Trump picks shed light on Christian Zionists' dark fielty to Israel

Back in 2018, soon after Donald Trump moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington in a buoyant mood. To the Israeli prime minister of Israel, the US president was an ally comparable with Lord Balfour and Harry Truman: the first recognised the rights of Jewish people in their ancestral land, while the second recognised the Jewish state before any other world leader.

But Netanyahu made another, rather more recondite comparison. “I want to tell you,” he enthused, “that the Jewish people have a long memory, so we remember the proclamation of the great king, Cyrus the Great, the Persian king 2,500 years ago. He proclaimed that the Jewish exiles in Babylon could come back and rebuild our Temple in Jerusalem.”

Obviously, the president had not gone quite that far. The foundations for a new temple had yet to be laid. On the face of it, the comparison was a preposterous example of sycophancy. It would have been absurd to mint a coin with Trump’s profile superimposed over that of the Persian king. According to the Times of Israel, someone in Tel Aviv did just that.

As the full implications of Trump’s victory sink in—to use a phrase coined by Elon Musk—it appears there may well be further repercussions from Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon. One of these is that a conquest that brought an end to the bondage of the Israelites may well land the Palestinians in a similar predicament.

Everyone knows that the story of America’s special relationship with Israel is a long one. In the case of Joe Biden’s with Netanyahu, maybe too long. Relations between them have been fraught of late. Now, there are signs that the mood is about to become more cordial as Donald Trump announces the names of his team.

Read more: Trump cabinet picks: A dream line-up for Israel's far right

And if Vivek Ramaswamy’s views are anything to go by, the new administration will be a disaster for the Palestinian cause. The biotech entrepreneur has made the gruesome suggestion that the heads of Hamas leaders be affixed to spikes and ranged along the Gaza border. Even some Maccabi ultras would blanch at that kind of imagery. However, Ramaswamy’s role is not important enough to be scrutinised by the Senate. Instead, he seems to have been appointed to keep Elon Musk company.

Many of Trump’s picks are controversial in ways that do not impinge on tensions in the Middle East. The choice of an anti-vax conspiracy theorist in the shape of RFK Junior, for instance, to head the health department has been the cause of domestic rumblings. Then there’s the decision to make Matt Gaetz the attorney general, despite allegations of sexual misconduct and, moreover, despite his single-minded hounding of former speaker Kevin McCarthy.

But to top them all, there’s Pete Hegseth, a man who once claimed he hadn’t washed his hands in ten years—admittedly, this was before the pandemic—and who also comes laden with allegations of sexual impropriety. There is something distinctly corporeal about Hegseth. Numerous tattoos mean that his body can be read as an account of the evolution of Republican eschatology.

So provocative have choices like these been that pundits have speculated whether this is a deliberate test of the Republican party’s loyalties. After all, the bulk of the nominations have to be vetted and agreed to by the Senate, which, along with the House of Representatives, is dominated by the GOP. There is even a theory that the wilder picks are deliberately intended to fail in order to draw the fire of the senators away from other—in some ways equally controversial—choices, like Tulsi Gabbard for the intelligence brief.

Thus, Jonathan Freedland has mused whether Trump might know "that Gaetz will never be attorney general, that his nomination will be blocked in the Senate where [...] too many will baulk. Gaetz is a chum, thrown into the water to satisfy the piranhas so that Trump can quietly ensure his other nominees get through".

If this were really the case, however, it seems doubtful that the president-elect would be invoking an archaic rule that would allow for recess appointments to avoid scrutiny altogether. He knows what a cabinet of curiosities he is foisting on his party. Assuming he is in earnest and would like to see all his nominations accepted, what do they tell us about this modern Cyrus’s plans for Israel and Palestine?

In the case of the prospective Middle East envoy, surprisingly little. Just about the sum total of what we know about Steven Witkoff is that he’s a Jewish real estate investor whose friendship with Trump is such that he was playing golf with him at the time of the second assassination attempt.

We know far more about Mike Huckabee, the prospective ambassador to Israel. In 2018, he was remarkably forthcoming in his view that there was “no such thing as an occupation” and that Israel had a “title deed to Judea and Samaria.” These are the names used by many in Israel for the occupied West Bank.

