The Evangelicals were instrumental in bringing this peace deal to the table.
Could the path to US President Donald Trump’s reelection go through Dubai to the heart of his Evangelical base in the American bible belt? One would have thought that the key to winning their support was annexing Judea and Samaria, the biblical heartland of the Land of Israel. But sources in the Evangelical community told The Jerusalem Post that they cared much more about bringing peace in the Middle East than changing the status of barren hilltops. Now, Trump is likely to get an electoral bounce from his core constituency with the impending signing of a peace deal between the United Arab Emirates and the State of Israel. “Will Evangelicals turn out to vote for Trump in larger numbers if he gives Israel the green light to annex large swaths of Judea and Samaria? I don’t believe so,” Evangelical leader Joel Rosenberg wrote in an op-ed for The Jerusalem Post earlier this year, when it looked like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would annex around July 1. “Most Evangelicals already believe that Trump is the most pro-Israel president in American history. If he could midwife a peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country, that would certainly energize Evangelicals.” Johnnie Moore, who helped organize the Trump campaign’s evangelical advisory board in 2016, told the Post that from his vantage point the White House deserves all the credit for being able to “defy conventional wisdom and unrelentingly pursue peace in the Middle East.” Moore used the historic signing to remind that “we are right now living in a time when there are gigantic leaders around the world and those leaders are sometimes controversial.” Moreover, Rosenberg told the Post there was a belief by several top Evangelicals that supporting an immediate annexation could have harmed Trump’s reelection campaign.
