The event was zealously cohosted by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who just days earlier was caught after secretly meeting with a convicted Israeli spy, leading to widespread calls for his resignation.

The criticism of this outlandish summit has been widespread too, but I felt the need to weigh in with a practical recommendation which I hope lawmakers urgently pursue: Every one of these pastors should be registered as a foreign agent. And after considering the nature of the summit, I doubt many could disagree.

A Summit of Anti-Christians Parading as Pastors

The rhetoric at the summit was exclusionary, vindictive, and overtly conspiratorial. It was essentially a PR strategy meeting where Israeli government officials instructed their American collaborators on how best to silence the mounting expressions of revulsion among the Christian public in America at the ongoing spectacle of Zionist violence in Gaza and the West Bank.

The whole of Prime Minister Netanyahu's regime seems bent on that mission, though public polling shows it to be an impossible task. After two years of what is commonly called the world's "first livestreamed genocide," complete with war crime after thoroughly documented war crime – and after thousands of women and children have been murdered and every church, hospital, and refugee compound in the region has been bombed – there is no coming back from this until the current regime in Israel faces a full public reckoning and is thoroughly ousted from power.

Nonetheless, the summit busily set about rehashing its methods of suppression and narrative manipulation: Dismiss criticism of Israel as Qatari-funded propaganda. Call into question the religious orthodoxy of those who reject radical Jewish settler violence in the West Bank. And of course: Keep lobbing accusations of antisemitism at those who reject extremist Zionism.

The whole thing is dirty. From a Christian perspective, it's offensive – men who ought to be moral leaders instead signing up to become defenders of a godless secular state just when it begins to earn near-universal hatred by engaging in a two-year murder campaign against civilians in Gaza.

But from the perspective of the ancient Christian community in Palestine – the primary victims of Netanyahu's bloodbath and the brethren with whom Christians have the clearest duty to stand – it's worse: This was not just a betrayal of the faith, but a personal betrayal of the Body of Christ still living in the land of Christianity's birth.

Palestinian advocate Fares Abraham put it this way in a timely column written in response to the talking points discussed at the summit: "As a Palestinian-American evangelical with family in Bethlehem and Gaza, and as someone who leads ministry across the region, I listened to this rhetoric with grief. Christians across history have interpreted Scripture differently, especially on matters of prophecy and politics. Treating theological disagreement as betrayal is both irresponsible and theologically unsound."