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Jared Kushner and Hakeem Jeffries met privately in New York City in recent weeks, and neither man wanted to discuss it afterward.

The New York Times reported the encounter on August 23, citing five people with knowledge of a session held in a New York City space a mutual friend provided. The two men discussed housing, immigration, and the cost of living. Kushner urged Jeffries to sit down with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles as a follow-up. NBC News confirmed the account the same day. Jeffries’s initial statement never acknowledged the meeting at all, insisting only that “the affordability crisis is not a hoax and nothing short of transformational policy change is acceptable.” He later posted a video on X acknowledging that “Kushner asked for a meeting.”

The timing carried its own message. Democrats lead in nearly every midterm poll, and Jeffries becomes speaker if they capture the House in November. Kushner has told associates that Jeffries ranks as “the most serious” Democratic leader. House Speaker Mike Johnson shrugged at the news on Fox News, saying “I don’t know what that’s about.” Crooked Media co-founder Tommy Vietor was less charitable, posting on X: “Jared Kushner has no actual government job; he just uses his family connections to get money from gulf autocrats and fund corrupt deals. The only way Jeffries should work with him is with demands for documents and subpoenas.”

That reaction captures a long-standing problem with Jeffries. Namely, the qualities that make Jeffries someone Trump’s inner circle can work with are the same qualities that have made him a target inside his own party and nowhere is more apparent than on the issue of Israel.

Jeffries reached that position by a steady ascent through the House. He won New York’s 8th Congressional District in 2012, succeeding Ed Towns, and quickly built a legislative profile around criminal justice reform. He introduced legislation to criminalize chokeholds after Eric Garner’s death and served as the lead Democratic sponsor of the bipartisan First Step Act of 2018, a jailbreak bill that became one of Donald Trump’s most significant legislative accomplishments of his first term.

House Democrats unanimously elected Jeffries to succeed Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader on November 30, 2022, making him the first Black American to lead either party in either chamber of Congress. He was re-elected to the post in 2024. In July 2025 he set the record for the longest House floor speech in modern history, speaking for eight hours and 44 minutes against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and breaking the mark Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) set in 2021. Heading into the 2026 midterms, Jeffries is widely positioned to become speaker if Democrats retake the House.

With Jeffries potentially becoming House Speaker, American Jewry could breathe a sigh of relief knowing that they have a safe pair of hands wielding the speaker’s gavel. Jeffries represents Brooklyn’s 8th District, which Jewish Currents has described as the 15th most Jewish congressional district in the country, and he was raised in Crown Heights, home to the global headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. He has extolled that constituency, telling reporters and audiences that “in New York City we consider Jerusalem to be the sixth borough.”

His public language and, more importantly, his legislative record on Israel have been reliably pro-Zionist throughout his congressional career. Jeffries backed the $1 billion Iron Dome replenishment in September 2021, which passed 420 to 9 over objections from eight progressive Democrats. He voted in favor of the $26.4 billion Israel Security Supplemental, H.R. 8034, in April 2024, which split House Democrats 173 to 37. He voted no on a GOP standalone Israel aid bill, H.R. 6126, in February 2024 that Democrats viewed as a partisan maneuver, and he supported the 2019 anti-BDS resolution H.Res.246 as well as the Antisemitism Awareness Act in May 2024. By 2022 alone, Jewish Currents documented Jeffries raising $440,000 from Israel-advocacy groups—the sixth-highest total among House members that cycle, per OpenSecrets—and he has traveled to Israel five times on AIPAC-sponsored trips since entering Congress in 2013. Jeffrie’s pro-Israel funding surged to over $1 million by the 2024 election cycle.

In July 2026, Jeffries continued his pro-Israel antics. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) offered an amendment stripping $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing for Israel from the fiscal 2027 State Department bill. It failed 104 to 314. Among Democrats, 103 voted yes, 98 voted no, and 10 voted present, with Massie the lone Republican supporter. Jeffries voted no. In a Dear Colleague letter, he called the measure “overly broad,” arguing it would hinder humanitarian aid efforts, refugee resettlement, and efforts to undermine resistance groups like Hamas. Notably, he declined to whip the vote, telling members there would be “good faith reasons that will result in members voting in a variety of different ways.”

They would proceed to do so, with his own deputy, Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA), announcing she would vote yes because “the status quo is not tenable.” Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi voted yes as well, saying “the Netanyahu government cannot maintain its current course.” Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-CA) stayed with Jeffries. The party’s top two leaders had split publicly on the defining foreign policy question of the cycle, and Jeffries found himself on the shrinking side.

The money surrounding that vote drew immediate scrutiny. Sludge reported that on May 20, AIPAC’s PAC routed two earmarked payments totaling $149,300 to the Jeffries Battleground Protection Fund, the largest earmarked disbursement in the PAC’s history, listed in Federal Election Commission records as an earmark of Jewish billionaire investor Daniel Och.

The AIPAC money flowing into Jeffries’ coffers has raised concerns among progressives. When Jeffries told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show in November 2025 that AIPAC’s PAC could give only “$5,000 or $10,000 per cycle, that’s it,”Sludge called the characterization misleading, noting the group’s conduit system has funneled more than a million dollars in earmarked donations to his campaigns.

That financial relationship has fueled further backlash. When AIPAC’s United Democracy Project super PAC spent $14.5 million in June 2024 to defeat Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Jeffries offered only a muted response, telling Punchbowl News that “pro-Israel groups are going to support pro-Israel members of Congress.” Radio host Charlamagne tha God has mockingly nicknamed Jeffries “AIPAC Shakur” for his close alignment with pro-Israel donors.

Other leftist outlets have taken Jeffries to task for his devotion to Israeli interests. His 2026 partnership with liberal Zionist organization J Street to oppose the Massie-sponsored arms amendment drew a pointed critique from CounterPunch, which accused him of coupling rhetoric about restraint with continued support for weapons transfers amid allegations of Israeli conduct in Gaza.

Jeffries’s financial entanglements do not end with AIPAC. Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder later convicted of fraud, donated to Jeffries’s campaign, and Jeffries pledged to donate the funds after FTX’s collapse, according to Bloomberg. Separately, 2026 reporting found that committees tied to Jeffries and other Democratic leaders donated to candidates who had pledged to reject corporate PAC money, even as those same committees accepted funds from corporations including Barclays, CVS and UnitedHealthcare, raising accusations of an indirect funding workaround.

The financial ties only reinforce a rhetorical record that consistently delegitimized Palestinian resistance to Israeli transgressions. In February 2022, he called claims that Israel is an apartheid state “demonstrably false, dangerous and designed to isolate Israel in one of the toughest neighborhoods in the world,” responding directly to Amnesty International’s report on Israeli apartheid. After October 7, 2023, he declared in a press release that “America stands firmly and unequivocally with Israel” and that Congress “must stand with Israel until the invasion by Hamas has been crushed.” He also criticized the phrase “from the river to the sea” in a November 2023 statement as a call for “the complete destruction of Israel,” and stressed in February 2025 that “our commitment to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and Democratic state and eternal homeland for the Jewish people is ironclad.”

The most recent flashpoint in Jeffries’s career came in August 2026 with a private meeting with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and top outside adviser, to discuss “potential areas of common ground” on housing, immigration, and the cost of living. The New York Times noted the meeting’s timing “underscored that those around Mr. Trump were well aware of the likelihood of a Democratic-led House,” and that Kushner suggested Jeffries also meet with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Kushner reportedly told associates that if anything bipartisan gets done with Congress, Jeffries is “the most serious person among Democratic leaders.”

Despite the criticism he received from progressives, Jeffries defended the meeting on CNN and in a video posted to X, insisting “no one from the Trump cartel is getting a pass” and that he agreed to the sit-down only to “discuss the affordability crisis that exists, that is not a hoax.” This was not the first time Jeffries and Kushner had found common ground. He and Kushner have a prior working relationship dating to their collaboration on the 2018 First Step Act.

Taken together, Hakeem Jeffries is a reliable servant of Israel and the broader Jewish community. Both Trump terms have been Judeo-accelerationist to the core, with Israel getting nearly everything it wants. Naturally, the American public has grown tired of these escapades that only advance Jewish interests and are now prepared to vote the bums out in the upcoming midterms.

Though it should be stressed that in the Jewish-dominated plutocracy we live in there is no meaningful opposition to the Pan-Judah. At best, voters will have to pull the lever for another competing faction of Jewish proxies.

Enter Hakeem Jeffries and his minions.

Regardless of how the political pendulum swings later this year, the Jewish donor networks and political action committees backing Israel face no real downside, secure in the knowledge that a Democratic flip merely elevates Jeffries, an empty suit who is a certified coon for the Cohens in word and in deed.

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Emmanuel Acho’s entry into the NFL was as unremarkable as his exit. Selected 204th overall in the 2012 draft by the Cleveland Browns, Acho never managed to make a meaningful impact. His tenure was a blur of injuries, practice squad designations, and minor trades between the Eagles and Giants, totaling a forgettable 33 tackles before he quietly drifted into retirement at age 25. While his athletic limitations prevented him from becoming a household name in sports, his true talent lay dormant, waiting for a medium that prioritized performative psychology over physical skill. He left the locker room not with a legacy, but with a master’s degree in sports psychology—a tool he would soon use to climb up the ladder of sports media.

Born in Dallas to Igbo immigrants, Acho was raised in the shadow of his father, Dr. Sonny Acho, senior pastor of Living Hope Bible Fellowship Church in North Dallas, founder and president of Living Hope Christian Ministries, and a mental health professional in private practice. In 1989, a year before Emmanuel was born, his parents began organizing medical missions to Nigeria. Those trips grew into Living Hope Christian Ministries and its Operation Hope program, and the Acho children joined the work as soon as they were old enough. His brother Sam followed a similar path through St. Mark’s School of Texas, the University of Texas, and the NFL.

