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The Israel-Gaza War: Evangelical vs. Catholic reactions

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 04, 2024

Next Monday, October 7th, marks the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on Israel by the terror group Hamas. It was this attack that started the Israel-Gaza War.

Is there any issue in our public life more fraught than the Israel-Gaza War? I mean, for Catholics. We all know where faithful Catholics stand on, say, abortion. But Israel-Gaza? We are all over the map. It is such a sticky wicket that a Catholic columnist would be well-advised not to even take up the topic, unless he has some sort of expertise in the matter.

I have no such expertise. And I am going to write about it anyway. I’m like that.

As I survey the events of the last year, I see three distinct Christian reactions: an Evangelical one, a Catholic one, and mine.

The Evangelical one is the easiest to describe. They back Israel to the hilt, no questions asked, end of story.

To my Catholic eyes, the Evangelicals have often seemed to me to falsely equate the modern state of Israel with the Biblical kingdom of Israel. But this is not actually true. Rather, they “see modern Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, believing that God is gathering them back to their homeland while as yet they do not believe in Jesus as their Messiah,” as an Evangelical friend once explained. He told me:

Christian Zionists of various denominations believe God will literally fulfill the promises He made to Israel as a people, while Roman Catholics and many Protestants tend to spiritualize those promises and/or apply them to the Church. While the Catholic Church does believe in the Antichrist and a final trial (Catechism Sects. 675—677), Evangelicals are much more likely to believe in the literalness of a future seven-year period before the return of Christ in which Jews and Christians are persecuted. The Scriptures in question include many references to the Jewish people being in the land and even operating their Temple system before Jesus returns. That’s why many Evangelicals see the existence of modern Israel as an extremely significant fulfillment of prophecy.

Catholics, as my Evangelical friend says, generally do not make such specific applications of Biblical prophecy to current events. I am aware of no distinctly Catholic theological reason for supporting Israel. In fact, the distinctly Catholic commentaries that I have seen on the Israel-Gaza War tend to run the other way.

The best primer on this is “Against Catholic Zionism”, an article in Crisis magazine by Matthew Tsakanikas, a professor at Christendom College. “God clearly never wanted an earthly Third Temple built,” Dr. Tsakanikas writes. “Christianity had become the fulfillment of the Sinai Covenant.” He argues that the Vatican informally accepted the original Zionism, “a secular movement of Jewish ethnicity,” but that Israel’s morphing into a “faith-state” has changed the equation.

To be sure, there are two different matters at play here. The existence of Israel itself and the Israel-Gaza War. But the two are very intertwined. While Evangelicals relate modern Israel to Scripture, Catholics feel a greater kinship with Christian Palestinians in the Holy Land, many of whom are Catholic. See Sean Fitzpatrick’s article “The Imperiled Palestinian Christians” and, just this week, Fr. Mario Alexis Portella’s article, “America’s Unconditional Support for Israel: A Flawed Policy”.

I appreciate the deep theological and global perspectives of my fellow Catholics, perspectives which are often missing from other right-leaning sources in the U.S. And I disagree with the theological assumptions that undergird Evangelical support for Israel.

Nevertheless, I’m with Israel. Not “to the hilt, no questions asked, end of story.” But at the end of the day, yes, with Israel and against her enemies. Here’s why.

The genocidal logic of “decolonization”

First, on the state of Israel itself. I should note here that my father is an Ashkenazi Jew. My mother is not. And I am Catholic. That makes me...not Jewish at all. At least not in the eyes of the Jewish people themselves. But what about the enemies of the Jews? “Mischling” was the Nazis’ pejorative term for someone like me, a “first-degree Jewish hybrid.” Those who hate the Jews hate me too. I get the whole Martin Niemöller poem thing (“First they came…”). We should speak up against hate in general and not just when they come for us. But as an ethnic Jew, I feel what they feel. On October 7th , they came for us.

It was similar feelings which gave rise to the modern state of Israel in the first place. A sense that, in the eyes of the Gentiles, there is no such thing as, say, a German Jew or an Austrian Jew. That they only see the Jew, the other, not one of their own. And that the Jews, therefore, needed a state of their own. The guilty conscience of the West, which led it to acquiesce in the modern founding of Israel, was well-deserved…especially after the Holocaust.

