Part 1

A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance
by Zev Chafets

In a time of jihad "against Jews and Crusaders," the Jews of America and Israel find themselves with a powerful albeit unlikely ally: tens of millions of American evangelicals. As the conflict in the Middle East roils and divisions harden, Israel, a nation at war, welcomes this Christian support, whereas the American Jewish establishment - liberal, secular, and Democratic - remains wary. This tension, along with the question of whether the Jews will embrace the evangelicals' offer of partnership before it is too late, is at the heart of Zev Chafets's incisive and compelling new book.

Over the course of a year, Chafets, a former New York Daily News columnist and onetime director of the Israeli government press office, travels the world, tracing the improbable confluence of Jews and evangelicals. Along the way, Chafets meets Jerry Falwell and his national championship debate squad, visits Jewish cadets at West Point, heads to Virginia to tour Pat Robertson's university, meets the Pentecostal priest of Wall Street, attends the world's biggest Christian retail show, accompanies the rabbi with the biggest gentile following since Jesus on a road trip, travels the Holy Land with a band of repentant Christian pilgrims, and breaks bread with George W. Bush (and five hundred fellow Jewish Republicans).

Although Chafets spins a penetrating, engaging, and often hilarious narrative, A Match Made in Heaven has at its core some very serious questions: How is the relationship between Jews and Christians changing? Why do evangelicals support Israel so strongly? Is their philo-Semitism just a front for their true purpose to convert Jews? Do the evangelicals, as their opponents charge, really want to use the Jews as cannon fodder at the battle of Armageddon? Or are they simply responding to the biblical commandment to love Israel? Finally, is the American Jews' fear of fundamentalist Christianity based on constitutional principle - or social and cultural snobbery and political partisanship?

Equal parts history, comedy, travelogue, and political tract, A Match Made in Heaven is a smart and adventurous trip along a rapidly changing religious and political border.

I was in Israel in 1969, when I got drafted by the American army. I had two choices: go back and serve or stay in Israel. Draft evasion was a federal crime punishable by $10,000 and five years in prison. Since there had never been any amnesties for draft dodgers, I figured that whatever I decided would be a lifelong choice.

I loved America. My family was there, and in the days before direct-dial telephone and the Internet Israel was, in my mother's mordant phrase, "in Asia." The country had the economy of a Warsaw Pact nation and a standard of living to match. Musically, it was still behind the Irving Berlin Wall. The only sport was kickball (known to the rest of the world as soccer). I had no job, no close relatives, no profession, and no prospects. I barely spoke the language. Who could resist?

I wrote to my draft board in Pontiac and said, "Sorry." Instead, I served in the Israeli army. I didn't exactly tip the balance of power in the Middle East, but I felt I was doing something important in a place where I was needed.

The Palestinian issue was just becoming trendy, and some of my Jewish friends at the University of Michigan had a hard time understanding my decision. Why would I want to live in a country the Black Panthers didn't respect? How could I fight Arabs? Weren't they on the same revolutionary side as the Vietcong?

I was never bothered by this particular scruple. The way I saw it (and still do), the Arabs had a lot of legitimate grievances, and if I were an Arab myself I'd probably be on the Arab side. But I was a Jew. Besides, I didn't think the Arabs had behaved very well, starting with their invasion of Israel at its inception in 1948. You have to be a special kind of jerk to attack people fresh out of the concentration camps, no matter how upset you were with the idea of living next to them.

The big issue when I first came to Israel was the future of the territories Israel conquered in the Six-Day War, but the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria had no special religious or emotional meaning to me. If the Arabs wanted them back in return for peace, fine. If they didn't-and they made that clear at an Arab League summit in the fall of 1967 by declaring a policy of "no negotiation, no recognition and no peace"-that was fine, too. I was raised during the cold war and I took protracted conflicts more or less in stride.

Besides, I couldn't really buy into the Israeli left's notion that giving back the territories to the Arabs was a moral imperative. I noticed that a lot of the Israelis making this argument lived in houses or on kibbutzim that had belonged to Arabs before 1948. Many had businesses that relied on cheap Arab labor. Still, hypocrisy isn't a capital crime, and anyway, I was too busy getting acclimated in my new country to worry about mere ideology.

