The Holy Land & the Middle East
Jesus was born in a land under military occupation, lived as a member of a colonized people, and was executed by the occupying power. Anyone who claims his authority for a theology that ignores the humanity of one group of people in that land has misread both the text and the history.
The Answer
This is among the most painful and contested topics this site will address. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has caused enormous suffering to real people on multiple sides. This article will not resolve it. What it can do is apply the consistent lens of this site — what does the teaching of a 1st-century Jewish reformer, filtered through modern liberal Jewish ethics and Catholic Social Teaching, actually say about how we are obligated to think and act in the face of this conflict?
The starting point is history that gets obscured in political debate:
Jesus was Jewish. He was born into a Jewish community in 1st-century Galilee, under Roman military occupation. He spoke Aramaic, read Torah, observed Jewish law, argued Talmudic-style disputes about its interpretation, and died for political reasons connected to that context. His people — the Jewish people — had a millennia-old connection to that land rooted in history, scripture, and lived community.
The modern State of Israel was founded in 1948 following the Holocaust — the systematic murder of six million Jewish people by the Nazi state, with widespread complicity across Europe. This is the context in which Jewish statehood was established. The trauma is real. The historical need was real.
Palestinians — both Muslim and Christian — have also lived in that land for millennia and were displaced in large numbers during the 1948 war (an event Palestinians call al-Nakba, "the catastrophe"). The suffering of Palestinian civilians under occupation, siege, and military operations is real. Palestinian Christian communities — some of the oldest Christian communities in the world — have been shrinking for decades.
The tradition of Jesus does not permit choosing which of these realities to acknowledge and which to ignore. Both peoples bear the image of God. Both communities' suffering is real. The prophetic tradition demands that we see both.
The Jewish Reformer's Lens
The Jewish relationship to the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) is among the most ancient and theologically complex in the world. Torah, Talmud, and centuries of prayer express a deep longing for the land — "next year in Jerusalem" has been recited at the end of Passover seders for over a thousand years, through centuries when most Jewish people had no access to Jerusalem and lived in exile.
Modern liberal Judaism — the tradition this site draws on primarily — has a complicated relationship with Zionism (the movement for Jewish statehood). Reform Judaism initially opposed Zionism in the early 20th century (the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 explicitly rejected the concept of a Jewish national homeland) before eventually embracing it after the Holocaust. Today, liberal Jewish communities hold a wide spectrum of views on Israeli policy, from unconditional support to sharp critique of occupation and settlement policy.
What liberal Jewish ethics does not permit is the erasure of Palestinian humanity. The same Torah that roots Jewish connection to the land commands: "You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Leviticus 19:34). The same prophetic tradition that insists on Jewish survival insists that justice cannot be built on the suffering of others. Amos, Isaiah, and Micah would have things to say about military sieges and civilian casualties regardless of who was conducting them.
The concept of Pikkuach Nefesh (saving life takes priority over everything else) applies to Palestinian lives as fully as Jewish lives. That is not a political statement. It is a direct application of the tradition.
Many Jewish thinkers — including Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and more recently Rabbi Brant Rosen, Peter Beinart, and others — have argued from within the tradition that the occupation of the West Bank and the conditions imposed on Gaza are incompatible with Jewish ethical values, regardless of the complex security environment. This is a legitimate internal Jewish debate, not antisemitism.
Catholic Social Teaching
The Catholic Church's position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reflects several consistent principles:
Two-state solution: The Vatican has consistently endorsed a negotiated two-state solution — a secure, internationally recognized Israel alongside a viable, independent Palestinian state. This position has been held across multiple pontificates.
Jerusalem as open city: The Church has consistently opposed any attempt by any party to make Jerusalem exclusively their own. The Holy City's significance to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam makes it, in the Church's view, a city that must remain accessible to all three traditions. The Vatican has not recognized any unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem.
Palestinian Christian communities: The Church maintains a special pastoral concern for Palestinian Christians — some of whom trace their community's presence to the earliest centuries of Christian history. The exodus of Palestinian Christians from the Holy Land, driven by conflict, economic pressure, and discrimination, is a source of deep concern for the Vatican. A Christianity that has no living presence in the land where Jesus lived is a profound loss.
