Although the Vatican has a role to play in bringing peace to Palestine, Ukraine and a thousand other conflict arenas, it must really do much better than Fr Neuhaus’ feeble, Jesuitical effort to square circles and justify the unjustifiable.
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This recent Vatican News article on anti-Semitism and Palestine is worth reading and reflecting on in its entirety. The first thing to note is that is author, Jesuit priest David Neuhaus, is a convert from Judaism and is now a senior figure within the Israeli/Palestinian Catholic Church as well as a Professor of Scripture in “Israel and Palestine” to where his Jewish parents migrated from South Africa as part of .Aliyah, Israel’s so-called Law of Return, for any South African, Irish or American Jews who would like to set up shop in their “ancestral homeland” in the Holy Land.
Thus, whether Neuhaus likes it or not, no matter how much of the zeal of the convert he may have, he has a dog in the fight and, rightfully or not, his article and, by extension, the views of the Catholic Church, have to be seen through that prism. This is not to immediately dismiss Neuhaus out of hand but to say that his article, no more than anyone else’s, is not Gospel.
Speaking of the Gospel, Neuhaus does himself no favours when he harps on about the alleged antipathy within the Bible towards the Jews. For a start, from a Jewish point of view, Jesus’ Holy Week antics were not only scandalous but totally blasphemous as well and Pontius Pilate was quite right to want nothing to do with their internal theological squabbles.
As Christianity secured a foothold, the Bible’s later books moved away from the earlier Jewish demographic as it tried to recruit Greeks and other more literary types to its cause. Not only were other prophets such as Simon, from whom we get the sin of simony, roundly pilloried but many of the early heretical sects were so off the wall they would have made even Charles Manson look like a moderate.
Although Luther, the father of German nationalism, detested Jews so much that his words were used as a defence in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, the Reformation was about land grabbing and votive taxes, not about Biblical interpretations, an obvious truism, given that less than 5% of Germans could even read when Luther started his rampage and that army manuals, rather than Biblical critiques, were the best sellers of his day.
Coming up to more modern times, German Jews were not part of the volk; they earned their crust money lending, peddling and exploiting their fellow Jews. Though much the same forces were at play in Imperial Russia’s Pale, it is important to note that not all of those Jews who fled the Pale had been victims of pogroms. This is particularly the case in Ireland, whose Jews, including Israel’s all-powerful Herzog clique, came from two distinct villages in the Pale, neither of which had ever experienced a pogrom. Their tales of persecution in The Pale, in Ireland and, later, in Mandate Palestine were self-serving lies from beginning to end.
We had, in essence, two sets of Jewish groups, the early Hispanic (Sephardi) ones who had excellent international networks centred around the Bevis Marks synagogue and the mish mash of exploited and exploiting Jews who poured out of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German Empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although these characters could often be seen punching the living daylights out of each other over quasi theological matters in Dublin, Belfast, Limerick, Cork and Ireland’s other main cities, turning coin rather than turning to Zion was their main concern.
Interestingly enough, many of these “Irish” Jews later set sail for Neuhaus’ South Africa once the Boers had been Holocausted. Gold rather than Zion was, again, the magnet. If one is to now argue that those wandering Jews, who got to Zion via the Pale, Ireland and South Africa now have a right to build their laagers over the skulls of martyred Palestinian children, that is a big call that can only be sustained by a mountain of lies and doublethink.
Not that the South African-Israeli-Palestinian Neuhaus does that. He kicks off by mentioning some anonymous, American “urbane professor of English literature” who condemns the Jews for, among other tropes, killing Jesus and for libelling Hitler and his 1000 year Reich. I regard that as a bare-faced lie if, for no other reason, that any American “urbane professor of English literature” would be far too circumspect to talk like that unless he wanted to be fired and blacklisted the very same day.
Having first established that anti-Semitism, whatever that is, permeates all nooks and crannies of American society, he insists that Jews remain our primary victims and conflates alleged anti-Semitism in America with the unspeakable nightmare the people of Gaza are currently experiencing.
Having given us a tiresome paragraph or so of how “the Jews” have been the most oppressed people ever, he then tells us that “Anti-Judaism mutated into anti-Semitism at the dawn of modernity and gathered impetus in the second half of the nineteenth century”. Though he makes this preposterous claim by saying that anti-Judaism took on an economic face, economics was always at the centre of discrimination against Jews, American Indians, the Boers or anyone else. What Neuhaus has done by conflating historical anti-Judaism with anti Zionism is to begin conflating those forces with Zionism and the hardships the Palestinians and the wider Arab family are now suffering. That is beyond dishonest.
The fact is, contrary to Neuhaus’ claims, because the Jews of Ireland, Britain, South Africa, Australasia and the Americas were never discommoded by Hitler’s purges, all of those, such as the Herzog family, who washed up in Palestine and Israel are thieves, pure and simple, without a moral leg to stand on.
In turning his attention to the Palestinians, Neuhaus begins by informing us that “The catastrophe for the Jews of Europe during the Shoah became a Palestinian catastrophe too in the twentieth century.” But the fate of Europe’s less fortunate Jews, just like the fate of America’s Indians, Australia’s Aboriginals or South West Africa’s Hereros has absolutely nothing to do with the Palestinians and there is no reason, bar all that flowed from the morally bankrupt Balfour Declaration, why they should still be getting it in the neck over any of that.
Neuhaus’ favourite word is “many” which he uses in such plug sentences as “Many insist that the Shoah is incomparable to any other human tragedy and no comparison is intended here”. But because Neuhaus keeps plugging away at the Shoah without asking how “many” Palestinians, Herero and Tasmanian aboriginals agree with him, it seems he is pushing a nefarious agenda with his “many” repetitions.
Not that the Palestinians are forgotten as Neuhaus then tells us that “anti-Semitism has also found a home within the Palestinian, Arab and wider Muslim world” and he refers to the Quran and related Hadiths to explain that, as if the mass expropriation of their lands and the mass expulsions and massacres of their people by entitled European “Jews” has nothing to do with it. Most Jews won’t even admit to any of that but say that the Palestinians just decided to pack their bags and leave in 1948 just like Gaza’s Aboriginals are currently going walkabout into the Sinai or onto the pier Israel’s American collaborators have readied for them as part of their Final Solution.
Although Final Solutions are something we are supposed to oppose, there are a number of Final Solutions playing out this very day in front of our eyes and the question is how can we make Never Again a reality, rather than just another propaganda weapon in NATO’s well-stocked arsenal. Although the Vatican have probably clapped themselves on the back for publishing this well-balanced article, not only is it nowhere near enough but it will change absolutely nothing on the ground in Gaza or on the West Bank, where this modern Shoah continues.
If Pope Francis wants to be made an instrument of St Francis’ peace, then both Vatican News and the debating halls of the Vatican itself should be thrown open not only to Fr Neuhaus but to Anglicans like Rev Stephen Sizer who, like his saintly namesake who also spoke truth to power, has been pilloried and martyred to an unconscionable degree for propounding the Palestinians’ case. Although the Vatican has a role to play in bringing peace to Palestine, Ukraine and a thousand other conflict arenas, it must really do much better than Fr Neuhaus’ feeble, Jesuitical effort to square circles and justify the unjustifiable.
