The “nature versus nurture” debate over the relative influence of inherited traits versus environmental conditions on humans is older than many realize. It can be traced through different stages of the biblical narrative. Angry at the Israelites’ worship of the golden calf, God was ready to destroy them all and start anew with Moses. Nature was to blame, as God despaired that these “stiff-necked people” could be re-educated.

In another biblical story, however, the Israelites were sent to wander in the wilderness for forty years to be reformatted before being allowed to enter the Land of Canaan. In this case, the emphasis was on nurture over nature, with the hope that the experience of benefiting from boundless generosity—such as the manna and the protective clouds of glory—would change them. This may have been the first known attempt at social engineering, even though the success was only variable.

“Panel from an Ivory Casket with Scenes of the Story of Joshua,” 900–1000 AD, Byzantine, Made in Constantinople, Medium: Elephant ivory, traces of polychromy. Credit Line: Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917. Object Number: 17.190.135a-d. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

The contemporary history of the Jews presents a more daring case of such re-education. For centuries, Jewish ideals have stressed mercy, modesty, and beneficence. The abhorrence of violence is so ingrained that in many Jewish communities, knives, which could be tools of murder, must be removed from the table before reciting the grace after a meal. Blessing and violence are deemed incompatible.

After centuries of being educated to strive for moral perfection, some Jews — initially a tiny minority — adopted a unusual role as colonial settlers—a role historically associated with European Christian civilization.

They conveniently instrumentalized biblical commandments, such as  “You shall clear out the Land and settle in it, for I have given you the Land to occupy it.” The settlers embraced a literal and materialistic reading of the Bible abandoning the interpretative tradition developed in rabbinic Judaism. Jewish tradition reads the biblical verses that mention violence allegorically: the sword and the bow used by Jacob the Patriarch against his enemies become symbols of obedience to divine commandments and good deeds. Tradition locates Jewish heroism in the house of study, not on the battlefield. But Zionists rejected this tradition as that of “exilic weaklings.

Naturally, like in other locations such as India, America, or Algeria, most inhabitants of Palestine—Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike—resented the Zionists who began colonizing Palestine in the late 19^th century. Resistance emerged, and generations of Israelis grew up fighting against it. Palestinians came to be perceived as a constant source of danger. Educated in the spirit of military courage, moral superiority, and self-righteousness, the Israeli came to disdain and replace the Jew. The murder of Jacob De Haan, a Jewish anti-Zionist lawyer, by members of a Zionist militia in 1924 marked not only the onset of organized political terrorism in Palestine but also the affirmation of a new national identity.

Ideals of martial valour were not only inculcated through the educational system but, more powerfully, were induced by the predicament of all colonial settlements: suppressing resistance from the colonized. Generation after generation of Israelis have participated in the violent “pacification of the natives,” forcing them to submit to discrimination, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing.

The daily news of brutalities perpetrated by the Israeli military in Gaza underscores the success of the Zionist transformation of the Jew. The massive support that these acts receive from Israeli society at large strongly confirms this. The recent debate in the Israeli parliament when some Knesset members asserted the legitimacy of gang raping Palestinian detainees by Israeli soldiers reveals profound dehumanization—that is, the denial of full humanity in others, along with the cruelty and suffering that accompany it. But this also threatens the humanity of the soldier.

To mitigate this, the soldier must keep a distance from his victim. This is achieved through the industrialization of murder, which began with gas chambers and carpet bombing and continued with targeted assassinations by missiles and kamikaze drones. World-renowned Israeli scientists and engineers, assisted by major American corporations, have made a qualitative advance in streamlining remote violence. In Gaza, artificial intelligence (AI) now determines targets and destroys them. This points to an abdication not only of their ancestors’ moral values but of humanity altogether.

The Israelis’ war on Gaza confirms a triumph of nurture over nature, all the while demonstrating that technological progress does not equate to progress in humanity. In fact, it normalizes amorality, which most Western governments accept because, in their view, it is Jews who commit these atrocities, whether qualified as mass murder, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. Few realize that a century of living by the sword has transformed the Jew into a ruthless Israeli. Thus, one can better understand Israel as a state and a society when it is no longer regarded as “the Jewish state”, a nebulous concept that only blurs our vision and obscures reality. Only then can the world judge Israel on merit like any other state.

Reprinted from Russia in Global Affairs with the author’s permission.

The baby succumbed to the harsh weather as a result of the dire living conditions in Gaza, where destroyed homes and infrastructure leave residents exposed to harsh weather, local health authorities confirmed.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, the ongoing Israeli aggression since October 2023 has left thousands of families without adequate shelter, food, or medical care, contributing to worsening health crises. Over 45,436 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 108,038 injured since October 2023, officials said.

