Christians Are Pressing Trump to Clear a Path for Israel to Annex the West Bank

New York Times

08-03-2025

Evangelical Christian leaders who delivered votes to President Trump are now pressing him to declare that Israel can claim ownership of the West Bank, based on a promise God made to the Jews in the Bible.
They are seeking a way to pave a path toward annexation of territory that is widely viewed internationally as intended for a future Palestinian state. Israel seized the territory from Jordan in a war in 1967 and has occupied it since. In recent years, the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been encouraging Jewish settlers to build homes there at an increasing rate.
Prominent evangelical supporters of Mr. Trump are mounting a multipronged approach to pressure the president — making appearances in Israel, petitioning the White House, pushing their ideas at a key evangelical conference and building congressional backing.
Some of America's leading evangelicals, including Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins and Mario Bramnick, visited Jerusalem on Tuesday to publicly back Israel's sovereignty of the West Bank.
'I literally feel God is giving Israel a blank check,' said Mr. Bramnick, the president of the Latino Coalition for Israel and the pastor of a Florida church whose profile ballooned after he hosted prayer calls in support of claims the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Mr. Trump.
These evangelical leaders are part of a movement called Christian Zionism and believe that the land was given to the Jews in the Bible.
They refer to the West Bank with the biblical names of Judea and Samaria. They believe that Christians who assist in fulfilling this biblical pledge are blessed and that the establishment of the state of Israel indicates other biblical prophesies will follow. For some, though not all, that most notably includes an apocalypse that will lead to a second coming of Jesus Christ.
'We Christians are calling on our beloved President Trump and his team to aggressively remove all barriers to Israel's sovereignty over all the land, including Judea and Samaria,' said Terri Copeland Pearsons, an influential pastor who produced the television program of her father, the televangelist Kenneth Copeland, and now serves as the president of his eponymous Bible college in Texas. She made the remarks at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in the state last Thursday.
Organizers at the event pushed a resolution sponsored by the American Christian Leaders for Israel that rejects 'all efforts' to pressure Israel to relinquish West Bank territory. That group, formed a decade ago, describes itself as a network of about 3,000 Christian leaders 'representing tens of millions of American Christians' who advocate 'biblical truth' and steadfast support for Israel. Organizers at the convention said they would present the petition to the White House shortly after the conference. The sponsors did not respond to a request for comment on how many people signed the petition and whether it was presented to the president.
The demand is meant to help build support for a controversial effort promoted by some in Israel to annex land that is home to roughly three million Palestinians and now about half a million Israeli settlers.
Much of the world considers Israel's West Bank settlements, which have expanded rapidly in recent years, a violation of international law. Israel disputes this characterization.
The Christian Zionist advocacy around the West Bank comes as the prospect of an independent Palestinian state has grown especially dim since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, ignited a war in the enclave and also led to rising tensions in the West Bank, about 55 miles away.
Those petitioning Mr. Trump to support Israeli annexation of the West Bank say they hope such a declaration will end any further discussion of a future Palestinian state there.
Their resolution comes as Mr. Netanyahu's far-right government has greenlighted settlement construction and expansion in the West Bank at a faster rate than in the past and amid intense military raids in Palestinian cities there since January. The raids have displaced tens of thousands of residents.
The petition also joins a wave of similar initiatives by influential conservatives and Christians, in Congress and beyond, aiming to sway policy in the second Trump term.
Days before American Christian Leaders for Israel announced the petition, Representative Claudia Tenney, Republican of New York, who identifies as Presbyterian, sent a similar letter to Mr. Trump with five other members of the congressional 'Friends of Judea and Samaria Caucus' she started this year. It called on his administration to 'recognize Israel's right' to declare sovereignty over the territory, saying that doing so would be integral to defending 'the Judeo-Christian heritage on which our nation was founded.'
Asked in February at a news conference with Mr. Netanyahu about his position on Israeli annexation of the West Bank, Mr. Trump said that 'people do like the idea,' and that there would be 'an announcement probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.'
Mr. Trump's comments also helped fuel enthusiasm for a resolution on Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank adopted last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an agenda-setting annual conservative gathering.
Mr. Trump has supported other initiatives of the Israeli far right: Last month he endorsed mass Palestinian displacement from Gaza, and in January, he overrode a Biden executive order that had allowed sanctions for West Bank settlers deemed to have violated human rights.
He has selected evangelical Christian supporters of Israel for key positions in his administration, including the televangelist Paula White-Cain as a senior adviser to the newly created White House Faith Office who is vocal about her support for Israel on religious grounds, and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, a former governor and Baptist minister who has long aligned with Israeli settlers, as his nominee for ambassador to Israel.
In 2017, Mr. Huckabee participated in a ceremony in a West Bank settlement and told CNN he thinks 'Israel has title deed to Judea and Samaria,' adding that 'there is no such thing as a West Bank' or 'an occupation.' Last year after he was named for the ambassador role, he told Israeli army radio that annexation was 'of course' a possibility.
Ms. Tenney recently introduced a bill that would replace government references to the West Bank and use the biblical names instead. Representative Brian Mast, the Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has instructed staffers to call the territory Judea and Samaria, according to an internal committee memo first reported by Axios last Wednesday. (Neither lawmaker responded to requests for comment.)
Christians are far from uniform, however, and many support a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Evangelical leaders' stance does not reflect the views of the entire community, much less the perspective of all Christians or all Americans broadly, as backing for Israel has fallen amid its war with Hamas in Gaza, while support for Palestinians has risen and driven a protest movement on college campuses.
'This is a long, enduring tension we Palestinian Christians have with our siblings in the U.S., especially evangelicals,' said Daniel Bannoura, a theology doctoral candidate at Notre Dame who hosts a podcast on faith and social justice called 'Across the Divide.'
Mr. Bannoura, the son of a Baptist minister, grew up in the West Bank and later attended college and graduate school in the United States. He said that because his community in the West Bank was 'very small and dwindling' — made up of about 50,000 people by some estimates — and because their identities complicate prevailing narratives, 'Palestinian Christians haven't been given a voice.'
In stark contrast, many evangelicals have a direct line to the White House. Larry Huch, a Christian Zionist minister and television show host, boasted at the news conference promoting the West Bank annexation petition that Ms. White-Cain of the White House Faith Office was in touch.
About 80 percent of white, evangelical Christians voted for President Trump in 2024, according to a voter survey by The Associated Press. And the Christian vote more broadly was key to his victory, research from Arizona Christian University showed, with Christians making up more than 70 percent of voters and more than half voting for Mr. Trump.
'The current administration is very aware that white evangelical Christians voted in large numbers and are deeply motivated to support Israel,' said David Katibah, who leads communications and Christian engagement at Telos in Washington, a group formed by two Christian Americans in 2009 — one evangelical and the other of Palestinian descent — to support a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict through education and 'peacemaker' training.
Mr. Katibah said he had been raised in an American evangelical community and noted that within it there is not a monolithic perspective on annexation. Increasingly, younger evangelicals are embracing 'a more expansive view' that emphasizes mutual flourishing, justice and human rights for both sides, he said.
Some research does back this point. A 2021 survey commissioned by the University of North Carolina at Pembroke found a sharp shift in attitudes among younger evangelicals between 2018 and 2021, with their support for Israel dropping from 75 percent to less than 35 percent along with an accompanying rise in a desire to see United States policy that reflects a Palestinian perspective.