Ask someone who hates Israel why they do so, and you will usually get a slogan. Ask a member of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) why they love Israel, and you’ll get a history lesson.
I have been involved with enough movements to know the difference between a room performing conviction and a room built on it. The ballroom at the Gaylord National Resort—with thousands of Christians from all 50 states—was unmistakably the latter. These folks don’t need a chant or a slogan. They have an informed approach that substantiates their values and actions. Their conviction has been alive in American life throughout the history of the country.
Long before the modern-day State of Israel existed, American Christians were already arguing that the Jewish people had a right to live, govern themselves and re-establish their ancestral nation in their homeland. That conviction grew out of something older. A set of Christian, American and democratic values that point toward the same conclusion: that the Jewish people’s connection to the land and their right to self-determination and safety are worth defending.
Last week, at the CUFI summit in Washington, D.C., I spent three days among the people who carry that conviction forward. I left feeling more empowered in my own work because of them, who show that Christian support for Israel is not a fringe issue in American society. It has a mainstream, values-driven, fact-based current running straight through the center of it.
Founded by Pastor John Hagee in 2006, CUFI has grown into a movement of more than 10 million members—the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States. It crosses political, ethnic, generational and denominational lines. Its mission doesn’t stop at the State of Israel’s borders. It is just as committed to standing with the Jewish people wherever they live and to confronting antisemitism, anti-Jewish bigotry and hatred in all its forms—on campuses, in politics, online and wherever it surfaces.
That is exactly why Jews and Christians must move closer together. Not because we share common enemies alone, but because we share common values: that human dignity is universal, that self-determination is a right and that a safer world for the Jewish people is a safer world for everyone.
I saw this up close. CUFI is made up of people who, when you ask them why they show up, do not reach for one thing. They reach for all of it at once: politics and scripture, history and the future, facts and values, all together as a single conviction rather than a list of reasons.
What struck me most, talking to person after person, was how many of them have been to Israel; most of them have traveled there more than once and rarely as tourists. They often go there year after year, with each trip built around something more than sightseeing: volunteering, working alongside Israeli nonprofits, studying, praying at sites that matter to their own faith, and sitting in the homes of Israelis of every background, Jewish, Druze, Bedouin, Christian and Muslim. Then they come home and organize congregational trips, campus chapters, letter-writing campaigns and delegations walking congressional hallways with policy briefings in hand.
Belief, for the people I met, was never meant to end at the sanctuary door.
CUFI’s own language captures it: act, lead, pray, defend America, vote Israel. The organization is explicit about its method: “As Christians, it is our biblical and moral responsibility, as well as our great privilege, to stand with Israel and support the Jewish people. To do so most effectively, we must be informed.” They do not act blindly. They study first.
That stands in stark contrast to the movements on the other side of this fight. Virulently anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist, they are driven not by education but by slogans, propaganda and disinformation. The people I met at CUFI can tell you the history, the theology, the policy and the facts. Hatred rarely wants or needs to know anything at all. It only needs a slogan simple enough to chant.
I had the honor of embracing Hagee himself. A fifth-generation preacher and author of dozens of books, he still speaks about his work with striking directness and candor. His wife, Diana Hagee, who has spent nearly five decades opening her home to thousands, brought that same warmth and open-heartedness directly to our conversations. Their daughter, Sandra Hagee Parker, has testified before Congress on antisemitism and expresses her parents’ convictions with her own unmistakable boldness.
I also spent time with Shari Dollinger, CUFI’s co-executive director, with whom I partner on representing Jewish people through Voice of the People and as a co-founder of the Jewish & Indian Alliance.
I had a substantive conversation with Boris Zilberman, CUFI Action Fund’s senior director of public policy and strategy, about the policy fights—Iran, Israeli security assistance, antisemitism on American campuses—that turn conviction into votes.
My conversation with Ari Morgenstern kept going, while we worked out in the hotel gym, and again, in the halls of the conference. It was a fitting way to discuss advocacy with someone whose work turns belief into policy.
But CUFI’s leadership is only part of the story. What stayed with me longer were the faith leaders, community organizers and ordinary citizens who are, in every way that matters, no longer ordinary at all. They are people who took a single trip to Israel and turned it into a decade of activism.
I will be honest about something else: The world does not make it easy right now to stand publicly with Israel or the Jewish people. I have faced death threats for my advocacy, for speaking openly about Israel and simply for the fact of who I am.
Last week, I met Christian pastors and college students who approached me, acknowledged my work and told me, without my asking, that they face the same thing. They are often threatened for standing with the Jewish people and the State of Israel, despite not being Jewish themselves. That is precisely why CUFI’s commitment to fighting antisemitism matters as much as its advocacy for Israel. The two are not separate missions; they are the same. Antisemitism is no longer a Jewish problem that Christians are generously helping to solve. It is a shared problem, and it demands a shared determination.
To the Christians who already show up, keep going. Your consistency is the alliance. To those who have not yet found their way in: You don’t need a stage to start. Learn the history, learn the facts and then find the version of showing up that best fits.
And to my own people: Do not cower, do not hide who we are. Jewish tradition has never asked us to sit still. We are taught tikkun olam, to “repair the world.” We are taught twice, “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” We are taught gemilut chasidim, acts of lovingkindness, and kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh—“All of Israel is responsible for one another.”
That is also what Zionism has always been at its core: not a movement that exists only for the Jewish people’s benefit, but one whose principles of self-determination and dignity extend outward to protect others as well, from Israel’s disaster relief teams on the ground far from its borders to the model it offers other populations seeking their own self-determination.
That does not require us to diminish who we are. We can be unapologetically Zionist and genuinely committed to a better world for all people. It is not a contradiction; it is the whole point. Our faith must make us bolder, not smaller, and it must push us to partner not only with allies who stand beside us when convenient, but with friends who stand beside us because they’ve decided we are theirs to stand with.
History does not remember movements for how people felt mingling together in a room, no matter how sizable or significant. It remembers them for what they built once everyone left and went home.
What I saw last week was a movement building something durable, fact by fact, relationship by relationship. That is the kind of alliance that outlasts a news cycle.
