U.S. Christian support for Israel recalibrates after Netanyahu’s ouster

A Christian worships at a prayer hall overlooking Jerusalem in 2018. Photo by Micah Danney.

NEW YORK — As an unlikely coalition of politicians threatened to end Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year reign as Israel’s prime minister last month, Mike Evans, a stridently pro-Israel evangelical leader, published a scathing open letter condemning coalition leader Naftali Bennett.

“You betrayed the very principles that a generation gave their blood for and died for,” Evans wrote on June 3. “You want to be in bed with the Muslim Brotherhood and Leftists. God have mercy on your soul. You are a pathetic bitter little man, so obsessed with destroying Netanyahu that you're willing to damage the State of Israel for your worthless cause.”

Evans was reacting to the news that Bennett, once chief of staff to Netanyahu, had joined forces with centrist politician Yair Lapid to head a coalition of members of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, from eight parties that span the political spectrum, including a small Arab Islamist party. They were attempting to cobble together enough support for a vote of confidence that would unseat Netanyahu, who, amid a legal probe into corruption allegations against him, had been unable to gain enough votes to create a governing coalition.

Their effort would succeed by a single vote, and Bennett was sworn in as prime minister on June 13, ending the longest stint of a prime minister in Israel’s history.

Evans runs the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem that honors non-Jewish allies of the Jewish people and the creation of the state in 1948. He also heads the Jerusalem Prayer Team organization, which maintains an international audience and solicits donations to support Holocaust survivors, according to its website. Evans has been a close ally of Netanyahu’s since his first term as prime minister in the 1990s. They met as young men, before Netanyahu got into politics. 

After Donald Trump’s election, Evans lent his influence to the successful push for the U.S. embassy to be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which signified American recognition of the city as the capital of Israel. American presidents had long avoided the move in order to keep it as a bargaining chip in a potential peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem to be the capital of a future Palestinian state. Many evangelicals praised the move as a fulfillment of prophecy that solidified Israel’s status as the home of the Jewish people, with the holy city as their capital. To mark the occasion, Evans put up posters around the city and adorned buses with wrapping that celebrated Trump’s support for Israel. 

In his letter, Evans decried Bennett’s actions as a betrayal of not only his former boss but the entire pro-Israel evangelical community, which Evans said he’d spent his life building.

“You have lost the support of Evangelicals 100 percent. I don't know how you can sleep at night. It would have been so easy for you to have gone with a conservative government. We gave you four years of miracles under Donald Trump and this is how you show your appreciation- shitting on our face. How dare you!” Evans wrote.

One of the posters Evans put up around Jerusalem ahead of Trump's visit in 2018. Photo by Micah Danney.

In a separate blog post for The Times of Israel, he likened the coalition’s efforts to a striptease that was attempting to seduce Israelis to turn against themselves.

“Everything we evangelicals have sacrificed our lives to build they’re destroying. While Rome burns, they fiddle. I will only have one mission in life left, to use every bit of my energy and power to destroy these fools before they destroy the nation,” Evans wrote.

Bennett’s coalition gained enough votes in the Knesset to take power on June 13. Four days later, the Philos Project, a New York-based group that advocates for Israel and “positive Christian engagement in the Near Eastern cultures,” published an open letter in support of the new government. It was signed by a diverse group of more than 80 Christian leaders in the U.S.

“We want to thank you in advance for protecting our shared values as they apply to Israel’s citizens, whether Jews, Christians, Muslims, or Druze; for guarding the holy sites and welcoming religious pilgrims from around the world to discover the birthplace of their faith; for defending Israel from outside aggression; and for continuing to work toward peace with Israel’s neighbors. In return, we pledge to deepen our friendship with your country and its wonderful people,” the letter said.

It was partly in response to what Evans had published, said Luke Moon, deputy director at the Philos Project. Evans had insinuated that going against Netanyahu was akin to going against Israel, and therefore going against God.

“Which was kind of absurd, but it got a lot of play and it hurt the reputation of all Christians,” Moon said.

Many Jewish Israelis don’t understand the distinctions between different denominations. Philos wanted to show that Evans didn’t speak for them. 