But the pulpit of the church proved too small for Acho’s ambition; he realized that modern media offered a far more lucrative stage for a man willing to perform the role of the pliant golem for the Judeo-American establishment. Acho went from the Longhorn Network to ESPN2 college football coverage, then joined Fox Sports in June 2020 as co-host of Speak for Yourself, replacing Jason Whitlock. He later anchored Speak and co-hosted The Facility on FS1. When Fox canceled The Facility and two other shows in July 2025, Acho launched Speakeasy—a creator-owned YouTube sports show airing after primetime NFL games—alongside former NFL running back LeSean McCoy.

What lifted Acho above the sports desk was a project of a different kind. In June 2020, weeks after George Floyd’s death, Acho posted a video called “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man.” The first episode drew several million views in a few days. Matthew McConaughey called from an unknown number to request an appearance, the project accelerated, and the series accumulated more than 90 million views total and won two Emmy Awards, with Oprah Winfrey serving as the publisher of the companion book through her imprint at Macmillan. Multiple books followed, with at least three of them turning into New York Times bestsellers. The sequence, Acho has said in subsequent public appearances, is what set everything else in motion.

Acho applied the same template to a different cause. The former NFL player and Israeli actress and activist Noa Tishby were introduced by their agents roughly two years before October 7, 2023. He approached the subject of antisemitism because he had noticed it rising and had noticed something else, namely that people around him could not define the word. Tishby brought her own credentials to the project. She founded Act for Israel in 2011, the first Israel-focused online advocacy and rapid response organization. Appointed Israel’s inaugural Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and the Delegitimization of Israel in April 2022, she held that volunteer post until the Netanyahu government dismissed her in April 2023 after she publicly criticized his judicial overhaul on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher and in Israeli media.

Their partnership nearly collapsed before it produced anything. According to the Times of Israel, a prospective book project almost fell apart when Acho brought Palestinian American activist Noura Erekat into an online conversation as a counterpoint without telling Tishby in advance. The two were able to make amends. Then Hamas attacked Israel, and Acho concluded the work had become more necessary, not less. Out of that collaboration came a bestseller. Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew arrived April 30, 2024, from Simon Element, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, and immediately hit the New York Times bestseller list.

Having mastered the rhetoric of the establishment, Acho needed a narrative of personal “suffering” to solidify his status as the preferred Black mouthpiece for the Zionist project. Shortly after the book’s publication in April, Acho had finally found his signature anecdote—a manufactured moment of peril to prove his loyalty to the tribe. Leaving a North Hollywood sushi spot, a stranger dared to suggest he was being paid by Zionists. For a man of 6’2” and 240 pounds, a verbal jab from a woman on the street should have been a non-event, but Acho recognized the utility of the moment immediately.

He would later transform this minor confrontation into the centerpiece of his speech before the Anti-Defamation League earlier in 2026, using it to curry favor with his Jewish benefactors. He told the ADL audience, “This is how it feels to be Jewish,” effectively donning the mask of the victim to better serve his masters.

His commitment to Jewry deepened after co-authoring his book with Tishby, and within a year it took him to Israel itself. He went to Israel for the first time in February 2025, traveling with Tishby to mark approximately the 500th day since the Hamas attack. They visited Hostage Square in Tel Aviv and met families of the hostages, walked the grounds of the Nova music festival massacre, and saw Kibbutz Nir Oz. That same month the two appeared together at Barry University outside Miami for an event hosted by the David Posnack Jewish Community Center and the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, one stop in a long run of synagogue and federation appearances that has included Atlanta’s Temple, where more than 900 people turned out.

The institutional recognition came in the spring of 2026. On March 11, 2026, the ADL announced that Acho would receive the first-ever ADL Ally Award, presented on the mainstage of the Never Is Now Summit on Antisemitism and Hate in New York on March 16 and 17. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said Acho “has a passion and a commitment for engaging people across differences with empathy and integrity,” adding that “he is accomplished in his professional life, and beyond that, he is a mensch of the first order.” Acho accepted, and used the speech to state the thesis his last two years have been built on: “The Jewish community and the Black community have far too much in common to not be fighting together.”

Acho’s performance on the ADL stage is not an isolated instance of individual sycophancy before organized Jewry. As this author has observed, the Zionist strategy has shifted toward cultivating specific Global South populations to fill the void left by a world horrified by the livestreamed carnage in Gaza. By targeting nations like Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and India, the architects of this project are building a new coalition of melanin-enhanced golems to serve as the firewall against international condemnation.

Emmanuel Acho serves as a local avatar for a global strategy, acting as the primary buck-dancer of the Nigerian diaspora. He executes his assigned role with an unsettling enthusiasm, proving he will gladly liquidate his dignity for the accumulation of a few extra shekels and a pat on the head from the likes of the ADL.

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Byron Lowell Donalds is a Republican U.S. Representative for Florida’s 19th Congressional District and the current Trump-endorsed frontrunner for Florida governor in the 2026 race. Widely described as a “rising star” in the GOP and one of only a handful of black Republicans in Congress, Donalds projects the image of a staunch “America First” conservative outsider. However, a closer examination of his political journey, legislative track record, and extensive network of establishment donors reveals a politician whose actions often align more closely with conventional, interventionist Republicans than with the anti-establishment rhetoric he champions.

Born in October 1978, Donalds and his two sisters were raised by their single mother in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, and he has described that childhood as difficult. His early adulthood brought two encounters with the law that he now uses as part of his redemption arc.

The first came in 1997, when he was 18 and a student at Florida A&M. Officers stopped him in Tallahassee and found marijuana in his pocket. Leon County records show the charge dismissed through a pre-trial diversion program and a $150 fine. For years he told that story as a simple possession arrest. In March 2026, running for governor, he acknowledged to CBS News Miami that he had also been selling, confirming an account his first wife gave the Florida Trident in 2024. He said he dealt “for a period of time, low level amounts,” and called that stretch of his life a run of terrible decisions.

The second came in 2000, at 21. Florida charged him with bribery, a second degree felony, in a scheme to defraud a bank. Donalds has long maintained the conduct was theft rather than bribery, telling an interviewer in 2014 that an acquaintance persuaded him he could make $1,000 by depositing a bad check, and that he repaid the bank roughly seven times what he took. He pleaded no contest, served probation, and later had the record sealed and expunged. “These were the actions of a young kid, I can’t undo that,” he said. “I can’t undo my mistakes, but the only thing I can do is to show and become the man that I am today for my family and for the community that I love.”

Donalds credits a conversion to Christianity around that same age as the turning point that put him on the path to normalcy. He transferred from Florida A&M to Florida State and earned a degree in finance and marketing in 2002, then built a career in Southwest Florida finance. He started at TIB Bank as a credit analyst in 2003 and rose through senior analyst, commercial credit manager, and assistant vice president, worked in portfolio management at CMG Surety, and finished as a financial advisor at Wells Fargo Advisors before politics took over. He won a Florida House seat in 2016 and entered Congress in 2021. Now, with Donald Trump’s endorsement in the 2026 gubernatorial race, Donalds is positioned to become the first elected black Republican governor in U.S. history if he wins the general elections.

Donalds entered politics through the Tea Party wave of 2010, the year he left the Democratic Party. His first run for Congress came in 2012 and ended in defeat in the Republican primary that Trey Radel won. He stayed in public life through the school choice fight, the cause that would define his family’s rise.

The vehicle was Mason Classical Academy, a Hillsdale affiliated charter school that Collier County activist Kelly Lichter founded in 2012 and opened in 2014. Erika Donalds signed on as a founding advisory board member and won a seat on the Collier County School Board that same year, serving until 2018 and becoming one of the most prominent school choice advocates in Florida. Byron joined the school’s board of directors and rose to vice president.

The alliance did not hold. Lichter and another board member later sued Byron, Erika, and a roster of associated individuals and organizations in federal court, alleging that Byron began working in May 2016 to take the school over. Erika called the suit frivolous and a waste of taxpayer money. She went on to build a career managing charter schools through her Optima companies, which the Florida Bulldog reported have collected millions in school contracts, and Governor DeSantis named her to the Florida Gulf Coast University board of trustees in 2022.

The feud has followed Donalds into the governor’s race. Kelly Mason, who brought the earlier charter school litigation under her former name Lichter and won a Collier County School Board seat that November, surfaced a fresh complaint in Collier County Circuit Court this month. It centers on an August 2022 confrontation at Seed to Table, a Naples grocery store, on a night both had just posted primary wins.

Mason alleges Donalds approached her over the lawsuits against him and his wife and that he “berated and insulted her and insisted that he could ‘crush’ or ‘finish’ her.” She further alleges his senior adviser Larry Wilcoxson chased her through the store while shouting. She seeks compensatory and punitive damages for emotional distress, humiliation, and fear for her own safety and her children’s, and she is represented by Anthony Sabatini, a Lake County commissioner and former Republican state House member.

Part of the encounter reached the public four years ago, when a Fort Myers station aired video showing Donalds and two staffers speaking with Mason in a corner of the store, largely inaudible, before she walked off shouting at him about his wife.

The campaign is not treating the filing gently. “This is a baseless, politically motivated attack and shameful publicity stunt designed to damage Byron Donalds in the 2026 election,” communications director Gates McGavick said, adding that Mason has a long record of unsuccessful litigation against the family. The complaint arrives with under four weeks left before the August 18 primary, a race Donalds leads in both polling and money.

His persistence paid off in 2016, when he won a seat in the Florida House representing District 80. He chaired the PreK through 12 Quality Subcommittee and later the Insurance and Banking Subcommittee, working on education, elder affairs, and criminal justice. In 2020 he took the open seat of retiring Representative Francis Rooney, surviving a nine-way Republican primary by just over 700 votes before winning the general election.

In Washington, he wasted no time in establishing himself as a Conservatism Inc. darling. He joined the House Freedom Caucus, and compiled a strong conservative scorecard record, per Heritage Action. His national profile arrived on January 4, 2023, during the revolt against Kevin McCarthy. Donalds had backed McCarthy on the first two ballots, switched to Jim Jordan on the third, and then watched the Freedom Caucus put his own name forward. He drew 20 votes on each of three consecutive ballots, enough to deny McCarthy the gavel, and became the first black Republican ever nominated for Speaker. He ran again for the job that October, after McCarthy fell.

