This week in Jerusalem, Friends of Zion, along with the State of Israel, brought 1,000 pastors, some of America’s most dedicated evangelical leaders, to stand with Israel. They have put their sermons, schedules and family life on hold to be here. They are not here for a sightseeing tour; they are here to be commissioned as “Friends of Zion” Ambassadors to fight what I believe is the greatest ideological war against the Jewish people since the birth of the Nazi party.
The battle Israel is fighting today is not only about rockets and borders. At its core, it is a battle over the Bible and over whether the Jewish people have a legitimate, permanent home in the land where their story began.
For Christians, Israel is not just another country on the map. It is the cradle of our faith. The story of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, King David and Jesus starts here. If you cut Israel out of the Bible, you do not just edit a text, you undermine the foundations of Christian faith itself.
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The promises concerning Israel also helped shape the United States. Our belief that there is a sovereign God, that moral truth exists, and that rights come from God and not from government all echo the biblical worldview. The great awakenings that saved and steered America were Bible-led revivals. Remove the Bible and you remove the foundation of our freedom.
Years ago, Israel’s late president Shimon Peres, the founding international chairman of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center, warned me that the wars of the 21st century would be “proxy wars, ideological wars, media wars and economic wars.” Time has proven him right.
If the Gaza war has taught us anything, it is that information is power. The ability to shape perceptions and win hearts and minds is now as important as battlefield success. He who defines the terms controls the narrative.
Today the phrase, “Zionism is racism,” has entered the global vocabulary. It appears in NGO reports, human rights forums, campus slogans and social media feeds. It makes it sound “progressive” to question whether the Jewish people should even have a state. In reality, it is old fashioned antisemitism dressed up in the language of social justice.
At the heart of this ideological war is a theology many have never heard of, “replacement theology.” In simple terms, it claims that God has rejected the Jewish people, cancelled His promises to them, and transferred those promises to someone else. Once you accept that idea, it becomes easy to treat the Jewish state as an aberration of history and hence a problem to be solved.
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For more than a decade, radical regimes have invested billions into poisoning hearts and minds against Israel, especially in the West. They now use advanced technology to do it. In May 2021, more than 2.3 million bot accounts flooded the Facebook page of the Jerusalem Prayer Team I founded during an online event to refute Hamas propaganda. That coordinated antisemitic attack helped push platforms to downgrade our presence and ultimately shut down a page with 77 million followers.
