With the Vatican having just announced that “blessings” of homosexual “couples” will be administered in Saint Peter’s Basilica—thus providing a definitive confirmation, as if one were lacking, that we have entered the time of the Great Apostasy—why a second article on the Israel-Palestine conflict? The answer lies in a prophetic parallel I ought to have developed further: that a substantial segment of the Jewish people views the establishment of the State of Israel by force and violence as precisely an apocalyptic sign of Jewish apostasy.
I was prompted to write this piece by an article entitled “Pro-Palestinian Zealotry and the Betrayal of the West,” written by the same author to whom I originally replied regarding her false accusation of “anti-Semitism” leveled against the Editor on account of his justified condemnation of Israel’s immorally disproportionate actions in the Gaza Strip, where the death toll now stands at 23,000 and northern Gaza has been reduced to an uninhabitable wasteland. Here I want to discuss that parallel in greater depth, including its implications for both Church and State.
Even liberal or entirely secular Jews have in recent days risen to oppose what they view as the disordered worship of the Israeli state.
In a monograph entitled “On Three Anti-Zionisms”, the renowned Jewish scholar Shany Mor observes that from its inception as a purely political movement “Zionism was apostasy as far as the Agudists in Poland were concerned. It was a rare point of consensus between hasidim and misnagdim.” And as the Cambridge History of Judaism notes (Vol. 8, p. 516), during the 1930s “For many leaders of Haredi or ultra-Orthodox Judaism… Zionism was an apostasy, a public violation of Jewish law and tradition and a threat to the very continuity of Jewish life”—that is, the life of the Jewish minority in the Holy Land and the vast Jewish majority of the Diaspora. Hence, in 1938, even in the midst of the Great Arab Revolt in Palestine, the anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish group Neturei Karta (“guardians of the city”) described Zionism as “the terrible situation and great calamity that the Jewish community in our holy land and in the Diaspora has been battling for several years”, concerning which, they declared, “the only option” was an integral return to the practice of the traditional Jewish religion as “our only salvation in this dire hour.” The leaders of Neturei Karta viewed the Zionists as “builders of pagan altars.” (Ibid.)
Neturei Karta exists to this day, along with more than a dozen Jewish-run anti-Zionist organizations, running the gamut from progressive liberal to the so-called ultra-Orthodox. As to the latter, the parallel extends itself in a way that should be of keen interest to any Catholic who wants to consider the Israel-Hamas war on a level deeper than a visceral response to Hamas’ atrocities. The “ultra-Orthodox” are regarded by “conservative” and reformed Jews with the same loathing as “Catholic ultra-traditionalists” are regarded by the hitherto unheard-of “conservative” and “reformed” Catholic constituencies that emerged in the Church as a reaction to the ecclesial insurrection launched at Vatican II. Likewise, “ultra-Orthodox” Jews and “ultra-traditionalist” Catholics are viewed as dangerous subverters of the political status quo by government and its stenographers in the legacy media.
Analogously to the “ultra-Orthodox”, traditionalists are simply those Catholics who have not altered the beliefs and practices of their religion to accommodate the now undeniably catastrophic “updating” of the Church since the Council—a process of ecclesial auto-demolition that has reached its terminal phase with the advent of the noxious tyrant who now (even visually) disfigures the Petrine office. The difference, of course, is that our religion has been revealed and established institutionally by the very Messiah the Jews still await and will indeed recognize corporately at the end of salvation history—just as the Jewish scriptures themselves foretell.
And, like the members Neturei Karta, we decry “the builders of pagan altars” in our midst: a movement of ecclesial revolutionaries who seek to harness the Church to secular aims that are opposed to the divine commission. Or, as Pope Saint Pius X put it, “insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants” who belong to “the great movement of apostasy being organized in every country…” Many Jews rightly recognized at the time of the 1948 partition, and continue to protest today, that the creation of the State of Israel is indeed the work of “insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants” who have caused untold suffering not only for the Palestinians, who were forcibly displaced to make way for their creation, but for the Jewish people themselves.
Now, serious Jewish theological objections to the State of Israel as a doomed human enterprise in defiance of the divine plan are quite beyond the comprehension of the war-mongering, pro-Israel zealots in America’s uniparty and their emotivist cheerleaders in the Church.