Loyalty to Trump put him on the 2024 vice presidential shortlist and delivered the endorsement that has defined his current campaign. Donalds entered the race for governor in early 2025 to succeed the term limited Ron DeSantis, and the money followed. He had raised north of $67 million by the start of April and held $65.8 million cash on hand on June 1, while former Florida House Speaker Paul Renner and Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins had dropped to under $2.3 million and $3.5 million by late June. Donalds has since put roughly $20 million into a statewide ad buy aimed as much at November as at the August 18 primary, where he leads every poll of the announced field.

Donalds talks like a foreign policy hawk and votes like one. The tension in his record runs not against the peace through strength doctrine he invokes, which has always been hawkish, but against the non-interventionist strand of the America First coalition he claims.

On Iran, he gives no ground. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, he said that “A nuclear Iran is just simply unacceptable because that is a theocratic regime who is hell-bent on global jihad.” In the same interview he called for “full-scale regime change” in Cuba, citing 67 years of communist rule, a collapsing power grid, and food rationing. He has praised Trump’s unorthodox dealmaking as superior to conventional diplomacy and argued the White House needs maximum flexibility to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program.

His votes in the House follow this pattern. When Congress moved to invoke the War Powers Resolution against a conflict that has now run months and killed American servicemembers, Donalds voted no each time. He opposed H.Con.Res.38 on March 5, which failed 212 to 219 with only Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Warren Davidson (R-OH) crossing over. He opposed the Meeks resolution on June 3, which passed 215 to 208 when four Republicans broke ranks, and he opposed the measure the House approved 214 to 208 today, days after four more troops died. On these votes he sits with Republican leadership rather than in a hawkish minority.

He did back H.Res.1099 in March, declaring it United States policy that Iran remains the largest state sponsor of terrorism. It passed under suspension of the rules with most Democrats voting yes. Donalds also defended the June 2025 airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and endorsed Israel’s preemptive strikes that same month, saying Israel “didn’t really have much of a choice” when it came to attacking Iran, completely unprovoked.

Like most Republicans in Congress, Donalds is an ardent Zionist. Donalds went to the George Washington University encampment in spring 2024 alongside Lauren Boebert and other House Republicans, confronting demonstrators directly and pressing the university and city officials to clear the site.

He set out his view of the alliance early. In a November 2020 interview with JNS, weeks after his first election to Congress, Donalds said the American relationship with Israel “is the most important one in the region, probably the world.” Israel, he added, “is the one standing country that comports with our values as Americans, and that’s why [the relationship] is vertical.” Pressed on whether that squares with an agenda built on putting American interests first, he argued that “having a strong relationship with Israel is critical for our national security interests as well,” then asked, “I mean, who are we going to share interests with? The Iranians?”

The position has hardened as the Republican coalition has split over the Israel issue. The sharpest test has come over money being sent to Israel. Florida holds roughly $350 million in Israel bonds, the second largest government position in the world behind Palm Beach County, which crossed $1 billion in January. Asked whether he would pull the state out, Donalds said no, pointing to the yield and the bonds’ place in state pension holdings.

That answer was aimed at a specific rival. James Fishback, the investment executive running against Donalds, has vowed to divest every state entity on his first day, redirecting the money to housing assistance. Fishback has also said he will not visit Israel under any circumstances, mocked the Western Wall, accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, and proposed teaching that claim in Florida public schools. In April, Fishback traveled to Palm Beach County and delivered an ultimatum to Clerk of the Circuit Court Mike Caruso, a DeSantis appointee who had built the county’s Israel bond position to $1 billion. “You have 48 hours to divest the billion dollars you gave to Netanyahu, or I will use Article 4, Section 7 of the Florida Constitution to remove you for malfeasance from office,” Fishback said.

The provision he cited belongs to the governor, an office he does not hold and trails badly in the race to win. Caruso has defended the holdings as an investment, projecting $47.2 million in interest over three years. Jewish community leaders and pro-Israel groups condemned Fishback’s idea, particularly the suggestion that a county investment amounted to a personal gift to Israel’s prime minister. Fishback has separately criticized Donalds for convening a forum at a South Florida synagogue, accusing him of favoritism toward Jews.

Speaking at a campaign event in May 2026, with Fishback continuing to call for Florida to divest from Israeli bonds, Donalds drew the line sharply. “Israel is our ally. That is not going to change,” he said. “Anybody, in my opinion, who is trying to sever the relationship between the Israelis and the United States is acting, quite frankly, in the interest of the Iranian regime. They’re acting in the interest of the Chinese regime. They’re acting in the interest of the Russian regime.”

Donalds’ ties to the organized pro-Israel movement predate Congress. In May 2019, while serving in the Florida House, Donalds made his first trip to Israel on a tour sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, AIPAC’s charitable affiliate, traveling across the country and into Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority.

The Florida congressman is also closely aligned with the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC). He addressed the RJC Annual Leadership Summit in October 2025 and the Summer Leadership Meeting in 2026, pledging that Florida would “never tolerate antisemitism” under his leadership. In April 2025, Donalds received the award of the Zionist Organization of America’s “Robert Kasowitz Outstanding Patriot and Pro-Israel Congressman Award” at a gala in Florida, where ZOA President Morton Klein praised his staunch defense of Israel. Upon accepting the honor, Donalds declared, “Israel and the ZOA will always have a friend in me. We will stand against antisemitism and hate. It will not be tolerated in Florida. It will be fought, and we will win.”

Donalds’ campaign coffers reflect these relationships and then some. In February, Leading the Future, a super PAC funded by OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman, 8VC founder Joe Lonsdale, and the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, pledged roughly $5 million to Donalds, making him the first candidate for governor anywhere to draw the group’s support.

His single largest benefactor is Jeff Yass, the Zionist Jewish investor whose fortune runs in part through ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. Yass has given $7.5 million to Friends of Byron Donalds, the committee behind the campaign, which has now taken in more than $81 million overall. Asked why, a Susquehanna spokesman answered that Donalds is a “school choice warrior,” which points at the other half of the relationship. Yass has spent years financing school choice nationally, the same movement that made Erika Donalds’s career.

Behind the rhetoric of the Florida outsider and the populist firebrand lies a familiar political operator whose legislative record and donor base tell the real story. Byron Donalds is simply another affirmative action darling of the establishment, ready to reliably service Jewish interests and ensure that the treasury remains open for Tel Aviv. No amount of posturing about leaving the Democratic plantation can obscure the fact that he has merely traded masters, stepping up as a buck-dancer for World Jewry.

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Leo James Terrell built his identity around the Democratic Party for most of his adult life before declaring in 2020 that he had always belonged on the other side. Today he directs the Trump administration’s scorched-earth campaign against American universities, wielding the threat to “bankrupt” any institution he believes has allowed antisemitism to fester.

His journey from civil rights attorney to MAGA enforcer represents a political transformation so thorough that Terrell himself turned it into a marketing strategy. The new version has a name: “Leo 2.0.”

Born February 1, 1955 in Los Angeles, Terrell graduated from Gardena High School in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood in 1972, where his classmates elected him student body president. He took his bachelor’s degree from California State University Dominguez Hills in 1977, added a master’s in education from Pepperdine University, and completed his law degree at UCLA School of Law before joining the California Bar on December 4, 1990.

He spent years in the classroom before he ever entered a courtroom, teaching history, geography, and economics at Gage Middle School in Huntington Park. He once remarked that he considers himself “a better teacher than a lawyer.” Donald Trump nominated him on January 21, 2025 as Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.

With his bar card in hand, Terrell set up a civil rights practice out of a Beverly Hills tower at 8383 Wilshire Boulevard. He joined the NAACP in 1990 and took on pro bono work for the organization until a public break in 2003, when he resigned accusing the group of pressuring him over his endorsement of a Republican judicial nominee. NAACP Washington director Hilary Shelton pushed back: “not an NAACP lawyer, not even a former NAACP lawyer…he’s done volunteer work for us, which we appreciate.”

National visibility arrived through his friendship with O.J. Simpson, whose criminal and civil trials he watched and publicly supported as a family friend and legal analyst. He then co-hosted the Los Angeles radio program Terrell and Katz alongside conservative former judge Burton Katz, premiering on June 3, 1996 on KMPC, before graduating to a regular presence on Fox News programs including Hannity, The O’Reilly Factor, and Hannity and Colmes, where he served as the liberal foil. He also turned up on Nightline, Larry King Live, Today, and Good Morning America.

A joint investigation by ProPublica and the Chronicle of Higher Education concluded that Terrell’s actual legal career was “dramatically at odds” with Trump’s portrait of a “highly respected” attorney with an “incredibly successful career.” Lawyers who worked in the same world dismissed him as peripheral. Connie Rice, former western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, recalled that Terrell “was never at the table for the big cases that made impact. He loved holding press conferences.” Carl Douglas, a member of the Simpson defense team, put it more bluntly: “Leo was always a talker,” not “a baller.”

The paper trail told a similar story. Terrell faced two malpractice suits after accepting settlements without his clients’ knowledge. A federal appeals court characterized his management of the Edmond Logan criminal matter as “woeful,” and U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney wrote in 2017 that Terrell delivered “abysmal advice” that pushed Logan to turn down a plea deal and land a 35-year sentence.

His finances told the same story. The IRS filed 11 liens against him between 2004 and 2015, totaling nearly $400,000 in unpaid taxes. He sought Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in October 2010, disclosing $736,938 in liabilities, $304,650 in assets, and monthly income of $4,000, before the case was dismissed when he stopped attending required creditor meetings. More than a dozen small businesses took him to court seeking more than $170,000 in unpaid bills. His condominium went into foreclosure in 2013. When he filed his DOJ financial disclosure with $92,000 still owed to the IRS, he listed his liabilities as “none.”

