51ÂÜÀò

Why should Christians care about the conflict between Israel and Palestine? Why is there such a gap between Gen Z and other generations on viewing the conflict? Is Israel committing a just war, or is it genocide? In this episode, Sean and Scott address these questions, and more, with Dr. Jeff Myers, author of the new book

Jeff Myers, Ph.D. is the president of Summit Ministries, which has trained hundreds of thousands of young leaders to embrace God's truth and champion a biblical worldview. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Denver and is the author of 18 books including Understanding the Times.

Episode Transcript

Should Christians support Israel? How can a biblical worldview help us think about the current conflict in Palestine? And how does Gen Z uniquely view this conflict compared with other generations? These are some of the questions we're going to explore today with our guest, Dr. Jeff Myers, author of the new book, Should Christians Support Israel? I'm Sean McDowell.

I'm your co-host Scott Rae.

And this is the Think Biblically podcast from Talbot School of Theology, 51ÂÜÀò.

Jeff, it's great to have you back on a new topic.

Last time we talked about Gen Z.

Now we're going to focus on kind of how they think about the conflict in Palestine right now.

But this book is framed by a trip that you took recently to Israel after the tragic terrorist attacks by Hamas on October 7th.

Tell us a little about that trip and kind of how it framed your view of the conflict.

Hey, Sean.

Hey, Scott.

Thanks for the opportunity to be on the show today.

My travel to Israel during the time of war to the war zone was framed by a poll that I saw in November after the October 7th terrorist attacks.

And I know there's a lot happening in the news, but you'll remember 1,200 Israeli civilians, men, women, and children, slaughtered, raped, mutilated, 250 hostages taken.

That would be the equivalent of terrorists coming across the border into Southern California and murdering and raping and mutilating 42,000 people and taking 12,000 hostages, just for comparison's sake.

Now, I saw this poll and it was done by Mark Penn, Harvard University, and they said, you know, 60% of young adults say they think those Hamas attacks were justified because of Palestinian grievances.

The question was phrased just like that.

I'm not, this is no hyperbole.

They believed that those attacks were justified.

And I realized we've got a huge culture gap here and it's not between Democrats and Republicans.

It's not between religious people and secular people.

It is between older generations and younger generations.

So I wrote an opinion editorial piece for Daily Wire.

I called it, congratulations, America, you've raised a generation of terrorist sympathizers.

And that got a little bit of attention.

But it led to the opportunity to go to the land.

And you've been to Israel so you know that you go to Tel Aviv.

They have a lot of security, of course, but the place is packed.

No, it was completely empty.

I mean, the security procedures and JFK were extraordinary.

And I got into the airport, there's nobody there.

And everybody kept asking me, why are you here? Why are you here? Don't you know we're at war? And so I finally said, I'm here to show solidarity.

And the passport agent just stamped the passport and shoved it back across and said, solidarity with home.

And you realize there is so much tension going on in this place.

Well, from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, where the streets were empty, I'd never experienced that before.

And then down to the war zone.

And you know, you're getting there for a couple of reasons.

First of all, the road becomes rough because it's now chewed up by tank treads.

And then I'm traveling south, so I'm looking off to the right.

I can see smoke arising from terrorist hideouts that have been targeted in Gaza.

And then on the left, I hear the artillery.

So I'm right, literally right in the middle of it with the small group that I'm participating in this with.

And the entire trip was just to find facts, to gather information, to discover what is really going on that we aren't hearing about in the news and that a lot of people aren't even hearing about at church.

So I talked with everybody I could find.

I talked with Palestinians and Israelis.

I talked with Arabs and with Jews, with secular Jews, with religious Jews, with people on the right, people on the left, intelligence officers, IDF, everybody in between, so that I could get a perspective and come back and try to communicate what's happening in the U.S.

And it turned into a book.

I know you guys are both authors.

Something doesn't just happen into a book.

Well, it did in this situation.

I was writing out all my notes for the media and realized, nope, this needs to be told in a larger way.