As the Jewish Encyclopedia recognizes (reprinted here), there is a well-developed “ultra-Orthodox” theology of opposition to not only Zionism but the very existence of a Jewish state as a defiantly irreligious undertaking:
The anti-Zionist world-view of the ultra-Orthodox groups Neturei Karta and Satmar Hasidism perceives Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel as an anti-messianic act, conceived and born from sin. These groups vigorously deny the very legitimacy of the collective political return to the Holy Land and to Jewish sovereignty….
In the words of the Midrash (as expounded by Rashi), the people were adjured not to return collectively to the Land of Israel by the exertion of physical force, nor to “rebel against the nations of the world,” nor to “hasten the End.” In short, they were required to wait for the heavenly, complete, miraculous, supernatural, and meta-historical redemption that is totally distinct from the realm of human endeavor. This waiting over two millennia manifests the very essence and singularity of the Jewish people, expressing their faith in divine providence, in the assurance of the prophets, and in messianic destiny…. “Unless the Lord build the house, its builders labor in vain; unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman keeps vigil in vain” (Psalms 127:1)
Accordingly, any Jewish political revival that is not messianic intrinsically represents a denial of divine providence and of the hope of redemption; it is a betrayal of the destiny and uniqueness of Israel. The attempt to hasten the End, to return by physical power to the sphere of political–and certainly military–history is a collective revolt against the kingdom of heaven, an aggressive aspiration to overstep human boundaries into the realm reserved for God–just like the deeds of the generation of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1 -9). This is an act of the devil, a demonic outburst of unclean forces that may not be corrected. It is ultimately doomed to failure, regardless of human deeds: “The Lord shall rebuke you–the Satan who has chosen Jerusalem” (paraphrasing Zechariah 3:2).
Do I mean to suggest that the State of Israel must be destroyed? On the contrary, any attempt to destroy it would run athwart of Catholic just war principles, would have no prospect of success, and would cause vastly more harm than good. For better or worse, the State of Israel is a fait accompli, and not only the Palestinians but the whole world must live out the consequences of its creation, as indeed its Orthodox opponents warned. Regarding those consequences, the redoubtable Col. Doug MacGregor, one of the few voices of reason on the insane U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, warns—here echoing Orthodox Jewish admonitions—that Israel might well destroy itself by triggering a vast regional war with the surrounding Arab states as Netanyahu attempts to “finish off everybody in the neighborhood” while the U.S. continues to be the dog wagged by the Israeli tail. Said MacGregor back in November:
I simply think we need to end the fighting. Israel itself is at high risk. If we want Israel to survive, it is now in our interest and Israel’s interest for this to halt, this killing in Gaza. If this goes on for another month, what we’ve been talking about—this slow but steady coalescing of [anti-Israel] forces in the region—that will reach a point where finally everyone says: “That’s it. No more. We’re attacking. We have a holy obligation to the Muslims Arabs in Gaza and on the West Bank. They’ve all been through too much. We will attack.” That’s where we ought to focus right now. That’s why we need to stop this thing. And there are Israelis who understand this. It’s a slim majority at the moment that backs Netanyahu and what he wants to do, because everyone is emoting and wants revenge, revenge, revenge.
Now, serious Jewish theological objections to the State of Israel as a doomed human enterprise in defiance of the divine plan are quite beyond the comprehension of the war-mongering, pro-Israel zealots in America’s uniparty and their emotivist cheerleaders in the Church. They continue to defend anything and everything Israel does to “defend itself” against the very people it has displaced by force and for nearly 60 years has confined to a veritable concentration camp that Israeli bombs have now reduced to rubble. They have no conception of why Orthodox rabbis are now raising the Palestinian flag in West Jerusalem itself or why, as my friend Anne Rao has witnessed, only days ago Orthodox Jews drove two SUVs up Sixth Avenue in Manhattan with “horns honking, Palestinian flags flying from the windows, and signs on the back that said ‘Every real rabbi is anti-Zionist.’”
As Jewish division over the existence of the State of Israel and its conduct should make clear to Catholics, there is no morally compelling reason to support an endless war on behalf of a purely political entity in the Middle East against the Middle Eastern people originally displaced by its founders, whose most zealotic successors now seek to expel that same people entirely from Gaza.
