American Evangelicals must confront Israel’s war on Christianity
April 24, 2026 08:49 AM GMT+03:00
For decades, the political alliance between American Evangelical Zionists and the State of Israel has been treated as a theological and geopolitical fortress.
Built on a shared vision of the Holy Land, this bond has channeled billions of American taxpayer dollars and vast amounts of advanced weaponry into the Israeli military.
However, a series of disturbing events—culminating in a viral video of an Israeli soldier’s vandalism of a Jesus statue in Southern Lebanon—demands a painful, long-overdue reckoning.
If the American Christian conscience is to remain intact, it can no longer turn a blind eye to the systematic destruction of the world’s oldest Christian communities in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.
Israel must be held accountable for the desecration of churches, and the church-going American “patriots” who fund this destruction must ask themselves why they are subsidizing the erasure of their own faith’s heritage.
A pattern of destruction
The creation of Israel and its subsequent wars have been major factors in the sharp decline of the Christian population across the Levant.
Since its inception, Israel has mistreated Christians and sought to displace them in significant numbers. In 1948, some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to make room for Jewish immigrants.
Alongside their Muslim neighbors, roughly 90,000 Palestinian Christians were displaced, accelerating a demographic decline from 12.5% of the population to 1.2% today.
Thus, the recent footage from Lebanon was not an anomaly; it was a symptom of a broader policy of cultural and religious liquidation of Christians by Israel.
From Gaza City to the towns of the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran, Christian places of worship are being reduced to rubble.
The historical irony is staggering. While the Israeli government often presents itself as the sole protector of religious freedom in the Middle East, the reality on the ground tells a different story.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have overseen the bombardment of religious sites that have stood for centuries.
This is a regime that has not limited its reach to Palestine; its military actions have expanded to impact Christian and other religious sites across the region, including destruction reaching as far as Christian landmarks in Isfahan, Tehran, and other cities in Iran during recent airstrikes.
These are not isolated incidents, despite the narrative presented by Israel’s expansive propaganda machinery. A consistent pattern has been repeating for a long time.
Consider this: recent U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in Iran have damaged centuries-old Armenian churches in Isfahan and the St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Tehran.”
In Palestine, Israeli forces struck the Holy Family Church, the only Catholic church in Gaza, on July 17, 2025, killing three and injuring dozens of Christians, including the parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli, not to mention the systematic Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian Christian villages in the occupied West Bank.
Again, these are not merely collateral damage in a secular war; they are the intentional targets of a policy that views non-Jewish religious identity as an obstacle to total territorial control and land grabs.
Israel’s goal is to engineer demographics by settling global Jewry (Aliyah) in the region to create a pure ethno-supremacist Jewish land in Palestine and Lebanon, devoid of its indigenous Christian and Muslim populations.
The hypocrisy par excellence of the American Church
Perhaps the most jarring element of Israel’s anti-Christian enterprise is the source of its funding. American taxpayers—specifically those within the MAGA movement and the ranks of Christian Nationalists—are the primary financial engine behind this destruction.
This evangelical MAGA lunacy, at its extremes, is willing to go as far as to sacrifice the indigenous Christian inhabitants of the land at the expense of Jewish territorial expansionism.
Consider this: evangelical Zionist and current U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, in his February 2026 interview with Tucker Carlson, suggested that biblical interpretation grants Israel rights to vast areas of the Middle East stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, saying it would be “fine if they took it all.”
There is a profound, almost pathological hypocrisy at play. American evangelical Zionists claim to love the “Holy Land,” yet they remain silent as the original Christians of that land—the direct descendants of the first apostles—are displaced and killed.
These are people who have kept the flame of the Gospel alive for two millennia, yet because they are “non-white” Christians in the Middle East, their lives and their cathedrals seem to carry less weight than a political alliance in Washington.
We must ask the hard question: Why do American Christians support a regime that actively destroys the very faith they claim to hold dear? Is it a “moral decay” within the American church, or a blind adherence to a supremacist political ideology that has superseded the teachings of Christ?
A history of Muslim tolerance and the Zionist threat
To understand the gravity of what is being lost, one must look at the history of the region. For centuries, Muslim-majority lands were the primary refuge for those fleeing religious persecution.
When Medieval Europe was busy persecuting Jews, Muslims, and “heretical” Christian sects, it was the Ottoman Empire, the Iranian Empire, the Andalusian Empire (Al-Andalus), and other Middle Eastern and North African nations that opened their arms.
The Spanish Inquisition saw Jewish, Muslim, and “heretical” Christian refugees fleeing to the Muslim East for safety. For generations, these Jewish and Christian minorities lived within the fabric of the Muslim world.
Now, that delicate pluralism is being shattered by a Zionist movement that treats Christian and Muslim holy sites with equal disregard.
The “freedom of worship” touted by Israeli PR is a myth that dies every time a bomb levels a Christian parish, or a soldier defaces a statue of Jesus or Mary.
The call for accountability
For too long, Israel has benefited from Christian evangelicals, seeing it as “useful idiots” for its expansionist causes. However, there are clear signs that the era of America’s “unconditional support” is coming to an end.
A new generation of Americans is turning on Israel. Data confirm a significant generational divide in American attitudes toward Israel, with younger generations (Gen Z and Millennials) showing much lower levels of support than older Americans.
As another indication of this change, in a historic April 2026 vote, 40 U.S. Senate Democrats voted to block key weapon sales to Israel.
These sentiments in the U.S. public need to evolve into policy. There must be protection for Christian minorities and their places of worship, ensuring they are exempt from the death and destruction prevalent in current regional conflicts.
American Evangelical Christians must find the moral courage to say: “Not in my name.” They must demand that their tax dollars stop funding the bombardment of the Middle East’s Christian minorities—and everyone else, for that matter.
If the “patriotism” of the American right is to mean anything, it should not involve the subsidizing of a foreign military that views its own religion as a target.
Ultimately, Israel must be held accountable—not just for the loss of life, but for the systematic effort to erase the Christian footprint from the Middle East.
If the American church does not speak up now, it will have to explain to future generations why it stood by and watched while the cradles of its own faith were turned into dust. Accountability is no longer a political option; it is a spiritual necessity.
k up now, it will have to explain to future generations why it stood by and watched while the cradles of its own faith were turned into dust. Accountability is no longer a political option; it is a spiritual necessity.
Ahmad Hashemi, Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Program at the Global Policy Institute (GPI). 