http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/6073/features/when-liberal-protestants-were-zionists/
TO REALLY LEARN ABOUT CHRISTIAN ZIONISTS CHECK OUT DAVID ISAAC’S SITE ZIONISM 101….BETTER THAN ALL NIEBUHR’S PALAVER…..RSK
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/zionism-101-ruth-king.html
http://zionism101.org/NewestVideo.aspx
In his recent book Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence, Daniel F. Rice includes a chapter on the eminent Protestant theologian’s relationship with Felix Frankfurter, one of the most prominent American Jews of the 20th century. One of the foundations of their friendship was their shared belief in the Zionist project. Indeed, Niebuhr not only helped found the Christian Council on Palestine, an association of pro-Zionist Christian clergy, but wrote impassioned defenses of the Jewish state for important periodicals like the Nation and The New Republic. Frankfurter so esteemed Niebuhr’s writings on Zionism that he was at a loss to find any written work that, in his words, “faces the Jewish problem more trenchantly and more candidly.”
Such effusive praise was typical of Niebuhr’s admirers. Niebuhr, a professor of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary, founding member of the anti-Communist Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and prolific writer, earned renown as a prophetic voice on American foreign policy. His major works, including Moral Man and Immoral Society, The Irony of American History, and The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, are still cited by contemporary theologians, writers, and politicians. President Obama, for one, calls Niebuhr his “favorite philosopher.”
Given the way intellectual fashions have turned against the Jewish state, it is now very difficult to imagine a prominent liberal Christian theologian defending Zionism with anything like Niebuhr’s depth of passion. As Rice notes, Niebuhr supported Israel because he thought it provided a firm basis for Jewish identity, something he felt American Jews had lost while stewing in the melting pot. He lauded Zionism for recognizing that “each race or people has a right or duty to develop” and that “only through such differentiated development will its highest civilization be attained.”
In order to explain Niebuhr’s Zionist sympathies, we ought first to consider three major themes that he emphasized throughout his work. The first was that policymakers needed to acknowledge the concrete limits they faced in applying moral precepts to the practice of politics. Indeed, since politics involved decisions on behalf of and in reference to collectives, altruism was impossible in the political realm, especially in the international arena. Nations could not empathize with other nations, and thus could not be expected to act in accordance with their perspectives. Since appeals to other nations’ senses of reason and morality would inevitably fail, nations could not forswear the use of force.