JERUSALEM — Before President Donald Trump announced nearly two weeks ago that the United States would move forward recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, he was warned from almost all sides about the political chaos that the decision would unleash.

But two days later, while Palestinians faced off with Israeli soldiers in a “Friday of Rage” against the new US policy, about a 20-minute walk west, the Friends of Zion Museum buzzed with visitors awed by the interactive exhibits extolling evangelical Christians' support for Israel. Inside those walls, everything was going as planned.

“We are all bible-believers and we believe that this is the bible-land and that Jerusalem is the ancient capital of Israel back to the days of King David,” Mike Evans, founder of the Friends of Zion Museum, told Reuters recently. Evans, a prominent Christian Zionist, was an early supporter of Trump and is now a member of the president’s influential evangelical advisory board, a lifeline to a key section of Trump’s base.

US evangelicals have long supported Israel, whose founding they see as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Their champion in the Trump administration is Vice President Mike Pence, who is scheduled to make a trip to Israel this week, in part to focus on the plight of Christians in the Middle East. Evans is set to join Pence on the trip — which Palestinian politicians and Arab Christian leaders will now boycott as part of the Jerusalem fallout. He'll also likely be met with continued protests in the streets from Palestinians that left hundreds injured on Friday.

But Israel’s government and its far-right supporters have also recently become more adept at cultivating US evangelical support, as its agenda has become conveniently aligned with this powerful conservative lobby and voting bloc. That’s translated into largely blanket support from the US’s Christian Zionists for Israel’s more religious-nationalist and regionally assertive agendas, from reshaping the peace process to bucking the United Nations to deepening ties with other Arab and African states. That’s also set the stage for some seemingly strange bedfellows of convenience — for now.

Israelis widely cheered Trump’s renewed pledge that the US would eventually move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, hailing it as a sign that the Jewish right to self-determination in Jerusalem was at last being recognized. But in the hours and days following Trump’s announcement from a White House podium flanked by Christmas trees, another religious dimension held sway: Trump gave Israel his blessing because it benefited his powerful evangelical Christian base.

Dominant parts of American evangelicalism teach that the state of Israel is “the fulfillment of prophecy … which means that it could not be wrong in any way because it’s doing God’s work,” said Dr. Diana Butler Bass, who studies the movement. Part of this prophetic teaching is that all Jews must move to biblical Israel with Jerusalem as its capital — and then convert to Christianity — in order for the Messiah to come.

That first part of the equation lines up well with the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose extreme-right coalition is strongly supportive of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, disputed territories with biblical ties that Israel captured in 1967 but that Palestinians also claim as part of their future state. These settlements are considered illegal under international law, but are thriving nonetheless.

Bass explained that these evangelicals see both Netanyahu and Trump as doing God’s will in moving the world toward the end of days. “That they are both in power at the same time … heightens the prophetic expectation,” she said.

But the second part of the equation sits very, very uncomfortably with many Jews. “There’s a lot of anti-Semitism in all of this stuff,” said Bass. She described the desire for the mass conversion of Jews not as an acceptance of Judaism as a theology or religious practice in its own right, but as “instruments” to reaching the prophesied Judgment Day. (Evangelicals deny that anti-Semitism comes into play during their work.)