Hi, welcome to this week's laser focus. I am Laser Berman, your host. Now, you might have noticed

earlier this month a rather curious episode. It was really kind of niche, but it actually made

waves in the Christian community across many different churches. As often happens, Jews were at the center, Jews in Israel, were at the center of this fight,

but it wasn't really about Jews. It was really a fight over Christian theology,

over how different groups of Christians see God's promises, see Israel's role, see Jews' role in that.

And what we're going to try to do here today is not talk directly about things that might

be in the news like Iran, like Gaza.

We're actually going to speak to an expert on Christian Zionism, a Christian Zionist himself,

one of the leaders here in Israel,

and try to understand what the movement is and what the source of this fight was.

Now, just to go over with you as a means of introduction, what I'm referring to,

there was a document that came out about two weeks ago from an umbrella movement or an umbrella group, the heads of churches

and the patriarchs of Jerusalem. And it had these statements come out every once in a while,

but this one was a little bit different. It talked about undefined specific individuals in

Israel who were pushing quote unquoteunquote harmful ideologies,

including Christian Zionism. Now, this statement was seized upon by many Christians who are

not friendly to Israel and said, look, here's proof that Christian Zionists are pushing some theology that is not biblical,

that is mistaken. Look, we have all of the heads of the various churches in Jerusalem who are coming

together to issue this condemnation. It turns out, and some of this was my reporting as well,

that the Catholic Church was not behind

this. They didn't even know about it. But the internet being what it is, social media being

what it is, this thing spread and became a major fight. Now, some prominent Christian Zionists

...