Editor’s Note: We are reposting William Wolfe’s important NatCon speech here for our readers. We count Yoram Hazony a friend and coalition partner who is seeking to advance many of the policies and goals that Christians advocate. American Reformer does not have a stated position on Israel because we do not think there is only one position for Christians to hold. Historically, evangelicals and conservative Protestants have been strong supporters of Israel for all sorts of reasons. Those views are changing with younger generations across the political spectrum. We think having a serious discussion about the reasons for those changes and the future of the American-Israel alliance are important to have in public. William’s talk is seeking to start that discussion and do so respectfully with our Israeli friends.
Author’s Note: A few months back. Dr. Yoram Hazony, founder of the National Conservatism conference, asked me if I would come speak at the conference on a panel about the future of the American Right and Israel—in Jerusalem. The specific task that Hazony gave to the panelists, myself included, was to “explain why support for Israel is waning on the American Right.” Frankly, I was hesitant to do so, as this topic is monopolized by loud and belligerent actors on either side of the debate. But this issue is not going away, and it deserves a more honest and serious treatment, and one offered from a friendly posture, than what is often offered by either “groypers” on one side or “NeoCons” on the other. I had no control over the schedule (it was set for October 7) and I dutifully executed on the mission assigned. Despite predictable reactions from dishonest, bad faith, or ideologically captured actors with an axe to grind back in America, Hazony and the conference organizers were very pleased with how the panel went. To which I say: Mission accomplished.
So, I am one of those evangelical Christians that my fellow panelist Jonathan Kepperman was talking about. It’s good to be here today.
I want to start with a verse from Proverbs. Proverbs 27:6: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Profuse are the kisses of an enemy.” And a second proverb, Proverbs 22:3: “The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.” I think that’s a good summary of the themes that we’re discussing here on this panel.
I want to thank Yoram Hazony for inviting me to be here. I count Yoram as a friend. It’s interesting—in the run-up to this conference, I have been labeled many things, a Nazi, an antisemite, a Zionist shill. And yet here I am in Israel; a weird place for a Nazi to be.
And I do want to do a little bit of personal throat clearing here as well. First of all, Yoram has not seen a single word of these remarks. So my remarks were not screened. Nobody told me what I could or couldn’t say. Nobody obligated me to be here. I’m not here, and this is more to some American friends I have overseas currently in my home country, as any part of a “containment effort on the right.” I’m here because I try to be a good and loyal friend. And loyalty is an important political virtue.
Of course, my loyalties are first and foremost and always with the United States of America and no other country, as it should be. I am a loyal American patriot, a Christian. I can trace my lineage on the continental United States back to those who fought in the Revolutionary War. I am an American. But again, as I said, Yoram is my friend.
I spent about 10 years working behind the scenes in politics as a legislative staffer and then in the first Trump administration in positions where it would have been pretty inappropriate for me to have had a public presence. But after I left Washington DC in 2021, after the first Trump administration, I thought to myself, “well, I have a lot of opinions on things and there’s this app called Twitter. I could start using it.” And shortly after I started using Twitter and writing more publicly and writing particularly on patriotism and nationalism and American nationalism and even on this very scary word sometimes, “Christian nationalism,” it caught the attention of Yoram. I had a chance to speak at NatCon in Miami. I spoke at a NatCon in DC recently and again I’m glad to be here at NatCon in Israel.
I asked a good friend of mine, and I won’t use his name here but he’s a very prominent media figure in the United States of America, a friend of Israel, supporter of Donald Trump and JD Vance (and that’s a very important theme here that I’ll come back to): “What should I say over here?”
And this is what he said to me. Again, I’ll keep it anonymous, but I thought it was good, so I’m just going to quote him:
“We need to talk about why the upcoming generation wants a reassessment of foreign alliances and deserves to have the room to do so without immediately being called the worst names while acknowledging there are some bad actors trying to hijack this conversation for sinister means. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth having constructively. Every culture is permitted to assess what is best for it and its posterity. The same should be true of American culture as well.”
It’s in that spirit that I’m here. I’m going to try to put some things in perspective. Share some numbers—what are we really talking about here? And then give some opinions on what I think is causing this friction on the Right in regards to Israel and the Jews and consider where do we go from here.
Mapping American Jews: Largely on the Left
And so let’s start with who actually are American Jews, right? Israeli Jews and American Jews are kind of two different conversations. I’m an American. I want to consider first and foremost what’s happening on American soil. There are about 7.5 million Jews living in the United States of America. You can get different numbers from different polling places. You know, the only thing worse than lies are statistics, right?
But there’s about 7.5 million Jews in the United States of America. The vast majority of them identify with the Democrat party. Pew asked Jewish adults what party they belong to. 71% identified with the Democrats or leaned that way. 26% identified with Republicans or leaned that way. Half of them described their politics as liberal. The exception is the Orthodox community, but that’s about one in 10 of Jews in the United States.
