catholics against antisemitism
a genesis of the common good
I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear.
— Mahmoud Kahlil, Letter from a Louisiana Detention Center
A few weeks after October 7, 2023, an organization that purports to be a Christian organization that claims to “advocate for pluralism in the Middle East”—a pluralism “based on freedom and the rule of law,” according to their website—created a coalition called “Catholics Against Antisemitism.”
This particular organization does not seem to believe that Palestinians or Arabs (many of them their fellow Christians, mind you, and, regardless of religion, their fellow children of the God of Abraham) deserve the same freedom as everybody else, however.
In response to the March 8 abduction of Mahmoud Kahlil, this organization wrote: “The U.S. cannot allow those privileged to be in our country to break our laws by undermining our values and the safety of our Jewish neighbors.”
In contrast to the support of state arrests without due process, many voices from all shades of the political spectrum have condemned Kahlil’s illegal detainment. In his recent book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, journalist Peter Beinart notes that the appellations of antisemitism to progressive voices making well-researched critiques of Israel do not actually indicate antisemitism. These are critiques that seem to protect the interests of a nation-state, Israel, but do not actually reduce antisemitism.
“A 2021 study of 16 European nations found that the single best predictor of antisemitism was xenophobia. The Europeans with the most negative views o Arabs, Africans, and Muslims also held the most negative views of Jews.”
And, on this side of the pond, a UCLA study found:
“Republicans who opposed military aid held more negative views of Jews than those who supported it. But among Democrats, there was barely any correlation. Democrats who opposed arms sales to Israel were roughly as favorably inclined toward Jews as Democrats who supported them. Among progressives, opinions about U.S. policy toward the Jewish state and opinions about Jews did not go hand in hand.”
Furthermore since a Jewish graduate student was expelled from Columbia last week for protesting “a U.S.-backed genocide,” the well-being of Jewish students seems to matter less than the protest against Israel and the U.S.’s military actions. “The Jewish people know what genocide is,” Grant Miner, the expelled student, said in an online statement. “That’s why so many of us, alongside people of all backgrounds, are standing up against what’s happening in Palestine.”
This self-identified Christian organization, however, is not standing up against Israel’s UN-documented war crimes in the Gaza strip: the targeting of hospitals and sexual assault among them.
In an email in September 2024, this organization praised the Israeli military’s hacking of thousands of pagers in Lebanon to murder a dozen people as a “staggering display of technological and logistical prowess.” They called the terrorist attack of exploding pagers “successful” and “impressive.”
Israel’s “impressive success” in killing twelve people—two of them children and two of them innocent healthcare workers—was, of course, in violation of international law. So I wonder how these actions of Israel’s military further this organization’s stated desire for a “pluralism based on the rule of law” in the Middle East.
As Israel resumed its bombing of the Gaza strip—killing 200 children in two days, according to a Unicef spokesperson interviewed by Al Jazeera—this supposedly Christian organization issued a missive in support of Israel’s bombing: “terrorism unpunished sets unimaginable precedents,” they wrote.
In the email, they make it clear they mean that Hamas’ attack on October 7 must not go “unpunished.” I ask—sincerely—is Israel’s killing of 50,000 Palestinians not enough “punishment”? Is the razing of the entire strip to rubble that the Associated Press estimated it would take at least fifteen years to clean up not enough punishment?
Who is the judge deciding who has been punished enough for which crimes? Is the government of Israel judge, jury and executioner here? Again, how exactly is that the rule of law? Contrary to popular opinion in the United States, there are standards of international law beyond What We Say Goes. So, please, once again, explain how the military violence that Amnesty International has declared a genocide is somehow defensible.
And, you might ask, along with myself—where exactly is the Christian vision in this? Why are 50,000 images of God so easily wiped off the face of the earth without an ounce of contrition? Why should this terrorism go unpunished?
Why exactly are we—the United States and our ally Israel—allowed to play God, letting our wrath fall on our enemies, deciding who is “just” and “unjust” without an ounce of scruples, remorse or penance for our own sins? Are we so confident that it is others’ violence that needs punishing and our own is somehow absolved? Where do we get this confidence?
Because, as I read the Sermon on the Mount that commands us to be merciful in order to be shown mercy, to be makers of peace, and commands us to do unto others as we would have done unto us, I am not so confident that any violence anywhere is righteous. Certainly not a nuclear power bombing children or shooting children stuck in cars.
Abducting people in the middle of the night, killing them quietly and burying them at sea, sending immigrants—without due process—to a prison with an estimated population of 100,000 known for its human rights abuses—these are our own foreign policies.
