Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu confidante Ron Dermer positioned Evangelicals five year ago as Israel’s most reliable supporters, more reliable than American Jews.
Today, Mr Dermer is gone. He resigned in November as strategic affairs minister and the prime minister’s point man on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
Gone too is Evangelical reliability with many young Evangelicals and members of President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again or MAGA support base rejecting the long-standing notion that the United States and Israel’s national interests overlap.
“This train has left the station. It’s not coming back, especially with the younger generation,” said Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, an Evangelical conspiracy theorist, who during the Covid epidemic compared masks to the yellow Star of David Nazis forced Jews to wear. Ms. Taylor Greene later apologised for her comment.
Andrew Kolvet, a close associate of Charlie Kirk, the assassinated founder of Turning Point USA, an influential far-right youth organisation that has become a platform for the airing of differences in Mr. Trump’s base suggests that “Israel has become a symbolic battle about: What does ‘America First’ really mean?”
Mr. Kolvet has taken over many of the Turning Point duties of Mr. Kirk, who was killed in September while addressing a gathering of the organisation.