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The annual conference of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), one of America’s most visible pro-Israel Christian lobbying groups, is wrapping up today in Washington. It has offered three days of discussions and speeches focused on continuing unconditional support for Israel under the justification of obeying “the Biblical mandate to bless God’s Chosen”.
The problem is not simply lobbying for specific policies. It is that CUFI and other Christian Zionist organisations elevate support for Israel from a matter of US foreign policy into a litmus test of faithfulness to God.
As a Palestinian-American Christian born in the West Bank, I believe this claim is not only politically dangerous. It is theologically distorted and reckless.
Once a political position is treated as divinely ordained, ordinary moral scrutiny becomes suspect. Questions about military aid, settlement expansion, the genocide in Gaza or the treatment of Palestinians are no longer treated as policy debates. In CUFI’s framework, they can be cast as rebellion against God.
CUFI does not speak for all Christians; many Christians across traditions oppose its extreme positions. But its political influence makes its theology consequential.
The issue here is not whether Christians should love the Jewish people. Christians are commanded to love all people.
But love for the Jewish people is not synonymous with uncritical loyalty to the modern state of Israel. It is not the same as blessing a government or excusing policies that have massacred and dispossessed Palestinians, restricted their movement and made life increasingly unbearable for Christian and Muslim communities alike.
The central flaw in CUFI’s rhetoric is that Jewish people, biblical Israel, the modern state of Israel and the current Israeli government are treated as one indivisible reality. They are not.
The Jewish people are a people. The modern state of Israel is a state, founded in 1948, with borders, elections, political parties and military power. Its government is a temporary political coalition whose policies can and must be judged.
Treating all of this as biblical faithfulness is not faithfulness at all. It is political theology. Even if Christians believe the Jewish people hold a unique place in God’s purposes, that belief does not make any state, government or military campaign immune from moral scrutiny.
To readers outside evangelical circles, it may seem strange that ancient biblical texts would shape American policy toward a state founded in 1948. But Christian Zionist theology reads God’s promises to Abraham and Israel as a continuing mandate to support the modern state of Israel. Genesis 12 is often invoked: “I will bless those who bless you.”
Yet in the broader biblical narrative, the promise to Abraham was never a blank cheque for state impunity. Its purpose was to affirm that “all the families of the earth” would be blessed. The prophets did not bless Israel by ignoring injustice; they loved Israel enough to confront its evil kings, defend the vulnerable and warn against violence, arrogance and oppression.
Jesus did not teach his followers to sacralise any nation. On the contrary, he called them to love their neighbours, bless their enemies and become peacemakers.
Christians in the US and elsewhere are increasingly opening their eyes to the flawed logic of Christian Zionist theo-political narratives.
A Pew Research Center survey published in April found that 60 percent of American adults now hold an unfavourable view of Israel. Among Christian respondents in the poll, 48 percent of Protestants and 61 percent of Catholics said they had a negative opinion of Israel.
While white evangelicals remain among Israel’s most reliable supporters, even among them the tide is turning. In the same Pew Research survey, 32 percent of white evangelicals expressed unfavourable views towards Israel, up from 26 percent in 2025. I have seen this quiet reckoning firsthand.
The loudest pro-Israel organisations may still claim to speak for all “Bible-believing Christians”, but many evangelicals I encounter are wrestling with a different question: whether support for Israel has been confused with faithfulness to Scripture.
I observed the ripples of this doubt after my appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show in February. Many evangelical pastors and leaders reached out in grief, telling me they had never heard a Palestinian Christian describe what occupation, settlement expansion, military control and daily humiliation mean for the living Christian communities of Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, Jerusalem, Taybeh and Gaza.
I witnessed a different kind of hope at Urbana 25, a Christian youth conference that gathered 7,000 students and leaders in Phoenix. I shared the stage with Aaron Abramson, CEO of Jews for Jesus. We showed that Israelis and Palestinians need not compete for Christian sympathy; we could acknowledge one another’s pain and reject injustice together.
Afterwards, lines of students came to thank me for speaking up for the Palestinian people. They were not looking for a new enemy. They were looking for a more faithful way to tell the truth.
That is exactly what a new generation of evangelicals is trying to recover: a faith that refuses the false choice between Jewish safety and Palestinian dignity.
Christians can fiercely oppose antisemitism without tolerating anti-Muslim hatred. They can grieve the horrors of October 7 without justifying the destruction of Gaza. They can reject violence without pretending Palestinian suffering began on October 7. And they can care about Israeli security without blessing the permanent dispossession of Palestinians.
This should not be controversial. It becomes controversial only when theology is twisted to serve political power.
For Palestinian Christians, the cost of this theological distortion is not abstract. In Gaza, the Israeli army has killed Christians and bombed churches, leaving historic communities displaced and grieving their dead. In the West Bank, church leaders have warned of escalating settler attacks. Meanwhile, the Rossing Center has documented 155 violent incidents against Christians and Christian property in the Holy Land in 2025.
This is why many evangelicals I hear from are increasingly uneasy with a theology that uses Scripture to excuse Israel’s actions. They have not abandoned the Jewish people. They are refusing to let their faith be used to sanctify policies that harm their neighbours and silence the church in the very land of its birth.
The true biblical mandate is not blind allegiance to a flag or a military. It is truth-telling, mercy and peacemaking. It is love without favouritism and the refusal to confuse God’s covenant faithfulness with human impunity.
If Christians want to bless the people of the Holy Land, they should oppose every form of injustice. And if they want to bless the church there, they must start listening before it disappears entirely.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