It comes after a three-week-old baby girl died in a tent encampment in Al-Mawasi in the southern city of Khan Yunis on Wednesday, Dr Munir Al-Bursh, the director general of Gaza’s Health Ministry, said on his X account.

Sela Mahmoud Al-Fasih “froze to death from the extreme cold,” he explained.

“Frozen Angel,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / IbisPaint, 2024

Moreover, Dr Ahmed Al-Farra of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis reported two additional deaths on Tuesday.

“A three-day-old baby and another baby, less than a month old, both died after a severe temperature drop,” he said.

The suffering has become particularly extreme in Khan Yunis, where many Palestinians displaced by over 14 months of indiscriminate attacks have sought refuge in makeshift camps.

“The tents do not protect from the cold, and it gets very cold at night, with no way to keep warm,” Al-Farra explained. Newborns face heightened risks as malnutrition among mothers reduces the quality of milk they can provide.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza continues to deepen as Israel’s strikes continue unabated, displacing over 90 per cent of the population, many repeatedly. Despite appeals from the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and warnings from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) about preventing genocide, the assaults persist.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Israelis bombed the airport in the capital, Sanaa, the port of Hodeida, and oil refineries. Al-Mashhad al-Yemeni reports that, according to local sources, the Israeli fighter-jets primarily targeted Sanaa International Airport and al-Dailami Air Base, with eight raids having been carried out almost at once.

The Israelis destroyed the control tower at the airport and appear to have damaged the tarmac, putting it out of operation.

Since the head of the World Health Organization was in Sanaa and was at the airport, the attack endangered his life.

Local sources said that Israeli fighter-jets conducted three similar raids on Hodeida and oil facilities around the port.

The Israelis have a legitimate casus belli or legal basis for war, given that the Houthis have been firing missiles at Israel, endangering schoolchildren and other civilians. Likewise, the Houthis have disrupted Red Sea commerce by attacking random cargo ships, which further violates the laws of war.

However, the Houthis have not been flying jets against Israel, so attacking the airport just harms the civilian Yemeni economy. Likewise, the Hodeida port is the main conduit for food and other necessities to reach the north for civilian purposes. Attacking oil facilities means lack of gasoline for civilian families to drive into the market and get food. Yemen is a country with a profound health crisis after a decade of war, with millions suffering food insecurity and the danger of disease outbreaks rampant. It has the highest burden of cholera globally.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was at the airport when it was struck, and whose close call exemplifies the Israeli practice of disregarding civilian life, described the scene:

“Our mission to negotiate the release of @UN staff detainees and to assess the health and humanitarian situation in #Yemen concluded today. We continue to call for the detainees’ immediate release.

As we were about to board our flight from Sana’a, about two hours ago, the airport came under aerial bombardment. One of our plane’s crew members was injured. At least two people were reported killed at the airport. The air traffic control tower, the departure lounge — just a few meters from where we were — and the runway were damaged.

We will need to wait for the damage to the airport to be repaired before we can leave.

My UN and @WHO colleagues and I are safe.

Our heartfelt condolences to the families whose loved ones lost their lives in the attack.”

UN spokesperson Stéphanie Tremblay reported that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “warns that airstrikes on Red Sea ports and Sana’a airport pose grave risks to humanitarian operations at a time when millions of people are in need of life-saving assistance.”

The Israeli doctrine of total war, in other words, in which civilian harm is completely disregarded, is now being applied to Yemen. The Israelis are not the first. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates heavily bombed Yemen 2015-2022, inflicting substantial damage on civilian infrastructure and killing many civilians, in a failed attempt to dislodge the Houthis from power. On the whole, bombing guerrilla groups is ineffectual unless combined with a land campaign.

Photo of Sanaa by Mohammad mansour on Unsplash

Even the New York Times has finally caught up to Israeli reporters at +972 Mag, who reported last spring that Israeli commanders were allowing up to 100 dead civilians for each senior militant killed, and up to 20 civilians dead for each lower-level fighter. These barbaric rules of engagement have led NATO to cease military cooperation with Israel, since their ROE violates the norms of the armies of civilized countries.

The Houthis grabbed power in 2014-2015, overthrowing the recognized Yemeni government. They are a militant movement that sprang from the Zaydi denomination of Shiite Islam. The Zaydis differ from the Shiites of Iran, Iraq and Lebanon in not having ayatollahs and in having relatively good relations with Sunnis historically. Although Zaydis make up only 25 percent of the Yemeni population of 34 million, they comprise half of the population of northern Yemen where the Houthis rule. Some Sunni tribes have allied with the Houthis, so the latter they rule 70% to 80% of the population.

