TEL AVIV, Israel – Final week, an influential group of American Christians publicly reaffirmed the Jewish individuals’s proper to Judea and Samaria because the biblical heartland of Israel. The Judea and Samaria space is extra generally generally known as the West Financial institution.
The declaration was unveiled on the annual Nationwide Spiritual Broadcasters Conference in Dallas by American Christian Leaders for Israel and was anticipated to be signed by 3,000 non secular leaders earlier than being delivered to President Donald Trump.
The push to use Israeli sovereignty to the world comes after Trump stated final month that his administration would make an announcement on the matter within the coming weeks when requested about annexation.
The Oslo Accords, cast underneath the Clinton administration, divided the West Financial institution into three areas: Space A, underneath full Palestinian jurisdiction; Space B, underneath Palestinian civil administration and Israeli safety management; and Space C, underneath full Israeli authority.
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The Cave of the Patriarchs, also referred to as the Cave of Machpelah. The positioning is the burial place of Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the Jewish individuals, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, and is located in Hebron in Judea and Samaria, additionally extra generally known as the West Financial institution.
A 2020 Trump plan, dubbed Peace to Prosperity, envisioned Israel annexing elements of Judea and Samaria, however was shelved in favor of the Abraham Accords, which normalized Jerusalem’s ties with 4 Arab international locations.
“The evangelicals gave Trump the presidency. He’ll help our place on the Bible and that’s why he selected Mike Huckabee [as ambassador to Jerusalem], who helps Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria,” Dr. Mike Evans, founding father of Mates of Zion, which boasts slightly below 30 million members, advised Fox Information Digital.
The declaration reaffirms “the Jewish individuals’s inalienable proper to the Biblical Heartland of Israel and reject all efforts—each from the US and the worldwide neighborhood—to stress the Jewish individuals to relinquish their ancestral homeland in Judea and Samaria.”
The Tomb of Joseph close to Shechem (Nablus). Samaria, Jul 6, 2021. (Roee Oz/TPS)
Evans stated evangelicals help Israel “as a result of they imagine in ethical readability, good versus evil, they’re buddies of Zion. They see Jews being killed as a result of they’re Jews, not due to land.”
Pastor John Hagee, the influential founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel, advised Fox Information Digital that Evangelicals “know the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will all the time preserve His phrase to the Youngsters of Israel. From starting to finish, the Bible is a Zionist doc mandating that each one believers stand with, and bless, Israel and her individuals.
“For nearly half a century, I’ve been preaching the message that Israel doesn’t occupy the land, Israel owns the land, the title deed of which is recorded within the pages of the Bible. The land was endowed by God to the Jewish individuals forever,” added Hagee.
Aerial view of Joshua’s Alter in Judea and Samaria, extra generally known as the West Financial institution. (TPS-IL)
Earlier this week, Fox Information Digital reported that some Republican lawmakers led by Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) urged the president to acknowledge Judea and Samaria as Israeli territory. Their letter to the president expressed help for Jerusalem making use of sovereignty over the world, which the lawmakers stated was “the guts of our shared Judeo-Christian heritage.”
Israel’s Parliament Speaker Amir Ohana on Feb. 23 urged the federal government in Jerusalem to increase sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, saying full management over the area was the “one and solely method” to attain lasting peace.
One other Likud lawmaker, Dan Illouz, advised Fox Information Digital that Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 bloodbath “proved that any withdrawal, any concession, any phantasm of coexistence with those that search our destruction isn’t just naive—it’s suicidal … we withdrew from Gaza, and in return we obtained Hamas and the bloodbath of our individuals. Judea and Samaria can’t grow to be one other terror state.”
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President Donald Trump, left, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reply questions throughout a joint press convention within the East Room on the White Home in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 4, 2025. ( REUTERS/Leah Millis)
“A push for sovereignty in Judea and Samaria can be the top of Israel,” Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli lawmaker and an architect of the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, advised Fox Information Digital. “If Israel have been to grow to be a minority of Jews dominating a majority of Palestinians, it could be neither Jewish nor democratic. I don’t imagine it may ever occur, however simply waving this [idea] is dangerous sufficient,” he stated.
“The suitable in Israel believes that Trump would help no matter they demand. However 5 years in the past, he advised there might be a two-state resolution. As such, it’s not as clear-cut because it appears,” he added.
Late final month, Netanyahu ordered the Israeli Protection Forces (IDF) to conduct a “large” counter-terrorism operation in Judea and Samaria after three buses exploded close to Tel Aviv, and bombs have been discovered on two others in what’s being investigated as a coordinated assault.
Israeli troopers participate in an operation in Jenin, because it seeks to take out Iranian-backed terror teams. Feb. 24, 2025. (REUTERS/Raneen Sawafta)
“This brutality and forceful displacement of civilians within the West Financial institution… was by no means about self-defense, however quite a colonial enlargement scheme and an ethnic cleaning marketing campaign,” Ahmad Fattouh, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s dominant Fatah faction, advised Fox Information Digital.
“Annexing the West Financial institution will set us again to 1948 and destroy any future stability or prospects for peace. Each rational voice understands too nicely that there isn’t a method ahead besides the two-state resolution; in any other case, it’s going to result in limitless havoc,” he added.
Israel Ganz, head of the Yesha Council, the umbrella group representing Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, is working together with the federal government in Jerusalem to push for sovereignty.
Pastor John Hagee speaks throughout “March For Israel” on the Nationwide Mall on Nov. 14, 2023 in Washington, D.C.
“We began a marketing campaign to push for it, however we received’t do it with out the help of the U.S.,” he advised Fox Information Digital. “Many within the Trump administration are very linked, they know the world, they usually imagine in our proper to this place. They perceive that in the event that they need to stabilize the scenario, we will need to have sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.”
“For Israel to have the ability to proceed to outlive and thrive alongside the coastal plain, which produces about 80% of the nation’s GDP, then it should preserve management of the excessive grounds in Judea and Samaria,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus (ret.), a former IDF worldwide spokesperson and now a senior fellow on the Basis for Protection of Democracies, advised Fox Information Digital.
“If another entity, Palestinian or in any other case, holds that, it could be used as a strategy to threaten Israel’s safety; its core infrastructure, together with Ben-Gurion Airport, and likewise its inhabitants– concentrated in a slim strip between Haifa [in the north] and Ashdod [in the south]–approximately 15 kilometers broad,” he stated.
Palestinian terrorists take up place throughout a confrontation with the Israeli military in Jenin on July 3, 2023. The Israeli military stated it had launched drone strikes in Jenin as a part of an “in depth counterterrorism effort.” (Photograph by JAAFAR ASHTIYEH/AFP through Getty Photos)
One other ingredient, Conricus defined, is that some 500,000 Israelis at present reside in Judea and Samaria, they usually should be protected.
“The tendencies of escalation in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem are highest now since Oct. 7. We see vital terrorist exercise in virtually all Palestinian cities and continued weak point of the P.A. in exercising management,” he stated.
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Ze’ev Orenstein, director of worldwide affairs on the Jerusalem-based City of David Foundation, advised Fox Information Digital that the Jewish individuals’s millenia-long connection to the Land of Israel bestows upon them an inherent proper to Judea and Samaria.
“The truth is that there’s probably no different individuals on the planet as we speak with a deeper–and longer–connection to any piece of land than the Jewish individuals with the Land of Israel, normally, and Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, specifically; the place the inhabitants proceed to worship the exact same G-d, converse the identical language, apply the identical religion, rejoice the identical festivals, and stroll upon the exact same stones, as their ancestors did so many 1000’s of years in the past,” Orenstein added.
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