But let it not be thought religious opposition to pro-Israel zealotry is confined to orthodox Jewish believers. Even liberal or entirely secular Jews have in recent days risen to oppose what they view as the disordered worship of the Israeli state. Consider the recently released film “Israelism”, whose producers explain its theme on the film's website: “When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the brutal way Israel treats Palestinians, their lives take sharp left turns. They join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity.”
The film, which I have watched from beginning to end, makes it clear that the filmmakers despise Donald Trump and are appalled at how the Jewish community, including even Abe Foxman, has praised him for his support of Israel. Thus, remarkably enough, pro-Israel zealotry stands condemned as the worship of a latter-day golden calf from both ends of the Jewish political spectrum: from the “ultra-Orthodox”, who are overwhelmingly Trump voters despite his pro-Israel stance (as are the vast majority of Catholic traditionalists), to the Jewish left, which joins the “ultra-Orthodox” in rejecting “Israelism”—a quasi-religion—yet views Trump as an “existential threat to democracy.”
As Jewish division over the existence of the State of Israel and its conduct should make clear to Catholics, there is no morally compelling reason to support an endless war on behalf of a purely political entity in the Middle East against the Middle Eastern people originally displaced by its founders, whose most zealotic successors now seek to expel that same people entirely from Gaza. We now see what the goal of pro-Israel zealots was from beginning: ironically enough, a unitary Israeli state “from the river to the sea.” Hence the right wing of the Knesset, represented by two senior ministers, today speaks openly of “the voluntary [!] migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees” so that that “Israel will permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip,” while the parliamentary left wing condemns that very idea as akin to “to Nazi calls for ‘Lebensraum’, or living space” and equivalent to “inciting genocide”, and warns that “A day will come and these two senior ministers in the Israeli government will stand before an international tribunal for war crimes.”
The critics of my first article failed, or refused, to understand the point that pro-Israel zealotry is as much a threat to the peace of the world as pro-Palestinian zealotry, if not more so. And that fact is quite apart from the distinct and undeniable threat radical Islam poses to the West as a whole. One commenter seriously remarked that “Africans and people from Muslim nations, all found a way to move to a new place… How come the Gazans don't move away?”— to which another pro-Israel zealot (an utter boor) responded: “Bravissimo!! Few people in the West (especially in the Catholic Church) realize how satanic Islam actually is.” But if all two million Gazans are “satanic”, how would forcing all two million of them into other countries solve, as opposed to infinitely exacerbating, the problem of their “satanic” presence? The critics of the position I defended are blind to the obvious reality that Islamic terror has unquestionably been bred in large measure by what has been done to the Gazans by pro-Israel zealots.
And all of this is happening 2,000 years after the Jewish people left the region in the Diaspora whose occurrence was foretold by Our Lord Himself: “And they shall fall by the edge of the sword and shall be led away captives into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down by the Gentiles till the times of the nations be fulfilled.” As a Jewish friend of mine has put it: “The idea of establishing an ancient real estate claim is actually unprecedented and mind-blowingly ahistorical. Who does that? It would be like the Powhatan Indians reclaiming Virginia as their own and ethnically cleansing towns of Virginians.”
Pro-Israel zealotry will not save us from the threat of Islam; it will only guarantee an endless expansion of the threat along with endless violence in the Middle East.
Yes, of course, we face what the author who prompted my first piece has since rightly described as “an existential divide between Western civilization and a culture that celebrates death, and glorifies terrorists, in order to subjugate all mankind to Allah.” But effective opposition to radical Islam does not lie with zealotic support of Israel, no matter how many thousands of Muslim women and children it bombs into oblivion. That way leads only to an exponential increase in the threat Islam poses to us all. Our opposition to Islam must take the form of Christian resistance embodied in the laws and institutions of the nations that once comprised Christendom. But that will require nothing less than another miraculous reconversion of the Western world, which is what the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart will surely involve before the end of days. Meanwhile, however, the West has thrown open its gates to the barbarians of Islam. What folly it would be, for the sake of Israel, to drive still more of them though those open gates into our midst, there to plot revenge for the fanatical support of Israel that bred them in the first place.
