TEL AVIV, Israel: Israel’s founding fathers, who etched a commitment to encouraging Jewish immigration into the declaration of independence, might be surprised to find that, seven decades later, the state is relying on Christians to fulfill that promise.
What was once a strictly Jewish-funded mission is increasingly being bankrolled by evangelical Christians. Israel’s Christian allies now fund about a third of all immigrants moving to the country, according to a tally by The Associated Press.
The figures reflect the ever tightening relationship between Israel and its evangelical Christian allies, whom Israel has come to count on for everything from political support to tourism dollars.
“After 2000 years of oppression and persecution, today you have Christians who are helping Jews,” said Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a group that raises money from evangelical Christians for Jewish causes. “This is an amazing thing.”
Israel has long depended on diaspora Jewish communities, especially in the United States, for donations and to lobby their local governments on its behalf. But evangelical communities have become increasingly important.
Israeli charities raise millions of dollars from Christians around the world, and evangelical Christians make up 13 percent of all tourists to Israel. A parliamentary caucus works with evangelical legislators around the world to foster support for Israel.
Israelis can also thank white evangelicals for helping to put President Donald Trump, an ardent supporter of Israel’s nationalist government, in the White House.
“Israel has no better friends, I mean that, no better friends in the world than the Christian communities around the world,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Christian media summit in Jerusalem last year.
European and American Jewish philanthropists championed immigration to Israel, known as “Aliyah,” or ascending, even before the creation of the state in 1948, by working to settle Jews in what was then Ottoman and British Palestine. In the decades after independence, the government partnered with Jewish groups to organize dramatic airlifts of Jews from troubled countries.
Christian support for the Aliyah largely began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and has grown in recent years as American Jews have redirected charitable donations to niche causes. That has forced nonprofits to expand their pool of benefactors.
“We don’t see any reason why not to rely on help, including donations, from all our friends around the world, be they Jewish, Christian or others,” said Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Jewish Agency, a nonprofit that spearheads Jewish immigration to Israel.
The Israeli Ministry of Aliyah and Immigrant Absorption, however, said it has no ties to Christian groups.
Of the more than 28,000 Jews who immigrated to Israel in 2017, at least 8,500 arrived thanks to Christian donations, according to official figures and numbers provided by the Fellowship and Jerusalem’s International Christian Embassy, another prominent group that raises money from evangelicals. The Jewish Agency receives additional undisclosed funds from other Christian donors, meaning that share could be even higher.
Not everyone is pleased. Some in Israel are suspicious that the evangelical embrace stems from a belief that the modern Jewish state is a precursor to the apocalypse — when Jesus will return and Jews will either accept Christianity or die.
Liberal Jews, who make up the majority of the American Jewish community, bristle at the evangelicals’ ties to the political right and their support for Israel’s settlement enterprise in the West Bank, a major sticking point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group in Washington, said the Jewish community should be “wary of taking help from those who are playing with our lives to further their own religious and ideological purposes.”
Evangelical Christianity is one of the fastest growing religious movements, making up more than a third of the world’s estimated 2 billion Christians. Evangelicals say their affinity for Israel stems from Christianity’s Jewish roots. Some view Israel’s establishment as fulfilling biblical prophecy, ushering in an anticipated Messianic age. Jews also believe in a future Messianic age, but do not believe Jesus is the Messiah.
“It’s a connection. It’s a DNA that goes back to Sunday school, to their very being. It’s a love affair, it’s a romance with a nation that is connected to heaven and earth,” said Mike Evans, an evangelical Christian who sits on Trump’s evangelical faith advisory board.
In recent years, suspicions have diminished in Israel, thanks in part to the steady flow of donations as well as evangelical representatives playing down talk of the end of days. They say it is not a central tenet for most of the world’s evangelicals or what makes them love Israel.
Johnnie Moore, the faith board’s spokesman, said the skepticism over evangelical support was “ignorant” and “offensive.”
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews says it gave $188 million to the Jewish Agency over the course of a two decade-long partnership, with Eckstein even sitting on the agency’s executive board. But after disagreements over how to publicize the Fellowship’s support, the two had a falling out and the Fellowship struck out on its own in 2014.