And that is the story behind this book, Should Christians Support Israel? Darrell Bock So, Jeff, let's go into a little bit more detail about what you saw in Israel that was not, or is not being communicated back to folks here in the U.S.

and maybe in Europe.

What are some of the things that the media here is missing that we need to fill in? Jeff Sarris Man, Scott, there's so much here.

Let me just mention a couple of things.

The first thing is that the Israelis are conducting this as a just war.

Now, in the group that I went with, just a handful of people, but one of the guys in the group, his son, who had grown up in Christian school, Christian high school, Christian college, said to his dad, "Why are you supporting genocide?" By just going on the trip, "Why are you supporting genocide?" And when I arrived there, I realized that this is propaganda that people have been given here.

In fact, John Spencer, who's America's leading expert on protecting non-combatants in a time of war, says that Israel has done more than any other nation in history, including the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, to protect non-combatants.

They bind themselves to extraordinarily strict rules of engagement.

Now, in a time of war, civilians die.

The history of humanity is the history of war.

Will Durant said out of the 3,000 years of history that he studied only 268 years had been completely at peace.

So 92-some percent of all of history is a history of war.

Christians have thought about this a lot, and Aquinas and Augustine, these two dominant Christian philosophers, both said, "Look, war is evil.

War is always evil, but it's possible for just outcomes to result.

It depends on how you conduct the war.

Do you have a legitimate government with a just cause and a right intent pursuing the war aims with proportionality and discretion?" And that became obvious, that that's what's going on.

In fact, I was with some IDF soldiers, and I said, "Okay, tell me a little bit about what's going on when you go into Gaza, because you're engaged in street fighting, hand-to-hand fighting, essentially." And they said, "Well, we just try to protect ourselves." I said, "Well, how do you know who the terrorists are?" Because there are a lot of people there.

They said, "Well, the terrorists are the ones that shoot at us." And I realized, "Well, you have to wait until they shoot at you to shoot back." Yeah, yeah, that's what we do.

Now, these are not necessarily trained professional soldiers.

These are not Navy SEALs.

These are everyday Israelis who did their military service, and now in their 30s and 40s are coming back to the war zone to protect their nation, because they're now fighting on seven different fronts.

So that was the first thing that really startled me.

In fact, here's what we've learned that in a time of war, typically in an urban warfare situation, nine non-combatants are killed for every combatant killed.

Nine.

In this particular war, it's about one, one non-combatant killed for every combatant killed.

So that gives you a sense of Israel is doing something that is extraordinarily disciplined that most militaries never do that is just not in the news.

I haven't seen a single article about just war.

I've seen a lot of things about genocide, a lot of questions about proportionality, but nothing about that.

And the second thing was the steps that the Israelis were taking to provide for the needs of people in Gaza.

I don't know if you've been to Gaza.

It's not big.

It's a 25 mile long stretch of Mediterranean coastline, about seven miles wide at its widest point.

This was a disputed territory for decades between Egypt and Israel.

Israel left the region completely in 2005 and in 2006, a group called Hamas won an election there.

Hamas stands for Islamic Resistance Movement in Arabic.

And the United States has classified it as a terrorist group because of the tactics that it uses and because it uses its position of political power to raise an army not to defend or protect the people that rules the Gazans, but to bring about the annihilation of the state of Israel as its stated charter demands that it does.

But I was thinking, well, how do they get food and water? My questions were really basic.

They get water because we have two water lines running into the territory.

Really? And you haven't cut it off? No, no, we've always provided water to them.

We desalinate it and then we send it to them.

I said, well, how are they getting food? Because we're always hearing that you guys have cut off all the aid trucks.

And this was back in January and they gave me the figure.

The figure now is 500,000 tons of food aid that the Israelis have brought into Gaza, 500,000 tons.

That is enough to meet the food needs of 50% of the Gazan population.

I said, well, but you've destroyed all of their agriculture and all of that, right? I mean, that's what people do in a war.

That's what they did to you guys.

The Hamas terrorists destroyed 70% of Israel's agricultural production.

They said, no, we haven't.

Some of it burned up, but 75% of it is intact.