And after October 7th, this didn’t really change. After October 7th, the rising tide of things that could be legitimately called antisemitism, which not everything is legitimately called that, but we saw legitimate demonstrations of antisemitism on college campuses in America by the Left, by leftists, by radical Marxists, college kids and students and universities captured by essentially communists.
Even in light of that, in light of those protests, when it came time to vote in 2024 for either Donald Trump and JD Vance or Kamala Harris and Tim Walz Minnesota, it didn’t really change that much.
Trump and Vance received 77 million votes. And out of those 77 million votes, they got about a little over one to one to one and a half million Jewish votes.
So when we are talking about American Jews and a conversation about the future of the American Right, there are many people—and in this talk I am going to pivot back and forth between the first and third person, not everything I say here includes me or is my opinion, but here it does—there are many people, and myself included as an American Christian patriot, who wonder why is it that so much of our national political conversation on the American Right is dominated by people who account for essentially one out of out of 70 or 80 of our voters?
The other 98% of the Republican voting coalition are evangelicals and Protestants, Catholics, veterans, and secular conservative Americans who never set foot in a synagogue and who never have plans of coming to visit Israel. They just care about America and they care about putting, as we’ve said for so many years now, America first.
These numbers are important. The Jewish portion of the Republican coalition is very very small. So here’s an encouragement I would give: every coalition partner needs to know their place. And I don’t mean that in a rude way, but simply as a matter of fact.
One of the projects I’m working on in the American political environment as an evangelical Protestant is the fact that evangelical Protestants have ceded the leadership of the conservative political coalition in America largely to Catholics and Jews. Even though American Protestants are the ones who built our country. There was one Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. There were no Jewish signers of the Declaration of Independence.
For the first 200 years of our existence, America was a Protestant nation, almost exclusively. Catholics played a large role in our country, yes, but over the last 50 years, evangelical Protestants in particular have sort of receded from leadership. We think that this is concerning. We want to play a bigger coalitional role. And so, every coalitional partner needs to know their role and know their place. Who’s the senior partner? Who’s the junior partner? I think these are things that are driving this conversation.
Favorability towards Israel is dropping. Many of our panelists have mentioned that. I’ll just mention one other sort of interesting survey as I was looking at this. Chicago Council polling from just this fall puts younger Republicans, Gen Z and millennials at 48% on a favorability scale. Again, this is on the right, these are Republicans, 48% of the next generation. That’s probably a higher estimation than some while their grandparents sit at 65. So, we’re looking at close to a 20% drop in support over these recent generations.
Again, one might assume that October 7th would have been the thing that maybe would have brought American Jews rushing to join the coalition on the Right. While there was some movement, and I’m not pretending or saying there was no movement, the vast majority of American Jews when they went to the polls still voted on things like support for democracy and support for abortion access.
Pew has long found that more than eight in 10 American Jews say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while White evangelicals, the backbone of the Republican voting base, say the reverse.
Thus, when I think of American Jews fundamentally, I don’t think of people who I don’t like because of their ethnicity. By no means. I think of people who are my political opponents—because they are. They are people who go to the polls and try to cast votes that cancel out the things that I’m voting for. And a lot of younger Republicans increasingly feel this way.
So that’s the situation we’re in.
Three Further Thoughts on Why Support for Israel Is Waning
What is leading to this? Three brief points.
First, Americans are war-weary.
We are a war-weary nation. Now, you might say to somebody like me, “ join the club.” But the truth is we are not you. We’re not in the situation you’re in. We are not beset on all sides by enemies who wish our destruction. You have a different lot in life than we do.
America enjoys the protection of vast oceans on either side. We have an incredibly anemic country to our north in Canada and a nation to our south in Mexico that, if they’re not flooding us with illegal aliens, we can largely ignore. This is the blessing of providence that God has given to us as an American people.
But over the last 20 to 30 years, we have spent thousands of lives in American blood and trillions of dollars in American treasure in a region that many people ask, “ Why are we over there?”
And I’m not saying there aren’t good answers to that question. But as somebody who knows many global war on terror veterans, I know that they’re deeply disillusioned by what we’ve done in the region. So, when they see America get into yet again another war in the Middle East, as we have here recently with Iran, it is frustrating.
Now, I support Donald Trump. I’ve voted for him three times. I worked for him. I would stand with Matthew Peterson in saying that, if I were in a position to give advice, I would have said maybe we don’t do it this time—but we want to trust the president and the people who are in charge and the American people who voted for him.
Still, none of that changes the fact that Americans are a war-weary country right now and particularly the millennials and the younger generation.
Second, we want our national sovereignty back.
And I don’t just mean that in terms of a relationship between America and Israel, but that’s something that often is brought up. But we see this in other areas as well. We are pulling out of a variety of things in relation to the United Nations. Not the entire United Nations yet, though, if we did, I wouldn’t be mad.