Of the already perilous condition of the civilian population, UNHCR writes,

“The ongoing conflict and related breakdown of basic infrastructure and services, as well as limited availability of humanitarian assistance, has left many displaced individuals and households living in substandard conditions. Inadequate water and sanitation facilities contribute to frequent outbreaks of cholera, with resulting malnutrition. Compounding the severity of these needs, Yemen’s economy is in crisis, with over 80% of the population now living below the poverty line. Of the 96,907 IDP and host community households (588,835 individuals) assessed to date in 2024, almost 50% reported earning 25,000 Yemeni Rial (50 USD) or less per month, with 35% reporting no income at all. This forces some families to rely on harmful coping mechanisms, such as skipping meals, taking children out of school to work, begging, and exposing women and children to other forms of exploitation and abuse, including early marriage.”

Yemen is enormous, bigger than California, but its south and east are thinly populated, and those are the areas the Houthis do not control — some 60% of the land area.

When Israel launched its ground operations in Gaza, Beit Lahia was already largely destroyed due to many days of relentless Israeli bombardment which killed thousands.

Still, the border Gaza town resisted, leading to a hermetic Israeli siege, which was never lifted, even when the Israeli military redeployed out of much of northern Gaza in January 2024.

Beit Lahia is largely an isolated town, a short distance away from the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel. It is surrounded mostly by agricultural areas that make it nearly impossible to defend.

Yet, a year of grisly Israeli war and genocide in Gaza did not end the fighting there. To the contrary, 2024 has ended where it started, with intense fighting on all fronts in Gaza, with Beit Lahia, a town that was supposedly ‘conquered’ earlier, still leading the fight.

Beit Lahia is a microcosm of Israel’s failed war in the Strip, a bloody grind that has led nowhere, despite the massive destruction, the repeated ethnic cleansing of the population, the starvation and the genocide. Every day of Israel’s terrible war on the Palestinians serves as a reminder that there are no military solutions and that the Palestinian will cannot be broken, no matter the cost or the sacrifice.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, remains unconvinced. He entered the new year with more promises of ‘total victory’, and ended it as a wanted criminal by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The issuing of an arrest warrant for the Israeli leader was a reiteration of a similar position taken by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the start of 2024.

The ICJ’s position, however, was hardly as strong as many had hoped or wanted to believe. The world’s highest court had, on 26 January, ordered Israel “to take action to prevent acts of genocide”, but stopped short of ordering Israel to halt its war.

The Israeli objectives of the war remained unclear, although Israeli politicians provided clues as to what the war on Gaza was really all about. Last January, several Israeli ministers, including 12 from Netanyahu’s Likud party, took part in a conference calling for the resettlement of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. “Without settlements, there is no security,” extremist Israeli minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, said.

For that to happen, the Palestinian people themselves, not merely those fighting on the ground, had to be tamed, broken and defeated. Thus, the ‘flour massacres‘, a new Israeli war tactic that was centered around killing as many Palestinians as possible while waiting for the few aid trucks that were allowed to reach northern Gaza.

On 29 February, more than 100 Gazans were killed while queueing for aid. They were mowed down by Israeli soldiers, as they desperately tried to lay their hands on a loaf of bread, baby milk or a bottle of water. This scene was repeated, again and again in the north, but also in other parts of the Gaza Strip throughout the year.

The aim was to starve the Palestinians in the north so that they would be forced to flee to other parts of the Strip. Famine actualized as early as January, and many of those who tried to flee south were killed, anyway.

From the early days of the war, Israel understood that to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, they must target all aspects of life in the Strip. This includes hospitals, bakeries, markets, electric grids, water stations, and the like.

The Gaza hospitals, of course, received a large share of Israeli attacks. In March, once more, Israel attacked the Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City with greater ferocity than before. When it finally withdrew, on April 1, the Israeli army destroyed the entire compound, leaving behind mass graves with hundreds of bodies, mostly medical staff, women and children. They even executed several patients.

Aside from a few statements of concern by western leaders, little was done to bring the genocide to an end. Only when seven international aid workers with the charity, the World Central Kitchen, were killed by Israel, a global outcry followed, leading to the first and only Israeli apology in the entire war.

Desperate to distract from its failure in Gaza, but also Lebanon, and keen on presenting the Israeli public with any kind of victory, the Israeli military began escalating its war beyond Gaza. This included the strike on the Iranian Embassy in Syria on 1 April. Despite repeated attempts, which included the assassination in Iran of the head of Hamas’s Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, on 31 July, an all-out regional war has not yet come to pass.

Another escalation was taking place, this time not by Netanyahu but by millions of people around the world, demanding an end to the Israeli war. A focal point of the protests were student movements that spread across US campuses and, ultimately, worldwide. Instead of allowing free speech to flourish, however, America’s largest academic institutions resorted to the police, who violently shut down many of the protests, arresting hundreds of students, many of whom were not allowed to return to their colleges.