I said, wait a second.

So you're telling me, I'm hearing all of these stories about Gazans starving and you're telling me that they have 125% of their food needs met.

Why are they starving? And then they just looked at me like, you still don't get it, do you? This Hamas group does not care if every single Gazan dies.

They only want the annihilation of the state of Israel.

And so I came back and realized three things had not been communicated in America and three things specifically, one of them specifically for Christians.

The first one is that Israel is a legitimate nation that has a right to defend itself.

Second, that Hamas is the enemy here.

People keep saying things about Israel, you know, trying to put Israel in a bad light.

But Hamas, this terrorist group is an apocalyptic rape and death cult.

It is the enemy of the Palestinian people and the enemy of Israel.

And it needs to no longer be able to field a military or form a government.

And the third thing is that God's not done with the Jewish people.

While I was there, we sat down with an intelligence officer and the person who was arranging the meetings for us said, we really are glad that you guys are here.

And again, it's just a small handful of us.

We're really glad you guys are here.

I said, well, why? I mean, why are you saying that? They said, because you're the first Christians who have come over to actually ask questions and try to figure the word.

You're the first Christian group that we've had.

And it just, it stunned me because Christians go to Israel all the time.

Millions of Christians every single year go to Israel.

But obviously in wartime, nobody was going to find out what was really taking place on the ground and provide, I think, a helpful corrective to some of the impressions that Americans have been given.

Jeff, that's really helpful to get the perspective on the ground, seeing it with your own eyes, you know, not too long after this conflict broke out.

Did you have a chance to meet with Palestinian Christians or Palestinians who are not Christians here or there perspective? I had the opportunity to meet with Palestinians who were, they were not Christians.

They were, they were Muslims.

There are almost no Palestinian Christians in Gaza.

In fact, the intelligence officer I worked with said there are 991 out of a population of 2.5 million people.

And we know where they are.

We're watching out for them.

But they were, they were not available to be talked with.

But a meeting with the Palestinians and with Arab Israeli citizens, both.

There was a tremendous amount of tension in those conversations, because on the one hand, they know Hamas is evil.

They know that if Israel was not sitting in the middle between the West Bank and Gaza, that Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian authority in the West Bank would be at civil war with one another.

There's kind of the story out there that the Palestinian people are all one people, that they are an identifiable people group, that, but it's not quite that simple.

It's very tribal.

And each tribe is at war with each other tribe for dominance to determine who gets to represent the Palestinian people.

Here's what I found.

The Palestinians, even in the West Bank, they were in favor of Hamas.

And I have found that this is true since that time too.

I was, in fact, I was visiting with a Palestinian Muslim here in the States and I spent an hour with them and I asked him, what do you, what do you think about what's going on there? I said, what he said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, what do you think of Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian authority in the West Bank? He said, oh, that man is trash.

I said, well, what, what do you think about Yahya Sinwar? Who's the now the leader of, of Hamas.

He was the mastermind behind the October 7th attacks.

He said, very intelligent man.

I said, I know a lot of people who've talked with Yahya Sinwar and he is a very cruel man.

He said, oh, yeah, good point.

Like that was, but that was the extent of the thinking.

They, they know that the Palestinian authority is corrupt, that it is betrayed the Palestinian people over and over again to the point where in the hearts of the people, they now think it would be better if they were ruled by this group.

They know as a terrorist group, they know, uses terrorist tactics.

They know, does not allow free speech, does not allow freedom of press brutally suppresses all dissent.

And this don't take my word for it.

This is what Amnesty international and the human rights campaign have said.

And neither of those groups, I think it's fair to say is a friend of Israel.

They, they, you know, they're pro Palestinian, if anything.

So it was, those conversations were quite awkward, a lot of frustration with Israel.

But let me say this to you guys, because a lot of people didn't know this.

There was a lot of frustration inside of Israel with their leadership.

They felt that they had been betrayed and not well protected by their own government.

And Israel, man, we think that we have political division in this country.

They have 55 political parties in Israel, 55, and 15 of them hold seats in the Knesset, which is their parliament.

