Lobbying for Annexation

How Yossi Dagan is building support for Israeli extremists in Washington

- BY: Glen Stellmacher and Dan Friedman

THIS PAST summer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made headlines when he falsely claimed at a Christian conference in Jerusalem that there was “no starvation in Gaza.” A less noted, but just as telling, moment came after Netanyahu's remarks, when Yossi Dagan, a leading advocate for Israeli ambitions to annex Palestinian territory, presented evangelical minister Paula White-Cain with a gift: a glass map of the occupied West Bank, etched with the locations of Christian holy sites.

“My friend,” exclaimed White-Cain, who coordinates President Donald Trump's relationships with influential Christians. “It's such an honor.”

His gesture was part of a pattern. During a March 2025 meeting in Washington, DC, Dagan gave White-Cain a mezuzah supposedly made from stones near the biblical altar of Joshua. “You are doing a mission from God,” Dagan told her. “You are saving the world with President Trump.” He presented a similar mezuzah to Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who is US ambassador to Israel, when they toured holy sites in the West Bank.

Dagan’s courtship of White-Cain and Huckabee is part of a yearslong effort by the Israeli right to cultivate support from American evangelicals for Jewish settlers in the West Bank. The head of the Shomron Regional Council, which oversees dozens of settlements, Dagan has been aggressively lobbying the US to back the annexation of the West Bank—a once fringe idea that now looks increasingly possible.

Since Israel first occupied the West Bank during the Six-Day War in 1967, hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers have moved to the territory—relentlessly encroaching on the land that is home to around 3 million Palestinians. No country, including the United States, has recognized the area as part of the state of Israel, and the International Court of Justice stated in July that “Israel must immediately cease all new settlement activity” and return all West Bank land and property.