Meanwhile, the US continued to block international efforts aimed at producing a ceasefire resolution at the United Nations Security Council. Ultimately, on 31 May, US President Joe Biden delivered a speech conveying what he termed an “Israeli proposal” to end the war. After some delay, Hamas accepted the proposal, but Israel rejected it. In his rejection, Netanyahu referred to Biden’s speech as “incorrect” and “incomplete”. Strangely, but also unsurprisingly, the White House blamed the Palestinians for the failed initiative.

Losing faith in the American leadership, some European countries began changing their foreign policy doctrines on Palestine, with Ireland, Norway and Spain recognizing the State of Palestine on 28 May. The decisions were largely symbolic but indicated that western unity around Israel was faltering.

Digital Image.

Israel remained unfazed and, despite international warnings, invaded the Rafah area in southern Gaza on May 7, seizing control of the Philadelphi Corridor – a buffer zone between Gaza and the Egyptian border that extends for 14 kilometers.

Netanyahu’s government insisted that only war can bring their captives back. There was very little success in that strategy, however. On June 8, Israel, with logistical support from the US and other western countries managed to rescue four of its captives held in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. To do so, Israel killed at least 276 Palestinians and wounded 800 more.

In August, another heart-wrenching massacre took place, this time in the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where 93 people, mostly women and children, were murdered in a single Israeli strike. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, women and children were the main victims of the Israeli genocide, accounting for 70 per cent by 8 November.

An earlier report by the Lancet Medical Journal said that if the war stopped in July, “186,000 or even more” Palestinians would have been killed. The war, however, went on. The rate of genocide in Gaza seemed to maintain the same killing ratio, despite the major regional developments including the mutual Iranian-Israeli tit-for-tat strikes and the major Israeli ground operation in Lebanon.

In October, Israel returned to the policies of targeting or besieging hospitals, killing doctors and other medical staff, and targeting aid and civil defence workers. Still, Israel would not achieve any of its strategic goals of the war. Even the killing of Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, in battle on 16 October  would not, in any way, alter the course of the war.

Israel’s frustration grew by leaps and bounds throughout the year. Its desperate attempt to control the global narrative on the Gaza genocide largely failed. On 19 July, and after listening to the testimonies of over 50 countries, the ICJ issued a landmark ruling that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal.”

That ruling, which expressed international consensus on the matter, was translated on 17 September to a UN General Assembly resolution “demanding an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine within the next twelve months”.

All of this effectively meant that Israel’s attempt at normalizing its occupation of Palestine, and its quest to illegally annex the West Bank was considered null and void by the international community. Israel, however, doubled down, taking its rage against West Bank Palestinians, who, too, were experiencing one of the worst Israeli pogroms in many years.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, by 21 November, at least 777 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October 2023, while thousands more were wounded and over 11,700 arrested.

To make matters worse, Smotrich called, on November 11, for the full annexation of the West Bank. The call was made soon after the election of Donald Trump as the next US President, an event that initially inspired optimism amongst Israeli leaders, but later concerns that Trump may not serve the role of the saviour for Israel after all.

On 21 November, the ICC issued its historic ruling to arrest Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. The decision represented a measure of hope, however faint, that the world is finally ready to hold Israel accountable for its many crimes.

2025 could, indeed, represent that watershed moment. This remains to be seen. However, as far as Palestinians are concerned, even with the failure of the international community to stop the genocide and reign in Israel, their steadfastness, sumoud, will remain strong until freedom is finally attained.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

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(The Conversation) – The human rights group, Amnesty International, recently issued a report concluding that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute a genocide.

The war in Gaza has led to widespread calls for a ceasefire. This situation, and its ripple effects globally, have also raised questions and reckonings among varied communities and institutions around how to respond to suffering and how to witness and hope for transformation.

In a recent message for the first Sunday of Advent, the Rev. Munther Isaac, one of the foremost Palestinian Christian theologians, issued a letter pleading for the world to “humanize the children of Gaza, the children of Palestine.”

Similar pleas are also being made from Muslim and Jewish voices in support of Palestinian human rights. Such faith-based communities protesting Israel’s occupation and genocide say that criticizing Zionist ethnonationalism is not to be equated with antisemitism. Israel disputes the accusation of genocide and states that it is acting in self-defence following the Oct. 7 attacks.

As a Christian theologian and a professor of religion and culture, I have been considering what this call to “humanize” means for Christian churches and theologians.