The majority party, the one that has more seats than anybody else.

This is, this is Likud.

This is the party of Benjamin Netanyahu.

They only hold 32 seats out of 120.

So even they are an extreme minority and they debate and fight about things all of the time.

The one thing they can agree on is we're fighting wars on seven different fronts.

We have to stick together.

And so they fight fiercely when they are attacked.

But as I said, I think they're doing it according to just war principles as best I understand them.

And I know that's a huge controversy at a podcast about that yesterday.

And it raised the ire of a lot of people.

Darrell Bock Well, Jeff, let me pursue that a little bit further.

You have a specific chapter in the book on the just war criteria.

But what I'm familiar with with those criteria is that there's two parts to it.

One is what's called the, what's called in Latin, use ad bella, which is justice in the decision to go to war, which you address specifically in that chapter.

But there's also the criteria that was called use in bella, which is justice in the conduct of war, which I didn't see particularly addressed in that chapter.

And I'm curious, even if you concede that the numbers of innocent Palestinians who have been killed is inflated, I'll concede that.

There's still, there's a lot of collateral damage that's come from the way Israel has pursued this.

And I mean, yeah, I get that's helpful to recognize that the A.L.E.

aid that's come in, but I mean, there's a lot of the Gaza Strip that has been reduced to basically a parking lot.

Where is the place for sympathy and compassion for the Palestinians who, you know, that in Israel, I think it's made it clear, our war is not with the Palestinians, it's with Hamas.

But there are lots of innocent Palestinians who've had their lives turned completely upside down, if not had, you know, loved ones and family members killed as a result of Israel trying to do away with Hamas.

How would you respond to that? There's no question that's true, Scott, that their lives have been turned upside down.

I did address, I did address justice in the context of war in the second part of that chapter on just war through three different things, that conduct in war is just if it, first of all, is based on military necessity, second of all, if it's based on proportionality, and third of all, if it's based on distinction or discretion.

And each one of those is really important to talk about.

And it's very difficult to do this because, you know, as I'm trying to think about how to describe this philosophically, I have pictures in my mind of destroyed buildings and of grieving families.

And it is, it is the case that possibly 20% of Gaza is uninhabitable, their neighborhoods.

You know, people had always described it as an open air prison camp, so they didn't expect to see much when they saw pictures.

But it was functioning, it was, it was, there were functioning cities there, high rise buildings, stores, you know, you could buy products, grocery stores, things like that.

It wasn't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, it's quite poor, but it was wealthier than 140 of the world's nations.

So that was the situation before the war.

How, so how do these three principles of justice in war apply in this situation? Well, the first one's military necessity.

A lot of people have said Israel, everything Israel does is a war crime.

You have to keep in mind, that's because they believe Israel does not legitimately exist as a nation.

That's the very first criteria.

If it doesn't legitimately exist, it can't legitimately conduct war.

Everything it does is by definition a war crime.

Okay, so if we set that aside for a minute and say, okay, let's, let's start with the idea that Israel legitimately exists as a nation and its declaration of war was legitimate.

What is military necessity? Military necessity says that when you go into a war, you are responsible to protect non-combatants.

You are also simultaneously responsible to protect the lives of your troops.

That you have a stewardship responsibility.

You have, you may not, for example, say, oh, well, the Palestinians want to fight, you know, they're going to run into the tunnel at one end.

And so we have to send in guys one at a time to run in the tunnel at the other end.

And, you know, just see who wins, because that's what that that's the best way to do it.

Now, that's not ethical.

That's immoral to do that.

If you have the means to drop a bomb and collapse the tunnel.

The second, the second thing is proportionality.

And proportionality is not, it's not based on the number of bodies because I don't know how to say this.

We sometimes think that proportionality would be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, right? Lex talionis.

We all learned that in the Old Testament.

So if they kill one guy, if they kill one of our guys, then we can go over there and kill one of their guys.

So what people expected to have happen is they slaughtered 1200 Israelis.

The Israelis go across the border and they slaughter, rape and mutilate 1200 Gazans.

