It doesn't take that. One principle of fundamentalist Christianity is that Israel must exist for the second coming to happen.
I remember this reason being given before in the Israel thread, I think by FD. It never felt to me like a major reason for our support. It's not something that's preached in churches that I've went to.

This means that the Israel lobby has a strange coalition of bedfellows in the US. Both left, right, and religious right, will all support Israel. They might all have different reasons, even radically different reasons, but the end result is the same. I can think of no foreign entity that gets similarly diverse, even perverse, support.
This I agree with. They do have an extremely large amount of political power, for such a small minority. I'd say they developed a lot of this power as a means to overcome the abusive discrimination they had to deal with when they immigrated here.

I've said this before, it's not a subject that gets talked about much in the parts of Ca. where I've lived. So I might have an invalid view of the situation.