The former Arkansas governor and evangelical Christian also revealed that he was against a two-state solution and there was “really no such thing as a Palestinian.” According to the BBC, 'the Israeli far right has indicated that it sees Huckabee’s appointment as a sign that it will be able to further advance its agenda, including annexation of the West Bank, during the next Trump term [...] Smotrich said that 2025 would be “the year of sovereignty” in the West Bank, adding that he had instructed Israeli authorities to begin preparatory work for annexation of the occupied territory.’

In a remarkable mirroring of the Huckabee nomination, Netanyahu decided to nominate a hardline settler leader for the Israeli ambassador to Washington three days after Trump’s election. US-born Yechiel Leiter, who was Netanyahu’s chief of staff when he was finance minister, supports the annexation of the West Bank. According to the Haaretz newspaper, he was once active in the US-based Jewish Defence League, the organisation founded by far-right rabbi Meir Kahane. His son was killed fighting in Gaza.

If Mike Huckabee’s sympathy with the Israeli right seems obvious, his evangelism might appear, at first glance, to be incidental to his views. In fact, it is an essential key to understanding them. During the election campaign, Trump was keen to address the concerns of the evangelicals. On more than one occasion he referred to them as ‘my beautiful Christians’ and assured them they would never have to vote again, so long as they overcame their reluctance to do so now.

When Trump effected the embassy move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it was as a result of evangelical pressure, specifically in the form of Texas-based Pentecostal televangelist John Hagee and his Christians United for Israel. Hagee’s movement was the subject of ‘Praying for Armageddon’, a documentary that followed the investigations of Lee Fang. Founded in 2006 and with 8 million members, CUFI is the most well-funded and powerful ‘pro-Israel’ organisation in America, dwarfing AIPAC, J Street and others.

In essence, the evangelicals espouse the state of Israel not out of any love for Jews but as a prelude to Armageddon and the return of Christ to Jerusalem. This led Abraham Foxman, then national director of the Anti-Defamation League, to complain, “It is for their own salvation, not for Jewish salvation; it’s so they will see the Second Coming of the Messiah. A campaign of Christians to send Jews to Israel is morally offensive.”

Chris Lehmann, writing in The Nation, was equally unimpressed: ‘American evangelicals have long prided themselves on their undeviating support for Israel. But the basis of this alliance is not a standard convergence of diplomatic interests, and it’s certainly not a flourish of faith-based solidarity with the Jews. Instead, it’s a matter of the opportunistic choreographing of the foreordained final act of history. Believers in the literal interpretation of the “end times” prophecy see the fortunes of Israel as a key harbinger of the Final Judgment and the elevation of fallen human history into the realm of the divine. In secular leftist politics, advocates of rapid escalation of class and geopolitical conflict are known as accelerationists; in end times prophecy belief, acceleration is left to God’.

Such ‘Christian Zionists’ have also been longstanding funders of Israel’s extreme far right, a fact not lost on Netanyahu, who has been happy to overlook their apocalyptic motives. Between 2001 and 2015, the John Hagee Foundation donated over $58mn to far-right Israeli organisations, including settlements and Im Tirtzu, an extreme nationalist group that, at the time, literally demonised Israeli progressives (depicting Knesset member Naomi Chazan with horns) and helped pass anti-NGO laws.

Washington State University historian Matthew Avery Sutton, author of American Apocalypse, a study of modern prophecy faith, says the the pronouncements of Hagee and his son make clear that the evangelical right, unlike many other religious Americans, has zero interest in a negotiated settlement to the Israeli occupation. “In their ideal world, there would be no two-state solution, no Palestinian state,” he notes. “The idea is that Jews should control the entire land that King David controlled.” This will lead to the final battle and the return of Jesus to supervise the Rapture.

It’s whacky stuff, maybe, but quite mainstream in the Republican party. The new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is just one recent example of a prominent figure to come under its influence. Addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, Johnson reiterated his opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza, proclaiming that “God will bless the nation that blesses Israel.”

This sentiment comes from an allied evangelical tradition of pro-Zionism known as “blessings theology,” which hinges on God’s pledge to Abraham in Genesis that he will “bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.” The Speaker also appealed to the logic of end-times prophecy, declaring that “God is not done with Israel.”