And then everybody's even, but that is not how a war works.

Scott, you know, when, when we experienced the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC and on flight 93 in Pennsylvania, maybe 3000 people died in that.

That was an attack.

It was a declaration of war.

We had to find the enemy.

It wasn't a state.

It was, it was this amorphous group called Al Qaeda.

How do you go battle against them? So the, you know, America decided for better, for worse, how to pursue that.

But no one expected that we would send all of our armies over, pick out 1200 innocent civilians of theirs and kill them.

That's just not how you conduct a war.

Proportionality is based on the potential threat that the enemy represents.

So Hamas has represented a threat.

They have, they continue to represent a threat.

Their leaders have said, we will do October 7th, a thousand times.

And do they have the means to do it? Well, apparently they do.

They have the backing of Iran, which is an extraordinarily wealthy oil nation that has an apocalyptic vision that demands the annihilation of the state of Israel and the killing of Jews.

So they have the, they have all of that.

Um, they, they, even before October 7th, they had shot 30,000 missiles into Israel, 30,000.

I mean, the provoking went on for years and years and years and Israel's response was always limited.

They sent suicide bombers and 770 people in Israel killed in suicide bombings by Hamas.

And finally, Israel said, this is enough.

This is enough.

The time to just say, well, you know, an eye for an eye tooth for tooth is, is over this.

As long as this group Hamas exists, they will always be oppressing and killing their own people and using them as human shields.

And they will always be attacking Israel.

This is the time to go to war and finish it.

And they weren't trying to even kill everybody in Hamas.

They just said, we want to end their ability to have a military and to, uh, feel the government that's proportionality.

And then the third one is distinction or discretion.

And you primarily have to try to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.

And I will say that's much harder to do than people think because the combatants in the situation are not considered by Hamas to be combatants, right? You always hear these stories.

Oh, well, the Gaza health ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.

Why not? Because they don't believe they have any combatants.

They believe that if somebody runs down the street with a rifle, trying to shoot at Israeli soldiers and that person is killed, they are an innocent civilian.

They are, they're not, they're not, they're not a combatant.

They are a martyr.

So everybody's a martyr and the more martyrs, the better.

That is the position of Khalid Mashal, who's the outside leader of Hamas, the guy who gained a net worth of $5 billion skimming off of international aid.

That was designated for destitute Gazans.

There's a whole lot more there, but you gotta, you gotta look at this with clear eyes and then try to figure out what kind of information are we getting out of Gaza that is accurate? No, but there are no reporters in there.

I mean, I hope people understand the only reporters who've ever been in there and they're only a handful are the ones who were embedded with either Hamas or with the IDF.

All the others are stringers, people who live in that area who work for Hamas, who released to the world the information that Hamas once released.

Jeff, I know the focus of your book is on how Gen Zers are far more sympathetic to Hamas and have less support for Israel than other generations.

And the stats are pretty jarring in a sense, but I was having a conversation with a Gen Zer and he asked me a question that to him just seemed kind of black and white.

He said, so how can Israel specifically target areas in Gaza and Hamas, knowing distinctly that innocents such as children are going to die as a result? Now I know Hamas, like you had mentioned right in the book, will specifically post in, you know, they'll hide as terrorists in hospitals and in schools, etc.

But is it ever okay to attack with a hundred percent certainty that children are going to die? He looked at me like I was crazy to think such a thing could ever be moral.

And I know that's common within Gen Zers and that's at the heart of this book.

What would you say to him in light of that question? The answer to that question, Sean, is the same as how we have to grapple with the issue of genocide.

What is the intent? Is there a military intent there? We know that in war, every war that has ever happened, even wars, you know, I would start by asking that young man, do you think that it was a good thing for the Allied forces to go after the Nazis? Now I'm assuming the young man would say yes, but you know that when those bombs are dropped on those ammunition factories in Germany, that there is going to be collateral damage.

There are civilians working in those buildings, right? You know that.

Is the wars, is it still possible to have a just war? And you have to go back to intent.