The break came in July 2020. Terrell went on Fox News and announced he would cast his first-ever Republican ballot, pointing to Black Lives Matter’s grip on the Democratic Party, the push to defund police departments, and what he described as Biden’s condescending assumption that Black voters had nowhere else to go. He reinvented himself as “Leo 2.0,” moved red Trump-branded caps online, and landed a six-figure Fox News contributor contract.

The October 7 Hamas attacks gave Terrell a cause with a sharper edge. He declared that “No Jewish American in his or her right mind should vote Democrat,” trained his criticism on Black Lives Matter over antisemitism, and after October 7 compared the organization to ISIS.

The passion Terrell now brings to fighting antisemitism stands in sharp contrast to a history of near-total absence from the cause. ProPublica’s investigation concluded that before his MAGA conversion, Terrell had “little previous engagement with Jewish causes.” Jewish Insider noted in February 2025 that “Terrell does not have many connections to advocates in the Jewish community who work on the issue,” and seasoned antisemitism activist Ken Marcus said he had “never met Terrell.” In any substantive sense, his involvement with Jewish causes began only around 2020 and deepened through 2023 before reaching full intensity with his government appointment in early 2025.

That appointment positioned him as chair of the Department of Justice’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism starting in February 2025. Pro-Israel institutions wasted little time in embracing him. Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein proclaimed that “Leo Terrell will go down in history as one of the best friends the Jewish people ever had.”

Awards from organized Jewry soon followed. On January 25, 2026, Aish bestowed its King David Award on Terrell at the Dan Family Aish World Center in Jerusalem, citing his work defending Jewish students and the State of Israel. The Israeli government added its own tribute, conferring the Beacon of Truth Award for the Fight Against Antisemitism at a separate Jerusalem ceremony that praised his “moral clarity” and “tangible, on-the-ground impact.”

In office, Terrell has governed the way he argued on television. Appearing on Fox’s Life, Liberty and Levin, he vowed that “We are going to bankrupt these universities. We are going to take away every single federal dollar,” and added the direct threat: “If these universities do not play ball, lawyer up, because the federal government is coming after you.”

Columbia absorbed the opening blow, which consisted of an immediate cancellation of approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts, which the task force described as the opening salvo.

Terrell announced in a press release on March 7, 2025 that “Canceling these taxpayer funds is our strongest signal yet... This is only the beginning,” and when reports emerged in July 2025 that a settlement might be in reach, he shut the door publicly: “I will not ‘SELLOUT’ Jewish Americans. NO DEALS!”

Harvard became the next target. On March 31, 2025, the task force notified Harvard that it was reviewing more than $8.7 billion in federal grants across the university and its hospital affiliates. Days later the administration moved to freeze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts. Harvard sued in federal court, and in September 2025 U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs issued an 84-page ruling ordering the administration to restore the frozen funds.

Burroughs wrote that “there is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism” and that “defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities” in violation of the First Amendment and due process protections. The Trump administration appealed in December 2025, sending the case to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

Rather than retreating after the legal setback, Terrell vowed to expand the offensive nationwide. Terrell mapped out an aggressive national expansion, promising he expects “massive lawsuits” against “Jew-hating” universities, which includes Harvard, the University of California, Los Angeles, among others. On the question of international students, he drew a hard line on Israeli media outlet N12: “We will chase after the campus inciters, and those that are here with a student visa — goodbye. You are here by grace, if you create a mess, crime or discrimination against Jews, you will find yourself outside.

In 2026, Terrell unveiled a 15-city National Awareness and Action Tour alongside a new civilian Antisemitism Advisory Committee and a “social media alert system” built to “expose and shame cities that fail to take action.” He was emphatic that the committee would not be one “that’s going to write a report that collects dust,” describing it as a vehicle for on-the-ground solutions at the local level where, he argued, most official inaction on antisemitism occurs.

The posture stands in striking contrast to a January 2020 version of Leo Terrell who held Trump personally responsible for a surge in antisemitic violence. For someone whose conversion to the cause traces in any meaningful way only to 2020, the material returns have been considerable. His government salary is $167,603. His speaking fees run between $50,000 and $100,000. His personal X account has roughly 2.6 million followers. And the awards from pro-Israel organizations show no sign of stopping.

Rather than reading his transformation as a change of heart, look at the bottom line. Terrell is simply buck-dancing to secure his next round of shekels from the pan-Judah.

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The Pew Research Center released its annual survey of global attitudes toward Israel in June 2026, and the findings painted a picture of near universal disapproval. A median of 67 percent across all 36 countries surveyed held unfavorable views of Israel. Not a single country had a majority viewing Israel favorably. Confidence in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had cratered worldwide.

Yet buried in the data was a remarkable exception. 49 percent of Ghanaians reported holding a favorable view of Israel, making Ghana one of only a tiny handful of nations globally where nearly half the population still supports the Jewish state. Sub-Saharan Africa was the only region in the entire survey where pluralities still held favorable views. Kenya came in at 50 percent favorable. Nigeria registered 47 percent despite a sharp nine point jump in unfavorable views from the previous year.

These numbers demand explanation. Why does Ghana stand so far apart from global opinion? The answer lies in a unique convergence of historical ties, evangelical theology, Israeli diplomatic strategy, and the explosive growth of Pentecostal Christianity across West Africa.

Ghana’s relationship with Israel predates Ghanaian independence itself. In 1956, Israel established a consulate in the Gold Coast while it was still a British colony. After Ghana achieved independence in March 1957, Kwame Nkrumah invited Israel to deepen ties, and Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

The warmth of the early relationship was striking. Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir was the only foreign Cabinet official invited to participate in Ghana’s first independence anniversary celebrations in March 1958. Israel also helped establish the Ghana Air Force in July 1959, founding a flying training school in Accra staffed by Israeli instructors and technicians, with Indian advisers setting up the new service’s headquarters later that year.

Meir’s 1958 trip—her first to the African continent, taking in Liberia, Ghana, and other West African states—left her deeply moved by the challenges facing newly independent African nations. She personally championed the establishment of MASHAV, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, making international cooperation a signature element of her foreign policy. Meir stated that “human and economic development in Africa is a drive toward universal self-determination and justice,” articulating the humanitarian philosophy that would guide MASHAV’s work for decades.

The “golden years” proved fragile. At the January 1961 Casablanca Conference, Ghana joined other countries in sharply criticizing Israel, and the relationship cooled steadily through the 1960s. The Yom Kippur War of October 1973 proved to be the breaking point. In late October 1973, Ghana severed diplomatic relations with Israel, in compliance with an Organisation of African Unity resolution calling on members to cut ties over the occupied Arab territories.

For the next two decades, formal diplomatic relations were suspended. The signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993 opened a window for Ghana to review its position. On August 9, 1994, Ghana and Israel signed a joint communiqué and simultaneously announced in Tel Aviv and Accra the re-establishment of diplomatic ties. Ghana reopened its mission in Tel Aviv in 1996, but Israel did not reopen its embassy in Accra until September 2011.

The post-2011 period has witnessed a dramatic deepening of ties. Two rounds of formal political consultations were held in 2018 and 2021, and Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen visited Accra in 2023. A Ghana–Israel Parliamentary Friendship Association was inaugurated in June 2025, and a Third Session of the Ghana–Israel Political Dialogue was held in Jerusalem in January 2026.

Military cooperation has also featured. In September 2018, 25 commanders from the Ghana Armed Forces received training from Israeli Defense Forces officers in shooting and Krav Maga. In 2019, Israel appointed Colonel Aviezer Segal as its first military attaché to Africa in several decades; according to the Times of Israel, the IDF was by then training local forces in more than a dozen African nations, including Ghana, as part of Netanyahu’s broader Africa strategy.

Cybersecurity has emerged as one of the most dynamic areas of cooperation. In 2020, Ghana’s Minister of Communications led a delegation to the CyberTech Global conference in Tel Aviv, where Ghana and Israel signed a Memorandum of Understanding to strengthen cybersecurity cooperation. In 2024, Ghana’s Cyber Security Authority achieved Tier 1 status in the International Telecommunication Union’s Global Cybersecurity Index, with a score of 99.27 percent.

Yet cybersecurity cooperation also produced the single biggest controversy of the modern relationship. Around 2015–16, NSO Group contracted to supply its Pegasus spyware for roughly $6 million; with a $2 million fee added by the local intermediary, Infralocks Development Limited—run by George Derrick Oppong—Ghana’s National Communications Authority paid $8 million for the system, which was acquired for the National Security Council Secretariat. In 2020, three former senior officials were convicted in Accra High Court for causing financial loss to the state. Former Deputy National Security Coordinator Salifu Osman and NCA Director-General William Tetteh Tevie each received five-year sentences. The Times of Israel called it “the first time in the world that a government official has been jailed for doing business with NSO.”

Economic ties have grown steadily. The Israeli Trade Mission reported in May 2023 that over five years of engagement, Israeli businesses had concluded $140 million worth of deals with over 450 Israeli and 2,000 Ghanaian companies and agencies. MASHAV has run training programs in Ghana since 1958 in agriculture, health, education, and innovation; in 2019, a second batch of 70 Ghanaian agricultural graduates was sent to Israel for an 11-month attachment on Kibbutz farms.

The relationship has drawn serious criticism beyond Pegasus. Former MP Ras Mubarak has argued that Israeli investment and aid carry a political price tag. Netanyahu himself told Israeli ambassadors to Africa in 2017 that the “first interest” of the Africa push was to “dramatically change the situation regarding African votes at the UN and other international bodies from opposition to support.”

In November 2018, Ghana’s Foreign Minister Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey visited Israel and assured Knesset member Avraham Neguise—a Likud figure who chaired the World Likud movement—that Ghana would help Israel gain observer status at the African Union, drawing backlash from pro-Palestinian voices who said it cut against Ghana’s non-aligned tradition.

In December 2025, seven Ghanaian travelers—including four members of a parliamentary delegation bound for Tel Aviv University’s Cyber Week conference—were detained at Ben Gurion Airport for over five hours without justification; three were deported. Ghana’s Foreign Ministry condemned their “humiliating” treatment and said they had been deliberately targeted, and in a rare reciprocal move Ghana deported three Israelis who had just arrived.

