Abraham Foxman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, doesn't go that far, but he's also not terribly concerned about the evangelicals' motivation. "Some [evangelicals] are motivated theologically, in that for the Second Coming of the Messiah, one of the prerequisites is for Jews to be safe and secure in the Holy Land," he says. "That's not a reason for us to reject them. I believe that when the Jews are safe and secure in the Holy Land the Messiah will come for the first time. So what?"

After all, as Foxman indicates, Christians certainly aren't the only ones with a messianic view of Israel. While secular or reform Jews -- that is, most Jews -- tend to see the need for a secure Jewish homeland as a political matter and are thus willing to negotiate its borders, Orthodox Jews share the evangelicals' conviction that Israel is covenant land. That's why when it comes to issues like settlements, Rabbi Eckstein says, deeply religious Jews have more in common with Christians than with the Jewish mainstream. Israel, says Eckstein, "is the Holy Land for both the religious Jew and for the evangelical Christian. It is a miracle, the ingathering of the exiles. It is God's redemption."

But the two versions of redemption are starkly different. In the evangelical one, the Middle East is convulsed by unprecedented violence and most Jews die.

The vast majority of Jews desperately want to avoid a full-scale conflagration between Israel and the Arab world. Dispensationalists don't. In the dispensationalist narrative, Christians will be raptured to heaven before all the fighting between Jews and Muslims starts. Everyone left will face mass death and destruction. "Some people see some of the imagery in Revelations being caused by nuclear weapons," says Brodrick. Thus evangelical Christians' support for policies like the permanent takeover the West Bank and Gaza and even, in some cases, the expulsion of Palestinians into Jordan, should be understood in the context of a worldview in which world war is inevitable.

Eckstein recalls an ad for a prophesy book in Charisma magazine that said the post-rapture tribulations would "make the Holocaust seem like a party." Though he believes most evangelicals are more "humble and responsible" than that author, he says, "There are those who are so definitive and absolute about the future, and their theology does entail the destruction of millions of Jews in the battle of Armageddon. I believe it says in the Book of Revelations that the blood will be so high that it will reach the bridle of a horse."

Dispensationalist Christians believe that this is all in the service of establishing the reign of Christ on earth. Yet while they chase this fantasy, they're content to put real lives -- Jewish lives -- on the line. "It doesn't make me feel any better when they tell me to keep the whole West Bank when I don't think that's for the benefit of Israel politically," says Gorenberg. "When somebody's hope for where Israeli policy will lead is Armageddon, clearly they're going to be judging things differently."

For now, as Jews and evangelicals work together, those differences might not matter. Yet as American government support of the mujahedin shows, realpolitik partnerships against metaphysical evil can turn rancid. When people believe their politics are endorsed by God, today's ally can be tomorrow's Satan.

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