Second, on the Israel-Gaza War, one need not be an ethnic Jew to understand that they are coming for us. All of us. That Israel’s enemies are our enemies. Consider Najma Sharif, a writer for Teen Vogue, who tweeted approvingly of the attacks on Oct. 7th: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” His tweet was liked 100,000 times in the first two days.

Then consider Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, who said in response to a pro-Palestinian protest of him on January 10th: “They have a right to protest. But I’ll tell you something else. Nobody’s going to listen to them unless they lead off with the fact that they acknowledge and condemn the brutal sadistic genocidal attack of Oct. 7 and what it did to all those innocent” civilians.

So why don’t they? Read the tweet again. It’s because October 7th is what they really meant by “decolonization.”

I do not see in the anti-Israel protesters good-hearted people who simply wish to protect innocent Palestinians from further harm. I see malformed Marxists who want to do to Americans what Hamas did to Israelis on October 7th.

This, to me, is at the heart of Critical Race Theory. And “land acknowledgements.” And the historically ignorant half-baked attacks on Christopher Columbus. And the 1619 project. And on and on.

These ideologies, which are spreading fast, see all human activity through the prism of oppressor vs. oppressed. What happens next? When an entire group of people, by their very identity, are perceived to bear some sort of eternal blood guilt?

The goal is to delegitimize our very presence on this continent. “U.S. out of Central America” was a saying on the Left in the 1980s. Occasionally, a leftist would joke “U.S. out of North America too.” They are not joking anymore.

None of this is to deny the suffering of other people, either at the creation of Israel or in the present war. We can and should call out violations of Just War principles. Or, indeed, its Jewish equivalent, “Purity of Arms”.

But at the end of the day, I’ve got a pretty good idea of who wants us dead and who doesn’t. Who will dance in the streets on 9/11, and who won’t. The people who committed the atrocities of October 7th would do the same thing to you and me, if they could. And to our loved ones too. Indeed, the ideologies I mentioned above are already setting us up for it. We got our first taste of it in the manifesto of the Nashville school shooter. There will likely be more.

It is all a part of the same thing, a war on our civilization. We need to understand this. And we need to support Israel, the war’s first—but not last—target.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.
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  • Posted by: peterandleslie4790 - Oct. 09, 2024 7:34 AM ET USA

    ewaughok, Can you give an example of what you are saying? My impression is that groups recognized by the U.S. as terrorist entities, like Hamas and Hezbollah, are explicitly Muslim and do not have Christian members. Palestinian Christians tend to affiliate more with, say, groups like the PLO, which are more secular (at least by Middle East standards).

  • Posted by: ewaughok - Oct. 07, 2024 11:23 PM ET USA

    My earlier comment got somehow cut short. I hope you will allow it to be completed … Although we certainly must come to the assistance of our Christian, Catholic Palestinian co-religionists, that comes to an end when those same people join terrorist groups, either directly or through financial or other support. A Christian of any ethnicity cannot plot evil against his neighbor, and then turn around to cry “I’m the victim,” when his neighbor responds in self-defense.

  • Posted by: ewaughok - Oct. 06, 2024 11:07 AM ET USA

    Thank you for this article that tried to present both sides in their best light. However, the Catholic anti-Zionist approach slides inevitably into a Catholic anti-Semitism, which has been the road the Catholic Church has taken throughout history. Vatican II took an un-breachable stand against this.

  • Posted by: JonathanC - Oct. 06, 2024 9:22 AM ET USA

    Assuming this issue started on October 7 is reprehensibly short-sighted. Ignoring the horrific nature of Zionist atrocities against Arabs since the early part of the 20th century betrays a serious lack of historical perspective. And lumping all protestors together with those who would "dance in the streets as America's demise" is disingenous at the least. Large numbers of protestors are Jews and others who recognize Zionist behavior deplorable and danerous to Jews and others everywhere.

  • Posted by: loumiamo4057 - Oct. 05, 2024 5:38 AM ET USA

    I was surprised that you did not mention the significance of October 7th. This year, that date will be the 453rd anniversary of the victory at Lepanto. One thing Muslims are very good at is holding a grudge.

  • Posted by: suesims19529182 - Oct. 04, 2024 6:55 PM ET USA

    As an Ashkenazi Jew (both sides!) who converted to Catholicism 25 years ago, I have to thank you for this balanced article.