Why do evangelical Protestants hate Palestinians?

A banner featuring US President Donald Trump and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee in central Jerusalem, 7 May 2025 (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP)

Since April 2025, Mike Huckabee, a white evangelical American Protestant and Baptist minister, has served as the US ambassador to Israel.

A right-wing religious fanatic and former Republican presidential candidate, Huckabee previously served as governor of Arkansas.

He believes, as part of his Protestant zealotry, that "there is no such thing as a Palestinian", and that Palestinian identity is merely "a political tool to try and force land away from Israel".

Most recently, the ambassador described Palestinians in Gaza as "wicked, uncivilised savages" - in keeping with the tradition of missionaries, colonists and other "civilising" forces.

Huckabee opposes Palestinian statehood and dismisses Israeli settler-colonialism on Palestinian land as nothing more than urban development.

Countering even Israeli claims that what Jewish colonists build on stolen land are "settlements", Huckabee insists they are simply "communities", "neighbourhoods" and "cities".

He is not alone. Earlier this month, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which claims more than 10 million members as the largest pro-Israel group in the US, held its annual summit near Washington, DC.

Huckabee has been religiously obsessed with Israel and Jews since his youth, and has visited the country more than 100 times since 1973

The conference, which attracts senior government officials and lawmakers each year, has been described as a "three-day lovefest" for Israel that culminates in lobbying at the Capitol.

CUFI has applauded Huckabee's confirmation and praised Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who vowed this would be "perhaps the most pro-Israel administration in American history".

Far from fringe, this is the dominant religious current shaping US policy on Israel - one with theological and imperial roots that long predate the state itself.

Its modern champions, like Huckabee, follow a long line of evangelical Christians whose lineage can be traced back to the Protestant Reformation and the Millenarian movement it spawned in the 16th century.

That movement supported the "restoration" of European Jews to Palestine and their conversion to Protestantism, in the hope of expediting the so-called Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

Imperial foundations

Evangelical Protestant Zionism preceded Jewish Zionism by 300 years, and it was this Protestant Zionism that laid the ideological foundations of the Jewish settler-colony that would become Israel.

A surge of Protestant missionary zeal swept through England at the end of the 18th century, coinciding with the emergence of the Eastern Question and the Jewish Question.

This reignited the Crusades' erstwhile project of ending Muslim control of the "Holy Land". It likewise revived Protestant Millenarian and "Restorationist" projects aimed at converting European Jews and "returning" them to Palestine. This was also the era of the flourishing of British imperialism.

Two British missionary societies took an interest in Palestine and the wider region: the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East (founded in 1799), or CMS, and the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews (founded in 1809), popularly known as the London Jews Society or LJS.

The latter was founded by two German Jewish converts to Protestantism. It was established under the auspices of the evangelical Anglican group the British Bible Society, the missionary arm of the Clapham Sect, founded by William Wilberforce.

As part of its missionary activity, the Clapham Sect invited a German Jewish convert, Joseph Samuel Christian Frederick Frey (1748–1827) - born Joseph Samuel Levy - to move from Berlin to London to proselytise among British Jews, a task that led to the establishment of the LJS.

Both the CMS and the LJS were sponsored by the elite of English society and politics, including British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston and his evangelical son-in-law, Lord Shaftesbury (previously known as Lord Ashley), among others.

Palmerston even approached the Ottoman sultan to request permission for the "return" of European Jews to Palestine.

Palmerston, who became Britain's foreign minister in 1830, was a strong advocate of Jewish "restoration" to Palestine. The LJS converted many Jews in Britain, 250 of whom became Anglican clergymen - many of them former rabbinical scholars.

By 1841, the position of patron of the LJS was conferred upon the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church.

'Peaceful' crusaders

Fanatical evangelical Americans, Germans, Swedes and others joined this new "Peaceful Crusade" to convert Jews and take over Palestine throughout the 19th century.

The evangelical Zionist current did not abate in the 20th century; on the contrary, it intensified after the establishment of Israel

By World War One, all the British leaders in office - including Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour - were fanatical evangelical Christians who supported Jewish "restoration" to Palestine, which in 1917 took the form of the "Balfour Declaration".