I co-authored a recent article with theology professor Michel Andraos of Saint Paul University, “A Sin against Humanity and God: the Genocide of the Palestinian People and the Churches’ Silence.” This article explores how and why many abiding silences pervade western church responses to the crisis in Gaza.

Last year, at his church in Bethlehem, Isaac created a manger scene featuring the Christ-child in a keffiyeh amidst strewn rubble, a reminder of the one whom many liberation theologians, like Isaac, believe to be on the side of the marginalized and the oppressed.

This crêche aimed to remind Christians of the Christ-child whom they believe was born in a makeshift shelter, in a land under military occupation, and to prompt new acknowledgement of Palestinian suffering. Isaac put it in his Christmas sermon/lament last year: “I invite you to see the image of Jesus in every child killed and pulled from under the rubble.”

Silences around settler colonial ideologies

Some churches and church agencies in Canada have called for a ceasefire, humanitarian aid and an end to all weapon transfers to Israel. Last Feburary, some urged the Canadian government to live up “to its obligation to prevent the crime of genocide where it might plausibly occur.”

Yet, many silences pervade church responses. One is around settler colonial ideologies. As Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb writes in his book Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible, there is a need to unpack connections between western settler colonialism, Christian theology, Zionism and the Palestinian territories.

“St. Porphyrius,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, Clip2Comic, 2024

In October 2023, an Open Letter to Western Christian leaders and theologians from Kairos Palestine, a Christian Palestinian movement, called on churches in the West to “repent of their indifference to Palestinian suffering.”

The letter said this indifference is reflected in a western double standard that “humanizes Israeli Jews while insisting on dehumanizing Palestinians and whitewashing their suffering.” This double standard reflects “an entrenched colonial discourse that has weaponized the Bible to justify the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, Oceania, and elsewhere.”

Since the letter was issued, the death toll in Gaza has sharply increased.

While conservative Christian Zionism is a well-known phenomenon in North America, lesser recognized forms of Christian Zionism can be seen in Catholicism, Anglicanism and Lutheranism.

Church calls

Another way churches reflect silences towards violence in Gaza is in interfaith dialogue. We argue that the mainline or liberal churches remain bound to what the late Jewish theologian Marc Ellis called an “interfaith ecumenical deal.”

Ellis argued that this deal consists of the churches repenting of their long-standing history of anti-Judaism and antisemitism largely by remaining silent on Zionist ethnonationalism and the oppression of Palestinians. In other words, Palestinians become the sacrificial victim of Christian guilt over Christian anti-Judaism/antisemitism and for their complicity in the Holocaust (Shoah).

Christians in Canada and elsewhere must challenge older models of interfaith dialogue that do not address Israel’s occupation.
Israel continues to receive support from the West, including the churches, in part because of their commitment that the genocide of the Jewish people should happen “never again.”

This reasoning is flawed. For one, it supports an ideology that Jewish safety is only secured through military ethnonationalism. Second, it offloads the responsibility to protect Jewish life onto Israel alone. Jewish people must experience security throughout the world.

Christians must reject the ideology that protesting the genocide of the Palestinian people is an assault on Jewish freedom. Jewish and Palestinian freedom are inextricably bound, and unless we understand liberation in universal terms, we create new forms of tyranny.

Neutrality equates to complicity

Palestinian Christian theologians maintain that western Christian neutrality equates to complicity. As Isaac put it:

“Regrettably, many western Christians across wide denominational and theological spectra adopt Zionist theologies and interpretations that justify war, making them complicit in Israel’s violence and oppression.”

The stances of most mainline churches when it comes to Israel are a marked exception to their historical responses during other atrocities and large-scale human rights abuses, which they roundly condemned, such as Apartheid in South Africa.

Need to support BDS strategies, arms embargoes

Effective actions reflecting concern for Palestinian lives can be seen in some church responses. At the United Church of Canada’s recent General Council meeting, the church adopted a resolution which:

“affirmed the application of justice principles to the conflict in Israel and Palestine in such a way that enables the adoption of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) strategies and joins in the consensus of the international human rights communities in recognizing and rejecting Israel’s apartheid system.”

Some other church leaders are speaking up. Pope Francis has called for an investigation to determine whether genocide is taking place in Gaza.

In August, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said “the State of Israel has been denying the Palestinian people dignity, freedom and hope,” and called for an end to the occupation.

These latter comments signal steps in the right direction, however church leaders must go beyond words toward action. Actions should include lobbying western governments to impose arms embargos, and explicitly advocating for a lasting ceasefire to stop the genocide.

Roles for theologians

A significant contribution towards church responses of solidarity can come from Canadian theologians. Theologians can contribute by investigating the abiding connections between the theological justification of settler colonialism in both the Palestinian territories and in Canada, the genocide of Indigenous Peoples and Christian anti-Judaism and antisemitism (for example, ideas around Christians “replacing” Jews as God’s “covenant people”).