What is the intent? Is the intent to kill those civilians? That was certainly a Moss's intent.

They have not abided by anything even approaching a just war doctrine.

They intentionally kill civilians.

Okay.

Their intent was to do that.

And I put the documentation in the book about that.

So do we know that it's possible that people who are not combatants are going to die when combatants are targeted? Yes, we do.

And that is an unfortunate aspect of war.

That has been an aspect of every single war that has ever been conducted.

Do we have a just aim? Is this enemy genuinely evil and in need of being defeated? Is it possible that justice can arise from this even though we all know that war is evil? And I think the answer is yes.

But you can't, you know, obviously think about it this way.

As someone, God forbid, were to break into the home of one of your friends and try to kill their family and that person had a gun and shot back.

Is it possible that those bullets could go across into a neighbor's house and harm someone that's there? Yes.

Is it still right for them to shoot those bullets to defend their family? In my opinion, it is.

It is still right for them to do that.

They are just in that kind of a response.

But if they say, "I'm going to shoot bullets around and what I'm intending is that the bullets will go into the neighbor's house and hurt people," then that's not permitted.

This is why, you know, in every given police action, they're trying to figure out how do we go after the bad guy knowing that if there are innocent people around, they could get harmed.

How do we protect them? You have to be able to do both at the same time.

But the only way to distinguish what is really happening there is the question of intent.

Jeff, one more question for you.

I think I've heard Scott say many times that one of the hardest ethical issues to deal with is on euthanasia.

It's just so complex.

There's no doubt with this conflict it is up there in terms of how difficult and painful, and I appreciate you lay out and tackle some of these tough questions in the book.

Some of the other questions that I get asked are the right of Israel to the land, whether it's biblically or just historically.

And I was having a conversation with a young man, and he was talking about it.

He's going, "Wait a minute.

You know, there are Palestinians living in there before 1948 for generations as a family." In fact, just this week I heard a Palestinian Christian who went to a well-known evangelical school, not 51ÂÜÀò, but one like a 51ÂÜÀò, and he just kept referring to the land as his homeland because his family had been there going back for generations.

Does Israel have the right to land? Do they not have the right? How do you make sense of that part of the conflict that's taking place today? Well, it is true that Palestinian people can trace their lineage back into that land.

And so here's this is a complicated one.

But I would, one thing you have to remember is that everybody who lived there was Palestinian, okay, because it was called Palestine.

It was named that by Emperor Hadrian after Jerusalem was destroyed.

Only Israel had ever built a nation state in that land.

And to this day, the only nation who's ever built a nation state in that land was Israel.

Jerusalem has only ever been the national capital of one country, and that is Israel.

Okay, that's only ever been the case.

It is, but people were living in that land, and everybody there was called a Palestinian.

Hadrian named it Palestine.

In Arabic, it's Philistine.

He named it after their worst enemies to shame them and scattered them around the world.

So everybody there was Palestinian.

It wasn't a question of whether you're Palestinian.

You could be a Palestinian Jew, a Palestinian Christian, Palestinian Arab, Palestinian Muslim, Palestinian, but everybody was Palestinian.

It was a rhetorical battle that began in the 1900s, specifically around the time that Israel was reformed as a modern nation, where the Palestinian leader said from this point forward, the word Palestinian will only refer to Arabs, only.

And that way we can distinguish ourselves from the Jews.

The Palestinians at the time Israel was formed were asked to form their own nation in Judea and Samaria, the better, you know, the better part of the land.

And they refused.

They refused it in 1948.

They refused it in 1967, 2000, 2008, every time the Palestinians have been given the opportunity to say, we are a people and we will form a nation.

They've refused to do it because they had only one aim.

We don't want our own nation.

We want all of it.

We want Israel to not exist.

We'd want the Jews to not be here at all.

Well, the Jews claim to the land goes all the way back to Abraham, 3,500 years.

So I don't know.

Are we just going to have a debate about who's been there longer? Because that's really the issue.

And then of course, people discuss, well, you know, some of the Jews who come back, they aren't Middle Eastern.