Curiously, Ghana’s UN voting record has been quite hostile to Israel. According to the pro-Israel monitoring group UN Watch, Ghana has voted against Israel in the large majority of recent General Assembly votes, with no pro-Israel votes. Ghana voted against the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017, and in September 2025 President Mahama, addressing the General Assembly, backed Palestinian statehood and a two-state solution and condemned Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

This apparent contradiction, warm bilateral ties alongside consistent pro-Palestine UN voting, reveals the true driver of Ghana’s pro-Israel sentiment. It is not government policy but popular religious culture.

According to Ghana’s 2021 census figures, 71 percent of Ghanaians are Christian. Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians represent about 44 percent of all Christians. Scholars consistently identify this demographic reality as a primary engine of pro-Israel sentiment. In the edited volume Christian Zionism in Africa (ed. Cynthia Holder Rich), Suraya Dadoo’s chapter “Brand Jesus: Pro-Israel Messaging Through Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches in Ghana” documents how support for Israel has been embedded in church culture.

Israel has deliberately leveraged evangelical Christianity as a diplomatic tool across sub-Saharan Africa. Gideon Behar, former head of the Africa Bureau at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has described growing Evangelical communities in Africa as having a natural affinity for Israel and as an increasing factor pushing African governments to strengthen ties with it. He explained: “But the fact that there are Evangelical communities that are becoming larger and stronger everywhere in Africa . . . these communities naturally have a stronger connection with Israel, and a stronger urge to have links with us, and they are certainly a factor that is increasingly encouraging African countries to strengthen their ties with Israel.”

Archbishop Nicholas Duncan-Williams, founder of Christian Action Faith Ministries and one of West Africa’s most influential evangelical figures, serves as Patron of the Ghana Israel Business Chamber. In a 2017 sermon, he declared that a key sign of the end times would be “when the capital of Israel is moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,” urging his congregation to pray for it as prophecy to be fulfilled.

Ultimately, Ghana serves as the latest exhibit in a broader, calculated strategy by organized Jewry to cultivate golem states across the Global South. By weaponizing the theological fervor of low-IQ, easily manipulated populations, Israel secures a diplomatic and intelligence foothold that masks its deepening isolation in the West. As European nations increasingly awaken to the reality that organized Jewry has acted as the historical nemesis of their civilization, Israel has predictably pivoted toward melanin-enhanced, opportunistic constituencies who are eager to buck-dance for shekels in exchange for immediate financial gain.

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Floyd Mayweather Jr. retired with an undefeated professional record of 50-0, ranked by BoxRec as the greatest pound-for-pound boxer and greatest welterweight of all time. He won world titles in 5 weight classes and earned over $1 billion in purses and pay-per-view royalties during his career. Beyond his athletic achievements, Mayweather has emerged as one of the most prominent non-Jewish celebrity advocates for Israel, with connections to the Jewish community stretching back decades and deepening dramatically in recent years.

Mayweather’s earliest and longest-standing tie to the Jewish community was through Bob Arum, founder of Top Rank Boxing and one of the most powerful figures in the sport. Arum has spoken publicly about the role of Judaism in his life and his involvement with the Chabad movement. Arum promoted Mayweather from 1996 until 2006, when Mayweather left to found Mayweather Promotions. Their relationship was famously contentious, with Mayweather accusing Arum of underpaying him, but it placed Mayweather in close professional proximity to a prominent figure of the Jewish community for years. Arum promoted Yuri Foreman, a Belarus-born, Israel-raised professional boxer who held the WBA super welterweight title from 2009 to 2010. Foreman affectionately referred to Arum as “my other rabbi.”

The Jewish world that surrounded Mayweather’s professional career eventually drew him into direct contact with Israel itself. After his exhibition fight in Dubai against YouTuber Deji, Mayweather arrived in Israel in November 2022 for a surprise visit. He visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem and prayed there, strolled through Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda Market asking fans for shawarma recommendations, and attended the Tel Aviv basketball derby between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Hapoel Tel Aviv as a guest of his friend Xavier Munford—a former Hapoel Tel Aviv point guard. He also visited Aish HaTorah’s headquarters in Jerusalem, where he met with Aish leadership including Rabbi Steven Burg, Aish’s CEO, beginning what became a lasting relationship with the organization.

The Aish connection deepened over the following months and became central to Mayweather’s public identification with Israel. In March 2024, Mayweather returned to Aish’s Jerusalem headquarters — overlooking the Western Wall—where Burg presented him with the Champion for Israel Award, “a special honor reserved for those who continue to advocate against hate and antisemitism and stand up for Israel.” Mayweather told the assembled crowd: “Aish has welcomed me and my team in Jerusalem before, and it is very exciting to be back. This place is amazing. Everyone should come and visit here.”

The same period that brought Mayweather closer to figures like Burg also brought him into contact with associates of a far more controversial kind. One of Mayweather’s most controversial connections to the Jewish community involves Jona Rechnitz, a Jewish businessman who became a close associate and friend. According to legal documents from a 2026 lawsuit Mayweather filed against Rechnitz alleging fraud, Rechnitz began developing a relationship with Mayweather around 2017 through a mutual acquaintance. Rechnitz had previously pleaded guilty in 2016 to conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud involving bribing NYPD officials, and later accompanied Mayweather to Israel in March 2024.

Whatever controversies later emerged from the Rechnitz relationship, Mayweather’s public alignment with Israel reached its peak in the months following October 7, 2023. Within days of the Hamas attack, Mayweather dispatched his private jet—”Air Mayweather”—to Israel loaded with over 5,000 pounds of supplies including food, water, and bulletproof vests for both IDF soldiers and civilians. He also posted on Instagram: “I stand with Israel against the Hamas terrorists... I stand with Israel and Jews all around the world. I condemn antisemitism at all cost.”

In December 2023, he was honored with the “Champion of Israel” award at an American Friends of Magen David Adom gala in Miami Beach, where the event raised $4 million. In March 2024, he traveled to Israel again, visiting the Dan Family Aish World Center in Jerusalem, where he received the Champion for Israel Award from the Orthodox outreach organization Aish, presented by Rabbi Steven Burg. He wore a Star of David hat and necklace, sang songs in Hebrew, and met with students. Also during the March 2024 trip, he visited United Hatzalah headquarters in Jerusalem and toured their Dispatch and Command Center, and separately visited Magen David Adom’s Marcus National Blood Services Center in Ramla, where he dedicated a fleet of ambucycles—the motorcycle-based emergency response vehicles—dubbed the “Floyd Fleet,” in the words of AFMDA CEO Catherine Reed: “The Floyd Fleet will save thousands of lives in record time and wouldn’t have been possible without him.”

The honors and visits soon translated into more substantial financial commitments. In October 2024, he donated $100,000 to United Hatzalah specifically for the purchase of 100 bulletproof vests for volunteers responding under fire. In December 2024, he donated $1 million to United Hatzalah at the organization’s annual Miami Gala, which raised $14 million total. He also launched the “Mayweather Israel Initiative,” a charity program aimed at giving free birthday presents to every Israeli war orphan, delivered via a van called the “Floyd Mobile.”

This sustained pattern of giving eventually drew recognition from the most prominent Jewish political organization in American politics. In November 2025, Mayweather attended the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit in Las Vegas, where he received the “World Champion for Israel” award. He declared on stage, “I’m not with you guys 10 percent, 50 percent. I will always be the voice for the people in Israel. I will always stand behind the country of Israel.” The RJC honored him specifically for his financial donations, visits to injured IDF soldiers, and vocal opposition to antisemitism.

Unsurprisingly, Mayweather has publicly aligned with President Donald Trump—one of the most pro-Zionist presidents in American history—on multiple occasions. He attended Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 and posed for photos with Trump and Donald Trump Jr. In early 2025, Mayweather appeared on Fox Business’s Making Money and declared, “I think Trump is a great president, actually he’s the best president in my eyes. He’s the best president we ever had. Great businessman, and that’s what it’s about.” Elon Musk reposted the video.

Outside the ballrooms and award galas, Mayweather’s buck-dancing for Israel has also exposed him to direct hostility. In December 2024, while at Hatton Garden jewelry district in London, Mayweather was confronted by a crowd after declaring he was “proud to support the Jews.” A member of the crowd took a swing at him; his security team evacuated him. Mayweather denied being “punched or touched in any way” in an Instagram statement.

Mayweather’s transformation from a ring general to a performative puppet for Jewish causes serves as a jarring reminder that even the most celebrated athletes can be molded into buck-dancers for Zion, who eagerly trade their dignity for the hollow approval of Jewish oligarchs that treats them as little more than a temporary prop in a grander project of subversion. Being a shabbos goy is a problem that transcends color lines. As long as public figures of all racial backgrounds and confessions are incentivized to submit to an agenda that is not their own, we will remain trapped beneath the suffocating grip of organized Jewry that requires our total cultural surrender to survive.

There’s no bobbing and weaving your way out of this dilemma.

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When popular leftist streamer Hasan Piker told his massive audience that Hamas is “a thousand times better than Israel” and that he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” Van Jones did not dismiss him or call him names. He wrote a Substack essay engaging with the argument directly. Published under the title “Breakdown: Is Hasan Piker Right About Hamas?”, the piece argued that simply writing Piker off accomplishes nothing because the streamer is “emerging as one of the major voices of his generation.”

Jones characterized Piker’s core claim as asserting that “the Israelis have been so brutal to the Palestinians, have treated them so badly and have prosecuted the war in Gaza with such violence — that pretty much anything Hamas does pales in comparison.”

While Jones acknowledged having personally witnessed Palestinian suffering in the West Bank and Gaza, and agreed that “the Gaza war was prosecuted too aggressively,” he fundamentally rejected Piker’s position on Hamas. His central critique focused on means: Hamas “has spent the past 10 years firing rockets at innocent Israeli men, women, children, babies, hospitals, schools and nurseries,” Jones wrote, and the only reason those rockets had not murdered tens of thousands of Israelis was the Iron Dome. Jones also noted that while Israel has killed more Palestinians since October 7th than Hamas has killed Israelis, this is “not for lack of trying on Hamas’s part.”