Working with Palestinian, Muslim and Jewish and decolonial groups campaigning against Israel’s occupation can be a source of interfaith solidarity and action.

Soon, two Christmases will have passed with no end to the killing and destruction. Two Christmases in which Palestinian Christians have called out to western churches to repent and to respond, and two Christmases in which their cries have fallen largely on unhearing ears.

Jane Barter, Professor, Department of Religion and Culture, University of Winnipeg

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Pope continued, in a clear condemnation of the Israeli government, “With sorrow I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty; of the children machine-gunned, the bombing of schools and hospitals… So much cruelty!”

He said, “Let us pray for a ceasefire on all war fronts, in Ukraine, the Holy Land, in all the Middle East and the entire world, at Christmas.”

On Saturday, he had been equally forthright on Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, saying, “Yesterday they did not allow the Patriarch (of Jerusalem) into Gaza as promised.”

“Yesterday children were bombed. This is cruelty, this is not war.”

The Pontiff underlined, “I want to say it because it touches my heart.”

(Latin Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa did ultimately manage to visit Gaza City on Sunday to conduct mass for the Christian Palestinian refugees from Israeli bombardment there, in coordination with Israeli authorities. But apparently until the Pope spoke out, the Israeli military had denied him permission.)

Francis’s increasingly outspoken condemnation of Israel has caused several controversies this fall. In a new book first published in Italian in November, the pope called for a painstaking investigation of whether Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. (See below for an excerpt from my earlier analysis of these passages.)

On December 7, artisans from the Bethlehem Christian community presented a nativity scene at the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall. The installation was headed by Johny Andonia, 39. At the last moment, he decided to wrap the baby Jesus in a keffiyeh, the patterned scarf that is commonly worn by men in the Levant, Iraq and Arabia, but which has come to symbolize the Palestinians in particular. He said the scarf was a symbol to demonstrate the “existence” of Palestinians. After an outcry from Israel and its supporters ensued, the scarf was removed after three days.

Bethlehem in Palestine has a population of 29,000 about 3,000 of them Christians. Palestinian Christians have suffered from Israeli colonial brutality like all other Palestinians.

I wrote on November 21,

Pope Francis has a new book, Hope never disappoints. Pilgrims towards a better world. . . The Pope mentions Gaza on several occasions in the book. At one point he expresses concern about migration crises around the world, colored as they are by “violence and hardship,” in the Sahara, the Mexican-US border, and the Mediterranean, “which has become a large cemetery in the past decade.” He adds, “also in the Middle East,” because of the “humanitarian tragedy” in Gaza . . .

The Catholic leader laments that so many Ukrainians have been forced to flee, and praises countries that took them in, such as Poland. He then turns to the Middle East, where, he says, we have seen something similar . . .

Francis said he was thinking especially of those who leave Gaza in the midst of the famine that has hit the Strip. Experts estimate that about 100,000 Palestinians from Gaza managed to flee to Egypt before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu occupied the Rafah crossing with Israeli troops.

Then Pope Francis dropped his bombshell. According to some experts, he wrote, “What has been happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide.”

He insisted that a painstaking investigation be carried out to determine whether the situation fits the technical definition formulated by jurists and international organizations. He is likely referring to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and the Genocide Convention of 1948, on the basis of which the International Court of Justice is deliberating on whether what the Israelis are doing in Gaza is a genocide . . .

“Pieta,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

His last mention of Gaza comes in a passage where he recalls a photograph of a Palestinian grandmother in Gaza, her face not visible, holding in her arms the lifeless body of her five-year-old granddaughter, who had just been killed in an Israeli bombing, along with other family members. He notes that the image has been called “The Pieta of Gaza.”

The Encyclopedia Britannica explains, “Pietà, as a theme in Christian art, depiction of the Virgin Mary supporting the body of the dead Christ. . . . the great majority show only Mary and her Son. The Pietà was widely represented in both painting and sculpture, being one of the most poignant visual expressions of popular concern with the emotional aspects of the lives of Christ and the Virgin.”

Michaelangelo, “Pietà,” Public Domain.

He says that the photo, taken in a hospital morgue, conveys strength, sorrow and the unimaginable pain inflicted by war. He ends by again insisting that innocents must be protected even in the midst of warfare, a principle, he says, that is engraved on the hearts of all people.

The consequence of the Pope’s comments throughout is a humanization of the Palestinians — a humanization of which US and British media outlets have largely proved themselves incapable. The only way they can be all right with over 17,000 dead children in Israel’s campaign against Gaza is that they do not see them as truly human. Otherwise, even the death of one little granddaughter would have us all weeping uncontrollably.

