“The bedrock of support for the State of Israel is there because American evangelicals think it will bring Jesus back quicker,” former evangelical insider Frank Schaeffer says in Al Jazeera‘s 2024 documentary Praying for Armageddon. “And without the Republican bedrock evangelical voter, no Republican anywhere in America, for any office, gets elected. We don’t want peace, we being evangelicals. We want Armageddon.”

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Inside Washington, the influence is structural. Ralph Drollinger’s Capitol Ministries – which advocates a “Biblical case for defending Israel” – runs weekly Bible studies attended by members of Congress. During the first Trump administration, it convened a cabinet-level Bible study. The theology is not only in churches; it is in the room where power gathers.

The Christian Zionist map of Israel itself comes from scripture. In Genesis 15, a part of the Torah and Old Testament, God promises Abraham’s descendants land “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates”. For Christian Zionists and some Israeli ultranationalists, that passage is not a metaphor. It is a title deed.

In February 2026, the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, sat with independent broadcaster Tucker Carlson as Carlson read out the biblical passage describing land “from the Euphrates to the Nile”. Asked whether Israel had a right to all of it, Huckabee replied: “It would be fine if they took it all.”

Believe people when they tell you who they are.

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UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has repeatedly warned that the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza and the occupied territory is also a test of the international legal order. “What is lost in Palestine,” she told the UN Human Rights Council, “will be lost to us all.”

The pattern is visible beyond Palestine, too: enter on security grounds, build infrastructure, normalise the presence, and let the map change quietly.