>Sure, there is a political alliance between Xian fundamentalists and
Israel,
>but I wonder how deep it goes? It seems to me that for the grass-roots
>members of the Christian right, domestic issues such as abortion and gay
>rights are much more important than who controls the West Bank.
Abortion and gay rights are just sidelights for many fundamentalist Christians compared to the second coming of Christ-- do you ever watch the 700 Club? Pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the "Holy Land" and constant. Polls have shown that support for Israel is about twenty percentage points higher in the deep South than in any other region.
There is a tick of secularists that they never take the religious seriously on direct religious issues-- while many issues led to the breakdown of the Oslo negotiations, one of the touchest, most irresolvable issues was the Temple Mouth issue, since neither side wanted to tell their people that they had traded away God's holy site for anything else.
Leftists may want to reduce Israel to colonialism and imperialism, but for a bunch of religious folks, it's all about a creche and death penalty imposed 2000 years ago.
-- Nathan Newman