Significantly, Johnson has put pressure on the chair of the House Ethics Committee not to publish their report on Gaetz. It may not be coincidental that he owes his new job, in part at least, to the machinations which toppled his predecessor. Gaetz resigned two days before the committee was set to decide the publication issue.

He is that rare thing among the nominees: a man unpopular with American Jewry. When his appointment was announced, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted: ‘Rep. Matt Gaetz has a long history of trafficking in antisemitism—from explaining his vote against the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act by invoking the centuries-old trope that Jews killed Jesus to defending the Great Replacement Theory to inviting a Holocaust denier as his 2018 State of the Union guest. He should not be appointed to any high office, much less one overseeing the impartial execution of our nation’s laws.’

For his part, pastor John Hagee has said the Antichrist will be gay and Jewish. He has regularly expressed strong antisemitic feelings. This doesn’t mean he harbours any less belligerent feelings towards Iran. As he explained to Lee Fang, In plain Texas speech, "America should roll up its sleeves and knock the living daylights out of Iran for what they have done for Israel. Hit them so hard that our enemies will once again fear us.”

After Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, he took to his pulpit at his Cornerstone Church in San Antonio to urge immediate US intervention against the latter-day Persians. While the Biden administration was calling for de-escalation, Hagee was advocating not just war but, to be precise, Armageddon.

This brings me back to another of Trump’s appointments that have caused particular consternation among Republicans and the press, though with the obvious exception of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News; Pete Hegseth once co-hosted Fox and Friends Weekend.

If placed in charge of the Pentagon, the former serviceman and Guantanamo guard would have the kind of sway his recent career as a TV personality would scarcely seem to merit. The Jewish News Syndicate reported that in a 2018 conference, Hegseth said there was no reason why Solomon’s Temple should not be rebuilt on Temple Mount: ‘Speaking at the Arutz Sheva conference in the Israeli capital’s King David Hotel, Hegseth said re-establishing a Jewish temple on the site would be a “miracle,” adding, “I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen, but I know it could happen.”

He also appeared to endorse extending Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria: “A step in that process, a step in every process, is a recognition that facts and activities on the ground truly matter,” said Hegseth. “That’s why going and visiting Judea and Samaria and understanding that sovereignty—the very sovereignty of Israeli soil, Israeli cities, locations—is a critical next step to showing the world that this is the land for Jews and the Land of Israel.”

What the Jewish News Syndicate didn’t go into was the matter of Hegseth’s tattoos. Jonathan Freedland was not so discreet: ‘He’s covered in tattoos, including symbols favoured by the Christian nationalist far right, among them the slogan Deus Vult and the Jerusalem cross, which celebrates the medieval Crusades when Christians earned their spurs slaughtering infidel Muslims and Jews.’

The Times of Israel explained the ‘Deus Vult’ slogan, which is tattooed on his bicep, as Latin for ‘God wills it.’ 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, American Crusade.

The slogan has 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 claims that the phrase has been “adopted by some white supremacists.”

Elsewhere on Hegseth’s body, which is a kind of living document, appear the US Constitution’s famous opening phrase “We the People,” a “Join, or Die” snake from the American Revolution, and an American flag with an AR-15 rifle and a patch of his regiment, the 187th Infantry.

But Hegseth claims that it was the Jerusalem cross that led to his rejection by the National Guard when he applied for a crucial role. “Everybody can look it up, but it was used as a premise to revoke my orders to guard the inauguration.”

Did he mean to say ‘a pretext’? We may never know. The inauguration in question was that of Joe Biden.

The belief that the establishment of a Jewish state will be the prelude to the Last Judgment has been around for a long time. Sir Isaac Newton is known to the world as a pioneering physicist, but he also held radical views in terms of religion and even dabbled in the occult, including the Kabbalah. Way back in the eighteenth century, Newton predicted a Jewish return to Palestine, with the rebuilding of Jerusalem by the late 19th century and—allowing for the inevitable planning hiccups —the erection of the Third Temple by the 20th or 21st century. This would lead to the end of the world no later than 2060.

If Newton was right, then for warmongering evangelicals and tattooed crusaders alike, it looks like being a busy 35 years.