We’re pulling out of the World Health Organization. We are trying to reassess our NATO alliance.
Americans want national sovereignty. The Trump coalition wants national sovereignty.
We want an utter rejection of the vision of George H.W. Bush from his 1990 United Nations speech where he says he envisions a future of open borders and open trade and open hearts and open peoples and an end to nationalism abroad. But then reality came surging back in 2016 with Donald Trump and we said, “Giddy up. Let’s go.”
We want national sovereignty. We want America first to mean America first.
Another piece of the national sovereignty question, one that has been mentioned here, and much of what has been driving support for Israel in America has been a theological view that many of my Southern Baptist brothers and sisters share regarding Israel. I myself do not share it as strongly as they do, or maybe not even at all in the way that they do, depending on what exact eschatological system is in view. But in my work, I try in no way, shape, or form to make that a stumbling block between us working together to beat the Leftists trying to take over our Christian denomination. Which is why coming here was quite a bit of a risk for me. People ask, “What do you get for coming here?” And I say, “I don’t know. Probably grief.”
I love my Southern Baptist brothers and sisters who are dispensationalists. But the reality is that theology is also waning in the United States. And in the light of people who want American national sovereignty back, simply saying that the answer to supporting Israel is “because the Bible says so,” in light of these very difficult and complex conversations isn’t going to work.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a big believer in a lot of things being settled by “because the Bible says so.” And I respect that there are those who make that argument, but the reality is that that argument continues to have less purchase.
Furthermore, there are many people, specifically younger people on the Right, who find some sort of oddness about the fact that we have members of Congress who wave Israeli flags outside of their office year round. I understand if you would do it after an event like October 7th. But coming to our nation’s capital and seeing the flag of another sovereign nation outside of your congressman’s office, to many younger people on the Right, is an odd thing. They say “America first” but then this looks kind of like “America first plus Israel first.” What are we doing here? Those are the questions that they are asking.
Third, there are concerns again on the Right about the treatment of Christians in the Middle East.
Much of this is perception. This is not necessarily reality. Some of it is perception. But I’ll share a personal anecdote. One of the other foreign nations that I’ve had a chance to visit in recent years is the nation of Armenia. Armenia is the oldest Christian nation in the world. They are fighting against the Muslim Azerbaijanis who are attacking them and destroying their holy sites and desecrating their land and killing their people. And the Azerbaijanis are using Israeli drone technology. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is a fact.
If Israelis want Christians to be their allies, then that has to be a two-way street, not just in America, but in the broader Middle Eastern region as well.
More George Washington, Less Nazi Hunting
What I think could help us going forward here is a return to the greatest American who ever lived. His farewell address has been referenced multiple times here, but it is so insightful. It is so enduring. It is the most cited political speech in American history.
And in George Washington’s Farewell Address, he warns that permanent antipathies against particular nations or passionate attachments for others should be forsaken. And this is a line that many people know.
He says, “The nation which indulges towards another, a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty or its interest.”
I love that quote because it gets at both sides. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, stuck here in the middle with you.
There are people on both sides who let their affection for or their hatred of Israel dominate everything they do in the American political scene. I want to talk about what’s best for America. I don’t want to talk about why the “biggest threat” to America is the relationship between America and Israel, or why, no matter what happens, we must always stand with Israel. Instead, I want us to have honest, fair, reasonable debate; “come, let us reason together.”
And the only way we can do that is if we follow the advice offered by George Washington and we let neither antipathy or overweening fondness guide our relationships with foreign nations. So take heed from George Washington.
Lastly, please stop the Nazi hunting. Let’s stop the Nazi hunting. This has been alluded to already, but I want to point out where this is most particularly poignant on the right.
JD Vance is the successor to Donald Trump. JD Vance, not Marco Rubio, not Ted Cruz, not anybody else who can throw their hat in the ring. And this is most particularly where the issue, this Nazi hunting, antisemite hunting issue is being used to actually try to give the NeoCons power back again after a Trump era.
We support JD Vance. MAGA supports JD Vance. JD Vance is not an antisemite. Stop trying to put him and anyone else associated with him through some Leftist struggle session demanding he denounce this, that, or the other person. Just stop listening to those podcasters. Don’t let them live rent-free in your heads.
JD Vance is our guy. And if you want to help strengthen this relationship in any way going forward, the sooner you get on the Vance train, the better.
William Wolfe is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Baptist Leadership. He previously worked as a legislative staffer for three Republican members of Congress, and as the Director of House Affairs at the State Department and Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for House Affairs at the Department of War in the first Trump Administration. He is alumnus of Cotton Mather Fellowship at American Reformer and the George C. Marshall Fellows program at the Heritage Foundation. He has a BA from Covenant College and an MDiv and ThM from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. You can follow him on X here.