First Museum to Honor Friends of Zion

MembersFirst Museum to Honor Friends of Zion

Initially I visited the Friends of Zion (FOZ) Museum to find out why this new institution was claiming that British officer and Christian Zionist John Henry Patterson had called Benjamin Netanyahu a “sharp child.”

Tsvi Sadan

Nov 5, 2016 at 5:08 pm

Given that Patterson died two years before Netanyahu was born, it seemed the kind of sloppy research that could characterize, and thereby sink, the entire project.

FOZ responded to this inaccuracy by stating that the monologues in their multi-media presentation “do not presume to be exact quotations, because they were written after their death.”

Further to that, and given the Israeli public’s natural suspicion of Christian projects as being essentially missionary-oriented, I wanted to know if my impression of the museum as a “Christian project” was, in fact, correct.

What I found was that, though funded by Christians, the museum is an entirely Israeli project. A private initiative, the museum was developed and is run by Israelis who thought it was time for the Jewish state to acknowledge the invaluable contribution of non-Jews–most of them Christians–to the Zionist project.

Museum director Ilan Scolnik, himself a...

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