Daniel Seidemann, a prominent Israeli attorney who founded the NGO Terrestrial Jerusalem, went on a tweetstorm against Vice President Mike Pence for his hyper-partisan visit to Jerusalem that further exacerbated tensions in the region.
“The pageant Jerusalem [that] the world witnessed during the Pence visit was a meeting between a prominent leader of the ‘end-of-days’ evangelical cult and its Israeli sister settler cult — cults that now dominate the governance of their respective countries," Seidemann wrote. "That’s not Jerusalem."
Seidemann was referring to a powerful fringe Evangelical movement that believes Jesus will return to "rapture" Christians only after Israel retakes Jerusalem. This theological belief is behind many far-right American Christians' political position on Jerusalem. Some conservative Evangelicals believe the "rapture" will happen before the retaking of Jerusalem, but share a focus on the event as central part of their apocalyptic narrative.
The problem of conservative American political interference in Jerusalem is important to Seidemann's NGO, because the organization focuses on property transactions in Jerusalem as they relate to a possible peace deal between Israel and Palestine.
Seidemann says Pence "saw nothing of Palestinian Jerusalem" on his trip and even managed to avoid meeting with Palestinian Christians, despite the vice president's extremely public professions of Christianity.
While Pence has not overtly expressed his opinions on the apocalypse, the vice president's trip to Jerusalem raises continued concerns about his theocratic influence within the administration of an already authoritarian-leaning President Donald Trump.
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