16/til-kingdom-come/>
this film in January, I failed to mention that it was obvious that the
director was a liberal Zionist as should also be obvious from this
interview. This does not detract from the value of the film. It opened
yesterday as VOD but only through authorized theaters that are listed
here <https://tilkingdomcomefilm.com/watch>.)
NY Times, Feb. 27, 2021
American Evangelicals, Israeli Settlers and a Skeptical Filmmaker
A new documentary illuminates what the director calls an “unholy
alliance” that sharply altered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during
the Trump administration.
By David M. Halbfinger
TEL AVIV — The bear hug between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and
their governments was a partnership like no other the two countries had
seen. For four years, Israel was Washington’s favorite foreign-policy
arena and Jerusalem its best friend, and the brash new American approach
to the Middle East dominated Israel’s national-security discourse and
its politics.
Far less understood was one of the key underpinnings of that
relationship: the intricate symbiosis between evangelical Christians in
the United States and religious Jewish settlers in the West Bank. In a
new documentary, “’Til Kingdom Come,” the Israeli filmmaker Maya
Zinshtein delves into this “unholy alliance,” as she calls it, showing
how the settlers reap enormous political support and raise money from
evangelicals, who, she argues, directly and indirectly subsidize the
settlers’ steady takeover of the West Bank, which the Palestinians want
for a future state. In return, evangelicals edge closer to fulfilling
the prophecy many adhere to that the second coming of Christ cannot
happen without the return of diaspora Jews to the Holy Land.
That vision doesn’t end well for the Jews: They must accept Jesus or be
massacred and condemned to hell. But the film shows Christian Zionists
and right-wing Israelis agreeing to disagree about the End of Days while
cooperating, and even exploiting one another, in the here and now — and
making the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians more difficult
to resolve.
The film is being released in the United States on Friday, but when it
was broadcast in Israel in the fall it led to a wave of guilt and
soul-searching, in part for revealing how families in an impoverished
Kentucky community are cajoled by their pastor into donating to an
Israeli charity despite the country’s wealth, with a tech sector that
routinely mints billionaires. But the film is just as likely to teach
Christian and Jewish audiences in the United States a great deal about
subjects they may have thought they already understood — including how
American politics really work.
Zinshtein, 39, a Russian-born Israeli, said she was a classic immigrant,
with an outsider viewpoint and an ambition to make a mark in her adopted
homeland. Here are edited excerpts from an interview with her conducted
at her home in Tel Aviv and by phone.
You plunged into your project beginning in mid-2017, months before
President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the first big
display of the power of the relationship. What drew you in?
When you live in Israel, you’ve heard about the evangelicals, but no
more. People talk about “these Christians that love us.” But they don’t
get what that love means. It’s this force beneath the surface, which has
an agenda, and people just don’t understand it. But I want to know who
is influencing my life.
Q: What did you expect to witness?
A: It was clear that promises had been made to the evangelicals during
the 2016 campaign. But no one expected things to happen so fast. I
remember a meeting with one evangelical leader who’d told me, “Be
patient, maybe by late 2019 or early 2020, Trump will recognize
Jerusalem as the capital.” He did it three months later, and he moved
the embassy six months after that. In my plan, the embassy was supposed
to be the third act! I was terrified: What do I do now?
Q: What’s wrong with the agree-to-disagree collaboration between
American evangelicals and Israeli settlers?
A: We have our democracy, and the settlers are a certain percentage of
the country. But they have a much bigger influence than their share of
the population. And when you have this enormous political power entering
our conversation, it changes the balance. Remember the number of Jews in
the world, and the number of evangelicals. It’s not an equal
relationship, and we are not the stronger partner.
My brother’s in the reserves. He’ll get called up in the next war. And
there will always be a war here — it’s when, not if. The evangelicals
don’t want people to get killed, but they believe war is a sign. In
whose name will we fight these wars?
Plus, these people have a very specific set of beliefs that drives them.
In the film, for example, you see them celebrating the ban on
transgender [members of] the American military. You’re signing on with
their whole agenda. You cannot take just one part.
Q: There’s so much attention paid in the film to Christians’ love for
Israel. Do you accept that it’s really a form of love?
When you start questioning that, Israelis say, “Wait a minute, Maya.
Don’t we have enough people who hate us? Finally, someone loves us.
Let’s just take it.” But when someone loves you just for being Jewish,
there will always be someone who will hate you just for being Jewish.
Someone told me, “When they say they love you, they mean they love
Jesus. You are just part of the story. You are the key, and you know
what happens with the key after the door is open, right? You don’t need
it anymore.”
Love is really just another word for support, no?
But nobody asked, what did this support actually mean? It’s not “support
of Israel.” It’s support of a right-wing agenda that many people here
wouldn’t agree with.
Evangelicals are the only significant power outside Israel that is
openly supporting the settlements. No one else does. But the dangerous
thing is that they’re turning that into support for Israel. Pastor John
Hagee, when he started Christians United for Israel, was all about the
settlements. Today you won’t find him talking about the settlements at
all. Just “Israel.”
The film shows a religious settler telling visiting Christians that they
are bit players in a movie in which Jews are the stars.
The amazing thing in this relationship is each side thinks the other one
is stupid. Each side is trying to trick the other.
Q: The access you won was extraordinary. You didn’t just get an entire
Kentucky church and its pastors to open up to you and your crew. You
filmed inside the powerful Republican Study Committee and at a gala of
the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, at Mar-a-Lago.
It was mind-blowing. You saw all these wealthy Christians and Jews
sitting together, saw Christians give testimony about how “before I
started to donate to Israel, I had a small shop in Cleveland, and today
I have a huge chain of stores, just because I started to donate to
Israel.” They think it helps them in their lives.
How did you gain that access?
A: The fact that we were Israelis played a crucial role, because we
can’t immediately be put in a certain box. If I were a Jew from New
York, I’d never have been able to make this film. American Jews are
recognized as the other side. We are not. We are part of this bond. The
bond is with Israel.
You follow the money, showing an elderly Israeli woman who survived a
terrorist attack and now gets free food and shoes. If Israel is so
wealthy, why does it need foreigners’ help to feed and clothe her?
It’s embarrassing. But Israel invests so much in the settlements.
Christian money is filling needs created by the settlements. Maybe
instead of, I don’t know, building roads in the settlements, we need to
take care of our poor. It exposes a much bigger question of priorities.
The donors include people in one of America’s poorest counties.
I cried so badly. It’s freezing and you’re in a coat and you see kids in
a house with no windows coming out with no shoes. Kids with rat bites on
their legs. Some Israelis who saw the film asked if they could send money.
Q: What do you want the takeaway to be for evangelical viewers?
A: That [Israelis are] not just a Bible, we’re people with a present and
a near future. That Israelis and Palestinians want to live in peace.
Just because your faith says that God said to Abraham that all this land
belongs to the Jewish people — they are not going to suffer the
consequences. We are the ones who’ll suffer the consequences, in real
life, not just in the afterlife.
David M. Halbfinger was until recently the Jerusalem bureau chief,
covering Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories and the Middle
East. @halbfinge
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