Not only does the Pope humanize Palestinian suffering, refusing to lose his empathy in the face of the magnitude of the slaughter and the sheer number of children in burial shrouds, but in a sense he even divinizes Palestinian suffering. The dead little girl in her grandma’s arms is a Christ-like figure — Christ-like in her innocence, which did not prevent her from being brutally killed. And the heart-wrenching mourning of her grandmother is like the grief of the Mother Mary over her crucified son, himself the incarnation on earth of the divine.

Arab 48 reports that the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, the organizer of the ceremony to be held on January 27, Deputy Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, said, “We are bound to respect the decision of the International Criminal Court in the Hague.”

Rzeczpospolita reported that the Israeli state never asked that Netanyahu participate in the ceremonies, since the Israelis know very well what Warsaw’s response would be if Netanyahu traveled there.

Netanyahu has throughout his political career played politics with the Holocaust, so it is deeply ironic that he cannot attend the ceremony because he is charged with himself having committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Genocide scholars have criticized the use of the Holocaust to justify Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

The ICC issued the arrest warrant for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on November 21, 2024 on the charge of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip, including a charge of deliberately starving the Palestinians there.

The countries that have vowed to arrest the Israeli prime minister if he steps foot on their soil include Spain, Holland, Belgium, Ireland, Lithuania, Slovenia. Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said, “We cannot implement a double standard.”

There is a background to the satisfaction Poland might take in arresting Netanyahu, whose father Benzion Mileikowsky was born in Warsaw. The family changed their name in Israel.

The Poles maintain that the Holocaust was a Nazi German project implemented in part on Polish soil when Poland was occupied and helpless. The Polish parliament in 2018 even passed, and then backed off, a law making it illegal to accuse Poles of having been implicated in the commission of the genocide against the Jews.

In 2019, Netanyahu was quoted as saying in the presence of several journalists, “The Poles collaborated with the Nazis, and I don’t know anyone who was ever sued for such a statement.” He made similar statements on social media, but they were quickly deleted.

Tel Aviv at the time was planning an 8-nation conference in Israel of center-right governments, and the Poles were among the invitees. They boycotted, accusing Netanyahu of racism, which affected the prime minister’s prestige. He then maintained that it was all a misunderstanding and he never said any such thing but had been misquoted.

The two countries clashed again in 2021 over a Polish law limiting any further property claims for damages during the Holocaust. The law was of a piece with the general denial of any Polish culpability in the Holocaust.

Poland has been more sympathetic to Palestinian statehood aspirations than Israel’s right-wing government is comfortable with.

On the other hand, Poland has not itself been vocal in denouncing Israeli actions in Gaza, which Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch categorize as a genocide. Two-thirds of Poles in polling say they don’t want to get involved in the Israel-Palestine dispute.

May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain. (Oath of Maimonides)

Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –

Empathy will never be exhausted as gaza schools and hospitals 

are torn asunder by pilots in fighter jets, their grievances 

transposed from another time and place into strafing refugee villages with clinical precision;

 All good gained from sufferings of times long past, all dissipated by the voracious bombing of innocents as tens of

thousands of women and children are slain with impunity in a violence that rains down upon terrified heads; 

A puzzled drone operator in Gaza asked “when will the Israeli public wake up to the conflagration that has been taking place 

in their name while turning Gaza into rubble…what is it with these kippah-wearing part-time soldiers with their comments: 

“Nova was their Nakba” I see children crawling out from under rubble looking for remnants and yet we keep bombing; Is there no answer to this happening?

Israeli strike kills grandfather of ‘soul of my soul’ his grand-daughter Reem having been killed by an earlier air strike…Ten more killed in one family in Gaza airstrikes on Dec 17

 “Israeli strike In Deir al-Balah in the central Strip killed 10 people, including the city’s mayor, Diab Al-Jaru (Haaretz)

Palestinians have had a millennium of agriculture and olive groves and goat herds with multiple generations of shared 

Values, but eighty years ago dispossession of six million acres took place with 700,000 forced into becoming refugees; The

vacuously cruel insistence that Gazans are human animals, such phrases resonating among a leadership destitute of 

empathy for what they are perpetrating, an inversion of reality allowing victimizers to victimize the unprotected while ignoring 

the bestial state of mind  that justifies the lethality of bombing. smothering truth with unfeeling biblical hair-splitting ;

