THE PALIN DIGEST
A Closer Look at Sarah Palin & "Going Rogue"

Ever curious about the eschatological implications of that Sarah Palin quote from her interview with Barbara Walters -- the one in which she said she believes that "more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead" -- I called the executive director of the Pre-Trib Research Center at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., Dr. Thomas Ice. The Pre-Trib Center is one of the preeminent evangelical institutions in this country arguing for literal Bible prophecy, and especially for pre-millenial dispensationalism, a complicated belief system that concerns the conditions that must obtain on Earth before Jesus can return ("Pre-Trib" is short for "pre-tribulation.") One of the more famous conditions, of course, is the ingathering of the Jewish people in Israel. There are hundreds of variations of Protestant prophetic belief, but the Jewish role is generally crucial; very dramatic things will happen to the Jews in these prophetic belief systems, including their conversion to Christianity and their mass death in the battle of Armageddon.
 
I've been writing about these belief systems for a while, and an alarm bell went off in my head when I heard Palin talk about "days and weeks." It's quite one thing to say that Israel needs settlements to contain its growing population (a belief unsupported by the facts, but I'll deal with that another time), but it's something else entirely to predict that Jews in the Diaspora will imminently be flooding the Holy Land. I asked Dr. Ice if he thought that this statement by Palin, who has been exposed to this brand of evangelical thinking in her Alaska churches, was informed by these beliefs.

READ JEFFREY GOLDBERG'S ARTICLE AT THE ATLANTIC