The Zionist Organization of America was founded in 1897 to support the establishment of “a Jewish homeland in Palestine”. During the first world war it took a more explicitly statist direction, endorsed by the British government’s Balfour Declaration of 1917; in 1949 it was probed by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and ordered to register as a foreign agent, a designation the ZOA deflected by revising its constitution.
The ZOA has its critics in and beyond the American Jewish community. But even the strongest among them wouldn’t have foreseen the organisation’s present and increasingly intense collaboration with the leaders of 40 million evangelical Christian Zionists in America, whose theology predestines all Jews to be ‘called in’ to Palestine for Armageddon, there to embrace Christ as their Messiah or else to perish in the Rapture of his Second Coming.
This strange collaboration, described recently in Tikkun, reflects and portends much more than just a savvy tactic by the ZOA to increase American support for Israel. Whatever its consequences for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government policies and coalition politics, the ZOA’s gambit has ominous implications for American Jews’ own sense of belonging and security in America.