Meanwhile, back in the States, the FBI was now officially on my case. When agents staged a surprise inspection on Christmas Eve, my mother helpfully informed them that we were Jews and that it would be much more sensible to search for me on Passover. That way the agents could spend next Christmas with their families. When I heard this I had to laugh. My mother was too American to be mean to the FBI. On the other hand, she knew damn well that I wasn't going to try to sneak into Michigan to attend a family seder.

After finishing the army, I answered an ad in the newspaper and landed a job with the Liberal Party, the junior partner in what was to become the Likud. The Liberals were a secular petit bourgeois faction with no ideology greater than tax avoidance. Issues of war and peace were left to the senior partner, Herut, and its leader, Menachem Begin. Begin had run for prime minister in every election since 1949, and lost every time. No one expected a different outcome in the future.

When Begin won the 1977 election, there were more senior government positions than Likudniks to fill them. I was appointed director of the Government Press Office, a position that was something like the White House director of communications. I was twenty-nine years old.

As the only American on Begin's staff, I was occasionally consulted on issues relating to my native country-especially after it became clear that the Israeli embassy in Washington, staffed by holdovers from the Labor years, wasn't being very helpful. One of the things I was asked about was Christian Zionists-evangelicals like Falwell and Robertson, who wanted to establish relations with the government of Israel.

I wasn't particularly enthusiastic. To me, these Christian Zionists were evangelists like Pontiac's Reverend Tom Malone. But Israel didn't suffer from an overabundance of friends, and gradually I began to see that they were politically useful, even if their sincerity was a bit off-putting.

I don't mean to suggest that my opinion was in any way crucial. Menachem Begin liked evangelicals from the start. They believed, as he did, that the Bible gave Israel a deed to the Holy Land. They supported his policies. And they were willing to go to the mat for him against Jimmy Carter over the issue of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

Begin's office became a destination for visiting Christian Zionist celebrities. One day Johnny Cash and June Carter came by for a photo op. Cash was a lover of biblical history and came to see Begin directly from a visit to Masada, the mountain fortress where Jewish zealots had, two thousand years earlier, staged a sort of kosher Alamo in their futile rebellion against the Roman conquerors of Palestine. The early Zionists adopted Masada as a symbol of steadfastness and courage. When Cash told Begin he had been there, the prime minister slammed his hand down on his desk and proclaimed, "Masada will never fall again!" The Man in Black was so startled he nearly jumped out of his cowboy boots.

The American Jewish leadership was scandalized and outraged by the company Begin was keeping. Most of the Jewish grandees were liberals who had never met an evangelical Christian and didn't want to. They disagreed with Begin's settlement policy and saw (correctly) that it would lead to a clash with the Carter administration. They were also put off by Begin's European looks and Jewish mannerisms. The Jews of New York and Los Angeles wanted Sabra heroes like the dashing, one-eyed warrior Moshe Dayan. Begin reminded them of their Uncle Louie in dry goods.

This didn't bother the evangelicals a bit. Begin suited their notion of what a Jewish prime minister ought to be like. He called them "Reverend" and swapped Old Testament quotes with them. The prime minister was a man who divided the world into three parts: Us (the Jews), Them (the gentiles), and Me. He didn't judge Christians by where they went to college, their rural accents, or, for that matter, what political party they belonged to (at this stage, the late 1970s, many, including Pat Robertson, were still Democrats, although they were quickly trending Republican). The Christian Zionists supported Begin's policies, and that was enough.

"A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo - Evangelical Alliance", Zev Chafets, January 2007. Used by permission of HarperCollins www.harpercollins.com. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Zev Chafets was born and raised in Pontiac, Michigan. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he moved to Jerusalem, where he spent thirty-three years in politics, government, and journalism, including a stint as director of the government press office for Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Chafets is a former columnist for the New York Daily News, as well as a founding editor of the Jerusalem Report magazine and the author of nine books of fiction, media criticism, and social and political commentary.