Collin Levey / Times editorial columnist
Bush's religious base bolsters support for Israel

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President Bush and Sen. John Kerry had barely finished their speeches on Wednesday before an accounting of Bush's IOUs began. Lucky for Israel, the evangelicals who got out the vote are at the top of the list.

In his congratulatory message to Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made special mention of the need to resuscitate the peace process between Israel and "Palestine." To many Middle East watchers, the language was a signal that Blair, another IOU holder, now expects some payback for his support in Iraq. He undoubtedly would like it to involve pressure on the Jewish state for concessions to please European opinion.

Antipathy for the Jewish state is well-established on the continent, after all. It also finds a cozy home at the United Nations — that other institution hailed by Democrats during the campaign. What's more, as the president seeks more international backing for his Iraq policy, some sort of astounding progress on the Palestine issue is likely to be expected thanks to a perceived opening created by Yasser Arafat's death or incapacitation.

The easy way out is always the same: Put pressure on Israel to sacrifice its security needs to win some kind of deal from Palestinians, whose not-so-secret agenda is Israel's destruction. Happily, any such temptation is likely to be nipped in the bud by a serendipitous and growing alliance between Jewish pro-Israel voters and the "Zionist" Christians of the president's conservative base.

During the campaign, New Republic editor Peter Beinart wrote presciently that Bush would effectively "end" the Jewish vote this year. Not because Jews wouldn't vote for Kerry — they did, overwhelmingly — but because there was a new internal division: The Orthodox, and most religious Jews, broke for Bush while secular Jews remained aligned with the Democrats.

In fact, the Kerry campaign's efforts to scare Jewish voters by playing up Bush's Christianity and his administration's faith-based initiatives only deepened the alliance. Many Orthodox Jews share the president's vision of a greater role for religiously inspired charities, while many secular Jews find any intrusion of religion into the public square discomfiting or frightening.

Likewise, many conservative Jews and Christians fretted a Kerry administration intended to use Israel as a bargaining chip to get back in the good graces of our allies, the cornerstone of Kerry's Iraq strategy. That was a reasonable concern — the Clinton administration pressured Israel for eight years, seeking territorial concessions to please Arafat and win the president the Nobel Peace Prize he craved.

But if Jews have been voting more like Christians, splitting along "values" lines, conservative Christians have been voting more like Jews — that is, putting a premium on support for Israel as an overriding policy and moral concern.

This partnership isn't exactly new anymore. Christianity Today has run articles on "How Evangelicals Became Israel's Best Friend." Chicago Rabbi Yehiel Eckstein has partnered with Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell to run a program called "Stand With Israel." But the conservative Jewish-Christian pro-Israel alliance is likely to emerge into prime time now, a major force in stiffening Bush against pressure from Blair, the U.N., the Saudis and others.

The U.N. General Assembly, remember, has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other nation. And in Europe, even within months after Sept. 11, 2001, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine lectured that Europeans were "unanimous in not supporting the Middle East policy of the White House."

"Middle East policy," of course, is the code word for support for Israel. But even apart from their predisposition to the Arab states, Europeans' disdain is rooted in distrust of religious fervor. That's not altogether different from the blue-state Americans who fear the Christian right's influence on domestic issues. But they should now begin to weigh their fears against its more important role in foreign policy.

Here's hoping. Certainly, to this point in the war on terrorism, there has been a recurrent, if implicit, anti-Semitism in the attacks on the "neocon Nazis" of the Bush administration by many in the bien-pensant left.

But in Iraq, Israel and the Middle East, where democratic societies are young, and tenuous, the amen corner and the hallelujah chorus are discovering a deeper common purpose.

This election was a referendum on the war on terrorism above all, and conservative base turnout played a decisive role. It's time we realized that "values" voters are not just concerned with moral turpitude and religious matters, but with the broader principles that shape Judeo-Christian civilization and democracy around the world.

Collin Levey writes Fridays for editorial pages of The Times. E-mail her at clevey@seattletimes.com