On August 3, 1860, Emperor Napoleon III led a peacekeeping force of 12,000 soldiers to Lebanon to intervene in the ongoing violence between local Druze and Christians, justified by France’s legal status as the “protectorate of missions” within the Ottoman Empire.
Emboldened by religious and humanitarian concern and enabled by military and political strength, France redrew Lebanon through the réglement organique (organic regulation), a series of forced treaties with Constantinople that remade Lebanon as an autonomous Christian mutasarrifate under formal French military protection, and the right for France to approve or veto the appointed mutasarrif (head of government).
There is a thin line between international religious patronage and imperial control, a line that the American Evangelical caucus led by Ambassador Mike Huckabee is rapidly approaching.
Through Huckabee, the Evangelical caucus has been flexing American state muscle as a modern protectorate of missions, formally reprimanding Israel over attacks on Christian sites and communities in Gaza and the West Bank, and over allegedly denying tourist visas to Evangelical missionaries.
This criticism has been a rude awakening for those Israelis, especially on the right, who still wishfully believed the Evangelical caucus to be an altruistic ally.
Instead, Huckabee has taken increasingly hostile steps to establish the United States as the protectorate of missions in the Jewish state, to effectively turn Israel into an American mutassarifate, where Christian communities are privileged and missionary activities protected, where Israel is reduced militarily to an American protectorate, and where Israel’s domestic politics is openly outsourced to Washington.
Israel’s cooperation with the American Evangelical community, as with any group, should be conducted without any delusions of altruism. The Evangelical caucus’ sympathy to Israel is no unconditional covenant of faith and friendship but actually a calculated pressure campaign to secure the future of Christianity in the “Holy Land.”
So long as Israel deludes itself with the myth of the altruistic Evangelical ally, it risks exposing itself to a foreign interest group with interests that contradict with those of the Jewish people.
The objectives of the Evangelical caucus have been exposed by Ambassador Huckabee. Now it’s on Israel to ensure they’re not achieved.
