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An Evangelical pastor standing for Reform UK this week has claimed that the existence “of the land of Palestine” was a “media lie started by Yasser Arafat”, Byline Times can reveal.
John Quintanilla is a pastor at the Hebron Christian Faith Church in Coventry, and a Reform UK candidate. He runs a church that funds Christian Zionist organisations donating to Israel’s war effort, and appears to be part of a growing trend towards radical pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian rhetoric within parts of Reform UK.
Several Reform figures have ties to organisations supporting the Israeli war effort or settler operations in the West Bank.
Quintanilla, 60, who is standing for Reform UK in the Longford ward in Coventry, preaches in the style of an American Evangelical pastor, and appears to hold a version of the Christian Zionist belief system that argues Israel is where the second coming of Christ will occur, and therefore bring about the end of the world.
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In a sermon titled Why Israel delivered on 16 November 2025 (and recently removed), Quintanilla told his congregation that Jesus would soon be returning, and that he would be coming back to the land of Israel. He argued: “There is no land called Palestine…It is a media lie started by Yasser Arafat an Egyptian. The region was called the region of Palestine which included some of Lebanon, and all of what we call today Jordan.”
Later in the sermon, Quintanilla appeared to argue that there was a clash of civilisations when comparing Christianity and Islam: “If you look at the history of Islam, where it has conquered and warred and colonized, all you will see is poverty, war and darkness.
“But if you look at the history of Christianity, you’ll see light, exuberance, creativity, wealth, freedom, prosperity…even before the so called ‘Western slave trade’, the Islamic slave trade went on for hundreds and hundreds of years before that and nobody says nothing about that. It’s still going on today. It was Christians that brought an end to the slave trade.”
He added: “Wherever Christianity has been, the nation has flourished. So there’s a problem because they [Muslims] are claiming to be the final revelation from God, but there’s no life, there’s no prosperity. If they didn’t have no oil, they’d still be pushing round a horse and a cart today.”
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Quintanilla’s church is named after Hebron, a city in the West Bank. The financial statements for the Hebron Christian Faith Church on the website of the charity commission show that the church “financially supports” various organisations including Christians United for Israel [CUFI], an Evangelical Zionist organisation that has been criticised by groups of various faiths for funding and supporting Israel’s war effort in Gaza.
CUFI has previously come under fire for its apocalyptic rhetoric regarding Israel and the Jewish people. John Hagee, the organisation’s founder famously claimed in a 1999 sermon, a recording of which resurfaced in 2008, that Hitler was sent by God to help the Jews reach the promised land.
While not going nearly so far, some of Quintanilla’s rhetoric on the exceptionality of the Jewish people also shades into some uncomfortable territory.
Later in the Why Israel sermon he stated: “The Jewish people somehow wherever they went for thousands of years didn’t blend in. They didn’t become Americans, they didn’t become Armenians, they didn’t become English. They retained their Jewish uniqueness, their Jewish culture wherever they went.”
Commenting on Reverend Quintanilla’s rhetoric, Dr Zena Agha, the interim director of the British Palestinian Committee said: “The rise of racist, intolerant, Islamophobic discourse is not particularly new, but what is new is the number of Christian Zionists running for office.”
She added: “What makes this an even more alarming escalation is over the clash of civilizations rhetoric which pits Christianity against Islam. This is at odds with multicultural Britain, which embraces all people, of all faiths and none. Such a position exposes the hard-line intolerance and fundamentally racist position of Reform.”
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Wider Trend
Radically pro-Israel rhetoric is increasingly common in Reform UK. Jason Pearlman, the founder of Reform UK Friends of Israel (RFI) recently claimed to Declassified UK that not a single war crime had been committed in Gaza by Israel.
Pearlman began the process of founding Reform UK Friends of Israel while still working for Israel’s president Isaac Herzog, who has himself been found by the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel to have incited genocide.
Declassified UK reported that when they asked Pearlman about a tweet he shared promoting the “Pallywood” conspiracy theory, that videos of Palestinian suffering are staged, he responded that “It is unfortunately a well-established fact that we have seen a lot of manipulation of the media.”