Vatican II's Nostra Aetate (1965): This landmark document formally repudiated the accusation that the Jewish people are collectively guilty for Jesus's death — a teaching that had fueled centuries of Christian antisemitism. The Church's condemnation of antisemitism is absolute and repeated. The ongoing sin of Christian antisemitism throughout history is not a minor footnote. It is one of the great moral catastrophes of the tradition.
Critique of all violence against civilians: The Church has condemned terrorism, indiscriminate rocket fire, and military operations that cause disproportionate civilian casualties — from all parties. This even-handed application of just war theory (a Catholic framework requiring that military action be proportionate, discriminate, and directed at combatants rather than civilians) is the consistent Catholic position.
Sources & Citations
- Leviticus 19:33–34 — Love the Stranger (Hebrew Bible) The Torah. "When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt." This commandment applies to all people in the land, regardless of ethnicity or origin. It is grounded in the experiential memory of oppression: those who have been strangers must not become oppressors of strangers.
- Isaiah 2:1–4 — Swords into Plowshares (Hebrew Bible) One of the Major Prophets. The iconic prophetic vision of universal peace — nations streaming to Jerusalem to learn God's ways, swords beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, nations learning war no more. This vision is explicitly universal — it includes all peoples, not only Israel. It stands as a judgment against any theology that consecrates ongoing violence as God's will.
- Matthew 5:9 — Blessed Are the Peacemakers (New Testament) One of the four Gospels, part of the Sermon on the Mount. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." A peacemaker is not someone who demands one side surrender unconditionally. The Hebrew concept of *shalom* — the peace Jesus invokes — encompasses wholeness, justice, safety, and flourishing for everyone. Peace built on the permanent exclusion or domination of one group is not *shalom*.
- Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate (1965) A declaration of the Second Vatican Council (the gathering of the world's Catholic bishops called by Pope John XXIII). Section 4 explicitly repudiates the charge that the Jewish people bear collective responsibility for Jesus's death and condemns all forms of antisemitism. This was a watershed moment in Catholic-Jewish relations and a formal repudiation of centuries of Church-sponsored hatred.
- Pope Francis, Meeting with Palestinian and Israeli Leaders (multiple occasions) Pope Francis has met separately with Palestinian and Israeli leaders on multiple occasions and consistently called for a two-state solution, the protection of civilian life, humanitarian access to Gaza, and the preservation of Jerusalem's character as a city shared by three faiths. His public statements on the conflict consistently apply Catholic just war principles to both parties without partisan alignment.
- Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism (2012) A book by a liberal Jewish journalist arguing from within the Jewish tradition that the ongoing occupation of the West Bank is incompatible with Jewish democratic and ethical values. Represents a significant strand of liberal Jewish thought that distinguishes between support for Jewish security and the right to a Jewish state, on one hand, and support for specific Israeli government policies, on the other.
What Should We Do?
For everyone: Start with a commitment to acknowledge the humanity and suffering of everyone involved — without making that acknowledgment conditional on the other side's acknowledgment first. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 was a massacre of civilians and deserves to be named as such without qualification. The death toll among Palestinian civilians in subsequent military operations is staggering and also deserves to be named without qualification. Both things are true simultaneously.
Resist the tribal pressure to pick a side and become an uncritical defender of that side's actions. The prophetic tradition does not endorse any nation's violence unconditionally. It applies the same standard — protect civilian life, pursue justice for the vulnerable, seek peace — to everyone. If you find yourself defending things done by your preferred side that you would condemn if done by the other side, you have left the prophetic tradition and entered tribalism.
Actively oppose antisemitism. It is surging globally and has historical roots in Christian theology that must be named and repudiated directly. Antisemitism is not merely offensive — it is lethal, as history has demonstrated repeatedly and recently. At the same time: criticizing Israeli government policy is not antisemitism, any more than criticizing US government policy is anti-American. The conflation of these things is itself a form of dishonesty that makes the real problem harder to name and fight.
For Catholics specifically: Learn the Church's actual teaching on the conflict — the two-state solution, the open Jerusalem, the protection of civilian life on all sides, and the support for Palestinian Christian communities. Reject the "Christian Zionism" popular in some American evangelical contexts that treats Israeli military policy as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. This is not Catholic theology. Catholic theology is grounded in just war principles, human dignity, and the universality of God's love — all of which apply to Palestinians and Israelis equally.