Its own Aliyah project has since ferried thousands of Jews to Israel from 27 countries, providing them with financial assistance beyond that extended by the state, as well as vocational training and assistance with local bureaucracy. The Fellowship said it has spent nearly $20 million on Aliyah since 2014. Eckstein said the organization believed Jewish-funded groups were not doing enough, particularly following the conflict in Crimea.
Some 200 Jews from Ukraine arrived at Israel’s Ben Gurion International airport recently wearing Fellowship t-shirts. They were greeted by a gaggle of boisterous Israeli student volunteers, waving flags and chanting Hebrew folk songs.
One of the new arrivals, Serghey Lanovyy, said it made no difference to him that his Aliyah was funded by Christians.
“Religion is religion. You can believe whatever you want but if people need help, they need help,” he said.
Christians emerge as key patrons for Jews moving to Israel
Christians emerge as key patrons for Jews moving to Israel
Palestinian Red Crescent says Israeli strike kills 7 in West Bank
- The strike occurred in the village of Tamun in northern West Bank, organization says
- Israeli said its forces were involved in a ‘counterterrorism operation’ in the area
RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories: The Palestinian Red Crescent said an Israeli drone strike in a village in the occupied West Bank killed at least seven people on Wednesday, while the military said it had struck an “armed cell.”
“An Israeli strike in the village of Tamun in the northern West Bank killed seven people,” the group said in a statement.
The Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah said eight people had been killed.
The Israeli military told AFP its forces were involved in a “counterterrorism operation” in the area.
As part of the operation, an Israeli “aircraft, with the direction of ISA (security agency) intelligence, struck an armed terrorist cell in the area of Tamun,” the military said in a statement.
Violence has soared throughout the West Bank since the war between Hamas and Israel broke out in Gaza on October 7, 2023.
Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 870 Palestinians, including many militants, in the West Bank since the start of the Gaza war, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
At least 29 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military raids in the territory over the same period, according to official Israeli figures.
First Gaza aid ship arrives at Egypt’s El-Arish port since ceasefire
CAIRO: A Turkish ship docked at Egypt’s El-Arish on Wednesday, delivering the first aid destined for Gaza through the port since a fragile ceasefire went into effect, a Turkish official and Egyptian sources said.
“We are prepared to heal the wounds of our Gazan brothers and sisters and to meet their temporary shelter needs,” Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya posted on X on Wednesday.
The ship was loaded with 871 tons of humanitarian aid, including 300 power generators, 20 portable toilets, 10,460 tents and 14,350 blankets, according to Yerlikaya.
A team from the Egyptian Red Crescent received the Turkish aid to make the necessary arrangements for its delivery to the Strip, a source at the port, 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of the Gaza Strip, said.
Two staff from the Egyptian Red Crescent also confirmed its arrival.
Since the start of the truce in the Palestinian territory, hundreds of truckloads of aid have entered Gaza while some has been airlifted in.
The truce between Israel and Hamas came after more than 15 months of war sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Syria’s Sharaa: jihadist to interim head of state
DAMASCUS: In less than two months, Syria’s Ahmed Al-Sharaa has risen from rebel leader to interim president, after his Islamist group led a lightning offensive that toppled Bashar Assad.
Sharaa was appointed Wednesday to lead Syria for an unspecified transitional period, and has been tasked with forming an interim legislature after the dissolution of the Assad era parliament and the suspension of the 2012 constitution.
The former jihadist has abandoned his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani, trimmed his beard and donned a suit and tie to receive foreign dignitaries since ousting Assad from power on December 8.
The tall, sharp-eyed Sharaa has held a succession of interviews with foreign journalists, presenting himself as a patriot who wants to rebuild and reunite Syria, devastated and divided after almost 14 years of civil war.
Syria’s new authorities also announced Wednesday the dissolution of armed factions, including Sharaa’s own Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), which is rooted in the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda.
Since breaking ties with Al-Qaeda in 2016, Sharaa has sought to portray himself as a more moderate leader, and HTS has toned down its rhetoric, vowing to protect Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities.
But Sharaa has yet to calm misgivings among some analysts and Western governments that still class HTS as a terrorist organization.
“He is a pragmatic radical,” Thomas Pierret, a specialist in political Islam, told AFP.
“In 2014, he was at the height of his radicalism,” Pierret said, referring to the period of the war when he sought to compete with the jihadist Daesh group.
