Trump's deal is about winning over Christian Zionists

US President Donald Trump so-called "deal of the century" is aimed at winning over support among Christian Zionists, who number about 20 million in the United States and have poured millions of dollars over the past decades seeking an expanded Israel, analysts have said.

Phyllis Bennis, the director of New Internationalism project at the Institute for Palestine Studies, said that the announcement was also geared towards keeping Trump in the White House and Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu out of jail.

"There is an effort to win support from the right-wing Jewish community in the US and most especially the evangelical Christian Zionists. That's Trump's goal, his son-in-law and his bankruptcy lawyer and his buddies that made up this team, their goal is to support the right of the already very far right-wing range of Israeli politics," she told MEE.

According to previous reports by MEE, Christian Zionists have sponsored the migration of thousands of Jews from Russia, Ethiopia, and other countries to Israel.

"They [Trump and Netanyahu] are trying to support the settler movement, trying to discredit any notion that Palestinians have. And I think that's really what is going on here," Bennis said.

"How many big gifts can we give to Netanyahu so that he will be sure to get reelected? That will make the evangelicals happy, it will make the right-wing Jews happy and everybody will vote for Trump and he'll be happy. So it doesn't really have much to do with anyone's version of peace, certainly not justice, but even peace. This is not about changing anything, this is about consolidating what already exists."