Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday told a group of evangelical Christian leaders in Florida that Israel will back persecuted Christian communities being threatened by radical Islam around the globe.
His remarks come less than a week after the United States launched strikes against the Islamic State group in Nigeria in response to attacks targeting Christians.
“We are joining an effort to have basically a united nations of countries that support Christian communities around the world, beleaguered communities who deserve our help, just as you are helping us, we want to help back,” Netanyahu said. “And we’re capable of doing this. In Africa, with intel, in the Middle East, with a lot of means that I won’t itemize each one.”
He noted that Christians are under attack across the Middle East, including in regional rival Turkey, and that Israel is the only country in the region that protects its Christian community, which makes up just under 2% of the country’s population.
“Christians are being persecuted across the Middle East, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Nigeria, in Turkey and beyond,” he said. “We’re also aware of the fact, as you are, that one country protects the Christian community, enables it to grow, defends it, and makes sure that it thrives, and that country is Israel. There is no other. None.”
Netanyahu reiterated that Israel has “no better friends” than the evangelical Christian community, which, he said, has “stood by us through thick and thin.”
“It’s hard for me to conceive of the emergence of the Jewish state, the re-emergence of the Jewish state, without the support of Christian Zionists in the United States, also in Britain, but the main thrust was in the United States in the 19th century,” he said. “Christian Zionism facilitated the rise and success of Jewish Zionism.”
At the same time, Netanyahu said that today together Jews and Christians need to redouble their efforts in bolstering support among young conservatives in the United States as part of the “eighth front” in the war Israel is fighting.
“We’ve fought, as you know, a seven-front war, and we’ve come out in many ways victorious, but there’s an eighth front, and that’s the front for the hearts and minds of people, especially young people in the West, and for me, especially in the United States, and for me, especially on the conservative wing of the United States,” he said.
“I think it’s not just Israel’s battle. I think it’s our common Judeo-Christian civilization’s battle, and I think we have to engage in that battle, as forcefully, with as much resolution as we engage the other seven fronts. I think it affects not only Israel, it affects America, it affects our alliance, it affects the future of Western civilization.”
