the face of it, it may seem bizarre that Israeli Jews should accept the friendship of those whose greatest hope is their conversion to Christianity. Yet the link has proved too important to both sides for them to let even this obstacle stand in its way. For the American religious right, a Jewish state in the biblical Holy Land, even if it has not yet become Christian, is a major step along the path set out in the Book of Revelation. For the Israeli right, the support of a grouping with such influence and voting power across the USA is far too useful to be sacrificed for a point of theology. The unspoken compromise appears to be that as long as the US Evangelicals leave the conversion of the Jews to God rather than man, the Israeli right is prepared to overlook its allies’ ultimate goal. There could be no better proof of this unlikely pact than the words of Binyamin Netanyahu to a Washington Evangelical prayer breakfast in 1985:

I suggest that for those who know the history of Christian involvement in Zionism, there is nothing either surprising or new about the steadfast support given to Israel by believing Christians all over the world. For what after all is Zionism but the fulfilment of ancient prophecies? . . . And this dream, smouldering through two millennia, first burst forth in the Christian Zionism of the nineteenth century – a movement that paralleled and reinforced modern Jewish Zionism . . . Thus it was the impact of Christian Zionism on Western statesmen that helped modern Jewish Zionism achieve the rebirth of Israel.3

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