In the US, Zionist evangelical Christianity manifested in the establishment of several colonies in Palestine during the mid-19th century, intended to convert Jews and expedite the Second Coming.

This current did not abate in the 20th century; on the contrary, it intensified after the establishment of Israel, and especially after the 1967 war.

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were among the leading Protestant fanatics who supported Israel, as did American presidents who claimed an evangelical upbringing, most notably Bill Clinton.

It is to this tradition of evangelical fanaticism that US President Donald Trump's ambassador to Israel subscribes.

Divine mandate

Huckabee's conviction that God is on the side of Israel is one he shares with most evangelical Christians.

He argues that Israelis did not win their wars of conquest against Palestinians and neighbouring Arabs "because they had superior military, artillery capacity or air power."

Not at all: "They won them because they fought as if they knew that if they lost, they didn't lose some real estate," but rather "the land that God had given them 3,500 years ago. Because they did, I am convinced that God, Himself, intervened on behalf of His people in His land", he proclaims.

At a dinner hosted by the Israel Heritage Foundation, Huckabee affirmed to his audience that his support for Israel is grounded in faith: "We believe that we put our knee to God. We didn't create Him; He created us. And we are obligated to follow His law rather than to invite Him to follow some law that we have foolishly created for ourselves."

Huckabee's support for Israel has embarrassed even many of its staunchest backers in the US.

In 2015, while running for president, he responded to then-President Barack Obama's announcement of the Iran nuclear deal by accusing him of marching Jews "to the door of the oven".

Even the diehard pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League and Ron Dermer, Israel's ambassador to the US at the time, rebuked him for the remark.

But Huckabee remains undeterred. He cites scripture that commands believers to bless Israel in order to be blessed, quoting: "those who curse Israel will be cursed."

The new crusaders

Huckabee is not the only Protestant fanatic weaponised by the Trump administration in support of Israel.

The US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation - now participating in the ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza - also has an evangelical zealot as its chairman: Rev Dr Johnnie Moore, a former adviser to the White House during Trump's first term.

Moore supports Trump's vision of a Gaza "Riviera". His "personal journey has included studying Theodor Herzl's diaries and exploring lesser-known Christian contributions to early Zionism".

A former assistant to Jerry Falwell, Moore has received numerous awards from Zionist institutions in recognition of his unwavering commitment to Israel.

Figures like Moore, Huckabee and Rubio - yet another evangelical Christian who shuttles between Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism - are not aberrations. They are the contemporary face of a deeply entrenched evangelical Zionism that now operates through official posts, state policy and well-funded political networks.

Imperial convergence

The rise of Protestant evangelical Zionism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries - especially in Britain - coincided with the ascent of European, and particularly British, imperialism.

This was hardly coincidental: British imperialism provided a far wider world for the Protestant fanatics to missionise beyond Britain's shores.

Activists protest at the Rayburn House cafeteria on Capitol Hill during Christians United for Israel’s lobbying day, 1 July 2025 (Alex Wong/Getty Images via AFP)

Indeed, these missionaries were often dispatched ahead of conquest, preparing the ground for later imperial domination.

Whether in Kenya, New Zealand, Sierra Leone or Palestine, the role of evangelical Protestantism was always complementary to British imperialism.

It is not only the pro-Zionism of evangelical Christians that is mandated by their religious fanaticism, but also their hatred of Palestinians

In the case of Palestine and the Jews, this amalgamation took on a particular significance, given that Palestine is the land where both Christianity and Judaism were born.

The surge in support for Israel among American evangelicals after 1967, when the US became its primary imperial sponsor, was also no coincidence.

It is not only the pro-Zionism of evangelical Christians that is mandated by their religious fanaticism and pro-American jingoism, but also their hatred of Palestinians, cast as enemies of both the evangelicals' "chosen people" and of US imperial interests in the Middle East.

That their support for a genocidal state stems from religious conviction - not in defiance of it - is what keeps American evangelical Christians faithful to both their biblical and nationalist creeds.