What I saw in Israel—Part 1

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 20, 2026

This marks my eleventh article on Israel in the two years I have been writing for Catholic Culture. When the proprietors of this fine outlet first approached me about doing a regular column for them, I could not have imagined that the topic would end up occupying so much of my time. But when I am invited to be part of a delegation to Israel of “Catholic Community Influencers” for the purpose of “Discovering Israel, Combatting Antisemitism,” what’s a person to do?

The trip was funded by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), which agreed to make it primarily a pilgrimage, and a sojourn into the region’s rich history, culture, and Biblical faith, while also sharing their understanding about the complex realities on the ground. We were encouraged to ask difficult questions. We were not expected to accept or represent the views of the Israeli government or undertake any activities on its behalf. Each of us was free to form and express our own views. No conversation was off the record.

Those ground rules made for a fruitful trip. Inviting a dozen Catholics, even pro-Israel Catholics, to Israel is not the same thing as inviting a thousand Evangelical pastors. None of us were adherents of any form of Protestant Zionism. We had tough questions for our hosts and their speakers. I’m not sure our hosts were expecting that. They seemed taken aback at first. To their credit they quickly rallied and, if anything, they seemed to relish the intellectual back-and-forth.

I will get into all that more in Part II. First, I want to give my overall impressions of Israel. The country is extraordinary. If you are over a certain age and hail from a blue state, there is a feeling you get when visiting, say, Ron DeSantis’s Florida. You know the one. “Oh my goodness, people are happy here. They’re vibrant. They’re young! The America I remember from the 1980s, it’s still out there somewhere!” Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have a very similar vibe.

But with an edge. Israel is surrounded by mortal enemies. They know they could be wiped out at any moment. And yet the country is teeming with young people. Children, teenagers, young adults. I saw more young people in a week in Israel than I will see in a year in Connecticut. My sense is that Israelis know it could all disappear in a moment and, if anything, it makes them more determined to live life fully. That’s the vibe I get from Israel. Florida plus something existential.

Being in the Holy Land is an incredibly moving experience. In Jerusalem we saw the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Western Wall, the Upper Room, the place where Mary was assumed into Heaven, the City of David, the new Pilgrims Route and, of course, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where we celebrated Mass in the Crusader Chapel. I’ve heard my whole life about the embarrassing disputes between different Christian communions in that church but the Greek Orthodox priest who welcomed us into Jesus’s tomb was downright jolly.

So many sights and sounds crammed into one week. We saw Ethiopian Jews celebrate a bar mitzvah in the shadow of Al-Aqsa Mosque. I found the Holocaust Museum surprisingly understated, which somehow only added to the horror of the thing being commemorated. We know that “the Son of Man [had] nowhere to lay his head” (Lk 9:58) but Capernaum struck me as quite an upgrade from Nazareth. The Sea of Galilee where Our Lord called the first Apostles, St. Peter’s home where he cured his mother-in-law, the nearby synagogue, were set against a stunning landscape.

We visited two places that suffered severe violence during the October 7th terrorist attacks on Israel. At Nachal Oz, the Kibbutz closest to the Gaza border, we heard a firsthand account from Oshrite, who was its head of education. Though a Millennial, she reminded me of the hippie Boomers I had as teachers in my 1980s adolescence. I asked her about the role the Kibbutz’s Palestinian workers had played as spies for the attack, and about stories I had read of Palestinians in Gaza who would return escaped Israeli hostages to Hamas. “Where is the line between combatant and noncombatant?” I asked her.

Oshrite rejected the insinuation. “I’m too educated to believe that two million Gazans are my enemy,” she told me. Like everyone we spoke to, she made a sharp distinction between Muslims as such and radical Islamists. There was likewise no animosity from the other firsthand victim of Oct. 7th with whom we spoke, a young woman who experienced the Nova concert massacre. Or from our host, an American staffer at Israel’s U.S. embassy who was friends with the young couple that was murdered by an anti-Israel activist in Washington last year and was with them when they were killed.

My takeaways from this trip are, first, that now is a great time to be a tourist in Israel. There are almost no lines to speak of at the holy sites and the vendors are starved for our business. Secondly, that antisemitism is real. On the right it is, thus far, mostly an online thing. But it won’t stay there. On the left and, of course, among Islamists, it is already quite violent. (And not just overseas.) Israel’s MFA provided a valuable opportunity to learn about it firsthand, not just through the media, and I hope others will take advantage of it if they provide similar opportunities.

None of which is to be confused with legitimate disagreement over Israeli policies, which I’ll discuss in Part II.