Every July, Christians United for Israel — known by its acronym CUFI — takes Washington. Ten thousand delegates, most of them evangelical Christians from congregations in every one of the fifty states, converge on a hotel ballroom in the capital region for three days of policy briefings, keynotes, and congressional visits. By the end of the week, every member of Congress has received a CUFI delegation from their district, armed with the year's CUFI policy priorities and the names of the organization's 10 million members in their state. The 2026 CUFI Washington Summit is set for July 5 through 7 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center. Preparations are already well underway.
For pro-Israel Americans, the CUFI Summit is the single largest annual grassroots mobilization in the U.S. pro-Israel coalition. It is, measured by member count, the largest Zionist organization in America. And it is the piece of the alliance infrastructure that most often gets overlooked in mainstream media coverage that favors professional policy shops over volunteer grassroots networks.
The Scale of the Movement
Wikipedia's entry on CUFI summarizes the organization's reach in a way that is worth pausing over. CUFI was founded in 2006 by San Antonio megachurch pastor John Hagee. It is the largest Christian Zionist organization in the United States, with a claimed membership base of more than 10 million people organized into congregational chapters, campus chapters, and lay leadership networks. For comparison: that is roughly twice the membership of the AFL-CIO and three times the membership of the AARP among Americans who describe themselves as politically engaged on any single foreign-policy issue.
The membership translates into Congressional access. CUFI has spent nearly $2.5 million lobbying Congress since 2016, with $679,000 in 2025 alone focused on Iranian and Syrian sanctions, Iron Dome funding continuity, and the preservation of the Taylor Force Act's conditioning of Palestinian Authority assistance on the termination of payments to convicted terrorists. That lobbying is not a standalone operation. It is backed, every July, by in-person meetings in every congressional office in the country.
What CUFI Actually Accomplishes in Washington
The best way to describe CUFI's Washington footprint is to list the specific legislative achievements that CUFI mobilization helped deliver.
Iron Dome supplemental funding. When Iron Dome replenishment funding was briefly stripped from a 2021 continuing resolution by a group of progressive Democrats, CUFI members flooded congressional offices with calls within twenty-four hours. The standalone $1 billion Iron Dome replenishment bill passed the House 420-9. That is not a vote that happens without mass-scale constituent pressure on wavering members. CUFI delivered it.
The Taylor Force Act. The 2018 law conditioning certain Palestinian Authority assistance on the termination of "pay for slay" payments to convicted terrorists moved through Congress with active CUFI backing. The legislation has since been used as a template for similar conditionality in subsequent foreign aid bills and in multiple state-level divestment measures.
Iranian sanctions continuity. CUFI is a standing lobbying presence on every Iran sanctions bill that has passed the Congress in the last decade. The organization's 2025 disclosure confirms that sanctions and Iran policy remain the largest lobbying expenditure line.
Counter-BDS state legislation. CUFI state chapters have been active on all 34 state-level anti-BDS statutes that are now on the books, providing constituent testimony, public comment letters, and church-based voter education in legislative fights from Texas to New York.
The through-line is that CUFI is a grassroots mobilization machine that reliably delivers congressional pressure on Israel-related legislation — bills that the professional pro-Israel lobbying organizations could not pass without the constituent-side volume.
The Theological Frame — And Why It Matters Less Than Critics Argue
Critics of CUFI, including publications such as The Forward, have raised longstanding concerns about the dispensationalist theology that informs parts of the Christian Zionist movement — specifically the strand of premillennial eschatology that associates the return of Jews to Israel with biblical prophecy about the end of days. The theological debate is a serious one, and reasonable Jewish leaders have disagreed for two generations about whether to partner with evangelicals whose theological framework ultimately envisions a very different end state than mainstream Jewish theology.
Pro-Israel Americans reviewing CUFI's actual impact can make two observations without having to adjudicate the theological question.
First, the policy output of the CUFI network is, in every case, consistent with the interests of the State of Israel as defined by Israel's own elected government. CUFI lobbies for Iron Dome replenishment because the Israeli government has asked for it. CUFI lobbies for Iran sanctions because the Israeli government wants the maximum pressure framework preserved. CUFI supports counter-BDS legislation because the Israeli government and the American Jewish community have both asked for it. Whatever the eschatology, the earthly policy product is aligned.
Second, CUFI's own leadership has been explicit that the organization supports Israel as a matter of present-day conviction and does not condition that support on any theological expectation. John Hagee's public speeches and CUFI's organizational documents have consistently reinforced the organization's operating principle: Israel is supported as a sovereign ally, for the sake of Israel's own security and the moral clarity of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
American Jewish leaders have reached different private conclusions about how comfortable they are with the partnership. Those conversations will continue. What is not in reasonable dispute is that when the vote comes on the floor of the House or the Senate, CUFI's 10 million members are, measurably, the largest single Christian constituency in the country lobbying their representatives for the policies that keep Israel secure.
Why the 2026 Summit Matters Now
Three contextual factors make the July 2026 summit particularly important for the alliance.
The post-ceasefire political environment. With the April 22 U.S.-brokered Iran ceasefire deadline approaching and the post-Isfahan sanctions framework still being codified, the summer congressional agenda will be thick with Iran-related legislative priorities. CUFI's annual hill visits will land in the middle of that cycle and will have outsized influence on the fall appropriations and defense authorization processes.
Campus and K-12 antisemitism legislation. The Justice Department's Title VI litigation against Harvard, the Department of Education's letters to 60 universities, and the follow-on state-level actions on campus accountability have created a legislative window that CUFI's grassroots apparatus is positioned to push through. Expect campus accountability and Title VI enforcement to be a central CUFI summit priority.
The Abraham Accords expansion track. Kazakhstan's accession to the Abraham Accords framework earlier this year opens a Central Asian expansion track that requires congressional ratification of associated defense-cooperation and trade provisions. CUFI's traditional strength in evangelical districts gives its congressional delegations unusual influence in many of the Republican-held seats whose members sit on the relevant committees.
What Pro-Israel Americans Should Take Away
The CUFI Summit is, at its simplest, the annual reminder that the American pro-Israel coalition is bigger than any single denomination, ideology, or partisan identification. It is a coalition in which Jewish leaders, evangelical Christian leaders, black Christian leaders, Hispanic pentecostal leaders, defense and security professionals, and elected officials from both major parties all come to the same set of policy conclusions by very different routes.
The Iron 100 attempts to honor that full coalition by naming leaders across sectors and across political parties. CUFI's role — and John Hagee's role as its founding president — is a permanent feature of the Iron 100 landscape because the movement Hagee built is, by any honest measurement, indispensable to the political infrastructure of the U.S.-Israel alliance.
When the delegates arrive at the Gaylord National in July, they will be met with the CUFI events calendar of briefings and policy sessions, and they will leave with a week's worth of congressional meetings scheduled in every district back home. It is the least glamorous, least covered, and most politically consequential pro-Israel mobilization in the United States. The summit's reach is the reason that when the next Iran sanctions bill moves, or the next Title VI enforcement fight is waged, or the next Iron Dome replenishment vote is held, the grassroots political math lines up in favor of the alliance.