Over a year ago I published my only “political” post to date. It was really a memoir of my own experience in Israel/Palestine nearly twenty years ago. I make no apologies for wading into politics. The consoling notion that one can neatly divide religion from politics is certainly quaint, but it doesn’t seem possible without negating the integrity of either. Politics is often but scarcely ever merely tactical or pragmatic; it invokes transcendent values, ideals, and principles that command recognition, celebration, and even sacrifice. Religion is often but scarcely ever merely individual or ethereal; it enjoins laws, issues commandments, calls for a preferential option for the poor and degraded, and, at least when it’s working properly, disabuses you of the self-serving conviction that you can ever be well without all being well—that your salvation is just about you.
Very astute. I'm glad that you touched on the fact that conflicts tend to create victims who then go on to victimize others. For there to be real healing and real peace in these places long torn by violence, there has to be a kind of total, radical forgiveness and love or it ends up just perpetuating the cycle. Sadly, very hard to do. A predicament ever since Cain killed Able and despaired of retribution.
The patent bloodthirsty rhetoric that American "conservatives" have long had around the Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the primary reasons that, while I still consider myself a man of the Right, broadly, no major right-of-center party would get my vote under these circumstances. Those who do not bat an eye at the suffering of women and children do not deserve to hold high office.
It's funny, because you hear a lot from supporters of the war about not trying to make things "black and white" (in other words, claiming that there are all kind of complicating factors that should make us be hesitant to condemn Netanyahu or the IDF) but then it doesn't take much prodding for them to start seething about how every Palestinian deserves death and no price in civilan lives is too high to defeat Hamas. I mean, we're talking about rhetoric that would seem immoderate if it were directed at the Empire of Japan or the Third Reich (and that's the comparison that's most often made in support of the war in Gaza). "Bloodthirsty" is precisely the word; there's a palpable hunger for revenge that's straightforwardly incompatible with the professed values of Christianity and Judaism. Even a war that was perfectly just by traditional Christian standards should show a degree of hesitancy about causing unnecessarily civilian deaths, and there just isn't any of that going on. Americans have been treating World War II as the paradigmatic human conflict for decades, and since the civilan deaths in that war don't bother us too much, we've reached the point of treating a just cause as a blank check. They've forgotten that World War II was really won by sparing the defeated populations of Germany and Japan and spending decades working to morally rehabilitate them. I'm not saying it was a perfect process - far too many war criminals escaped punishment - but the idea that the IDF can just bomb Palestinian nationalism out of existence is not just bloodthirsty and genocidal; it's also anti-Christian and plain stupid.
Hi Jordan, thanks for this post and for the previous one. I can't accept the notion that "an Israeli state should exist," but I suspect that these words mean something substantially different in your usage than they do in mine. What would it mean, in your view, for a specifically "Israeli" state to exist without political Zionism, without demographic engineering, without racist anxieties about Palestinian birthrates, and without persistent denials of Palestinian refugee return? Wouldn't the end of these things simply spell the end of "Israel" as an enterprise predicated upon Zionism?
Thanks Chris. I mean two things here. One refers to an external condition and another to an internal one.
The external condition is that, as far as I understand it, the British and other Western powers offered both Jews and Palestinians states in exchange for help against the Ottomans. The initial proposals after the war were objectively unfair, so the Palestinians wanted a renegotiated proposal that made more sense of the population/land proportions. They didn't get that. Still, and perhaps I really am hopelessly optimistic here, I think it's important to hold out the possibility of some two-state resolution, even if everything these past two years (really these past several decades) have worked to make this basically impossible. I wonder, though, if the coming power shift after this genocide is over will change anything about that external condition.
As for the internal condition, in Rosean fashion I want to emphasize the potential for Judaism itself to accommodate and indeed find it within itself to ensure avoiding the injustices you list. In other words, why can't it be integral to Jewish identity to treat the non-Jew as an equal citizen? Yes, I know that this too seems overly optimistic, especially in light of certain polls of the Israeli population that have come out in recently days. But again, I want to hold out for the (very small) Israeli left, the fairly diverse and contested debates among American Jews, and for internal developments yet to come from within Judaism. I believe it *is* Jewish not to engage in such engineering or denials of return etc. I realize this seems hopeless. But I'm (supposedly) a theologian, after all, so I must hope against hope, and I must maintain the call for (and with) Jews to see it as intrinsic to their own identity to reject the current status quo.