The Piker essay is only the latest expression of a transformation that has unfolded since October 7, 2023, when Jones reinvented himself as the Jewish community’s most reliable Uncle Tom in the progressive world.

Jones did not arrive at this position of servitude to Jewish causes. It is rooted in his childhood and in a formative relationship with Dorothy “Dottie” Zellner, a Jewish civil rights activist who served as a staffer and newsletter editor for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1960s. Jones has recounted how Zellner threw herself into the civil rights movement after being inspired by the student sit-in movement of 1960. This relationship shaped Jones’s lifelong view that Black and Jewish communities are bound together by shared struggle and shared democratic values.

Jones has articulated this philosophy repeatedly. “We had 300 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow terror, and a bunch of crazy Black and Jewish kids went down one summer and broke the back of Jim Crow. The reason this country is a democracy at all is because Black and Jewish people have loved each other and helped each other and supported each other,” Jones said during a 2022 speech at the Wall Street Dinner, hosted by the UJA-Federation of New York, a charitable organization focused on uniting diverse groups to bolster Jewish communities.

This philosemitic worldview took shape in the rural Tennessee community where Jones came of age. Anthony Kapel “Van” Jones was born on September 20, 1968, in Jackson, Tennessee, to a high school teacher mother, Loretta Jean, and a middle school principal father, Willie Anthony Jones. He described himself as a child as “bookish and bizarre.” He graduated from Jackson Central-Merry High School in 1986 and earned a Bachelor of Science in communication and political science from the University of Tennessee at Martin.

Jones then enrolled at Yale Law School, where his radicalization accelerated. The 1992 Rodney King verdict was a pivotal moment. Sent to San Francisco as a legal observer at a peaceful march on May 8, 1992 — a week after the riots had ended — Jones was swept up in a mass arrest, held briefly, and released with all charges dropped. While in jail he encountered young radicals who changed his life. “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th,” he said. “By August, I was a communist.”

After Yale, Jones moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and in 1994 co-founded a socialist collective called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), which studied Marxist theory and organized around a vision of multiracial socialism. In 1996, he co-founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, focusing on economic empowerment and youth in the criminal justice system.

In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Jones as Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the Council on Environmental Quality. However, Jones resigned on September 6, 2009 amid a controversy driven largely by Fox News host Glenn Beck — who had a personal stake in the fight, as Jones had co-founded Color of Change, which was running an advertiser boycott against Beck’s show. Beck highlighted Jones’ past as a self-described communist, his involvement with STORM, a 2004 petition Jones signed that appeared to question the official account of 9/11, and a 2008 video of Jones calling Republicans “a**holes.” Jones denied being a 9/11 truther, but resigned, stating: “I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past.”

The White House exit did not slow Jones for long. Within a few years, he had reconstituted his career across media, advocacy, and policy institutions. After his departure from the White House, Jones became a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in February 2010, leading its Green Opportunity Initiative on clean energy and economic equity. He joined CNN as a political commentator in 2013. He co-founded the Dream Corps in 2011, a social justice accelerator whose initiatives include #YesWeCode for tech training, Green For All for green economy advocacy, and #cut50 for criminal justice reform. Dream Corps played a vital role in passage of the FIRST STEP Act in 2018, bipartisan legislation the New York Times called “the most substantial breakthrough in criminal justice in a generation.” In reality, Trump signed legislation championed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation that reduced mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. Tucker Carlson correctly characterized this as a jailbreak scheme rewarding criminals that undermined everything Trump promised about law and order.

By late 2022, Jones was prepared to deploy his expanded influence in defense of a community he had long considered an ally. Jones had served as the founding CEO of the REFORM Alliance, launched in January 2019 by Jay-Z, Meek Mill, Michael Rubin, Robert Kraft, and other founding partners to transform probation and parole systems, before moving to the organization’s board in 2021. In July 2021, Jones was one of the inaugural recipients of Jeff Bezos’ Courage & Civility Award, which came with a $100 million grant to support his philanthropic work.

The platform Jones built across criminal justice reform and bipartisan policy work soon turned toward a different cause. When rapper Kanye West made a series of antisemitic statements in late 2022, including praise of Hitler, Jones delivered the keynote address at the UJA-Federation of New York Wall Street Dinner on December 5, 2022. In his speech, Jones said: “I apologize for the silence of my community. The silence is over.” and: “You’re going to see a change going forward.” Forward senior political reporter Jacob Kornbluh, who reported the speech, later clarified that Jones “did not apologize for alleged Black silence about Kanye” — rather, “he stressed that many in his community are speaking out forcefully” and “said he was sorry that he and others didn’t do more before Kanye.”

Jones also published a Substack essay titled “Kanye West: Enemy of Blacks, Jews & Humanity” condemning West, writing that “Black people do not like Nazis” and celebrating the many Black leaders who had stood up against antisemitism. However, Jones’ speech at the UJA was controversial among many Black commentators and social media users, who objected to him appearing to speak for all Black people and apologize on their behalf for Kanye West’s behavior. TV personality Bevy Smith called his apology “bullshit” and accused him of currying favor with wealthy Jewish donors.

Whatever the controversy among Black commentators, Jones’s role as a public ally to the Jewish community would expand dramatically in the wake of the events of October 7, 2023. On November 14, 2023, roughly five weeks after the Hamas attacks, Jones spoke at the “March for Israel” rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., co-organized by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. He was among the non-Jewish speakers at what organizers called the largest pro-Israel gathering in U.S. history, with an estimated 290,000 in attendance. In his speech, Jones cited what he said was the FBI’s reported 400 percent increase in antisemitic hate crimes in the weeks since October 7, stated that the Jewish community “stood with the civil rights movement, walking arm-in-arm, facing death, going to jail,” and called on both sides to stop the violence.

Jones said: “I’m a peace guy, I pray for peace. No more rockets from Gaza, and no more bombs falling down on the people of Gaza.” The ceasefire call prompted the crowd to break into sustained “No ceasefire!” chants and booing. In a moment of visible flustering as the crowd chanted, Jones said “Let’s take a stand against Muslims” rather than “against anti-Muslim bigotry” — a slip he attempted to spin on X: “My speech read: ‘Let’s stand against anti-Jewish bigotry here. Let’s stand against anti-Muslim bigotry here. Let’s stand against hate here.’ But the chanting crowd threw me off — and I misspoke. We need to stand WITH Muslims, and Jews, and everyone who is under threat. “

The criticism over the rally did little to alter Jones’s trajectory. If anything, his public characterizations of Hamas grew more hostile in the ensuing months. On October 29, 2024, Jones appeared on the “Being Jewish with Jonah Platt” podcast and delivered strident remarks condemning Hamas. “The Palestinians deserve all the support in the world,” he said. “Their cause is just, they want human rights, they want dignity, they want sovereignty — that’s beautiful. And it’s been hijacked by a Nazi organization called Hamas who are terrible.” Jones continued: “They are not freedom fighters. They are freedom takers. They are not interested in democracy, they are not interested in human rights. They are not interested in women’s rights. They are not interested in gay rights. They are not interested in anything we care about. And they are trying to destroy Israel way more than they’re trying to help the Palestinians. It’s a Nazi organization.”

Jones expressed deep personal identification with Israelis after Hamas’ resistance operation on October 7, 2023. “I’m a progressive, so Hamas attacked my people. Those are my people on the kibbutz — those are liberals, those are my people,” he said. He also acknowledged that his pro-Israel stance had cost him financially. “I’ve had people pull money out of things I’m a part of. But who cares? Nothing compared to what those kids went through at the Nova festival. Nothing compared to what the people went through at the kibbutz.”

Jones has translated this rhetorical solidarity into recurring institutional partnerships with American Jewry. Jones has been a recurring speaker and participant at the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, founded by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft in 2019 (originally as the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, rebranded in October 2025). At the second Sports Leaders Convening on November 6, 2025 at Gillette Stadium, Jones moderated a session on Black-Jewish relations. He mentioned his travels with his Jewish godmother to Israel — including the Gaza Strip — in 2002 and 2004, noting that these visits gave him a clear sense of what Hamas represented.

The Kraft summits represent only one strand of Jones’s institutional engagement with Jewish causes. Jones has developed a deep partnership with the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation. In January 2025, he organized and led an AJCF-Exodus Delegation to Poland to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The delegation included prominent Black American leaders including billionaire philanthropist Robert F. Smith, Grammy-winning singer Victory Boyd, activist Malynda Hale, Pastor Carl Day, and entrepreneur John Hope Bryant.

In June 2025, AJCF honored Jones with its “Fighting Hatred Award” at the foundation’s 25th anniversary gala on June 11 at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. The award recognized Jones “for his commitment to promoting tolerance, bridging communities and combating hatred in all its forms.”

Additionally, Jones was also a featured speaker at the 2025 JFN International Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, held March 23 through 25, 2025. He appeared on the opening plenary panel on allyship alongside progressive transgender activist Brianna Wu. The JFN is a major network of Jewish philanthropists and foundations with roughly 700 attendees from nine countries at this gathering.

Jones has supplemented these speaking engagements with initiatives he has built and led himself. The EXODUS Over Dinner initiative, founded by Jones, has partnered with the American Jewish Committee. As recently as March 2026, an AJC-hosted Exodus Over Dinner event took place in Dallas, Texas, per the AJC. In early 2026, Jones participated in a panel discussion at the 92nd Street Y in New York titled “Forming a New Alliance Between the Black and Jewish Communities,” alongside Mijal Bitton, author Abigail Pogrebin, and Tony Award-winner Ari’el Stachel.

