NEW YORK -- In the "strange bedfellows" department, one of the oddest pairings on the current political scene is American Jews and the Christian right. Yes, both groups back Israel. But their long-term visions for its future are miles apart.

Consider the following quotation from the Web site of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, a strong supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's recent actions: "Indeed, there will finally be such a fullness of Israel when their hardness and blindness to the gospel is overcome as to vastly enrich the whole world. For the almost unbelievable truth is that all Israel will be saved. The fullness of Gentiles will climax with the fullness of Israel." It's hard to believe that this vision of an Israel in which all the Jews convert to Christianity is compatible with the vision for Israel held by most Jews.

It's not that non-Jewish support in the U.S. for Israel is something new--think Pete Seeger or the Weavers singing "Kumbaya." But there has been a seismic shift in the makeup of that support. It used to be progressive non-Jewish Americans who strongly backed Israel. Now Israel's best friends here are people like former Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed (who now heads the Georgia Republican Party) and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas). The Anti-Defamation League even went to the extreme of reprinting as an advertisement in the New York Times and other newspapers an article titled "We People of Faith Stand Firmly With Israel" that Reed wrote for The Los Angeles Times. Is this the same ADL that has as its cornerstone fighting bigotry, supporting civil rights and maintaining separation between church and state?

If Jews feel mainstream media coverage of Israel is biased, perhaps they ought to protest by watching a network that gives plenty of positive coverage to Israel: Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. Of course, the network's vision of Israel may make many Jews uncomfortable. As another article on its Web site proclaims: "Thus Jews, Israel, will eventually--and supernaturally--witness to the gospel, and with such explosive power that the world can scarcely be the same! Ah, there is God's future for ethnic Israel."

In some sense, this Christian fundamentalism is a mirror image of the Jewish fundamentalism contained within the Sharon government. While Sharon himself is a secular hawk, he has survived in politics since 1967 as the patron of the settlers, the hard core of whom are religious fanatics--and not only in their desire to control the biblical land of Israel that includes all of what they call "Judea and Samaria" or "Greater Israel." The most extreme among them also hold all of the modern democratic institutions of the state--from the Supreme Court to parliamentary democracy--in contempt. They yearn for a land of Israel fashioned in the image of the ancient kingdom of David, as opposed to the modern, pluralistic, forward-looking state Israel is today.

The newest member of Sharon's Cabinet is the head of the National Religious Party, Effi Eitam, a former Israeli army brigadier general who was refused higher promotion within the army because of his harsh treatment of Palestinians. Eitam, a "born-again" Jew, is a former secular kibbutz member transformed into a messianic Jew, much along the lines of other Religious Party settlers who saw the post-1967 era in Israel more as the fulfillment of biblical dictate than as a move to meet Israel's security needs.

Eitam, who has declared that he will be the first "kippa-wearing" prime minister (wearing a kippa, or yarmulke, denotes religious observance), is an ultrareligious Jew with fiercely undemocratic values. He believes not only in dealing ruthlessly with Palestinians across the 1967 Green Line but he says that the Israeli Arab citizens who reside within Israel's pre-1967 borders should be transferred out. He would do well with his counterparts in the United States, but his beliefs would most likely find little support among the bulk of Jews in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the U.S. Yet it is this point of view--in Israel and the U.S.--that is being strengthened by an alliance that supports Sharon, right or wrong.

As if the Christian right's vision of Israel weren't alien enough to the Israel most American Jews desire, a second result of this newfound alliance is the strengthening of the right wing's resolve within the current U.S. political landscape. The alliance of the Christian right, the neoconservative intellectuals (many of whom are Jewish) who long ago gave up on the Democrats and the more mainstream Jewish organizations has strengthened the resolve of the Bush administration to say yes to almost anything Sharon is doing. But it has also strengthened the ability of the conservatives to push through an American agenda that both runs counter to the will of the majority of American Jews and could even endanger American Jewish interests.

Karl Rove, Bush's political eyes and ears, has made it his role to be sure that Bush junior doesn't suffer the same fate as his father. In order to cement a two-term presidency, Rove is shoring up a conservative domestic agenda for the president. Now he has the aid of liberal American Jews.

Jo-Ann Mort is co-author (with Gary Brenner) of the forthcoming "Our Hearts Invented a Place: Can Kibbutzim Survive the New Israel?" and national secretary of Americans for Peace Now.

Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times

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