Christian Zionism

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President Donald Trump’s staggering victory on Tuesday left many asking themselves what drove many Americans to support the former president at the polls.

But in Israel, posters congratulating Trump had been printed and were already adorning buildings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

In a conversation with The Media Line’s Felice Friedson, former Trump adviser Mike Evans stands out as a pioneer of Christian Zionism.

Evans, who led the banner movement in the Jewish State, said that Trump’s views on Israel played a decisive role.

“Every Bible-believer in America believes that Israel is the Bible land,” Evans said. He cited chapter 12 of Genesis, in which God tells Abraham he will “bless them that bless thee and curse them that curse thee.”

“They were very worried. They knew Donald Trump would bless Israel, and they weren’t convinced that Kamala Harris would,” he said.

Evans, who is the founder of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center, which also houses the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, has devoted his career to evangelical Christian support for Israel.

He said that the war in Israel will likely come to a close by the time Trump takes office.

Trump has no desire to be a wartime president,” he said.

“He was adamantly against the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, and he was adamantly against the Ukraine war. So, I think that President Trump is basically sending a signal to the state of Israel, to [Prime Minister] Bibi Netanyahu, even though he’s not president right now, to get everything completed by January 20.”

Netanyahu can finish the war by January, seeing as both Hezbollah and Hamas have been significantly weakened,” Evans said. But in order to do so, he continued, Israel will have to confront Iran.

“Israel cannot strike the nuclear reactors. I wrote three books on this,” Evans noted. “Number one, they’re hardened. Number two, they don’t even have the armaments that would destroy them completely. And unless they use low-yield nuclear, which they’ll not do, these are high-population cities.”

What Israel can do, he said, is collapse Iran’s economy by striking the country’s oil refineries and ports. “They’ll have no more money to fund Hamas, fund Hezbollah, or even make their own ballistic missiles against the state of Israel,” he noted.

If Israel wants to accomplish that before Trump takes office, time is short. But Evans said that Israel is “100%” ready to do so.

“Israel has the cyber ability. They have the technology. They can knock it out,” he said.
Once Iran is bankrupt, the Iranian people will rise up against their leaders, Evans predicted.

“Remember, the Shah was overthrown by an oil strike. You collapse, you bankrupt Iran, you've got 85 million people. Who are really upset about the living hell they've gone through and their country being hijacked.”

“Eighty-five percent of the population, which is 85 million, despise the mullahs,” he said. “They can overthrow those mullahs. The mullahs will not have money to even fund terror within their own country.”

Since Trump was elected, Iran has experienced an economic shockwave, Evans said, noting that Iranians have been drinking alcohol and throwing parties since the election despite official bans.
“They are going against the mullahs, and the mullahs can’t do anything because there’s too many of them,” he said.

“The window is open now. I believe Donald Trump will be extremely happy if Israel bankrupts Iran. Remember, this is the president who had the strongest sanctions,” Evans said. “If he bankrupts Iran and knocks them out, it’s going to be wonderful.”

More difficult than taking out Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, Evans said, is the matter of bringing the hostages back home.

“I don’t believe for a second that Hamas has any intention of negotiating a resolution to this crisis using the hostages,” he said.

Trump's Iran plans can bring peace
Evans said that eliminating the Iranian threat would allow Trump to facilitate peace between Israel and the Sunni world.

Peace with Saudi Arabia is achievable within a year and would be the “jewel of the Abraham Accords,” the normalization deals between Israel and four Arab countries achieved during Trump’s first term.

Making peace between Israel and the Sunni world would be “a game changer for Israel,” he said.
In such a world, Iran would no longer pose a threat to Israel, funding would dry up for Palestinian terrorism, and an international coalition would emerge that could temporarily rule Gaza, he said.

He noted that Saudi Arabia, which has been mentioned as a potential player in postwar Gaza, has “zero tolerance” for antisemitism.

