In the Shadow of the Millennium: American Fundamentalists and the Jewish People
In 1982 Menachem Begin, then Israel’s Prime Minister, presented Jerry Falwell, an evangelist and leader of the fundamentalist group ‘the Moral Majority’, with a medal of the Jabotinsky Order, an organization associated with Begin’s Likud Party. Observers both of American religion and Middle East politics could not help but notice the friendship that had developed between the Israeli government and conservative evangelical elements within American Protestantism. The special interest this segment of American Protestantism had in the fate of the Jewish people, and their support for a national Jewish home in the Land of Israel was evident from the early beginnings of the fundamentalist movement and was derived from their interpretation of biblical prophecy regarding the end of history—in which they see a prominent role for the Jewish people.