I do not think hope for a two state solution effectively grapples with the complete and total unwillingness of the Zionist entity to ever actually take seriously the notion of such a proposal, and this is intrinsic to the very DNA of the project itself (*not* a result of some unfortunate corruption emerging along the way); we know, quite clearly, from the private, written correspondences of, for instance, David Ben-Gurion that the Zionist entity never had any real intention of respecting the (unfair, colonial) partition plan to begin with, and this is a current that runs through the entire history of the so-called "Oslo process."
It is as hopeless, in my view, to push for a two-state solution as it is to push for the more just alternative, which would be a single, free, democratic Palestine. I take a firm and uncompromising decolonial position here, and the "unrealistic" nature of the thing is fine by me because pushing for the alternative has revealed that this entity is willing to shamelessly engage in a live streamed genocide against civilians -- with similar attacks on Beirut and, now, my home country (June 13, 2025) -- in order to prevent the right of return.
One might say, "they would not have done this, whether far out of proportion or not, were it not for Oct 7," and I would say, "yes, but no starved people would be driven to Oct 7 were it not for Operations Cast Lead, Protective Edge, Pillar of Defense; for the assassination of ~200 civilians and injury ("kneecapping") of ~1000 more by Israeli snipers during the Great March of Return (2018-2019), which the UN describes as 'overwhelmingly peaceful;' for the desecration, humiliation, and violent storming of al-Aqsa mosque dozens of times, often on Ramadan, by the Zionist government and various civilian extremists, were it not for the aggressive colonial expansion of settlements in the West Bank; for the repeated seizing of land after the partition during several unprovoked wars throughout the last century both within Palestine *and* the region more broadly; for the unprovoked and criminal assassination of Shireen Abu-Aqila, a Melkite Christian and reporter, in the West Bank (sniper fire to the head); for any handful of the hundreds and hundreds of acts of colonial violence visited upon this indigenous population by a largely European nationalist regime."
Therefore, I advocate for decolonization, full accountability of all the complicit (including in the US), repatriation of those with dual citizenship status to whatever imperial metropole they were likely born in, total fulfillment of the right of return, massive reparation funds granted to the Palestinians from the wealth accrued by Zionist invaders, etc.
I am often stupefied by accusations of extremism here. Yes, relative to contemporary normativity, my positions are almost laughably radical, but with respect to just a basic sense of right and wrong?! I'm not so sure I'm the extremist. What I am saying is basically this:
1. If you steal something (like a home) from someone, it is not yours, and you should be compelled to give it back.
2. If you are torturing the owner in order to keep it, and he appeals to law, your conscience, or external solidarity for help, you should stop or be stopped via these means.
3. If you aren't stopped by those means (bc no one cares), and you then torture him nearly to death, then he must defend himself so that he does not die.
4. If you are fought and killed by this person, you have caused your own death.
*this is not about moral desert, but what a colonizer, who is by necessity doing something evil, forces the colonized to do in order to prevent his/her own evisceration.*
It would be difficult to hedge on this logic without appealing to pragmatism or hasbara, neither of which I am willing to make obeisance to. It is not fair to the oppressed.
For colonized people, self determination is something as important as life itself. Whose stance is hardline? "Let the colonizing thieves keep the land they stole and lie about peace while continuing occupation and extermination," or mine, which is, "give back what you stole" (so that those from whom you are using genocide to steal it do not fight for their lives against you) ?
You are not conscious of what people from where I'm from and our neighbors feel because of what the orders of cruelty and power have done to us. Your milquetoast stance has conduced to immense bloodshed — a genocide is happening. I'm sorry, but you are wrong in a violent but "peaceful sounding" way.
Thank you again for a careful and clarifying read on this situation. Even if, in general, our internet conversations are not capable of enacting any meaningful political change in the immediate sense, it seems crucial to me that catholics (and particularly Catholics who do theology and philosophy) need to cultivating speaking and analyzing in this “middle voice” which is neither simple calls for action with a pat solution nor apolitical metaphysical wrangling which never seeks to be embodied. Many American Catholics seem to think they know what the social/political expression of their theology should be, and it has been disastrous for an authentic religious humanism. Let us be more dialectical, more Hegelian, more Marxist.
