A group of more than 1,000 American Christian Zionist pastors and influencers has spent a week in Israel on an all-expenses-paid trip that was funded by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on Tuesday.
“This is the first time in history that the state of Israel has officially partnered with 1,000 strategic pastors to commission them as ambassadors to combat antisemitism and reach the youth of their generation,” Mike Evans, an evangelical pastor who helped organize the trip, told CBN News.
“Right now there’s an ideological war that Israel is losing, so they need the evangelicals, they need the Zionists to fight an ideological war,” Evans added.
Christian Zionists like Evans believe that the modern state of Israel has the right to all of the land in historic Palestine, including the Israeli-occupied West Bank, based on the Bible, a view that has its roots in dispensationalism, a Christian theology developed in the US in the 19th century.
The view runs counter to thousands of years of Christian tradition, as it’s rejected by the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and many Protestant denominations, yet it has significant influence on US foreign policy. During a speech to the crowd of pastors at the Shiloh archeological site in the West Bank, Evans addressed recent remarks from Vice President JD Vance and President Trump about not supporting the Israeli annexation of the Palestinian territory, which he calls Judea and Samaria.
“You said that the policy of the administration is that the West Bank will not be annexed by Israel. Mr. Vice President, we love you, and we love America, but the policy of the God who birthed America and the policy of the God who gave these people this land is in fact that Judea and Samaria is Bible land,” Evans said.
“Eighty percent of Bible stories come out of Judea and Samaria. So don’t pressure Israel to give illegal, radical Islam Jew-haters Judea and Samaria,” he said, adding that the MAGA movement is based on the Bible and “upon the God of this book, the God of Israel.”
While American evangelicals have always comprised a solid base of support for Israel, that support has been declining, part of an overall trend among Americans due to Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza.
“There is a growing cancer within the evangelical movement in America, where people are thinking Israel doesn’t matter and there’s nothing biblical about our relationship with Israel. This is very dangerous,” US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told CBN News during the summit.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry has taken other steps to influence American Christians, including spending millions on a propaganda campaign targeting evangelical churches in the US that is being called the “largest Christian Church Geofencing Campaign in US history, a project that was revealed by a federal filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The pastors’ summit in Israel concluded with Huckabee “commissioning” the attendees as “ambassadors” to stand with the state of Israel. During their time in Israel, the pastors were addressed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told them, “Stand up and be counted. Tell the truth. Speak to young people. Speak up to be counted. I’m counting on you, and I know you’ll do what has to be done. That’s what our destiny calls for.”