“When I met with the crown prince, I found him astonishingly pro-Israel,” Evans said. “More pro-Israel than most Jewish people in America.”

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman even told Evans that his own mother was a Jew, he reported.

When asked about the continued plights of the UAE during the war, Evans noted that Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Abu Dhabi, also “can't say enough nice things about Israel.”

The positive relationship between Israel and the UAE is evident in Emirates Air and Fly Dubai’s continued service to Israel throughout the war.

Evans said that the Palestinian people have been exploited by Iran. “I believe that the Palestinians have been used as cannon fodder by the Persians who don’t want to die killing Jews.
They want other people to die for them. So, they’ve gamed these people. They’ve gamed them in Lebanon.

They gamed them here in Gaza. But all that’s going to stop. And when it stops, there’s an opportunity to reform, rebuild, reeducate,” he said.

What led to October 7?
He said that the October 7 attack was not a result of the Palestinians’ desire for a state but rather the “radical Islamic ideology” that Palestinians have been exposed to.

“You can’t take people that believe in their hearts that Jews invented the diseases of the world, the wars of the world, and the deceit of Satan and expect them to be reeducated in a short process. It’s going to take time. It’s going to take patience,” Evans said. He noted that some “bad actors” will not be willing to be reeducated and will have to “get out of there.”

Eventually, peace can be achieved, but “it’s certainly not going to happen in a peace summit that is going to talk about land,” Evans said. “They still want to kill Jews.”

Evans described Netanyahu as “the most brilliant man on the planet.” “The only advice that I have for him is the advice that I’ve told him many times in the past: Put all of your faith in God and seek his strength and wisdom and power,” he said.

With God’s help, Evans said, Netanyahu might go down in history as “the 21st century Winston Churchill.”

Political differences, especially regarding Trump, mark some of the starkest differences between Jews in Israel and Jews in America.

Evans suggested that American Jewish support for the Democratic party could be explained in part by the sense among American Jews that promoting tolerance might protect them from antisemitism.

He described the current relationship between Jewish and Christian Zionists as at an all-time high.

During Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s initial courtship of the Christian Zionist movement, many Israeli Jews were suspicious of Christians’ motives.

“As the years went by, they started seeing [Christian Zionists] do good deeds and make sacrifices. And they thought, wow, they really care about us. And it’s not a hidden agenda. They really do care about us. And so this day is a brand-new day,” he said.

“The State of Israel now knows something about Christians. They know what a real Christian is,” he said. “And Mother Teresa said to me, real Christians can’t kill Jews. They have to love Jews. Because Jesus was Jewish. And love is not something you say. It’s something you do.”

It’s hard to question Evan’s love of the Jewish State. He jokingly recounted telling his wife that there was another woman in his life.

“She said, who? What?” he laughed. “I said, yes, her name is Israel. I’ve been with her over 200 times since we got married. … So, Israel is the love of my life, and I have to be with her always.”

Pete Hegseth wears his Christian pride on his sleeve — literally, and sometimes in Hebrew.

The Minnesota National Guard veteran, Fox News personality and now nominee for U.S. secretary of defense has a slew of religiously inspired tattoos that have drawn attention as Hegseth’s public vetting for a senior position in President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet has begun.

Hegseth, 44, has a litany of ink that points to his military service and penchant for patriotism, including the U.S. Constitution’s famous opening phrase “We the People,” a “Join, or Die” snake from the American Revolution, an American flag with an AR-15 rifle and a patch of his regiment, the 187th Infantry.

Other tattoos are religious in nature — and raising eyebrows over their potential implications for an official with responsibility for national security.

Hegseth’s tattoos, political views and religious affiliation and background are consistent with an extreme strain of Christian nationalism, according to Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies. Specifically, he appears to be belong to a fringe denomination known as Reformed Reconstructionism, which believes in applying biblical Christian law to society, exclusively male leadership, and actively preparing the world for the prophesied return of Jesus.