A good friend spent some time in the Holy Land while in seminary in the late '90s. I had little to no understanding of what was going on there, so I was taken aback when he said, in effect: the world doesn't know how the Palestinians are being treated over there. It's apartheid. I believed him, and everything I've read since then only seems to confirm his impression. We are witnessing a great evil being perpetrated in plain sight.
I read both pieces and am glad to have gained some understanding and some insight through your writing. Found it to be clear and compelling. Thank you for being brave. I think the anecdotes were best stylistic evidence of that bravery—it helped to be taken back in time, as confusing as it is to navigate these very times. For someone who has mostly been afraid to engage (especially while a student) and opted to observe instead, these articles are like a sibling or parent pulling you off the ice-rink/roller-rink/swimming-pool ledge and enacting (for you) that first action you couldn’t bring yourself to. I think there’s an audience (me) who needs to be lovingly pried off the outer edges of this conversation. And I think now was/is the time. And I think God’s grace to me in what you’ve written is more the call to prayer than it is to whatever other form of petitioning I thought was required of me. Which, for the first time, seems faithful rather than avoidant, and an honest rather than contrived response. Lots to think about. Peace to you and your family -Bella
The devil rejoices. I appreciate your effort to shine a light on the evidence. I shall pray and ponder. We serve a God of love. Yet Hamas and Israel are locked in a horrific struggle fueled by hatred. Who is missing? Come quickly, Lord Jesus!
No they’re not. The Zionist entity is hell bent on ethnically cleansing Palestine (and vast portions of the Levant) for the purpose of establishing Eretz-Yisrael, which is and has always been their goal (re: David Ben Gurion, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Chaim Weizmann, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, “Allon Plan,” and an endless list of more evidence), and Hamas, alongside the other Palestinian armed factions, are trying finally through the total use of all the force they can muster to prevent their colonial erasure and reclaim their homeland.
This is not a “both sides” issue; with respect, if you do not know what you are talking about, and if genocide is ongoing as a part of the topic about which you are clueless (sorry — that is what your commentary suggests), then please educate yourself before opining. The stakes are dire. This is not a game.
Very astute. I'm glad that you touched on the fact that conflicts tend to create victims who then go on to victimize others. For there to be real healing and real peace in these places long torn by violence, there has to be a kind of total, radical forgiveness and love or it ends up just perpetuating the cycle. Sadly, very hard to do. A predicament ever since Cain killed Able and despaired of retribution.
The patent bloodthirsty rhetoric that American "conservatives" have long had around the Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the primary reasons that, while I still consider myself a man of the Right, broadly, no major right-of-center party would get my vote under these circumstances. Those who do not bat an eye at the suffering of women and children do not deserve to hold high office.
It's funny, because you hear a lot from supporters of the war about not trying to make things "black and white" (in other words, claiming that there are all kind of complicating factors that should make us be hesitant to condemn Netanyahu or the IDF) but then it doesn't take much prodding for them to start seething about how every Palestinian deserves death and no price in civilan lives is too high to defeat Hamas. I mean, we're talking about rhetoric that would seem immoderate if it were directed at the Empire of Japan or the Third Reich (and that's the comparison that's most often made in support of the war in Gaza). "Bloodthirsty" is precisely the word; there's a palpable hunger for revenge that's straightforwardly incompatible with the professed values of Christianity and Judaism. Even a war that was perfectly just by traditional Christian standards should show a degree of hesitancy about causing unnecessarily civilian deaths, and there just isn't any of that going on. Americans have been treating World War II as the paradigmatic human conflict for decades, and since the civilan deaths in that war don't bother us too much, we've reached the point of treating a just cause as a blank check. They've forgotten that World War II was really won by sparing the defeated populations of Germany and Japan and spending decades working to morally rehabilitate them. I'm not saying it was a perfect process - far too many war criminals escaped punishment - but the idea that the IDF can just bomb Palestinian nationalism out of existence is not just bloodthirsty and genocidal; it's also anti-Christian and plain stupid.