But you have to understand the nature of God's covenant with the people.

God's covenant with Abraham was with the people in the land.

Every time the covenant is referenced in scripture, it's with the people in the land.

And Christian theologians made this tougher because for until 1948, the land was not, it did not exist as its own reconstituted nation.

So of course, theologians like John Calvin, Martin Luther, they treated Israel as a spiritual metaphor because it didn't exist as a physical place at that time that they were writing.

But since 1948, most theologians still are using theological categories that were in existence when Israel was only a spiritual metaphor before it was reconstituted in its modern incarnation.

And some people say, well, Israel, you know, modern Israel has nothing to do with ancient Israel, really.

That's an opinion.

That is not a fact.

Okay.

Modern Israel is a Jewish state.

It's acknowledged as a Jewish state.

There are 57 members of the organization of Islamic states, one Jewish state.

It is based on their basic laws based on the book of Deuteronomy.

The Hebraic traditions going all the way back to ancient times are based on the things they do, marriage laws, all of those kinds of things, based on the Old Testament.

Even the language Hebrew is recognizably the language of the ancient Hebrews.

So I think for all of those reasons, it's fair to say based on God's covenant, based on the historical reality of the situation, and based on the nature of the Israeli state, that this is a reconstitution of the ancient nation of Israel.

This is not to say, Sean and Scott, that all of the people there are righteous or that they love God.

It's not true.

Just like in our own country, there are a lot of people there who are secular.

They don't have any particular religious beliefs at all, but it is the recipient of God's covenant.

And that is consistent with what we know to be true geopolitically and historically.

I really appreciate that last qualifier.

When you get to the end of the book, you said, what can we do now? And one of the things you said is improve relations between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs.

He said, "Israel doesn't invest in social services and community development among Israeli Arabs as it does among Israeli Jews." So the case you're laying out is that Christians should support Israel, but that doesn't mean you cannot critique Israel and cannot have sympathy for those who are caught in the crosshairs.

Scott and I are looking at each other because we have literally dozens more questions we wish we could ask you about this.

I think we just scratched the surface on each one of these.

Literally each one of these questions could be an episode in itself.

But you lay this out.

I appreciate that you went to Israel and saw this firsthand and talked to people.

And your book for 120 pages just packs a punch.

It's just researched so well.

And the cool thing is you told me before that you're giving this away for free.

So whether or not people are hearing this going, "I'm with you, Jeff," or they're saying, "I'm not convinced.

I don't buy it." You're offering this for free so people can wrestle with your case.

Tell us how people can get a copy of Should Christians Support Israel? This is published by Summit Ministries.

If you just go to summit.org/Israel, you can see the link there to get your copy of the book.

And I think your point is well taken.

Whether somebody agrees or disagrees is not the issue.

We need to be informed and recognize that a lot of what we're seeing on TikTok, a lot of what we see in the news isn't giving the full story.

And you can get it in two hours and 120 pages.

You might come away and say, "I still think that guy is full of it.

I don't think he's on the right track here." Which is fine.

That's totally fine.

I've had Q&As with a thousand students at Summit Ministries this summer.

I've got another one coming up at noon today.

Trust me, they always ask harder questions than anybody in the media has ever asked.

You know how they are, Sean, right? They just lay it on you because they trust you and they feel safe to ask the tough questions.

So we'll be digging in.

This is something that we need to have as an ongoing discussion, even if we can't see eye to eye on every issue.

Well, as you know, I spent a good amount of time this past summer at Summit and it's one of my favorite places to speak at to partner with.

You guys are trying to help people see all issues through a biblical worldview.

And here at Talbot and 51ÂÜÀò, especially on this podcast, our aim is to think biblically about everything.

So I hope people will go to summit.org, pick up a copy, read it, discuss it, debate it, wrestle with it.

A free resource is impossible to beat, but above all, appreciate your work, appreciate your friendship.

Thanks for coming on, Jeff.

Thank you, Sean.

Thank you, Scott.

This has been an episode of the podcast, Think Biblically, Conversations on Faith and Culture.

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