The denomination has an affinity for the Crusades, the military campaign waged during the Middle Ages by European Christians to rid Muslims from the Holy Land, as described in the Old and New Testaments.

One of Hegseth’s most prominent tattoos is a large Jerusalem cross on his chest, a symbol featuring a large cross potent with smaller Greek crosses in each of its four quadrants. The symbol was used in the Crusades and represented the Kingdom of Jerusalem that the Crusaders established.

Crusader symbols have also grown popular on the far-right, which sees the imagery as a nod to an era of European Christian wars against Muslims and Jews. The shooter who committed the 2019 New Zealand mosque massacre had adopted symbols of the Crusades, and a crusader symbol also appeared at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in the U.S. Capitol as well as at the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Hegseth has said his tattoo kept him away from President Joe Biden’s inauguration just two weeks after Jan. 6.

“I was in the National Guard during the inauguration of Joe Biden, so I served under Bush, served under Obama, served under Trump, and now was going to guard the inauguration because I was in the D.C. guard,” he told Fox in June. “Ultimately, members of my unit in leadership deemed that I was an extremist or a white nationalist because of a tattoo I have, which is a religious tattoo. It’s a Jerusalem cross. Everybody can look it up, but it was used as a premise to revoke my orders to guard the inauguration.”

Hegseth also has “Deus Vult,” Latin for “God wills it,” tattooed on his bicep. The phrase was used as a rallying cry for the First Crusade in 1096. It is also the closing sentence of Hegseth’s 2020 book, titled “American Crusade.”

The slogan has also been used by members of far-right, white supremacist and Christian nationalist groups. The perpetrator of the 2023 Allen, Texas, mall shooting had it tattooed alongside neo-Nazi tattoos, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which said elsewhere that the phrase had been “adopted by some white supremacists.”

Hegseth also has a cross and sword tattooed on his arm, which he says represents a New Testament verse. The verse, Matthew 10:34, reads, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

He later added “Yeshua,” or Jesus in Hebrew, under the sword. Hegseth told the site Media Ink in a 2020 interview that the tattoo was Jesus’ Hebrew name, which he mistakenly said was “Yehweh,” a Biblical spelling of God’s name. He told Media Ink that he got the tattoo while in Bethlehem, Jesus’ birthplace, which is located in the present-day West Bank, where he was reporting for Fox Nation.

“Israel, Christianity and my faith are things I care deeply about,” Hegseth told Media Ink.

Hegseth opposes the two-state solution and supports exclusive Israeli sovereignty in the Holy Land. He has also said the idea of rebuilding the biblical Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is a “miracle” that could happen in our lifetimes. The First and Second Temples stood on a site where the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine, now stands.

Hegseth expressed these views in a 2018 speech delivered in Jerusalem at a conference organized by the right-wing Israel National News, also known as Arutz Sheva.

The speech laid out a vision of a world beset by a growing darkness that can only be saved by the United States, Israel and fellow “free people” from other countries.

He criticized the Obama administration’s record on Iran and said Trump is providing the right leadership on the issue while calling Europe “a museum soon to be drowned out by radical Islam and Islamism.”

He said that seeing the reality on the ground and talking to Israelis revealed the irrelevance of the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“I take a solemn responsibility in coming here and learning from Joe and from others about the truth on the ground and then going back to America and fighting the fake news about the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arab Israeli peace process, the so-called two-state solution that still drips off the lips of the intelligentsia in America today, when if you walk the ground today, you understand there is no such thing as the outcome of a two-state solution. There is one state.”

He concluded his speech by drawing a line from the historical milestones of Israeli history to a vision of the building of the Third Temple.

Visiting the Western Wall, he said, “got me thinking about another miracle that I hope all of you don’t see too far away, because 1917 was a miracle, 1948 was a miracle, 1967 was a miracle, 2017, the Declaration of Jerusalem as the capital was a miracle. And there’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the Temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.

“I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen. But I know that it could happen.”