The Republican presidential candidate's volatility has been increasing in the run-up to the US election on November 5, and Donald Trump's aggressive rhetoric is not sparing American Jews – who gave more than three-quarters of their votes to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. The former president has said that Jewish Americans "should have their heads examined" if they persist in not voting for him.
He believes the gestures he made in favor of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during his 2017-2021 term in office should earn him the unconditional support of American Jews. In 2019, during a speech to American Republican Jews, he called Netanyahu "your prime minister". But he has recently ramped up his attacks, now claiming that "Christians love Israel more than Jews".
These Christians whose support for Israel is, according to Trump, stronger than that of Jews, are part of a "Christian Zionism" that appeared in Anglo-Saxon Protestantism around 1840-1850, half a century before Jewish Zionism. Where it aimed to build the Jewish people into a nation in the face of European anti-Semitism, Christian Zionism developed around a so-called "evangelical" reading of the Old Testament. In this dogma, the salvation of the Christian faithful depends on the "restoration" of the Jewish people to the "land of Israel," and says that this "restoration" is a prerequisite for the establishment of the Kingdom of God.
As early as 1890 – seven years before the founding congress of Jewish Zionism in Basel – Chicago hosted a conference whose organizer, an evangelical minister, preached the "return of Palestine to the Jews". Evangelical politicians also supported 1921-1924 restrictions on immigration – particularly Jewish immigration – to the United States, and the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine under the British mandate.
Already galvanized by the founding of Israel in 1948, Christian Zionism was further entrenched after the 1967 conquest of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. American evangelicals saw such an occupation as nothing less than the fulfillment of a prophecy, while the majority of the Jewish community remains committed to a negotiated settlement based on the principle of "land for peace".
In 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister then engaged in a peace process with the Palestine Liberation Organization, denounced attempts to "undermine the policy of a democratically elected [Israeli] government, to pressure members of Congress". Rabin was assassinated shortly afterward by a Jewish-Israeli extremist, something which John Hagee, the Texan founder of Christians United for Israel, saw as having "launched Bible Prophecy on to the fast track".
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