Catholic guilt and Gaza

The following are excerpts from an essay published in Commonweal. Use this link to read the article in its entirety.

By Julie Schumacher Cohen
Catholic Advisory Council, Churches for Middle East Peace

Last year, I was part of a group of American Catholics who organized a letter advocating for more just U.S. policies on Israel-Palestine and a Gaza ceasefire. It was signed by over 6,000 Catholics. But many more, in the wake of the brutal October 7 attack by Hamas and the ensuing indiscriminate Israeli military assault on Gaza, have refrained from engaging. This has left a void in the American Catholic response. Until the election of the first American pope, Leo XIV, who has already called for a Gaza ceasefire, vice president JD Vance was perhaps the most prominent American Catholic voice weighing in during the past few months. President Trump personally thanked him for helping devise a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

Catholics’ hesitancy in applying the Church’s social teaching to Israel-Palestine, I believe, stems partly from guilt over historic Christian antisemitism and a fear of being associated with contemporary expressions of contempt for Jews. Of course, there is a sound basis for this guilt, including Vatican silence during the Holocaust and German Catholic complicity in it. From this point of view, members of the Church lack the credibility or standing to speak out now, and any critical stance toward the state of Israel can seem a further abandonment of the Jewish people. But the refusal to wrestle with the carnage in Palestine in light of Catholic commitments to human dignity, justice, peace, and reconciliation amounts to an abandonment of the Palestinian people. The terrible murder last week of two Israeli embassy aides outside the Capital Jewish Museum by an individual shouting “Free Palestine” may further deter Catholic advocacy, but it is in precisely such a moment, with more and more Palestinians being massacred daily, that engagement rooted in mutual flourishing is needed.     

As the Catholic daughter of an Israeli with family in Tel Aviv, and as someone deeply influenced by Palestinian Christians, I do not see these matters as zero-sum. We can grieve the Holocaust as an unfathomable act of human cruelty and mourn the way in which a people not responsible for it—the Palestinians—continue to bear an undue burden from its legacy. My maternal family, Libyan Jews, had to flee Benghazi in the 1940s because of the Nazi offensive in North Africa and collaboration with fascist Italy. With the help of British troops, my family made its way to Egypt. My great grandparents departed from there to Palestine. In 1950, facing anti-Jewish hostility in Libya stemming from rising Arab nationalism and a backlash against Zionism, my grandparents joined them in the young state of Israel. As with so many others, my family members’ futures were derailed by years of war that left them with existential scars. From age five, my mother grew up in Tel Aviv with a large extended family rebuilding their lives in a country that promised safety. 

But there was a problem. Tel Aviv was not empty when Jews settled in it; Palestine was by no means, as Zionists often declared, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” As the Israeli NGO Zochrot has now tracked, many of today’s Israeli cities and towns were Palestinian before being depopulated during the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee to make way for the establishment of Israel and never allowed to return. The former Palestinian Arab village Al-Shaykh Muwannis, for example, is now a neighborhood in Tel Aviv. There remains a single building left from the village: the so-called “Green House,” which was converted into Tel Aviv University’s clubhouse. 

Israel’s contemporary psyche, as Israeli scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has noted, is troubled by what he calls “Nakba anxiety”: Israeli resistance to confronting the realities of Palestinian refugees and their rights. As I learned how the creation of Israel was inextricably bound to the dispossession of Palestinians, my worldview shifted. I came to understand that in the Holy Land, there is a gaping injustice, a wound that needs urgent attention. 

For many Catholics, however, the injustice that led to the creation of Israel overshadows the injustice involved in actually creating it. President Biden is a good example. Throughout his political career, he repeated “I am a Zionist” without qualification. He regularly relayed a story of his Irish-Catholic father instilling in the young Biden a strong sense of the horrors of the Holocaust, incredulous that anyone would criticize the state of Israel in light of it. Biden’s viewpoint is primarily rooted in Jewish-Christian and US-Israel relations. Another oft-mentioned influence is a 1973 meeting with Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. The Palestinian people, both Muslim and Christian, have never figured equally for Biden, as reflected in record-high US military aid to Israel that has contributed to more than 53,000 Palestinian deaths, including more than 15,000 children, and the almost complete destruction of Gaza.

The colossal weight of Jewish suffering has influenced many other Catholics to become similarly partisan to Israel or otherwise rendered them mute when it comes to Israel’s misdeeds. But in honoring Jewish suffering, Catholics must also attend to the suffering of the Palestinians in the Nakba. Empathy for Jews or Jewish Israelis should not entail erasure of the Palestinian experience, neither historically nor now—in the midst of Israel’s renewed bombardment of Gaza; restrictions on humanitarian aid that threaten mass starvation; the Netanyahu government’s latest campaign to reoccupy the entire coastal enclave and further forcibly displace the population; and Israeli settlers’ and soldiers’ violent expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank.  …

Use this link to read the rest of the article on the Commonweal website.

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Julie Schumacher Cohen is a member of the Catholic Advisory Council of Churches for Middle East Peace, where she previously served as Deputy Director. She currently serves the University of Scranton as Assistant Vice President for Community Engagement and Government Affairs and is completing a PhD in Political Science at Temple University.