Jeffrey Sachs

It's not about treaties.

It's God's command.

That's a big part

of the israeli political scene right now it's half the the motivation and it's why all of this is so radicalized and so zealous but as we were talking um it's extremely important in the u.s context to understand

the Christian Zionist dimension to this because Zionism did not originate with Judaism, strangely, or with Jews, I should say.

Herzl was encouraged in his Zionism by a Christian Zionist.

And Christian Zionism was an evangelical belief

that the Jews should go back to make a homeland in the Promised Land or the Holy Land.

And that has roots hundreds of years before these Jewish secular Zionists started at the end of the 19th century.

And a big part of the Christian Zionist movement started in Britain in the first half of the 19th century.

These were Christians reading the Bible,

and reading the bible in very particular ways one may say increasingly with an emphasis on the last book of the bible revelation so what's called eschatology or the end of the world beliefs and part of that eschatology preached by a british preacher named darby with a huge effect subsequently in the united states was that the jews should go back to the holy land

so that the second coming can occur because the book of revelations says that the second coming of christ will occur when the jews are in control of the holy land it happens interestingly that these christian zionists were often

rather confirmed anti-Semites that wanted the Jews out of their own country.

They didn't want the Jews in Britain.

They didn't want Eastern European Jews migrating to Britain and so forth.

So they wanted them conveniently anyway out of Britain and back in the Holy Land.

But the point is,

There is a set of non-religious claims.

Our security depends on this.