With the recent deportation of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador’s high security terrorist prison, the United States has condemned innocent people—since they have seen no judge and so have not been found guilty—to possibly indefinite detention in a foreign country. That sounds very much like terrorism to me. If this thuggery goes “unpunished,” well what sort of “unimaginable precedent” does that set?
You do not have to be a Hamas sympathizer to see that there is more than one terrorist on the block. And if the Hamas attack on October 7 was violent and unethical, well—one can see where they got their tactics from.
This organization appended a small prayer to its apology for Israel’s renewed bombing in Gaza: “We pray for an end to this cycle of violence and that justice and enduring peace will prevail.”
Okay, well that’s a very nice sentiment.
A great way to enact that prayer might be to pressure the nuclear power in this situation to back down on bombing children.
Just a thought.
Two actual Christians from the Middle East wrote about this organization in Mondoweiss—an outlet covering Israel and the Middle East, founded by a progressive Jewish journalist. In their op-ed, the co-chairs of the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace (an organization it sounds like this one should support) wrote:
As Arab Christians, we say to the Philos Project that we refuse to be swayed by an ideology that seeks to separate us from our Muslim brothers and sisters.
The severe crises in the Arab World, while they often manifest in sectarian forms, are political and economic in origins. The roots of the crises are a complex mix of the legacy of colonial “divide-and-rule” policies and current geopolitical alliances, as well as domestic factors.
The best that the western powers can do is to stop their militarization of the region and their support for dictatorial Arab regimes and for the apartheid Israeli state.
And that sounds like a pretty Christian analysis if you ask me.
Anyhow, I came across this coalition because I was researching the first Catholics Fighting Against Anti-Semitism league that was founded in 1939, after nearly 1,000 Jewish Europeans were turned away from entry into the United States and sent back to Europe. More than 250 of them were killed in the Holocaust.
Dorothy Day and her managing editor at The Catholic Worker were on the organizing committee for this Catholics Fighting Against Anti-Semitism coalition. I have been re-reading The Long Loneliness this Lent, and Day wrote about her college friend Rayna Prohme, and how she was excluded from much of the University of Illinois’ social life. Day recalled that Rayna’s treatment was her first observation of antisemitism. It was a lesson Day carried with her throughout her life, even as other Catholics joined in the fever of Jew-hatred throughout the 1930s (much like this Christian organization supports the destruction of Palestinians).
Dorothy Day, unlike the war hawk language of this organization, never celebrated violence. Never. When the atom bomb was dropped, she began her prophetic invective against its deployment with a shocked meditation on the cruel adjective used to describe Harry Truman’s response:
Mr. Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did…
The effect is hoped for, not known. It is to be hoped they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers – scattered, men, women and babies, to the four winds, over the seven seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Easton.
Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant. We have created. We have created destruction.
Day’s sincere belief in the Mystical Body of Christ was carried out to its logical conclusion: if we are all members of the Body, then to wound other members of Christ’s Body is a sick form of self-harm, a mental illness rather than clear-eyed wisdom.
To be Christian is to be Baptized into an ineffable dignity into Christ’s death and Resurrection. And, rather than that dignity separating the Christian from others, it elucidates the fundamental dignity of the Image of God stamped in all of us, as Christ’s Creation.
“The Torah was never a land deed that validates the land of one person at the expense of another,” said Bishop Willam Shomali, a bishop of the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem, at an ecumenical meeting on March 11 in Jordan. “Rather, the religious book calls for the support of the poor, the needy and the oppressed, and to establish justice and peace on earth.”
“The Land is mine,” God says in Leviticus 25:23. In Laudato Si, reflecting on the responsibility of humans for God’s earth, Pope Francis writes:
This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature. Each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations. “The earth is the Lord’s” (Ps 24:1); to him belongs “the earth with all that is within it” (Dt 10:14).
In Laudato Si, Pope Francis uses the phrase the “common good” 29 times. This is echoed throughout Catholic Social Teaching encyclicals. In Quadragesimo Anno, calling for the reconstruction of the social order, Pope Pius XI uses the phrase 20 times. Pius reiterates the teaching of Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, which grounds all rights to individual freedoms and private property in the common good.
The common good is the horizon toward which all our rights are oriented. It is the root of all our personal freedoms. The common good is truly common: it is the exclusive concern of one country or limited to a certain religious sect or race of people. It is not bound by borders or nationalities or gender or religion.
To embrace the common good is to echo that refrain in Genesis from a God of love creating a universe saturated was beauty: and God saw that it was good. To embrace the common good is to embrace the creation of goodness, not, as Day mourned—the diabolical creation of destruction.