You do not 'call the shots' over Israel, Mr. President — God does

In the early days of June 2026, with Iranian ballistic missiles falling once more on the cities of northern Israel, the President of the United States gave a telephone interview to the Financial Times. The subject was the war and the prospect of an American-brokered arrangement with Tehran. Asked whether the Prime Minister of Israel would accept whatever terms Washington reached, the President answered without the careful language of diplomacy: Benjamin Netanyahu, he said, “won’t have any choice.” And then the words that ought to give every believing Christian pause: “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.”

Let it be said plainly, and without partisan heat, that this is not an attack upon the man. President Trump has in many respects been a friend to the State of Israel. He moved the American embassy to Jerusalem. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He brokered the Abraham Accords. For these things many in Israel, and many among her Christian friends, have been genuinely grateful. But friendship does not confer ownership, and gratitude does not require silence. When any man — however powerful, however well-disposed — declares that he “calls all the shots” over the decisions of Israel, he has said something that a Christian who knows his Bible cannot let pass unanswered. For the Scriptures are not ambiguous on the question of who decides the fate of Israel. The answer is not a president. It is not a parliament, nor the United Nations, nor the armies of her enemies. The answer is the LORD God of Israel, and He has never once, in four thousand years, surrendered that prerogative to any human being.

This is the conviction that animates everything we do at Christians Standing With Israel. We do not stand with Israel because of any politician, and our confidence in her future does not rise or fall with the disposition of any administration. We stand with Israel because the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has bound Himself to her by an everlasting covenant — and what God has decreed, no man revises.

The Covenant No Man Authored and No Man Can Annul

To understand why no president calls the shots over Israel, one must begin where the matter itself began: with the call of Abraham. The LORD said to him, “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3).

Notice what this establishes about the order of authority in the world. God does not say He will respond to the nations according to their power, their wealth, or their strategic leverage. He says the nations will be measured by one standard — how they treat the seed of Abraham. The blessing and the cursing proceed from God, not from man. The nations are the objects of the verb, never its subject. A president may imagine he holds the initiative; Scripture says the initiative was claimed, and settled, long before he was born. And this covenant was not a temporary arrangement to expire when circumstances changed. The LORD repeated it, expanded it, and bound Himself to it by oath: “I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant” (Genesis 17:7). “My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips” (Psalm 89:34).

So when a man says of Israel, “I call all the shots,” he is unknowingly stepping into a very old and very crowded line. Pharaoh believed he called the shots over the Hebrews, and the sea closed over his chariots. Every empire that has since presumed to decide the fate of the covenant people has made the same miscalculation, mistaking its moment of power for permanent authority over a people whose continuance was never in its hands to grant.

The Keeper Who Neither Slumbers Nor Sleeps

If the covenant establishes that God has bound Himself to Israel, the Psalms establish how He keeps her. The hundred and twenty-first Psalm declares: “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand” (Psalm 121:4–5).

Here is the answer to every man who imagines that the survival of Israel depends upon his vigilance, his deals, his permission. The One who keeps Israel does not doze at His post; He does not require a treaty to be reminded of His charge. The believer is therefore not thrown into despair when a president speaks of Israel as a vassal whose choices he controls — any more than he would be alarmed to hear a man boast that he commands the tides. The boast reveals only that the speaker has mistaken himself for someone far greater than he is.

The Apple of His Eye

There is a tenderness in God’s relation to Israel that the language of geopolitics can never capture, and it bears directly upon how He regards those who handle her roughly. Through the prophet Zechariah He says of the nations that plundered her, “he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye” (Zechariah 2:8). The apple of the eye is the pupil — the most sensitive and instinctively guarded part of the body. To strike it is to provoke the swiftest and most involuntary of defenses. This is not a sentiment to be exploited, and it is no license for Israel’s presumption; the prophets were unsparing in their rebukes of her sin. But it tells us that God does not regard the handling of Israel as a matter of indifference, to be left to whichever great power happens to hold sway in a given decade. He takes it personally. The nations have never been able to touch Israel without, in the end, touching the One who keeps her.

