NEW YORK — A night after the dedication of the new US Embassy in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel convened US evangelicals to plan their next steps.
In a conference room off his office, Netanyahu thanked the small circle of prominent pastors and activists Tuesday for pressing President Trump to open the embassy, breaking with decades of US policy that Jerusalem’s status should be decided in peace talks.
Netanyahu wanted to know which embassy would be next, running through a list of other countries with strong evangelical churches. Guatemala, Paraguay, and Honduras had followed the United States in announcing their intention to move their embassies to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, but what about Brazil, India, or even China?
“The prime minister was very excited,” recalled Mario Bramnick, the Cuban-American pastor of a Pentecostal church near Miami and a Trump supporter who attended the meeting.
The culmination of decades of lobbying, the dedication of the embassy in Jerusalem this past week doubled as the most public recognition yet of the growing importance the Netanyahu government now assigns to its conservative Christian allies, even if some have been accused of making anti-Semitic statements.
While Israel has long depended on the support of the Jewish diaspora, the Netanyahu government has made a historic and strategic shift, relying on the much larger base of evangelical Christians, even at the risk of turning off American Jews who may be troubled by some evangelicals’ denigration of their faith.
The paradox is well known: The beliefs of many evangelical Christians that Israel is special to God — and, for some, a marker in apocalyptic prophecies — lead many to hawkish support of the Jewish state while they simultaneously insist that salvation awaits only those who accept Jesus as their savior.
Netanyahu’s calculation mirrors that of his strong ally in Washington, where Trump has tapped a wellspring of evangelical support. Many of his top evangelical advisers attended the embassy dedication as well as private meetings with Netanyahu last week.
But liberal Israelis warn that the increasingly close ties between the Israeli right and the Christian right are accelerating a polarization that is turning support for Israel into a partisan question in Washington; not one Democratic lawmaker attended the embassy opening.
Liberal Jews also complain of a double standard, noting that Netanyahu’s right-wing government is far more vigilant about allegations of bigotry on the political left than among its conservative backers.
“There are a heck of a lot more evangelical voters than there are Jews,” noted Rabbi David Sandmel, director of Interreligious Engagement for the Anti-Defamation League. “So the Israeli government may say that for the sake of that support we are not going to put as much emphasis on this or that statement we may find problematic.”
Those trade-offs were on vivid display last week when Robert Jeffress, an early and vocal Trump supporter and the pastor of a Southern Baptist megachurch in Dallas, delivered an opening prayer at the embassy dedication.
Jeffress has warned that “you can’t be saved by being a Jew,” and that Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Mormonism lead followers to an eternity in hell.
In his opening prayer Monday, he alluded to biblical prophecies about a Second Coming, referring to the founding of the modern state of Israel 70 years ago as a “regathering” of God’s people.
Then he closed his prayer “in the name and the spirit of the Prince of Peace, Jesus our Lord,” a Christian flourish that troubled some Jewish organizers of the evangelical alliance.
“You have this evangelical who ends his prayer knowing full well that it’s inappropriate, that the Jews there are going to be upset that he did that, and not able to answer ‘amen’ to his prayer,” said Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
Such an explicitly Christian prayer, he warned, revived old fears of many Jews that evangelical support for Israel is “a way to sweeten us up and get us soft to get Jesus through the back door.”
Sandmel said Jeffress had often made statements the group deemed “unacceptable,” noting that assertions such as his admonitions that Jews were damned to hell had led to anti-Semitic violence.
It was a “gut punch for most American Jews,” the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote in an editorial published Friday.
The editorial charged that the evangelical alliance “erodes Israel’s standing in its traditional power centers — above all US Jews, who view evangelicals as a concrete threat to their values” and risked alienating “supporters it may need as soon as November, in the event the Democrats win control of the US Senate or the House.”
David M. Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel who presided over the embassy dedication, said evangelical Christians “support Israel with much greater fervor and devotion than many in the Jewish community.”
“You’re running a country, you need friends, you need alliances, you need to protect your people,” he said in an interview.