Leading evangelicals in push to have President Trump recognize Israeli sovereignty over ‘biblical heartland'
TEL AVIV, Israel - Last week, an influential group of American Christians publicly reaffirmed the Jewish people's right to Judea and Samaria as the biblical heartland of Israel. The Judea and Samaria area is more commonly known as the West Bank.
The declaration was unveiled at the annual National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Dallas by American Christian Leaders for Israel and was expected to be signed by 3,000 religious leaders before being delivered to President Donald Trump.
The push to apply Israeli sovereignty to the area comes after Trump said last month that his administration would make an announcement on the matter in the coming weeks when asked about annexation.
The Oslo Accords, forged under the Clinton administration, divided the West Bank into three regions: Area A, under full Palestinian jurisdiction; Area B, under Palestinian civil administration and Israeli security control; and Area C, under full Israeli authority.
A 2020 Trump plan, dubbed Peace to Prosperity, envisioned Israel annexing parts of Judea and Samaria, but was shelved in favor of the Abraham Accords, which normalized Jerusalem's ties with four Arab countries.
"The evangelicals gave Trump the presidency. He will support our position on the Bible and that's why he chose Mike Huckabee [as ambassador to Jerusalem], who supports Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria," Dr. Mike Evans, founder of Friends of Zion, which boasts just under 30 million members, told Fox News Digital.
The declaration reaffirms "the Jewish people's inalienable right to the Biblical Heartland of Israel and reject all efforts—both from the United States and the international community—to pressure the Jewish people to relinquish their ancestral homeland in Judea and Samaria."
Evans said evangelicals support Israel "because they believe in moral clarity, good versus evil, they are friends of Zion. They see Jews being killed because they're Jews, not because of land."
Pastor John Hagee, the influential founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel, told Fox News Digital that Evangelicals "know the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will always keep His word to the Children of Israel. From beginning to end, the Bible is a Zionist document mandating that all believers stand with, and bless, Israel and her people.
"For almost half a century, I have been preaching the message that Israel does not occupy the land, Israel owns the land, the title deed of which is recorded in the pages of the Bible. The land was endowed by God to the Jewish people for all time," added Hagee.
Earlier this week, Fox News Digital reported that some Republican lawmakers led by Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) urged the president to recognize Judea and Samaria as Israeli territory. Their letter to the president expressed support for Jerusalem applying sovereignty over the area, which the lawmakers said was "the heart of our shared Judeo-Christian heritage."
Israel's Parliament Speaker Amir Ohana on Feb. 23 urged the government in Jerusalem to extend sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, saying full control over the region was the "one and only way" to achieve lasting peace.
Another Likud lawmaker, Dan Illouz, told Fox News Digital that Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023 massacre "proved that any withdrawal, any concession, any illusion of coexistence with those who seek our destruction is not just naive—it is suicidal … we withdrew from Gaza, and in return we got Hamas and the massacre of our people. Judea and Samaria cannot become another terror state."
"A push for sovereignty in Judea and Samaria would be the end of Israel," Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli lawmaker and an architect of the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, told Fox News Digital. "If Israel were to become a minority of Jews dominating a majority of Palestinians, it would be neither Jewish nor democratic. I don't believe it could ever happen, but just waving this [idea] is bad enough," he said.
"The right in Israel believes that Trump would support whatever they demand. But five years ago, he suggested there could be a two-state solution. As such, it is not as clear-cut as it seems," he added.
Late last month, Netanyahu ordered the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to conduct a "massive" counter-terrorism operation in Judea and Samaria after three buses exploded near Tel Aviv, and bombs were found on two others in what is being investigated as a coordinated attack.
"This brutality and forceful displacement of civilians in the West Bank… was never about self-defense, but rather a colonial expansion scheme and an ethnic cleansing campaign," Ahmad Fattouh, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's dominant Fatah faction, told Fox News Digital.
"Annexing the West Bank will set us back to 1948 and destroy any future stability or prospects for peace. Every rational voice understands too well that there is no way forward except the two-state solution; otherwise, it will lead to endless havoc," he added.
Israel Ganz, head of the Yesha Council, the umbrella group representing Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, is working in conjunction with the government in Jerusalem to push for sovereignty.
"We started a campaign to push for it, but we won't do it without the support of the U.S.," he told Fox News Digital. "Many in the Trump administration are very connected, they know the area, and they believe in our right to this place. They understand that if they want to stabilize the situation, we must have sovereignty in Judea and Samaria."
"For Israel to be able to continue to survive and thrive along the coastal plain, which produces about 80% of the country's GDP, then it must keep control of the high grounds in Judea and Samaria," Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus (ret.), a former IDF international spokesperson and now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital.
"If any other entity, Palestinian or otherwise, holds that, it would be used as a way to threaten Israel's security; its core infrastructure, including Ben-Gurion Airport, and also its population– concentrated in a narrow strip between Haifa [in the north] and Ashdod [in the south]--approximately 15 kilometers wide," he said.
Another element, Conricus explained, is that some 500,000 Israelis currently live in Judea and Samaria, and they need to be protected.
"The trends of escalation in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem are highest now since Oct. 7. We see significant terrorist activity in almost all Palestinian cities and continued weakness of the P.A. in exercising control," he said.
Ze'ev Orenstein, director of international affairs at the Jerusalem-based City of David Foundation, told Fox News Digital that the Jewish people's millenia-long connection to the Land of Israel bestows upon them an inherent right to Judea and Samaria.
"The reality is that there is likely no other people on the planet today with a deeper–and longer–connection to any piece of land than the Jewish people with the Land of Israel, in general, and Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, in particular; where the inhabitants continue to worship the very same G-d, speak the same language, practice the same faith, celebrate the same festivals, and walk upon the very same stones, as their ancestors did so many thousands of years ago," Orenstein added.
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