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 six thousand 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 J. D. 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 amid 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 U.S.-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 U.S. 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.
Catholics who concern themselves with the Holocaust and ignore the Nakba miss a historic injustice that remains unrepaired, and for which the Christian West itself bears responsibility. Endemic antisemitism in Europe created the “Jewish problem,” and the refusal to settle Jewish refugees in the United States and elsewhere left many Jews defenseless against the Nazis. But the West engendered the “Palestinian problem,” too, erasing Palestinian rights with such policies as the 1917 Balfour Declaration that disenfranchised “non-Jewish communities” in their own homeland. In the book The Holocaust and the Nakba, Jewish and Arab scholars contend with the ways the two events are “interlinked” while remaining careful not to “[blur] fundamental differences between them.” In Israel-Palestine, two constitutive traumas must be encountered: for Israelis, the existential fear that the Holocaust prompts, and for Palestinians, a West-sponsored project of colonization and rescue that rendered them stateless—the “victims of the victims,” as Edward Said famously put it.
Insofar as Catholic neglect of the plight of the Palestinians stems from guilt about the Holocaust, it’s long past time to rethink how this guilt is addressed. Psychological research has shown that guilt, while encouraging accountability, can also become toxic. It can yield shame and inertia, eroding broader responsibilities and relationships. But guilt need not be dysfunctional; it can also spur introspection and remediation. Experts on mass violence and injustice point to “painful dynamics of guilt, shame, remorse, regret, and contrition.” These require cultural, legal, and religious treatment so that communities can “transform these social-emotional experiences into a productive, rather than destructive, force.”
For Catholics, the sacrament of confession offers a positive conception of guilt and charts a transformational process that can open up avenues for restorative justice. Through the act of confessing, Catholics are asked to examine their consciences and admit their failings. Even if we’re not responsible on an individual basis for the Holocaust, Catholic institutions do bear some historical responsibility: we are implicated collectively and must do our part to continue to root out the anti-Jewish attitudes that still mar our parishes and communities. Some Catholics, for example, responded with antisemitic anger to a December Hannukah social-media greeting from the U.S. Bishops, prompting a reminder of the teachings of Nostra Aetate, the seminal 1965 document promoting respect for Jews and Judaism. The Bishops’ 2024 pastoral note guarding against anti-Jewish sentiment in the Good Friday narrative also reflected the need for vigilance. Antisemitism persists—including among those who blame all Jews for the actions of the Israeli government—but at the same time, criticism of Israeli policy and Zionist ideology in itself should not be conflated with antisemitism. This conflation has gone so far that the Trump administration is justifying the detention of international student activists by construing their advocacy for Palestinian rights as antisemitic and supportive of terrorism.
An examination of conscience would also require Catholics to attend to Palestinian suffering, in its connection to the legacy of the Holocaust and on its own terms, as Palestinian anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj has encouraged. We must ask how we have supported—directly or indirectly—the 1948 Nakba and ongoing atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, aided by U.S. weapons and policies. In confession, we are led to see sin not as a merely individual matter but one manifest in broader structures. This reflection can help us better understand the systemic injustice in the Holy Land, which deprives Palestinians of basic rights in what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has deemed apartheid. God’s forgiveness for our action or inaction frees and empowers us to repair the harm. Confession calls us to the work of peace and justice.
Confessional reflection on the guilt around antisemitism should also help identify those most responsible to right the grievous wrongs of the Holocaust: Germany and the Western powers, not the Palestinians. On this point, it should be noted that efforts to assert Palestinian culpability through marginal ties between Hitler and the mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini have been rejected by Holocaust historians. As Jewish Israeli peace activist Haggai Mattar has explained, “the attempt to right the wrong done to Jews in Europe by wronging Palestinians has led to a catastrophe.” An uncritical endorsement of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism—over which Jews have their own disagreements—will simply mean that Catholics have done it again, committed yet another sin of inaction and implicitly endorsed injustice as remediation for injustice.
Pope Francis was consciously trying to avoid this problematic pattern. As Israeli Jesuit Fr. David Neuhaus, SJ, has noted, Francis’s comments on Gaza and his willingness to ask whether Israel is committing a genocide (a conclusion now reached by various experts and Amnesty International) demonstrate that he was “determined that the church not be accused again of being silent, accusations that rang out after the Holocaust.” At the same time, even Pope Francis could have done better; a letter he sent to Middle East Catholics on October 7, 2024, contained a regrettable reference to John 8:44, a passage used to justify anti-Jewish hatred for centuries. As Fr. Neuhaus wrote, “The church must constantly renew the commitment to fight against every trace of anti-Judaism and antisemitism while at the same time fighting for justice for the Palestinian people.”
Guilt over the history of Catholics who ignored or participated in the slaughter of Jews must lead us to address our responsibility toward Jews, Jewish Israelis, and Palestinians. We should also draw positively on the example of the Catholics who sheltered Jews, including the Italian Catholic nuns who protected my grandmother’s cousin during World War II.
Over Christmas in Rome with family, I visited the city’s Jewish quarter, which became a ghetto under papal edict and later Nazi diktat. More than 1,200 perished there during the Holocaust. The guide at the more-than-one-hundred-year-old Great Synagogue narrated the waves of Jewish persecution that had taken place where we stood. Much of the history he retold was tragic, until he came to the end: this synagogue, he informed the group, was the first a pope had ever visited. It was there that John Paul II tenderly declared the Jews “elder brothers” to whom Christianity owed its origins. For our guide, more important than the religious genealogy was the fact that Christians were repudiating any notion that Jews were unequal.
That equality must guide the ongoing work to root out antisemitism and inform how Christians interact with the state of Israel, a state whose actions, like those of any other state, must be considered on the basis of justice and international law. If Catholics refrain from joining the struggle for Palestinian freedom, they will not be doing their Jewish siblings any favors, and they will be actively harming their Palestinian siblings. The only viable future is one where Jews, Christians, and Muslims—seven million Jewish Israelis and seven million Palestinians—live in the Holy Land as equals.
