Israel Pulls Plug on God TV, Evangelical Channel ‘Spreading Gospel of Jesus’ to Jews

In a landmark ruling, Israeli regulatory authorities announced on Sunday that they are shutting down an evangelical Christian television station for not disclosing in its license application that its true agenda was missionizing Jews.

The Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Council notified Hot, the Israeli cable television provider, that its new Hebrew-language channel would be taken off the air within the next seven days.

Shelanu, a new channel set up by God TV – one of the largest Christian broadcasting networks in the world – in partnership with the Israeli Messianic community, had been broadcasting on cable television since the end of April. It is very rare for the council to take a channel off the air, and it is the first time a Christian channel broadcast in Israel is being shut down.

God TV was told by the council that it was welcome to submit a new license application that provided a more honest depiction of the nature of its programming. Proselytizing, in certain circumstances, can be against the law in Israel.

Had he known that the target audience of the new channel was the Jewish community in Israel, wrote council Chairman Asher Biton in a letter notifying Hot of his decision, he would not have approved the application as quickly and would have first consulted with all the council members.

“A channel that wishes to spread the gospel of Jesus among the Jewish nation sitting in Israel had never been broadcast on Hot, and the heads of the channel knew that, as was clarified in the hearing we held,” he wrote. Biton noted that Christian programming aimed at Jews is a “complicated and sensitive matter” and, therefore, the broadcasters should have been more upfront about the nature of the new channel.

Biton already notified Hot a few weeks after Shelanu (Hebrew for “Ours,” as in “Jesus is all of ours”) began broadcasting that he was considering suspending the license, subject to a hearing. The announcement came after a fundraising video surfaced in which God TV CEO Ward Simpson said: “God has supernaturally opened the door for us to take the gospel of Jesus into the homes and lives and hearts of his Jewish people.”