By Jason Jones via Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity | December 17, 2025
An army of American pastors handed themselves over to become propagandists for genocide this month, traveling on Israel’s dime to the “Friends of Zion Ambassador Summit” in Jerusalem. The event was zealously cohosted by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who just days earlier was caught after secretly meeting with a convicted Israeli spy, leading to widespread calls for his resignation.
The criticism of this outlandish summit has been widespread too, but I felt the need to weigh in with a practical recommendation which I hope lawmakers urgently pursue: Every one of these pastors should be registered as a foreign agent. And after considering the nature of the summit, I doubt many could disagree.
A Summit of Anti-Christians Parading as Pastors
The rhetoric at the summit was exclusionary, vindictive, and overtly conspiratorial. It was essentially a PR strategy meeting where Israeli government officials instructed their American collaborators on how best to silence the mounting expressions of revulsion among the Christian public in America at the ongoing spectacle of Zionist violence in Gaza and the West Bank.
The whole of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s regime seems bent on that mission, though public polling shows it to be an impossible task. After two years of what is commonly called the world’s “first livestreamed genocide,” complete with war crime after thoroughly documented war crime – and after thousands of women and children have been murdered and every church, hospital, and refugee compound in the region has been bombed – there is no coming back from this until the current regime in Israel faces a full public reckoning and is thoroughly ousted from power.
Nonetheless, the summit busily set about rehashing its methods of suppression and narrative manipulation: Dismiss criticism of Israel as Qatari-funded propaganda. Call into question the religious orthodoxy of those who reject radical Jewish settler violence in the West Bank. And of course: Keep lobbing accusations of antisemitism at those who reject extremist Zionism.
The whole thing is dirty. From a Christian perspective, it’s offensive – men who ought to be moral leaders instead signing up to become defenders of a godless secular state just when it begins to earn near-universal hatred by engaging in a two-year murder campaign against civilians in Gaza.
But from the perspective of the ancient Christian community in Palestine – the primary victims of Netanyahu’s bloodbath and the brethren with whom Christians have the clearest duty to stand – it’s worse: This was not just a betrayal of the faith, but a personal betrayal of the Body of Christ still living in the land of Christianity’s birth.
Palestinian advocate Fares Abraham put it this way in a timely column written in response to the talking points discussed at the summit: “As a Palestinian-American evangelical with family in Bethlehem and Gaza, and as someone who leads ministry across the region, I listened to this rhetoric with grief. Christians across history have interpreted Scripture differently, especially on matters of prophecy and politics. Treating theological disagreement as betrayal is both irresponsible and theologically unsound.”
He also noted:
For Palestinian Christians watching from just miles away, the scene felt familiar. It mirrored a pattern we know from both daily life and the Gospels: political authority and religious influence aligning while the vulnerable bear the cost. In Jesus’ time, Pilate and the Sanhedrin reinforced each other’s power at the expense of justice. Today, Christians in Bethlehem and Jerusalem see a similar convergence that deepens displacement, restricts worship, and silences the very Christian communities rooted in this land.
…The moral failure here is not abstract. The 1,000 pastors who enjoyed their free trip to Israel did not seem concerned that Palestinian Christians living minutes away cannot freely access their own churches in Jerusalem and other holy sites without Israeli military permission.
Yet these pastors were paraded as Israel’s spiritual partners while the indigenous church—the men, women, and families who actually bear the weight of life in the land—were treated as an inconvenience.
My friend Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, a Lutheran pastor who ministers in Bethlehem, felt similarly. “It makes me sad, even angry, that a thousand Christian leaders visited our land without even bothering to check on the indigenous Christian community that preserved the Christian witness in the land of Jesus for 2000 years,” he told me as I prepared this column. “This actually shows where their allegiance is. It is not to the Kingdom of God. Who was it that paid for this trip?”
Why Register as Foreign Agents? Allegiance to Christ and Allegiance to the United States Allign
In fact the participants in the summit couldn’t have made their allegiance clearer. In an almost occultic ritual disavowal of Our Lord and the “least of these brethren” whom He commanded us to treat as if they were Himself, the pastors signed off on formal language worthy of CS Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength.”
In what Abraham called the summit’s “Before You Go” guidelines, participants “were told that public evangelism and distributing Christian materials were prohibited in Israel, and that they should refrain from preaching altogether,” he reported. “In effect, the very faith that has driven Christians to share the gospel for two millennia was instructed to remain silent in Jerusalem.”
And here’s where things get back to the practical: The obvious reason to register these pastors as foreign agents is only half the reason. Because they are no ordinary operatives of a foreign government. They are agents of a foreign nation who are so zealous of their cause that they are willing to betray even their own religious convictions.
The U.S. hasn’t seen such fervent foreign operatives since the Cold War, when, as Whitaker Chambers pointed out, Communist agents treated their ideology as the one true religion.
In any case, they already are foreign agents in fact, and the least our elected leaders can do is ensure that these pastors publicly present themselves for what they are – not as spiritual or moral shepherds, but as propaganda czars for a secular foreign state trying to shore up cultural capital during its darkest hour.
Reprinted with permission from The Jason Jones Show.
Jason Jones is a film producer, author, and human rights activist. He leads global efforts—through film, aid, and advocacy — to protect the vulnerable, from the unborn to the persecuted in war zones, as featured on The Jason Jones Show.
Original article link