The letter’s intent was also to dispel the notion that Christians who support Israel do so for hyper-political reasons. In early May, Ron Dermer, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., said at a conference that Israel should prioritize the support of evangelicals over that of American Jews because the latter are “disproportionately among our critics.” Evangelicals’ numbers and passion make them the backbone of American support for Israel, he said.

“That kind of rhetoric was very unhelpful for us as Christians that support Israel,” Moon said. For most of them, their support is above politics, he said.

Dermer was Netanyahu’s ambassador to Israel’s most powerful ally for seven years and is considered to be closely aligned with his thinking. Courting and prioritizing evangelical support was a strategy that Netanyahu embraced, but behind closed doors it was highly controversial within his cabinet. While the political and financial support (an estimated $100-$200 million per year) is welcome, some Jewish Israelis and their leaders are uneasy about the friendship of people whose theology considers them to have not yet attained a due conversion.

Israel has anti-proselytization laws on the books that prevent Christians from certain activities that would be considered normal for churches in the U.S., like offering free food or other “material benefits” to entice Jews to join the fold. While there haven’t been any prosecutions, Christians working at faith-based organizations in Israel report being monitored by anti-missionary Jewish groups and by the government. While proselytizing is mostly legal, missionary is a dirty word in Israel.

Evans struck a somewhat more moderate tone at a press conference in Jerusalem on June 8, five days before the vote that would certify what he warned against. Still, he was obstinate.

“If Bibi Netanyahu goes in the opposition, we evangelicals – my 77 million evangelicals – will go in the opposition with him,” he said. “We’ll still support the state of Israel, but we’re not going to have the same position we’ve had because we won’t have trust. And trust is everything.”

The Jerusalem Prayer Team’s Facebook page had 77 million followers before Facebook removed it in May during the violence between Israel and Gaza. Facebook determined that it had violated its policy against “spam and inauthentic behavior.” During the heightened international attention, Facebook users opposed to the page’s stance launched a campaign to mass-report it. Evans told the Christian Broadcasting Network that it was an “organized attempt by radical Islamic organizations to achieve this objective.”

While Evans claims to have the support of 10% of the evangelical community, some observers are skeptical of that assertion. After the Knesset vote, on June 15, Evans posted a video in which he touted his role in Israel’s friendship with evangelicals.

“I am the bridge-builder for the Christian Zionists of the world with Begin,” he said, referring to Menachem Begin, founder of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party and the sixth prime minister of Israel. Evans denounced evangelical leaders for uniting against him “like a bunch of vultures” at the behest of left-wing politicians in Israel.

“Not one of them called me to comfort me when I was getting death threats, but rather they wanted to stoke me like one of the prophets,” he said.

Other big-name evangelical leaders have promised their continued support and that of their large followings. ​​Ari Morgenstern, spokesman for Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, told Cleveland Jewish News that “Christian Zionists have had a relationship with every Prime Minister since [David] Ben-Gurion. That will not change.”

A day after Netanyahu lost the office, he hosted Hagee and former U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley at the Prime Minister’s Residence. They posed for a photo that Netanyahu posted on social media. It caused an uproar among his opponents. One group threatened to petition the country’s High Court of Justice if he didn’t vacate the home, furious that he was acting like he was still prime minister.

While top evangelical leaders’ support for Israel has been synonymous with support for Netanyahu, Philos Project president Robert Nicholson said in a statement that the diverse nature of the new government -- decried by Netanyahu supporters as ideologically impure -- is a positive development.

“Here you have Jews and Arabs, both religious and irreligious, coming from the political left, right and center,” Nicholson said. “This is a government that truly embodies Israel’s flourishing democracy.”

Moon said there are pros and cons to the change. The fact that the “unity government” is unified only around opposition to Netanyahu could be a challenge for his organization. The coalition is not expected to make progress on the larger questions facing the country, like a two-state solution, which the Philos Project supports. It is simply expected to legislate on basic governmental responsibilities, which it has been hindered from doing by Netanyahu’s inability to form his own coalition.

While many Israel-supporters may have seen the former prime minister as the face of the country, Moon said the new government could be positive for Christian groups that saw engagement on Israel as too connected to Netanyahu.

“It’s an opportunity for those people to find their way back to the table if they had left,” he said.