Hi Jordan, thanks for this post and for the previous one. I can't accept the notion that "an Israeli state should exist," but I suspect that these words mean something substantially different in your usage than they do in mine. What would it mean, in your view, for a specifically "Israeli" state to exist without political Zionism, without demographic engineering, without racist anxieties about Palestinian birthrates, and without persistent denials of Palestinian refugee return? Wouldn't the end of these things simply spell the end of "Israel" as an enterprise predicated upon Zionism?
Thanks Chris. I mean two things here. One refers to an external condition and another to an internal one.
The external condition is that, as far as I understand it, the British and other Western powers offered both Jews and Palestinians states in exchange for help against the Ottomans. The initial proposals after the war were objectively unfair, so the Palestinians wanted a renegotiated proposal that made more sense of the population/land proportions. They didn't get that. Still, and perhaps I really am hopelessly optimistic here, I think it's important to hold out the possibility of some two-state resolution, even if everything these past two years (really these past several decades) have worked to make this basically impossible. I wonder, though, if the coming power shift after this genocide is over will change anything about that external condition.
As for the internal condition, in Rosean fashion I want to emphasize the potential for Judaism itself to accommodate and indeed find it within itself to ensure avoiding the injustices you list. In other words, why can't it be integral to Jewish identity to treat the non-Jew as an equal citizen? Yes, I know that this too seems overly optimistic, especially in light of certain polls of the Israeli population that have come out in recently days. But again, I want to hold out for the (very small) Israeli left, the fairly diverse and contested debates among American Jews, and for internal developments yet to come from within Judaism. I believe it *is* Jewish not to engage in such engineering or denials of return etc. I realize this seems hopeless. But I'm (supposedly) a theologian, after all, so I must hope against hope, and I must maintain the call for (and with) Jews to see it as intrinsic to their own identity to reject the current status quo.
I do not think hope for a two state solution effectively grapples with the complete and total unwillingness of the Zionist entity to ever actually take seriously the notion of such a proposal, and this is intrinsic to the very DNA of the project itself (*not* a result of some unfortunate corruption emerging along the way); we know, quite clearly, from the private, written correspondences of, for instance, David Ben-Gurion that the Zionist entity never had any real intention of respecting the (unfair, colonial) partition plan to begin with, and this is a current that runs through the entire history of the so-called "Oslo process."
It is as hopeless, in my view, to push for a two-state solution as it is to push for the more just alternative, which would be a single, free, democratic Palestine. I take a firm and uncompromising decolonial position here, and the "unrealistic" nature of the thing is fine by me because pushing for the alternative has revealed that this entity is willing to shamelessly engage in a live streamed genocide against civilians -- with similar attacks on Beirut and, now, my home country (June 13, 2025) -- in order to prevent the right of return.
One might say, "they would not have done this, whether far out of proportion or not, were it not for Oct 7," and I would say, "yes, but no starved people would be driven to Oct 7 were it not for Operations Cast Lead, Protective Edge, Pillar of Defense; for the assassination of ~200 civilians and injury ("kneecapping") of ~1000 more by Israeli snipers during the Great March of Return (2018-2019), which the UN describes as 'overwhelmingly peaceful;' for the desecration, humiliation, and violent storming of al-Aqsa mosque dozens of times, often on Ramadan, by the Zionist government and various civilian extremists, were it not for the aggressive colonial expansion of settlements in the West Bank; for the repeated seizing of land after the partition during several unprovoked wars throughout the last century both within Palestine *and* the region more broadly; for the unprovoked and criminal assassination of Shireen Abu-Aqila, a Melkite Christian and reporter, in the West Bank (sniper fire to the head); for any handful of the hundreds and hundreds of acts of colonial violence visited upon this indigenous population by a largely European nationalist regime."
Therefore, I advocate for decolonization, full accountability of all the complicit (including in the US), repatriation of those with dual citizenship status to whatever imperial metropole they were likely born in, total fulfillment of the right of return, massive reparation funds granted to the Palestinians from the wealth accrued by Zionist invaders, etc.
