Catholics and Jews after the Israel-Gaza War

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 24, 2025

The Israel-Gaza War has ended. While there is bound to be setbacks, it looks like the ceasefire may hold. What lessons should we derive from this experience?

The biggest takeaway for me is the uptick in antisemitism on both the left and the right in general and among Catholics in particular. It has not been pretty.

To be sure, abc one ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Opposing the Netanyahu government, or its policies, does not make one anti-Israel, let alone antisemitic. Many Israelis themselves (as one might expect in a functioning democracy) have protested their current leadership. In Catholic opinion journalism, mainstream writers with no animus toward Israel—Rusty Reno, Ross Douthat and Phil Lawler—all argued that Israel’s conduct violated the Just War principle of proportionality.

Nor did Israel help its standing with Catholics when its shells hit the only Catholic church in Gaza this past July—the same church the late Pope Francis had been calling every day. The Israeli government said it was an accident and I believe them. Not because I trust them (I don’t trust my own government, so why would I trust a foreign government more?) but because there is no evidence to the contrary and no rational motive for deliberately hitting the church.

No rational motive, that is, unless you are Babylon Bee managing editor Joel Berry, who reacted on X by saying that “there are only 200 professed Catholics still living in Gaza and they all support Hamas.” In other words, they had it coming. Berry, an evangelical, seemed to imply in a follow-up tweet that the Gaza Catholics aren’t real Christians anyway.

This has been a recurring theme for the past few months, pro-Israel Protestants expressing themselves in ways that push Catholics further away from Israel. The Philos Project’s Luke Moon was wrong when he responded to Catholic outrage over the shelling of the Gaza church by falsely accusing Church leaders of ignoring attacks on Christians elsewhere in the world. Ted Cruz was bat-guano crazy when, in his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show, he equated the modern state of Israel with the biblical kingdom of Israel—full stop, no qualification whatsoever—and said his mission as a U.S. Senator was to defend Israel because that was what he learned in Sunday School. And hundreds of U.S. Evangelical leaders did nothing to assuage the suspicions of America First populists when they released a letter timed to pressure President Trump to accede to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s desire to annex the West Bank—something Trump opposes—while Trump was meeting with Netanyahu last month.

All of that said, there is still something deeply wrong in the world of Catholic opinion-makers. Every time I read a Catholic condemnation of “Zionism” in toto, I shiver. If this were a hundred years ago, it would make more sense. Opposing an idea is one thing. Zionism was just an idea in 1925. But in 2025, Zionism is not a mere hypothetical. There is an actual country called Israel that has existed within internationally recognized borders for 77 years. When you say you oppose Zionism, what you are saying is you want the one Jewish state in the world erased, its seven or eight million Jews wiped out.

The same Catholics who post their hatred of Zionism also post the conspiracy theories of Oct. 7th Truthers. That is, the claim that the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust was the fault of…the Jews. That Netanyahu deliberately orchestrated the attack on his own country to bring about his dream of a “Greater Israel.”

And this is just the tip of the irrational Jew-hatred iceberg. Candace Owens’ claim that Israel had Charlie Kirk killed has spread like wildfire among young Catholics. The things being said about Jews among some young otherwise-faithful Catholics, in the wake of Kirk’s assassination and Candace’s accusations, are like something out of old newsreels from the 1930s.

Even among more responsible Gen Z Catholics there is something…off…in the way these topics are addressed. In a humorous segment in the last three or four minutes of the August 8th LOOPcast, CatholicVote’s Gen Z co-host, Tom Pogasic, comments on a bear chasing a guy in a sports mascot costume…by quoting the words used by an anti-Israel writer to justify the Oct. 7th terror attacks on Israel. “What did y’all think decolonization [Tom: “being a kraken”] meant? vibes? papers? essays?...”

The polite assumption is that Pogasic had the phrase in his head and didn’t recall its origins. And therein, perhaps, lies a way forward. Think of it like this. On the surface is the topsoil where Pogasic and I disagree about aspects of the Israel-Gaza War. Below the surface are the huge tectonic plates of recent shifts in American politics where we have more in common.

I get the frustration that drives more serious Gen Z Catholics like Pogasic. Nine months into the second Trump Administration the young still struggle to buy a home, to pay for health care, to find good jobs, to afford to raise a family. Tucker Carlson was not wrong when he asked Ted Cruz why we are so focused on fixing the world’s problems when our own country is falling apart. That question is what drove a lot of us, me included, toward the populist right.

How can Catholics be nationalist, be “America First,” while avoiding the unsavory associations such phrases had ninety years ago? The key lies in a rediscovery of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document that has been a foundation of Catholic-Jewish friendship. I will be one of several panelists at a conference at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, DC next week to mark the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate. You can register to attend, or to watch it on Zoom, here. I don’t have all the answers to the questions listed above. But, with the Israel-Gaza War over, now is the moment to think anew about how to walk and chew gum at the same time.