The author who prompted my original piece has written that “Of far greater import for the future of the Church is the Israel-Hamas war. In the fate of Israel lies the fate of the Church.” This author, like so many other pro-Israel zealots among Catholics, exhibits the same theological confusion condemned by the consistent Jewish witness against Zionism: “the fate of Israel” cannot be identified with a merely human creation installed by military force between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in 1948. That creation, to recall the Orthodox testimony above, is “a denial of divine providence and of the hope of redemption; it is a betrayal of the destiny and uniqueness of Israel… a collective revolt against the kingdom of heaven, an aggressive aspiration to overstep human boundaries into the realm reserved for God.”
The pro-Israel zealots in the Church have failed to appreciate the resounding prophetic congruence between the Orthodox witness against Zionism and the New Testament’s witness concerning the true fate of Israel—meaning the fate of the Jewish people as realized in the End Times, not an ephemeral nation-state erected in the mid-20th century by a political movement with the aid of the United States and Great Britain, and kept in power since then only by an endless supply of money and arms. As Saint Augustine explains in City of God (XX.29):
It is a familiar theme in the conversation and heart of the faithful, that in the last days before the judgment the Jews shall believe in the true Christ, that is, our Christ, by means of this great and admirable prophet Elias who shall expound the law to them…. For so far as regards the Jews, God has His heart turned away from our Christ, this being their conception about God and Christ. But in their case the heart of God shall be turned to the Son when they themselves shall turn in heart, and learn the love of the Father towards the Son.
Today’s Catholic pro-Israel zealots are heedless of the teaching of Saint Paul, the greatest Jewish convert in salvation history: “For I would not have you ignorant, brethren, of this mystery, . . . that blindness in part has happened in Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles should come in. And so all Israel should be saved as it is written: There shall come out of Sion, he that shall deliver, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob.” (Rom. 11:25-26). Seen from a traditional Catholic perspective, which happens to align with the Orthodox Jewish perspective on the blindness of the Zionists, the blindness of Israel is only perpetuated by pro-Israel zealotry even liberal Jews have decried as “Israelism”—the worship of a nation state that justifies any atrocity in its name.
In truth, it is pro-Israel zealotry that is a betrayal of the once Christian West because it commits Western nations to a defense of what Orthodox Jews see as nothing less than the vehicle of Jewish apostasy, in consequence of which the flames of radical Islam have been fanned into a regional conflagration that threatens the entire globe.
Pro-Israel zealotry will not save us from the threat of Islam; it will only guarantee an endless expansion of the threat along with endless violence in the Middle East. As I finish writing this piece, the United States and Great Britain have launched another undeclared war in the Middle East with dozens of bombing raids on alleged Houthi rebel positions in Yemen. And who are the Houthis? Yet another group of radical Islamists raised up by “US and Israeli influence in the Middle East”, who have allegedly been attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea in response to—what else?—Israel’s US-supported devastation of the Gaza Strip. Yet it was the Houthis who, less than three years ago, were delisted as a terrorist group for humanitarian reasons by the sane Biden administration that is now bombing them.
At the same time, the war-mongers in Congress, led by the jingoist buffoon Mitch McConnell, are clamoring for war with Iran after Iran seized a tanker filled with Iraqi crude oil in retaliation for the U.S. seizure of the very same tanker a year ago, when it was filled with Iranian crude. Yet the Biden administration has funneled tens of billions of dollars into Iranian coffers by lifting sanctions on oil sales and making a direct payment of $6 billion to Tehran in exchange for five hostages—with all those billions enabling Iran to fund none other than Hamas in its war against Israel! And so it goes, on and on ad infinitum, as the United States perpetuates the very crises it cites as justification for endless war in the Middle East—all for the sake of Israel.
In truth, it is pro-Israel zealotry that is a betrayal of the once Christian West because it commits Western nations to a defense of what Orthodox Jews see as nothing less than the vehicle of Jewish apostasy, in consequence of which the flames of radical Islam have been fanned into a regional conflagration that threatens the entire globe. To allude to the prayer of Pius XI we traditionalists recite each year on the traditional Feast of Christ the King, only the Lord of History will deliver the world from “the darkness of Islamism”—not the Knesset, or the IDF, or war-mongering fools here and in England. And only the Lord of History will determine the fate of the people of Israel, still unfailingly beloved by Him, in that time when, as we pray on the Feast of Christ the King, the Blood of the Savior will “descend upon them a laver of redemption and of life.”
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