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This chapter considers survey research about white evangelicals’ motives for supporting Israel. It reports on a religious service at a charismatic church that celebrated the emigration of the Jews to Israel as hastening Christ’s return. For enormous numbers of born-again Christians, supporting the Jewish return to the Holy Land allows them to join in the unfolding of divine history. Many disavow any intention of hastening scriptural prophecy, however. The chapter discusses another way to speed the end-times: building the Third Temple in Jerusalem. It notes plots to destroy the Dome of the Rock in order to clear the Temple Mount for the construction of the Temple. And it describes the biblically prescribed need for a red heifer to purify workers who would build the Temple. The chapter concludes by questioning the charge that George W. Bush is a Christian Zionist, perhaps even a premillennial dispensationalist, and that his faith shaped his Middle East policies.

This chapter considers a manifesto, anchored on binationalism, as a solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. After 100 years of conflict, there is no end in sight to the war between Israel and Palestine; the only visible change in the Middle East is deterioration. The small piece of land containing the names Israel and Palestine has become an intense critical mass containing all the tensions between East and West, between North and South, between religions, and between religious and secular thought. In the symbolic realm relations are much more complex: they are not about the balance of power, financial profit, or control of land, water, and natural resources. In this realm one also has to consider overt and covert theological structures. This chapter argues that binationalism is the only living alternative to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, “perhaps the only possibility for a new place, a new beginning and a new language, the only possibility for Israel–Palestine, for the Middle East, and maybe for the entire world”.

This chapter looks at Fr. Tadeusz Sroka's An Israeli Diary, or the Religious Dimension of Man's Fate (1985). An Israeli Diary takes the form of excerpts from a diary written in the years 1970–71. Each entry opens with press news about political events in the Middle East, followed by pondering over the Bible or the fate of the Jewish people. There are hardly any data concerning contemporary Israel, except a few facts showing Arab intransigence and the hopeless situation of Israel ‘in human terms’. The author says very little about Jewish history and nothing about Judaism; the Talmud is not mentioned, even in places where it could have been useful, for example in reflecting on capital punishment. The author's perspective is metaphysical; he assumes that the election of Israel is eternal. This, incidentally, is the official standpoint of the Catholic Church today, confirmed more than once by John Paul II. As a result, Israel is seen as the centre of the world. Next, the fate of the Jews reveals the ultimate perspectives of the human condition: on one pole the Holocaust, on the other the re-creation of the state by visionaries, in defiance of reason. Israel is a sign for the world, and today's secular Israel is an appropriate sign for the contemporary materialistic world.

This chapter focuses on how the six modern Jewish global migrations influenced Jewish cuisines in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. It explains the effect of political modernization on Jewish religious life and surveys how this affected the creation of religious denominations and the different role of the dietary laws in each denomination. The construction of modern kosher certification and Jewish food activism—“Jewish food ethics”—are described as a consequence of industrialized and globalized food production.