“Since then, he has moderated his rhetoric.”
Born in 1982 in Saudi Arabia, Sharaa is from a well-to-do Syrian family and was raised in Mazzeh, an upscale district of Damascus.
In 2021, he told US broadcaster PBS that his nom de guerre was a reference to his family’s roots in the Golan Heights. He said his grandfather was among those forced to flee the territory after its capture by Israel in 1967.
According to the Middle East Eye news website, it was after the September 11, 2001 attacks that he was first drawn to jihadist thinking.
“It was as a result of this admiration for the 9/11 attackers that the first signs of jihadism began to surface in Jolani’s life, as he began attending secretive sermons and panel discussions in marginalized suburbs of Damascus,” the website said.
Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he left Syria to take part in the fight.
He joined Al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, and was subsequently detained for five years, preventing him from rising through the ranks of the jihadist organization.
In March 2011, when the revolt against Assad’s rule erupted in Syria, he returned home and founded Al-Nusra Front, Syria’s branch of Al-Qaeda.
In 2013, he refused to swear allegiance to Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who would go on to become the emir of the Daesh group, and instead pledged his loyalty to Al-Qaeda’s Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
A realist in his partisans’ eyes, an opportunist to his adversaries, Sharaa said in May 2015 that he, unlike Daesh, had no intention of launching attacks against the West.
He also proclaimed that should Assad be defeated, there would be no revenge attacks against the Alawite minority that the president’s clan stems from.
He cut ties with Al-Qaeda, claiming to do so in order to deprive the West of reasons to attack his organization.
According to Pierret, he has since sought to chart a path toward becoming a credible statesman.
In January 2017, Sharaa imposed a merger with HTS on rival Islamist groups in northwestern Syria, thereby taking control of swathes of Idlib province that had been cleared of government troops.
In areas under its grip, HTS developed a civil administration and established a semblance of a state in Idlib province, while crushing its rebel rivals.
Throughout this process, HTS faced accusations from residents and human rights groups of brutal abuses against those who dared dissent, which the United Nations has classed as war crimes.
Palestinian Red Crescent says Israeli strike kills 7 in West Bank
- Palestinian Red Crescent: ‘An Israeli strike in the village of Tamun in the northern West Bank killed seven people’
- Israeli said that its forces were involved in a ‘counterterrorism operation’ in the area
RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories: The Palestinian Red Crescent said an Israeli drone strike in a village in the occupied West Bank killed at least seven people on Wednesday, while the military said it had struck an “armed cell.”
“An Israeli strike in the village of Tamun in the northern West Bank killed seven people,” the group said in a statement.
The Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah said eight people had been killed.
The Israeli military told AFP its forces were involved in a “counterterrorism operation” in the area.
As part of the operation, an Israeli “aircraft, with the direction of ISA (security agency) intelligence, struck an armed terrorist cell in the area of Tamun,” the military said in a statement.
Violence has soared throughout the West Bank since the war between Hamas and Israel broke out in Gaza on October 7, 2023.
Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 870 Palestinians, including many militants, in the West Bank since the start of the Gaza war, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
At least 29 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military raids in the territory over the same period, according to official Israeli figures.
Palestinians’ return to northern Gaza complicates Netanyahu’s war aims
- “There is no war to resume,” said Ofer Shelah, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv think tank
- The “total victory” envisioned by Netanyahu remains elusive
TEL AVIV: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed 15 months ago that Israel would achieve “total victory” in the war in Gaza — by eradicating Hamas and freeing all the hostages. One week into a ceasefire with the militant group, many Israelis are dubious.
Not only is Hamas still intact, there’s also no guarantee all of the hostages will be released. But what’s really raised doubts about Netanyahu’s ability to deliver on his promise is this week’s return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to their homes in northern Gaza. That makes it difficult for Israel to relaunch its war against Hamas should the two sides fail to extend the ceasefire beyond its initial six-week phase.
“There is no war to resume,” said Ofer Shelah, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv think tank. “What will we do now? Move the population south again?”
“There is no total victory in this war,” he said.
‘Total victory’ is elusive
Israel launched its war against Hamas after the militant group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and roughly 250 were taken hostage. Within hours, Israel began a devastating air assault on Gaza, and weeks later it launched a ground invasion.
