The Israel Guys, a Christian Zionist organization with a media reach spanning tens of millions of evangelical viewers, inaugurated a new visitors center in the Samaria community of Har Bracha last Thursday, giving Christian supporters of Israel a permanent physical home in the biblical heartland rather than just a channel to watch from abroad.
Har Bracha, Hebrew for the Mount of Blessing, sits on the southern ridge of Mount Gerizim, about an hour north of Jerusalem near Shechem. The center, complete with a coffee shop, wine tastings from the local winery, and guided tours, was built earlier this year by a team of 70 American volunteers on land provided by the regional council. “Now there is a place in Samaria where the nations can come to and see what it means for them to fulfill their role in the biblical heartland,” Joshua Waller, CEO of The Israel Guys, told JNS.
Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, who leads the Har Bracha Yeshiva in the same community, offered his blessing at the inauguration. Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria Regional Council, framed the opening in the context of the war that has reshaped so much of Israeli life since October 7, 2023. “This is a celebration of a partnership and shared values,” Dagan said. “Especially after October 7, we understand that Jews and non-Jews must fight together.”
From a Tennessee Farm to a Vineyard in Samaria
The organization’s roots reach back more than two decades before this year’s ribbon-cutting. In the summer of 2004, Tommy Waller, a farmer from Tennessee, stood in a vineyard in the mountains of Samaria owned by Nir Lavi, one of the first Jewish pioneers to replant vineyards in the region after 2,000 years. Lavi opened his Bible to a verse that gave the entire encounter its meaning: You shall again plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria; the planters shall plant and shall enjoy the fruit thereof. (Jeremiah 31:5) Waller realized he was standing inside a prophecy fulfilled in real time, and asked Lavi a simple question: What could he do to help?
That question became HaYovel, Hebrew for Jubilee, founded as a US nonprofit in 2007 after Waller, his wife Sherri, and their eleven children began making regular trips to Israel to prune and harvest alongside Israeli farmers. Over the following fifteen years, more than 3,000 volunteers from 32 countries joined the effort, helping establish and sustain more than fifty small farms across Judea and Samaria. Frustrated by what the organization describes as persistent anti-Israel rhetoric and misinformation in mainstream coverage, the Wallers launched pro-Israel media alongside the farm work, starting with The Joshua & Caleb Report television series in 2013, which ran four seasons and 32 episodes on Christian networks before becoming a weekly podcast in 2018.
In August 2021, that media effort consolidated into The Israel Guys, merging the organization’s video and newsletter work into a single platform that began with roughly 33,000 YouTube subscribers. Growth accelerated sharply after October 7, 2023, when the channel’s coverage and advocacy reached a far larger audience; by 2024, it had surpassed a quarter million YouTube subscribers and half a million followers across platforms combined, and the group’s YouTube channel now stands at over 419,000 subscribers.
Answering October 7 With Vineyards and Security Equipment
The war did not just grow the organization’s audience. It reshaped its work directly. In the war’s opening months, The Israel Guys launched Operation Ittai, a fundraising campaign that delivered security equipment, flashlights, protective vests, and surveillance cameras to small and vulnerable communities across Israel, aimed at preventing a repeat of the failures exposed on October 7. The organization also drew international attention for bringing American Christian volunteers, including a widely covered group of cowboys, to help with agricultural work in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led massacre, continuing the same hands-on model the Wallers had built since 2004. In January 2025, Israel’s Knesset recognized that record with the Voices of Iron Award, honoring the organization’s advocacy and support for Israel throughout the war.
Tommy Waller, who still leads the organization he founded, spoke at last week’s inauguration and returned to the same sense of standing inside prophecy that first brought him to Samaria in 2004. “I am not Jewish, but I believe in the Bible, and it is amazing to see I can touch what the prophets said,” he said.
Over more than two decades, The Israel Guys have built their appeal to millions of Christian supporters worldwide around a simple proposition: that the return of Jewish life to the vineyards of Samaria is not merely a modern political fact but the visible fulfillment of a promise made three thousand years earlier. The new visitors center at Har Bracha gives that proposition a fixed address for the first time, a place where the tens of thousands who have followed the organization’s media for years, or made the trip to volunteer themselves, can stand in the same hills where Tommy Waller once asked a stranger in a vineyard what he could do to help.