Jerusalem: The Burdensome Stone

Nowhere is the futility of human management of Israel’s fate stated more vividly than in the twelfth chapter of Zechariah: “And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it” (Zechariah 12:3).

A burdensome stone is a stone too heavy to lift. The image is of a great immovable weight that men gather around, confident they can heave it out of the way, and who succeed only in injuring themselves in the attempt. Every nation and every leader who has tried to lift Jerusalem — to move her, partition her, manage her, decide her future from a foreign capital — has been, in the prophet’s word, “cut in pieces.” This is the backdrop against which any declaration of “I call all the shots” must be measured. And the warning of Zechariah makes no exception for friendly nations. It does not say that only the enemies of Jerusalem will be cut; it says all who burden themselves with her. The hand laid upon Jerusalem in the spirit of ownership, however amicable its intent, is laid upon a stone that God Himself has made too heavy for any man to move.

The Iranian Missiles and the Sovereignty of God

It is no accident that the President’s statement came in the immediate aftermath of an Iranian missile attack, for the two halves of that day frame the entire question. On the one hand, a regime that has sworn Israel’s destruction for four decades launches its missiles. On the other, the most powerful friend Israel has declares that her Prime Minister does not call the shots. From a purely worldly vantage, Israel appears caught between a sworn enemy and an overbearing patron, her fate decided in Tehran and Washington alike, with little say of her own.

But this is precisely the situation in which the sovereignty of God shines most clearly, for it is the situation the prophets foresaw — the nations raging, the peoples imagining a vain thing, the kings of the earth taking counsel together. And what does Scripture say of the One enthroned above it all? “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision” (Psalm 2:4). The God of Israel is not anxious in the war room. He sits. He laughs. The raging of Tehran and the bargaining of Washington are alike beneath the feet of the One who keeps Israel. This does not mean Israel is passive, or that her leaders bear no responsibility to act with wisdom and courage; the God who keeps Israel has always worked through the obedience of those who trust Him. But it means the final word does not belong to the one with the most missiles or the most leverage. It belongs to the One who neither slumbers nor sleeps.

A Word to the Christian Who Loves America

Many who read these words are Americans who love their country, and rightly so. Let it be said clearly, then, that the argument here is not anti-American, nor is it ingratitude for genuine friendship. It is, if anything, the truest service a friend can render: to remind a powerful nation of the terms on which blessing is promised. For the same covenant that secures Israel also warns the nations — “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.” The deepest patriotism a Christian can show toward his own nation is to pray that it remain on the blessing side of that covenant, and to warn it, humbly, when its leaders speak as though Israel’s fate were theirs to dictate. We are reminded which kingdom we serve, and whose word is final.

Who Truly Decides

So we return to the words that occasioned this reflection. “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.” It is an understandable thing for a powerful man to believe. But it is not true, and four thousand years of history stand as witness that it is not true. Pharaoh, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome — every empire that presumed to decide the fate of the covenant people has passed into the dust of the museums, and the people they meant to manage are still here, still praying in the language of their fathers, still standing upon the land that was promised to Abraham.

Mr. President, with respect: you do not call the shots over Israel. Neither does the Ayatollah in Tehran who fires the missiles, nor the diplomats who draft the agreements, nor any coalition of nations however vast. The shots over Israel were called once, in an everlasting covenant, by the only One with the authority to call them — and that decree has never been rescinded and never will be. To stand with Israel is not to flatter her, nor to follow the policy of any government. It is to side with the verdict that God Himself has already rendered, and that no man has the power to overturn.

The sun still rises. The moon still keeps her course. And Israel still stands — not because of the favor of presidents, nor in spite of the wrath of her enemies, but because the God who keeps her neither slumbers nor sleeps. He, and He alone, calls the shots over Israel.