I am often stupefied by accusations of extremism here. Yes, relative to contemporary normativity, my positions are almost laughably radical, but with respect to just a basic sense of right and wrong?! I'm not so sure I'm the extremist. What I am saying is basically this:
1. If you steal something (like a home) from someone, it is not yours, and you should be compelled to give it back.
2. If you are torturing the owner in order to keep it, and he appeals to law, your conscience, or external solidarity for help, you should stop or be stopped via these means.
3. If you aren't stopped by those means (bc no one cares), and you then torture him nearly to death, then he must defend himself so that he does not die.
4. If you are fought and killed by this person, you have caused your own death.
*this is not about moral desert, but what a colonizer, who is by necessity doing something evil, forces the colonized to do in order to prevent his/her own evisceration.*
It would be difficult to hedge on this logic without appealing to pragmatism or hasbara, neither of which I am willing to make obeisance to. It is not fair to the oppressed.
Hardline stances will conduce to further bloodshed.
For colonized people, self determination is something as important as life itself. Whose stance is hardline? "Let the colonizing thieves keep the land they stole and lie about peace while continuing occupation and extermination," or mine, which is, "give back what you stole" (so that those from whom you are using genocide to steal it do not fight for their lives against you) ?
You are not conscious of what people from where I'm from and our neighbors feel because of what the orders of cruelty and power have done to us. Your milquetoast stance has conduced to immense bloodshed — a genocide is happening. I'm sorry, but you are wrong in a violent but "peaceful sounding" way.
Until the people are free.
I fully understand resisting genocide, my concern remains that hardline stances will conduce to more bloodshed.
Engage with the content of what I said or stop replying to me.
This is good. Instructive, damning. I’m going to read it a few times and think about it a lot. Thanks.
Thank you again for a careful and clarifying read on this situation. Even if, in general, our internet conversations are not capable of enacting any meaningful political change in the immediate sense, it seems crucial to me that catholics (and particularly Catholics who do theology and philosophy) need to cultivating speaking and analyzing in this “middle voice” which is neither simple calls for action with a pat solution nor apolitical metaphysical wrangling which never seeks to be embodied. Many American Catholics seem to think they know what the social/political expression of their theology should be, and it has been disastrous for an authentic religious humanism. Let us be more dialectical, more Hegelian, more Marxist.
Amen and amen.
A good friend spent some time in the Holy Land while in seminary in the late '90s. I had little to no understanding of what was going on there, so I was taken aback when he said, in effect: the world doesn't know how the Palestinians are being treated over there. It's apartheid. I believed him, and everything I've read since then only seems to confirm his impression. We are witnessing a great evil being perpetrated in plain sight.
I read both pieces and am glad to have gained some understanding and some insight through your writing. Found it to be clear and compelling. Thank you for being brave. I think the anecdotes were best stylistic evidence of that bravery—it helped to be taken back in time, as confusing as it is to navigate these very times. For someone who has mostly been afraid to engage (especially while a student) and opted to observe instead, these articles are like a sibling or parent pulling you off the ice-rink/roller-rink/swimming-pool ledge and enacting (for you) that first action you couldn’t bring yourself to. I think there’s an audience (me) who needs to be lovingly pried off the outer edges of this conversation. And I think now was/is the time. And I think God’s grace to me in what you’ve written is more the call to prayer than it is to whatever other form of petitioning I thought was required of me. Which, for the first time, seems faithful rather than avoidant, and an honest rather than contrived response. Lots to think about. Peace to you and your family -Bella
tl;dr
The devil rejoices. I appreciate your effort to shine a light on the evidence. I shall pray and ponder. We serve a God of love. Yet Hamas and Israel are locked in a horrific struggle fueled by hatred. Who is missing? Come quickly, Lord Jesus!
No they’re not. The Zionist entity is hell bent on ethnically cleansing Palestine (and vast portions of the Levant) for the purpose of establishing Eretz-Yisrael, which is and has always been their goal (re: David Ben Gurion, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Chaim Weizmann, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, “Allon Plan,” and an endless list of more evidence), and Hamas, alongside the other Palestinian armed factions, are trying finally through the total use of all the force they can muster to prevent their colonial erasure and reclaim their homeland.
This is not a “both sides” issue; with respect, if you do not know what you are talking about, and if genocide is ongoing as a part of the topic about which you are clueless (sorry — that is what your commentary suggests), then please educate yourself before opining. The stakes are dire. This is not a game.