From: Rebecca Sinderbrand
Subject: Looking Beyond the Gaza Withdrawal
Wednesday, July 20, 2005, at 3:31 AM PT   
JERUSALEM—To add to the general edginess of pre-disengagement Jerusalem, for the last few weeks the city has been gripped by successive heat waves of, well, biblical proportions. By noon, the stones of the Old City seem to radiate heat; winding through the alleyways of the Jewish Quarter is like taking a leisurely stroll through a slow-roast oven. Ten minutes in the midday sun and you feel a bit like you just ran a marathon. An hour outside feels more like getting hit by a bus.
The brutal temperatures have thinned out the crowds at the Western Wall, and the tourists are sparse today. But the faithful are still here. There are the Haredim, ultra-Orthodox Jews defiantly sporting fur hats and knee-length black coats in the summer sun. There are Israeli student groups and campers—wearing matching T-shirts and the orange wristbands of the anti-disengagement movement—chanting Zionist slogans from the courtyard in the back of the complex. And sitting just beside a phalanx of gun-toting soldiers, there's Earl Cox, Southern gentleman and longtime GOP stalwart.
So far this year, the government has handed evangelicals their own plot of land near the Sea of Galilee, started a special outreach program to shore up support for Israel in African-American churches, and planned the committee's first stateside conference for American sympathizers in Fort Worth this September.

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