According the Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, and The Cambridge World History of Genocide, colonial policies included the deliberate genocide of indigenous peoples in North America…Genocide intent includes spreading of disease via the ‘reduction’ of [natives] to densely crowded and unhygienic settlements…population removals to barren ‘reservations…deliberate starvation and famine, exacerbated by destruction and occupation of the native land base and food resources…”Economics should never be above moral issues and human rights issues” (Eitay Mack, Israeli lawyer & activist))

but soon a time comes when they are unable to relieve themselves of guilt and shame nor can they continue to 

manufacture counterfeit glee, excusing themselves from the barbarism of murdering children;  thus do the 

perpetrators of afflictions extend their excuses into the 

moral complexities of trauma, while split-personalities are 

rife with vengeful zealotry, a moral decay that cannot be atoned for multiple generations; This holocaust we are 

witnessing puts to rest “never again” by leaders who project 

evils upon their adversaries, while their own annihilating 

contentiousness is blindingly obvious to the discerning; Will they have recourse to the wailing wall to absolve themselves,

or will they continue to resort to biblical self-praising

while conflating 45,000 massacred civilians, including 16,000 

children with 1500 Israelis killed or taken hostage; War crimes become genocide when demonizing permits normalizing the 

daily erasure of a people by punishing them with gross afflictions; Yet zealots possess a moral schizophrenia 

“Gaza’s Afflictions,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

and an ethical decay that will infuse generations, even though they are genetically entwined and historically linked: 

I’ll tell you what should have been done already yesterday, and many months ago: to shout out for a cease-fire, not only to obtain a hostage deal… but also to protect the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank… We need to protect the Palestinians in the name of a shared future….. Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm

America’s leaders have wrought upon their children’s heads a blame that cannot be erased with well-groomed words; 

Essential thinking is necessary to awaken to conciliation and healing; Did not the Sermon on the Mount preach 

selflessness and love which reflected hillel’s golden rule that “what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow [man]; 

that is the whole torah”; One hundred peace groups in israel acknowledge the golden rule but only one member in a recent 

session of the Knesset supported the genocide case against Israel, and he was suspended, indicating that some minds 

can be elevated above the cruel thoughtlessness of militant leaders; Did not Freud say that Yahweh is one-half volcano god? 

Was not Christ born a Hebrew in Palestine? Are we not all 

haunted by the Law of Unintended Consequences?

“It’s like a Ponzi Scheme that collapses when you stop making a profit. Netanyahu is a believer in magical thinking. He supports a war against Iran, but such a war would be a disaster for Israel. These leaders around him  are resorting to biblical thinking., no longer acting rationally…Its an eschatological end-times thinking which they want to believe….(Alistair Crooke)

Consequences take place in the deep recesses of consciousness, where the majority, in their indifference, gnaw 

upon a mountain of platitudes: tectonic plates move slowly but when they erupt in volcanic action the sudden conflagration 

can change the nature of the world, killing not only the innocent but also the guilty in the holy land; The scales of justice are 

finely balanced between vice and virtue but out of the traumas will come a reckoning; The deadly weapons of mass destruction 

result in the intense trauma suffered by civilians while ten thousand children’s limbs are torn apart by lethal weapons,  

to  float in ghostly parables and nightmarish dreams as the rabbinic zealots of upside down thinking confront truth-telling; 

The renowned Rabbi Yakoov Shapiro noted: “Zionism is poison for the Jews; it is a suicidal ideology…and a liability to the Jews”; 

it does not represent Judaism, it is mythological nationalism; Israel is no longer a safe place but a foreign country and not the promised land”. 

Israel is deeply divided, it  is on the brink of an institutional collapse as the law …a wall between the kingdom of Judah and Israel all over again…Radical rabbis rely on oral Talmud that they maintain is the true Talmud….the clash is profound….all based on magical thinking…Armageddon with Iran means to attack the head of the octopus, while in Gaza the aim is ethnic cleansing so as to plant 50 settlements.(Alaisdair Crooke)

No matter if the “greater good” is called upon to justify horrors, there is nothing holy in massacring human life, 

since holiness is a quality to strive for, not a volcano to feed, while attempting  to ignore finely balanced  scales of justice; 

When the golden rule is so blatantly flaunted there is always and everywhere a reckoning for gross misdeeds and vast

atrocities; The pain and suffering and the taking of land rightly belonging to others, shouts out for deep remorse and moral atonement.

(Jerusalem) – Israeli authorities have intentionally deprived Palestinian civilians in Gaza of adequate access to water since October 2023, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths and thus committing the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. 

In the 179-page report, “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water,” Human Rights Watch found that Israeli authorities have intentionally deprived Palestinians in Gaza of access to safe water for drinking and sanitation needed for basic human survival. Israeli authorities and forces cut off and later restricted piped water to Gaza; rendered most of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure useless by cutting electricity and restricting fuel; deliberately destroyed and damaged water and sanitation infrastructure and water repair materials; and blocked the entry of critical water supplies.

Click below for Report: