Israel has an eight-week opportunity before the inauguration of president-elect Donald Trump to attack Iranian oil fields, and the coming year will see the United States herald a landmark peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, an American evangelical leader said on Thursday.
The remarks by Mike Evans, founder of the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, come just days after Trump was elected president of the United States for a second term and as Israel was bracing for a possible Iranian attack.
“Trump wants everything finished by Jan. 20 so he can be the builder,” Evans told JNS. “He does not want to be a wartime president.”
The Christian leader, who launched a billboard campaign across Israel congratulating Trump that was broadcast around the world, opined that the president-elect favored an Israeli airstrike on Iranian oil fields as long as it is done before he takes office since it would necessarily cause a shockwave in the American economy.
“Trump wants Israel to shut down the Iranian cash flow since once you bankrupt them their funding for their terror proxies is over and ultimately the people will overthrow the regime,” Evans said. “You hit the oil refineries and the mullahs are over.”
He asserted that the outgoing U.S. administration was “part of the problem, not the solution.”
“If Israel struck and destroyed oil refineries in Iran, there would be tears of joy in churches throughout the U.S.” he said, referring to the largely supportive evangelical Christian community of tens of millions across America that make up a significant part of the Republican Party.
He said that the relations between the two leaders was deep and personal in no small part because of their common chemistry and political savvy, calling a rift in the past over Netanyahu’s congratulating President Joe Biden on his election four years ago a “nothing burger.”
“Trump says what he feels at the moment. That has nothing to do with his respect for Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader,” Evans said. “There is no world leader Trump respects in the world more than Netanyahu.”
