As their last living hostages returned home from Gaza after two years of war, Israelis gave visiting President Donald Trump a hero’s welcome — and threw out some lofty comparisons.
“Mr. President, you stand before the people of Israel not as another American president, but as a giant of Jewish history — one for whom we must look back, two-and-a-half millennia into the mists of time, to find a parallel, in Cyrus the Great,” Amir Ohana, speaker of the Knesset, told Trump on Monday as he welcomed the president for a victory speech to the Israeli parliament.
To be compared to Cyrus is no small thing. Living around 600 BCE and shrouded in myth, the Persian ruler is traditionally credited with granting Jews permission to return from exile in Babylon to the land of Israel and for helping them to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. Because Cyrus was a pagan who by force seized and ruled over a vast empire, he tends to be treated as an imperfect yet essential vessel for God’s divine plan for the Jews, and is widely celebrated in Jewish history.
It’s a comparison that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also made. Visiting the White House in 2018 during Trump’s first term, shortly after the president moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Netanyahu situated Trump in a long line of friendly world leaders including Cyrus, Lord Balfour and President Harry Truman — all of whom he said helped return the Jews to their rightful homes in Israel. At the time a Jewish Israeli group, the Mikdash Educational Center, started selling commemorative coins imposing Trump’s face over Cyrus’s.
The Cyrus framing has also helped Christian Zionists embrace Trump since his first term, despite the community’s initial misgivings about Trump’s personal behavior and often crude demeanor.
In 2018 the Evangelical leader Mike Evans, who founded the Jerusalem-based Friends of Zion Museum, declared that Cyrus “was used as an instrument of God for deliverance in the Bible, and God has used this imperfect vessel, this flawed human being like you or I, this imperfect vessel, and he’s using him in an incredible, amazing way to fulfill his plans and purposes.”
As the return of the living hostages seemed imminent, Evans’ group placed “Cyrus the Great is Alive!” billboards in Jerusalem. The billboards feature images of Trump and the American and Israeli flags intertwined.
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