(RNS) — On Feb. 3, the night before his press conference with President Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with 14 prominent American evangelical Christian leaders at Blair House, across the street from the White House. Figures such as Jentezen Franklin, Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, John Hagee, Tony Perkins and several other key pastors gathered in a 90‑minute closed‑door session orchestrated by the newly designated U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.
It’s revealing that Netanyahu’s first meeting was not with American Jewish leaders but with American evangelicals.
In a subsequent CBN interview, Franklin, senior pastor of Free Chapel, a multisite church based in Gainesville, Georgia, recounted that Netanyahu expressed gratitude for evangelical leaders’ steadfast support of Israel during the war in Gaza. Second, the prime minister voiced deep concern that younger American Christians were beginning to withhold the blind allegiance their elders have long offered.
Afterward, Franklin tweeted on X that “there is no issue more important than America’s support for Israel.”
The situation is deeply worrisome on many levels. It is utterly shocking that these evangelical leaders chose to meet with a man subject to an active International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes instead of raising a prophetic call for peace or engaging with Christians in Israel and Palestine. Even worse, they completely ignored the urgent plea of 21 evangelical pastors and leaders from across the Middle East who issued a collective call to the global church last August, urging the world to listen to our cries and hear our stories.
Even more reprehensible, as Huckabee later admitted in an interview with Joel Rosenberg, the “universal feeling” among these pastors was not concern for peace or justice but anxiety over the disruption of their Holy Land tours. Rather than mourning the thousands of Palestinian children buried beneath the rubble in Gaza or pleading for the starving, wounded and displaced, they sought reassurance that, once the conflict subsided, they could return to treading the sacred ground where Jesus once walked — untainted by the bloodshed and dire suffering of innocent lives.
I write from the perspective of a Palestinian American evangelical who cares deeply about the church. I’m profoundly grateful for the American missionaries who have sacrificed to come to the Middle East and proclaim the gospel. Many faithful churches and dedicated missionaries work tirelessly, partnering with numerous God‑honoring ministries in the region to bring the hope of Jesus to desperate, shattered communities. Yet the credibility of our gospel witness as evangelicals is now at stake. We risk missing the opportunity to show the people of Gaza, a people on the brink of extinction, how deeply God loves and cares for them.
A significant generational shift is underway away from a false gospel of empire toward a faith that upholds justice, mercy and truth. Many young Christians recognize that true faithfulness to Christ cannot be reconciled with the destruction of Palestinian lives, the bombing of churches, hospitals and refugee camps or the systematic starvation of an entire population. Instead of engaging with Palestinian Christians, Messianic Jews and Muslim believers — communities in the region eager to work toward reconciliation and peacemaking — these evangelical leaders have chosen to align themselves uncritically with a far-right government in Israel and a man whose policies have led to widespread suffering, overshadowing our call to be peacemakers.
Netanyahu and Franklin say young evangelicals are turning away from Israel because they are misinformed and merely need “proper education.” This is both false and patronizing. Young evangelicals are not disengaging out of ignorance; they are awakening to realities their elders either overlooked or deliberately ignored. They see uncensored footage of families obliterated in airstrikes, read detailed reports from organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace, Amnesty International and the United Nations and listen to Palestinian Christians crying out for justice —voices that much of the mainstream evangelical establishment has long chosen to silence or ignore.
Recent research by the Barna Group confirms this shift: Support for Israel among evangelicals ages 18 to 29 has dropped dramatically from 75% in 2018 to just 34% in 2021, a number that has likely increased following the war in Gaza. This change is not a sign of ignorance; it is a sign of moral clarity and a rejection of a false gospel that equates unwavering political support for Israel with love for the Jewish people.
Ignoring this troubling picture, President Trump outlined a chilling vision for Gaza’s future, calling for the forcible displacement of Palestinians to make way for a “Riviera of the Middle East.” According to a recent survey by the Jewish People Policy Institute, reported by The Jerusalem Post, 80% of Jewish Israelis support Trump’s plan to remove Gazans from their homeland. If this plan is allowed to proceed, my wife’s Christian family in Gaza and the territory’s more than 600 remaining Christians face the very real threat of ethnic cleansing.
Have we reached a point where we no longer care for the body of Christ in places deemed “a demolition site,” as unworthy of life and dignity? The evangelical church stands at a crossroads. We must decide whether to continue an alliance with indicted war criminals and policies that many equate with ethnic cleansing or return to the radical, justice‑driven, peacemaking way of Jesus. History will remember this moment, and so will Christ.
(Fares Abraham, a Palestinian American, is CEO of Levant Ministries and serves as adjunct faculty at Liberty University. Follow him on Instagram and X @faresabraham. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)