Why is Glenn Beck going to Israel?

In its long slog through history, the Jewish caravan has acquired a lot of improbable and colorful camp followers, from Bulan, king of the Khazars, to Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. Lately, conservative commentator and former Fox News TV personality Glenn Beck has joined their ranks. This week, he plans to set up his tent in the Holy Land for three televised Zionist rallies, dubbed “Restoring Courage,” in Jerusalem and the ancient Mediterranean port city of Caesarea. They are a sequel to the mass Restoring Honor rally at the Lincoln Memorial a year ago.

Beck is traveling with letters of commendation from Jewish leaders such as Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman; conservative Christians such as the Rev. John Hagee, the head of Christians United for Israel; and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a newly declared GOP presidential contender.

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“These won’t be massive gatherings like the one in Washington last year,” Beck told me in a telephone interview. (Crowd estimates for that event ranged from 80,000 to more than 300,000.) “These will be ticketed events, specifically targeted at Christians around the world,” via the Internet.

In our interview, Beck said that the tour would be attended by “four presidential candidates, half a dozen to a dozen senators and about three dozen congressmen,” although he declined to name any of the participants. A few days later, Josh Rafael, his spokesman, called to say that, in fact, Beck wasn’t sure which high-ranking American politicians, if any, would be there. In any case, Beck doesn’t plan to share the lectern. This is his forum and, perhaps, his chance to make a bid for leadership of the growing Christian Zionist movement in the United States and around the world. Leading that movement could mean leading conservative Christians in this country as a whole.

This isn’t Beck’s first trip to the Holy Land. In July, he went to Jerusalem as the guest of a parliamentary committee and proclaimed his identification with Israel by paraphrasing the Biblical Book of Ruth: “Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people are my people. Your God is my God.”

Such fervent philo-Semitic rhetoric is rare, even among the United States’ Christian Zionists, a group whose operational alliance with Israel dates at least to the days of my former boss, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Jimmy Carter was in the White House and he had a palpable distaste, even then, for Israel. At the same time, rising evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were making support for Israel and its policies a pillar of their Christian Republican philosophy. Begin asked his staff how many of these evangelicals there were in the Unites States. The answer was upward of 20 million. And that settled that.

American Jewish leaders, virtually all of whom were (and are) liberal Democrats, were (and remain) scandalized. They argued that evangelical Christians believe that Jews don’t go to heaven and that they will die in some end-of the-world scenario. Begin — and every subsequent Israeli prime minister of both the left and the right — preferred to let God sort out eternity. Here on Earth, actions speak louder than words.