Israel has inflicted heavy losses on Hamas. It has killed most of its top leadership, and claims to have killed thousands of fighters while dismantling tunnels and weapons factories. Months of bombardment and urban warfare have left Gaza in ruins, and more than 47,000 Palestinians are dead, according to local health authorities who don’t distinguish between militants and civilians in their count.
But the “total victory” envisioned by Netanyahu remains elusive.
In the first phase of the ceasefire, 33 hostages in Gaza will be freed, nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel will be released, and humanitarian aid to Gaza will be vastly increased. Israel is also redeploying troops to enable over 1 million Palestinians to return to their homes in northern Gaza.
In the second phase of the ceasefire, which the two sides are expected to begin negotiating next week, more hostages would be released and the stage would be set for a more lasting truce.
But if Israel and Hamas do not agree to advance to the next phase, more than half of the roughly 90 remaining hostages will still be in Gaza; at least a third of them are believed to be dead.
Despite heavy international and domestic pressure to develop a postwar vision for who should rule Gaza, Netanyahu has yet to secure an alternative to the militant group. That has left Hamas in command.
Hamas sought to solidify that impression as soon as the ceasefire began. It quickly deployed uniformed police to patrol the streets and staged elaborate events for the hostages’ release, replete with masked gunmen, large crowds and ceremonies. Masked militants have also been seen along Gaza’s main thoroughfares, waving to and welcoming Palestinians as they head back home.
A Hamas victory?
Despite the scale of death and destruction in Gaza — and the hit to its own ranks — Hamas will likely claim victory.
Hamas will say, “Israel didn’t achieve its goals and didn’t defeat us, so we won,” said Michael Milshtein, an Israeli expert on Palestinian affairs.
The return of displaced Palestinians to northern Gaza is an important achievement for Hamas, Milshtein said. The group long insisted on a withdrawal of Israeli troops and an end to war as part of any deal — two conditions that have effectively begun to be realized.
And Hamas can now reassert itself in a swath of the territory that Israel battled over yet struggled to entirely control.
To enable Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, Israel opened the Netzarim corridor, a roughly 4-mile (6-kilometer) military zone bisecting the territory. That gives Hamas more freedom to operate, while taking away leverage that would be difficult for Israel regain even if it restarted the war, said Giora Eiland, a former Israeli general who had proposed a surrender-or-starve strategy for northern Gaza.
“We are at the mercy of Hamas,” he said in an interview with Israeli Army Radio. “The war has ended very badly” for Israel, he said, whereas Hamas “has largely achieved everything it wanted.”
Little appetite to resume war
President Donald Trump could play an important role in determining the remaining course of the war.
He has strongly hinted that he wants the sides to continue to the second phase of negotiations and shown little enthusiasm for resuming the war. A visit by his Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, to Israel this week and a visit to the White House next week by Netanyahu will likely give stronger indications of where things are headed.
In announcing the ceasefire, Netanyahu said Israel was still intent on achieving all the war’s goals. He said Israel was “safeguarding the ability to return and fight as needed.”
While military experts say Israel could in practice relaunch the war, doing so will be complicated.
Beyond the return of displaced Palestinians, the international legitimacy to wage war that it had right after Hamas’ attack has vanished. And with joyful scenes of freed hostages reuniting with their families, the Israeli public’s appetite for a resumption of fighting is also on the decline, even if many are disappointed that Hamas, a group that committed the deadliest attack against Israelis in the country’s history, is still standing.
An end to the war complicates Netanyahu’s political horizon. The Israeli leader is under intense pressure to resume the war from his far-right political allies, who want to see Hamas crushed. They envision new Jewish settlements in Gaza and long-term Israeli rule there.
One of Netanyahu’s coalition partners already resigned in protest at the ceasefire deal and a second key ally has threatened to topple the government if the war doesn’t resume after the first phase. That would destabilize the government and could trigger early elections.
“Where is the total victory that this government promised?” Itamar Ben-Gvir, the former Cabinet minister who quit the government over the ceasefire said Monday.
Israel Ziv, a retired general, said restarting the war would require a new set of goals and that its motivations would be tainted.
“The war we entered into is over,” he told Israeli Army Radio. “Other than political reasons, I don’t see any reason to resume the war.”