The depth of these institutional partnerships has occasionally drawn scrutiny from the progressive press. In October 2025, the progressive outlet Drop Site News reported that Jones was serving as a mentor in the newly launched Jacki and Jeff Karsh Journalism Fellowship, described as dedicated to “Jewish topics” and founded by Jacki Karsh, who has said the fellowship was created to help Israel win its “information war.” Jones forcefully denied the characterization, posting on X: “FAKE NEWS ALERT: This story is totally bogus. I agreed to give a one-hour, one-time talk to a handful of journalists next year — for free. I give more than 100 talks a year, covering all topics — speaking to people of all races, faiths and backgrounds.” Jones said the story misrepresented a routine speaking engagement.

Jones has shown a similar willingness to challenge his own political allies on questions of antisemitism. In August 2024, following Vice President Kamala Harris’ selection of Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro — who is Jewish — as her running mate, Jones publicly raised the possibility that antisemitism within the Democratic Party had influenced the decision. He said on CNN: “You also have anti-Semitism that has gotten marbled into this party. You can be for the Palestinians without being an anti-Jewish bigot, but there are some anti-Jewish bigots out there.” He added: “And there’s some disquiet now — and there has to be — how much of what just happened is caving into some of these darker parts of the party?”

In a similar vein, Jones wrote an extensive Substack essay titled “The Five Hs of the Black-Jewish Alliance” in which he warned that the historic Black-Jewish alliance “has been breaking down” since October 7 and that its collapse benefits “white nationalists” and “our geopolitical adversaries, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea.” He committed himself to fighting to preserve and rebuild that alliance, writing: “The Black community and the Jewish community have been together for 100 years… The best people in the Black community and the best people in the Jewish community and the best people who are both Black and Jewish have come together over and over again.”

Like a man who mistakes the walls of his master’s house for the borders of his own, Van Jones has surrendered his agency to the Jewish supremacist power configuration. In effect, he has chosen to spend his sunset years as the face of an unwanted and decaying alliance, forever tapping for the approval of Jewish political masters who view him as nothing more than a tool for their agenda to destroy gentile civilizations.

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In October 2025, hundreds of Kenyans marched through Nairobi’s Central Business District carrying banners reading “Israel Belongs to God”. Bishop Paul Karanja declared to the crowd, “We are here to declare that Israel is not alone. We will continue to stand with them.” The demonstration commemorated the second anniversary of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, but it represented something far more significant than a single day of solidarity. It revealed a geopolitical quirk that has left analysts scrambling for explanations.

According to a June 2025 Pew Research Center survey covering 24 countries, Kenya showed 50% favorable views toward Israel with 42% unfavorable. Nigeria registered 59% favorable and 32% unfavorable. These were the only two nations with majority positive sentiment toward Israel. In 20 of the 24 countries surveyed, majorities held negative views. Kenya and Nigeria, in addition to India, stand virtually alone in their enthusiasm for the Jewish state at precisely the moment when global opinion has turned sharply against it.

This pro-Israel shift among the populations in Kenya and Nigeria is not a sudden development born from the Gaza war. It represents years of cultivation, theological indoctrination, security partnerships, and strategic maneuvering that transformed two African nations into some of Israel’s most promising partners in the post-October 7 age.

The most fundamental explanation behind this rise in pro-Zionist sentiment lies in the explosive growth of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity across both countries.

Nigeria houses one of the world’s largest evangelical populations, with Operation World estimating the country ranks either third or fourth globally in total evangelical numbers, trailing only the United States and potentially Brazil or China depending on methodology. Pew Research Center puts Nigeria’s total Christian population at 93 million as of 2020, a 25% increase from 2010, making it the sixth-largest Christian nation in the world and the largest on the African continent.

Pentecostalism has become deeply embedded in Nigerian Christianity, though its precise share remains debated. The U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report, citing the Christian Association of Nigeria, places Pentecostals at approximately 30% of the Christian population, with an additional 10% identifying as evangelical Christians in non-Pentecostal traditions and African-instituted charismatic churches accounting for another 5 to 10%. When Pentecostal and charismatic Christians across all denominations are counted together, researchers at the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary place the combined Pentecostal and charismatic share of Nigerian Christianity significantly higher, reflecting the deep penetration of charismatic practice even within mainline churches. That figure has exploded in recent decades, driven by aggressive evangelization, media expansion and the global reach of Nigerian-founded movements like the Redeemed Christian Church of God and Deeper Life Bible Church.

Kenya presents a different evangelical landscape but one equally conducive to pro-Israel theology. According to the 2019 national census, evangelicals comprise 20.4% of Kenya’s total population out of 47.6 million residents — roughly 9.6 million by the census’s strict denominational count. Broader estimates that apply a wider evangelical definition, including researcher Sebastian Fath’s figures cited by Lifeway Research, place Kenya’s evangelical population closer to 20 million. An estimated 30 to 35% of Kenya’s population identifies as Pentecostal, indicating significant overlap between evangelical and Pentecostal identities.

Together, Nigeria and Kenya account for approximately 78 million evangelicals under the broader definitional framework, representing over 42% of Africa’s estimated 185 million evangelical population. This concentration reflects broader patterns of African Christianity’s expansion and the global southward shift of Christian demographics.

The theological framework binding these believers to Israel rests on Christian Zionism, a dispensationalist interpretation that views the modern state of Israel as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Genesis 12:3 serves as the foundational text. “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.”

The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, a global evangelical organization, has actively cultivated ties with Nigerian churches, organizing pilgrimages and promoting pro-Israel narratives. Pastor Rex Ajenifuja of I Stand With Israel has mobilized grassroots campaigns emphasizing that “Nigeria loves Israel” and framing solidarity as a spiritual obligation. Prominent Nigerian pastors have explicitly connected pro-Israel theology to national prosperity. During visits to Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Adeboye explained, “The problems that we are seeing between the Jews and the rest of the world, is because they are the favorites of God. When you are special to God, then automatically the devil wouldn’t like you either.”

In Kenya, the theological stance intersects directly with political power. Current President William Ruto’s administration has deepened ties with evangelical leaders who have publicly endorsed Israel as part of their eschatological worldview. During prayer services, Ruto and First Lady Rachel Ruto — a devout evangelical known for her faith diplomacy program that enlists clergy in matters of state — have woven Israel into Kenya’s spiritual identity. Ruto himself prayed at Jerusalem’s Western Wall during a 2023 state visit, with the site’s rabbi noting it was the longest prayer by any world leader he had witnessed there. At a faith rally convened by Rachel Ruto, crowds waved Kenyan and Israeli flags together while praying for both nations. Influential evangelical figures have openly equated support for Israel with national blessing.

Bishop Dennis Nthumbi, Africa Director of the Israel Allies Foundation, has described Kenya’s bond with Israel as a “covenantal, long-standing relationship” that no politician can sever. Bishop Mark Kariuki, the presiding bishop of Deliverance Church Kenya and former chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, has aligned himself with the broader conservative evangelical political theology that underpins pro-Israel sentiment across the continent. The Kenyan government provided active support for the October 2025 pro-Israel march. Speaking in a televised interview on Kenya’s Elevate TV ahead of the march, Africa-Israel Initiative president Bishop Joshua Mulinge confirmed that the government had granted permits and provided police escorts throughout the route. “The Kenyan government has been very supportive,” he said. “We thank God for our head of state and for the entire government.”

The Times of Israel reported that the October 2025 march aimed to call Kenyan Christians “out of the prayer closet and into the streets” to publicly express solidarity with Israel beyond private prayer. Speakers emphasized that “Christianity originated in Jerusalem and that the Church remains spiritually rooted in Israel.” A Norwegian representative of the Africa Israel Initiative stated, “I believe that anybody who blesses Israel, as the Bible says, is blessed. I think it should be in every Christian’s heart to support Israel.”

The political dimensions of evangelicalism in both countries reveal important patterns of religious influence on governance. In Nigeria, evangelical and Pentecostal movements have shaped political discourse around moral conservatism, prosperity theology, and spiritual warfare against corruption, even as the country’s Christian-Muslim demographic balance remains contested. Pew Research places Muslims at 56.1% and Christians at 43.4% as of 2020, though Afrobarometer surveys of adults have found Christians in the majority. Kenya’s evangelical community has achieved more direct political influence, particularly through President Ruto’s administration, which explicitly appeals to evangelical constituencies and employs religious rhetoric in governance.

A 2024 study by the French Institute for Research in Africa described Ruto as the first born-again president in what it called “the making of a born-again republic,” documenting how key evangelical leaders including Bishop Mark Kariuki of Deliverance Church Kenya, Bishop David Oginde of CITAM, and evangelist Teresia Wairimu of Faith Evangelism Ministries described Ruto as God’s appointed ruler during his 2022 campaign. This theological stance embraced by Ruto has been used to justify the suppression of pro-Palestinian activism, as evidenced by Kenyan police’s arrest of Kenyans displaying Palestinian flags in 2023.

Theology alone does not explain the depth of Kenya and Nigeria’s alignment with Israel. Strategic security cooperation provides pragmatic reinforcement for religious sentiment.

Nigeria’s fight against Boko Haram and Kenya’s struggles with al-Shabaab have led to intelligence sharing agreements and military training programs facilitated by Israel. These partnerships, while pragmatic, are often justified through evangelical rhetoric that conflates Islamist extremism with broader anti-Israel sentiment. Nigerian evangelicals have long portrayed Boko Haram’s insurgency as evidence of jihadist violence targeting Christians, reinforcing theological solidarity with Israel as a fellow victim of Islamist terrorism. That narrative, however, is contested by researchers including Brookings and conflict-monitoring group ACLED, which has found that the majority of Boko Haram’s victims have been Muslim, with religion-targeted attacks against Christians accounting for only 5% of civilian-targeting events recorded in its data.

In November 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga in Jerusalem and declared that “Kenya’s enemies are Israel’s enemies so we should be able to help,” pledging to build a coalition against fundamentalism that would bring together Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Tanzania. The meeting produced a memorandum of understanding on homeland security cooperation, with both Netanyahu and Israeli President Shimon Peres committing to help Kenya secure its borders against militant threats.

