Israel, Palestine, and Jason Jones

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 14, 2025

Two things can be true at the same time. Take, for instance, Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and military infrastructure this week. It’s possible to believe that Iran brought this on themselves. Indeed, that they have had it coming for a long time, perhaps as far back as the hostage crisis during the Carter era. That Iran’s rulers were high stakes gamblers who just lost their gamble. That the mullahs made their final, fatal, miscalculation beginning on October 7th, 2023, when one of their proxies in their “Axis of Resistance” butchered Israelis, setting in motion a war that has picked off many of those proxies and may now lead to the dismantling of the Iranian regime itself.

It’s possible to believe all that and still be sickened by the cheering for war that I saw on the Fox News Channel on Thursday night, as the attacks were being conducted. To remember how the same voices on cable news and conservative publications stampeded our own country off to preemptive war on faulty information and with disastrous consequences. To remember, especially, how the domestic blowback from being yoked to neoconservative interventionism nearly destroyed the hopes of pro-life and pro-family activists for a re-moralization of the United States in the early 21st century.

Likewise, it’s possible to have two different reactions to Jason Jones’ recent Substack responding to my column here at Catholic Culture. Jason is an important voice in the pro-life movement, the force behind the movie “Bella” and, more recently, the Vulnerable People Project, an organization which works to alleviate the suffering of our Christian brethren, and others, in Gaza and elsewhere. Readers may donate to Jason’s good work here.

In his Substack, Jason salutes my column attacking the dehumanizing rhetoric that has led to an uptick in antisemitism and violence against Jews here in the United States. Jason notes that similarly dehumanizing rhetoric is perpetrated against Palestinians and he cites about ten examples from “out-of-control Zionist cheerleaders in the West” and Israeli officials. Therefore, “American Opposition to Dehumanizing Rhetoric is on a Collision Course with Israel,” as the title of his Substack has it.

Jason is surely correct not just in opposing the dehumanization of others, but in rooting his—and my—opposition to such dehumanization in the Incarnation, in the Imago Dei present in every human person, including the Palestinians. That should be a truism, a no-brainer. And I think for most Catholics in the U.S.—the audience Jason and I are both addressing—it is. I do hear the anti-Palestinian rhetoric Jason cites from segments of the secular right and the Evangelical right. I almost never hear it from Catholics.

What I do hear from some U.S. Catholics is an antisemitism of a kind I had only previously read about in history books. I don’t know what kind of blowback—if any—Jason gets from Catholics in the U.S. for defending the human dignity of the Palestinian people. When I defend the Jews, I get stuff like this:

As an editorial in my hometown newspaper recently put it:

For Americans, the Israel-Palestine war is best understood as two distinct issues.

On one hand, there’s the debate over the conflict itself. American observers, whose government provides billions of dollars in aid to Israel, have spent many years, and especially the 20 months since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre of Israeli civilians, confronting important questions: Does Israel have a moral duty to coexist with a terrorist organization bent on the genocide of Jews? Has Israel’s post-Oct. 7 onslaught in Gaza gone too far? As the international community bears down on Israel and American public opinion becomes less sympathetic toward the Jewish state, should the U.S. reconsider its geopolitical role?

But then there are the domestic issues, which largely boil down to a couple of questions: Does the righteous indignation of anti-Israel activists—often nestled within elite institutions, and often directing their general disdain for Western civilization toward the soft target of Israel—justify antisemitic harassment and violence? Does the federal government have a duty to apply civil rights law to Jewish Americans?

I think that’s exactly right. Jason Jones has an international reach. His work largely addresses the first issue. I’m a local guy. My work—when it touches on the Israel-Palestine war—is largely addressing the second.

I’m also an “America First” guy. Whatever one’s view of the war—and Jason knows more about it than I do—I don’t live over there. I live over here. The uptick in antisemitic violence in the U.S. strikes me as a clear and present threat right here. The editorial cited above mentions the best-known examples—the murder of the couple that worked at the Israeli embassy in Washington, the firebombing of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, the Molotov cocktail attack on the elderly Jews in Colorado. But there are several other incidents also mentioned in the same editorial. If there is a similar pattern of anti-Palestinian violence in the U.S., I confess, I’m not seeing it. That horrible landlord in Illinois who murdered a Palestinian woman and her child appears to be an outlier. The antisemitic incidents mentioned in the Waterbury Republican-American are not.

Jason is not arguing in favor of those incidents or the antisemitic ideology underlying them, of course, and I’m not arguing against his desire that U.S. Catholics raise their voice to defend the dignity of the Palestinian people. What I am arguing, however, is that it is ok to make some distinctions. That two things can be true at the same time.

I don’t think any reasonable person, for instance, could disagree that the Palestinians have suffered terribly and that it is wrong to deny their humanity. But does that somehow put them above criticism? Or disagreement? I confess, when I think of the Palestinians the first image that comes to my mind is the one of them dancing in the streets on 9/11. The second is Yasser Arafat’s rejection of the deal brokered by Bill Clinton toward the end of his presidency, the best deal the Palestinians were ever likely to get, which would have got them almost everything they asked for.

Please don’t misunderstand me. When October 7th happened, the first thing I did was attend several Eastern Catholic vigils for peace here in Connecticut where, among other things, I learned to pray the beautiful Akathist to the Theotokos. Two months ago I accompanied a friend of mine, an Eastern Orthodox presbytera whom I have known for thirty years and whose family was displaced in Israel’s 1948 founding, to a talk in Hartford by someone described as “Palestine’s Gandhi.” Not until 55 minutes into his talk did the speaker express some mild regret for October 7th.

Which, to me, is the heart of the whole thing. But again, I’m not the Avengers. I’m just your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. I don’t have firsthand knowledge of the Middle East, like Jason. So what I propose is this: a conversation with someone who does.

There is no single podcast anywhere on the internet with whom I feel a greater affinity than CatholicVote’s LOOPcast. Jason’s appearance on LOOPcast’s April 24th episode struck me as, to be honest, quite lopsided. But a conversation among U.S. Catholics about Israel-Palestine doesn’t have to be. Jason’s group, Vulnerable People Project, is known for its advocacy on behalf of the Palestinians. Philos Catholic is a group known for its advocacy on behalf of the Jews. And Philos’ Andrew Doran is, like Jason, a man with a history of helping Christians on the ground in the Middle East. A conversation needs to be had between these two groups and, perhaps particularly, between these two men. On LOOPcast or somewhere else.

The goal would be to be hammer out a consensus position among U.S. Catholics and perhaps a joint statement. “Yes, the suffering of the Palestinian people is bad and yes, October 7th is not an afterthought. It is why there is a war there and the enemy is Hamas.” This should not be hard to do. Jason’s focus is the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza and mine is antisemitism against the Jews here at home. But look below the surface, at the foundations of what drives us both, and there is not much difference in our positions. That is something that I think U.S. Catholics, on either side of the war, bring to the table. An impetus toward peace, and a bridge between the two sides, that perhaps only our community could bring.

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.

Show 1 Comments? (Hidden)Hide Comments

• Posted by: Randal Mandock - Jun. 14, 2025 9:27 PM ET USA

  In the mid-1980s I was photocopying an acoustic radar facsimile record. An atmospheric scientist walked by and remarked how "noisy" it looked. My dissertation advisor happened to be there and retorted: "one man's signal is another man's noise". After paying attention to a couple of decades of reports by prelates on the ground in the Middle East, I decided to broaden my perspective on the history of this region. This resulted in a 180-degree turnabout from what I had learned earlier in life.