I n the lobby of the Jerusalem Convention Center, glossy campaign leaflets of wannabe Knesset members carpeted the floor. Activists flowed from the hall where the Labor Party's newly chosen leader, Amram Mitzna, had pledged to order Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip upon becoming prime minister. The party convention was ending unexpectedly early, as Mitzna's overwhelming victory had persuaded backers of ex-party chief Binyamin Ben-Eliezer to drop a challenge on how to pick Knesset candidates for Israel's Jan. 28 elections. I spotted a Knesset member, a Ben-Eliezer man. "Ah," he said, cutting short a conversation with two aides and giving me a nearly credible smile. "Good to see you. I'll have much more time for you now that we'll be in the opposition." "What are you talking about?" said one aide. "They'll crawl back into the government." She meant the government that incumbent Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would form after the election. Neither she nor her boss entertained the...

The Left Behind series By Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins. Tyndale House Publishing, $14.99 each N icolae Carpathia, the man who turned the United Nations into a one-world government with himself as dictator, has just decided on genocide. In his palace in New Babylon, capital of the world, Carpathia -- alias the Antichrist -- barks instructions to his top aide. "I will sanction, condone, support, and reward the death of any Jew anywhere in the world," he says. "Imprison them. Torture them. Humiliate them. Shame them. Blaspheme their god. Plunder everything they own. Nothing is more important." The aide rushes to obey, not knowing that he's fulfilling one more divine prophecy about the final days of history before the Second Coming. But as readers of this scene in The Remnant , the Rev. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' latest novel, soon learn, many Jews will survive the new Holocaust by becoming born-again Christians. As a rabbi-turned-pastor explains later in the book, Jews need to make up...