Similarly, Israeli ambassador Gil Haskel stated, “Israel is willing to send consultants to Kenya to help Kenya secure its cities from terrorist threats and share experience with Kenya because the operation in Somalia is very similar to Israel’s operations in the past, first in Lebanon and then in Gaza Strip.”

In February 2016, President Uhuru Kenyatta traveled to Jerusalem to strengthen counterterrorism cooperation, with discussions focused on combating al-Shabaab following the 2013 Westgate Mall attack and the 2015 Garissa University massacre. Nadav Peldman, Israeli deputy ambassador to Kenya, stated that Israel was “ready and willing to assist Kenya” in fighting terrorism, calling it “a heinous crime that should be confronted with the same force it projects.”

That defense relationship has since deepened under President William Ruto, who negotiated a $26 million Israeli government-backed loan in July 2025 to acquire the SPYDER surface-to-air missile system manufactured by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. The system, delivered in December 2025, accounted for roughly 70% of Kenya’s Ministry of Defence development budget for FY2025/26. The partnership spans counterterrorism operations, cybersecurity infrastructure, intelligence sharing, and joint military training.

Israeli-Kenyan relations have an economic dimension to them as well. In Kenya, Israeli drip irrigation technology — including low-pressure systems distributed through MASHAV — has been deployed to boost food security, alongside a 2016 Jerusalem Declaration in which Kenya and Israel committed to a 10-point water and irrigation cooperation framework. On the digital side, Kenya and Israel launched the Cyber-Dome Initiative between Israel’s National Cyber Directorate and Kenya’s Communications Authority, and have held Cyberweek Africa in Nairobi annually since 2023 to expand cybersecurity capacity-building across the continent.

The Israel-Nigeria partnership followed a parallel trajectory, with Nigeria’s Ministry of Defence reaffirming in April 2025 its commitment to “enhancing military cooperation with the State of Israel” following a meeting between Permanent Secretary Ambassador Gabriel Aduda and Israeli Ambassador Michael Freeman. The two sides discussed joint operations, knowledge exchange, defense industry development, and plans to finalize a new bilateral defence agreement, with Aduda pledging that Nigeria would “engage in strategic initiatives to replicate successful Israeli military cooperation frameworks.”

Nigeria, meanwhile, hosts over 50 Israeli companies operating across construction, infrastructure, hi-tech, communications and IT, and agriculture and water management. Cultural ties have also deepened: in 2021 the Israeli ambassador to Nigeria and the country’s vice president initiated a collaborative film co-production between Israeli and Nollywood filmmakers to mark 60 years of diplomatic relations. Israel’s MASHAV agency, established in 1958, provides agricultural training, water management, and health programs across East Africa, with Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Seychelles identified as its primary African partners for capacity-building.

None of the growing pro-Zionist sentiment in Kenya and Nigeria is a coincidence. Well-funded pro-Israel organizations have systematically cultivated African Christian support through parliamentary lobbying, church mobilization, and faith-based diplomacy.

The Washington, D.C.-based Israel Allies Foundation maintains a global parliamentary network of more than 1,500 pro-Israel lawmakers, coordinating faith-based caucuses in Kenya, Nigeria, and across Africa. Bishop Scott Mwanza of Zambia served as the foundation’s inaugural Africa Director, coordinating existing caucuses across the continent. He was succeeded by Rev. Dennis Nthumbi, who currently oversees 16 Israel Allies Caucuses as Africa Director and has been a leading voice in mobilizing Christian parliamentary support for Israel across the region.

In September 2024, 25 African lawmakers from 19 countries gathered in Addis Ababa for the first Pan-Africa Israel Parliamentary Summit, where they signed the “Addis Ababa Declaration of Africa-Israel Cooperation and Partnership.” The declaration, which included lawmakers from Kenya and Nigeria among others, affirmed Jerusalem as “the legitimate, undivided, and eternal capital of the Jewish State of Israel,” condemned anti-Zionism as antisemitism, and called for strengthening bilateral ties and supporting Israel’s observer status at the African Union.

Key Kenyan organizations include the Africa-Israel Initiative, launched in Zambia in April 2012 by a coalition of African church leaders including Bishop Joshua Mulinge of Kenya, who now serves as its president and leads the movement across more than 20 African nations. The Israel Allies Foundation Africa Division is led by Rev. Dennis Nthumbi. King Jesus Celebration Church Worldwide, chaired by Bishop Paul Karanja, co-convened the 2025 “March for Israel” through Nairobi’s Central Business District alongside the Africa-Israel Initiative and the Israel Allies Foundation. The Evangelical Alliance of Kenya serves as the national umbrella body for evangelical churches.

Nigerian organizations include the Lagos-based I Stand with Israel International Friendship Organization, led by Pastor Rex Ajenifuja; Christians United for Israel Nigeria Chapter, part of the global CUFI network founded by American pastor John Hagee; and the Africa for Israel Christian Coalition, founded by South African Israel lobbyist Luba Mayekiso, whose Nigerian affiliates have mobilized over 3,000 pastors across 22 states.

Prominent Nigerian evangelical leaders include Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, founder of Christ Embassy; Pastor Enoch Adeboye, General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, who has visited Israel multiple times and donated two ambulances to Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency blood services organization; and the late Prophet TB Joshua, founder of Synagogue Church of All Nations, who was named “Tourism Goodwill Ambassador for Israel” by Minister of Tourism Yariv Levin following a 2019 evangelical crusade in Nazareth.

Nigerian Christian pilgrimages to Israel have become a significant phenomenon. According to the Nigerian Christian Pilgrim Commission, approximately 18,000 Christian pilgrims from Nigeria travel to holy sites in Israel and Jordan each year on average, with the NCPC targeting around 10,000 pilgrims annually for its organized exercises. The NCPC organizes multiple pilgrimage cycles throughout the year — including Easter, Women’s, Youth, and General pilgrimages — with participants praying for Nigeria’s leaders and offering intercessory prayers at holy sites. The 84,000 figure in the original text is not supported by Israeli tourism data; Israel Central Bureau of Statistics figures show Nigerian tourist arrivals peaked at 12,700 in 2019, while a 2025 analysis of the decade from 2015 to 2025 estimated over 80,000 total Nigerian Christian pilgrimages over that entire ten-year span.

Former President Goodluck Jonathan — a practicing Pentecostal Christian who, as sociologist Ebenezer Obadare documented in Pentecostal Republic, cultivated strong ties with Nigeria’s Pentecostal constituency — played a pivotal role in what might be called “pilgrimage diplomacy.” In October 2013, he became the first sitting Nigerian president to undertake a pilgrimage to Israel, leading a delegation that included six state governors — including Governors Elechi of Ebonyi, Obi of Anambra, Akpabio of Akwa Ibom, Suswam of Benue, Jang of Plateau, and Orji of Abia — along with ministers and church leaders including CAN President Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor.

Initial pre-trip reports of 19 governors and 30,000 pilgrims proved to be overblown. Jonathan visited holy sites, met with President Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Bogi Ya’alon, and signed bilateral agreements on aviation. He made a second private pilgrimage in 2014, meeting Prime Minister Netanyahu with an entourage of about 20 political and religious leaders.

Jonathan expressed security solidarity when he wrote to Prime Minister Netanyahu during the search for three Israeli teens abducted by Hamas in 2014, stating, “I assure you that we are in solidarity with you, as we believe that any act of terrorism against any nation or group is an act against our common humanity.”

These visits had diplomatic consequences. In December 2014, when the UN Security Council voted on a Jordanian-tabled resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories and Palestinian statehood within three years, Nigeria abstained — a last-minute reversal that left the resolution one vote short of the nine needed to pass. The Guardian reported that both Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had phoned President Jonathan to ask him not to support the resolution. Nigeria’s abstention, alongside those of the UK, Lithuania, South Korea, and Rwanda, meant the US and Australia’s opposing votes were sufficient to defeat the measure without Washington needing to invoke its veto — a significant diplomatic victory for Israel given Nigeria’s historical support for the Palestinian cause.

Kenyatta played a particularly instrumental role in the diplomatic warming between Kenya and Israel. In February 2016, he visited Jerusalem for counterterrorism talks with Netanyahu. Netanyahu then reciprocated with a historic visit to Kenya in July 2016 — the first visit by an Israeli prime minister to sub-Saharan Africa in nearly 30 years. It was during that Nairobi press conference, not during Kenyatta’s Jerusalem visit, that Netanyahu declared: “Israel is coming back to Africa, and Africa is coming back to Israel.” Kenyatta in turn pledged to help Israel regain observer status at the African Union.

Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, President William Ruto posted on X (formerly Twitter) that “Kenya joins the rest of the world in solidarity with the State of Israel and unequivocally condemns terrorism and attacks on innocent civilians in the country. The people of Kenya and their government hereby express their deepest sympathy and send condolences to the families of all victims... Kenya strongly maintains that there exists no justification whatsoever for terrorism, which constitutes a serious threat to international peace and security. All acts of terrorism and violent extremism are abhorrent, criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of the perpetrator, or their motivations.”

The statement also called for de-escalation and a ceasefire — context omitted from early reporting — and drew sharp criticism from Kenya’s Muslim leaders and some opposition figures. Ruto subsequently softened his position at a November 2023 Arab-African summit in Riyadh, where he stated that “terrorism cannot be an answer to any conflict; neither is occupation” and reaffirmed Kenya’s support for a two-state solution.

Based on post-October 7 trends, the trajectory of support for Israel augurs a distinctly melanin-enhanced future, as centuries-old European animus toward organized Jewry—now reactivated by the industrial-scale genocide in Gaza—diminishes traditional alliances on the Old Continent. Under these circumstances, Israel must pivot toward emergent partners in the Global South, where nations like Kenya and Nigeria, buoyed by decades-long philosemitic trends, can provide millions of new golems for world Jewry to tap into.

Concomitant with Israel’s burgeoning alliance with India—itself a bastion of Hindu nationalist affinity for the Jewish state—this reconfiguration signals that pro-Zionism will inexorably become brown-coded within mere decades, as the Global South’s burgeoning populations eclipse fading Euro-American sympathies.

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