The new play Giant has revived the scandal of Roald Dahl, the beloved children’s author whose antisemitism became inseparable from his legacy. Dahl’s hatred had its roots in an obsession with Israel, especially after the 1982 Lebanon War, which hardened into something older and darker: Jews as a collective object of blame. Political fury dissolved the line between a state and a people.
Matt Chun shows where that road now leads.
Chun is an Australian children’s book illustrator, part of a profession entrusted with shaping how children understand innocence, cruelty, and empathy. But when Jews were murdered at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration in Bondi, his response in an article title “Never mourn a fascist,” exposed something far beyond political critique: raw antisemitism. The victims were neither Israelis nor soldiers. They were Australian Jews gathered in communal celebration, among them a ten-year-old girl. Chun denied their innocence and treated their deaths as politically qualified, as though Jewish identity itself diminished the claim to grief.
People stand near flowers laid as a tribute at Bondi Beach to honour the victims of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, in Sydney, Australia, December 16, 2025. (credit: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone)
That marks the evolution. Dahl saw war and blamed Jews. Chun sees Jews and explains away their murder.
That is why the cancellation of Chun’s forthcoming children’s book Bila by University of Queensland Press was fitting. Children’s books are an act of trust. Parents place them in their children’s hands believing that the people behind them understand something fundamental about innocence and human worth. A creator who cannot recognize the innocence of a murdered Jewish child at a Hanukkah celebration has forfeited any claim to shape the moral imagination of children.
Dahl’s antisemitism traveled through Israel before landing on Jews. Chun begins with Jews.
Chun wrote that “lands have been pillaged, poisoned, desecrated, and set ablaze by colonisers,” as he celebrates the slaughter of people at a holiday party. Alas, he is only the latest author instilling venom in the ink of books being marketed to children.
When rabbis portray Israel as a moral problem instead of a Jewish inheritance
Two progressive rabbis – Sharon Brous and David Ingber – sat before a packed Jewish audience in San Diego for a taping of the podcast Being Jewish with Jonah Platt, to wrestle with a distinctly modern Jewish dilemma: how does a tradition forged in exile process the return of Jewish power?
The subject was the rabbinate and Israel, but the deeper argument was Judaism itself.
The language was familiar: fear, shame, democracy, moral crisis. The question underneath it was older than the state and older than Zionism itself. What exactly is Judaism when Jews are sovereign again – and what does that mean for diaspora Jews?
That question is increasingly dividing Jewish life.
For years the pattern has been visible in polling, synagogue life, philanthropy, and communal politics. The further left a Jew moves politically, the more likely that Jew is to become publicly critical of Israel. The less traditional the Jewish framework, the more likely that criticism expands beyond policy into discomfort with Jewish statehood itself. Orthodox Jews criticize Israeli governments all the time, often fiercely, but they rarely place Jewish national existence itself in the dock.
That difference is not merely political. It is theological. It is civilizational.
Because traditional Judaism has always answered the question of Jewish identity in integrated terms: God, Torah, peoplehood, and land. These are particular to the Jewish people. They embody one structure. Remove one and the architecture strains. Remove the land and Judaism survives, but in suspension.
Diaspora Judaism became one of history’s great civilizational achievements, but it was always an adaptation to rupture. The prayerbook points toward Jerusalem. The festivals move according to the agricultural rhythms of the Land of Israel. The fast days mourn national destruction. The closing line of the seder and of Yom Kippur pushes in one direction only: next year in Jerusalem.
That was never metaphor. It was memory preserved as architecture.
For traditional Jews, Jewish self-rule is not simply politics. It is Jewish history restored. Such belief does not make every Israeli government wise or righteous. Jews argue bitterly over borders, settlements, courts, wars, and coalitions. But beneath those arguments lies a premise that remains fixed: Jewish political agency is indispensable.
Progressive – and especially non-Orthodox – Judaism increasingly begins somewhere else.
Its center of gravity is ethical universalism. Its first question is increasingly not what preserves Jewish continuity, but what satisfies universal justice. That instinct has deep Jewish roots. The prophets placed moral obligation at the center of covenantal life. But prophets do not run borders.
States do.
States defend territory, absorb casualties, deter enemies, and make violent decisions under imperfect conditions. Sovereignty stains the hands. Once universal ethics become the supreme framework, the Jewish state itself becomes vulnerable to indictment.
That is what the Brous–Ingber exchange revealed with unusual clarity.
And it was revealing precisely because it did not end in one room.
Their first conversation exposed a tension neither side could settle. Sharon Brous spoke from the prophetic register of progressive Judaism, where Judaism is primarily moral witness, conscience, and justice. David Ingber, while sharing much of that moral vocabulary, kept returning to something older and deeper: peoplehood, continuity, solidarity, historical necessity.
The disagreement lingered.
Brous later acknowledged discomfort with how the exchange unfolded, and the conversation resumed in a second round on Jonah Platt’s podcast. That itself was revealing. One debate became two because the argument underneath it could not be resolved by clarifying policy or refining moral critique. The disagreement was structural.
And in that second conversation, the divide remained.
Brous continued pressing the prophetic burden, insisting that Jewish moral credibility depends on confronting Jewish power when it acts unjustly. Ingber continued defending something prior to critique itself: the necessity of Jewish collective power in a world that has repeatedly shown its appetite for Jewish vulnerability, especially in light of the widespread antisemitism today.
One critiques Israel primarily as a moral actor, the other defends Israel first as a historical necessity and only then wrestles with its conduct.
It is the difference between inheritance and indictment.
And this internal Jewish struggle is increasingly being exported into the wider world, where it is eagerly consumed.
This week in the United Kingdom, leading progressive rabbis warned that Israel’s political direction poses an existential threat to Judaism itself, tied to the publication of their new book. The phrase was startling.
Israel as an existential threat to Judaism.
For two thousand years, existential threats to Judaism had names: the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the Crusades, the Inquisition, pogroms, the Holocaust, Soviet repression, the expulsions from Arab lands.
Statelessness itself was the existential condition.
Now, for growing sectors of progressive non-Orthodox Jewish leadership, the Jewish state itself is increasingly being cast as the danger.
That is more than criticism. That is inversion.
And notice who was eager to amplify it.
The Guardian, a British publication whose editorial posture toward Israel has long been sharply critical, gave the book and its thesis prominent space. That matters because internal Jewish dissent carries unique public utility in anti-Israel discourse. Criticism from outside can be dismissed as hostility. Criticism from inside acquires the authority of confession.
Progressive Jewish critique often assumes its audience shares its covenantal investment in Jewish survival. The wider world often hears something simpler: if even rabbis are indicting the Jewish state, the case against it must already be proven.
That is one of anti-Zionism’s most valuable currencies: Jewish testimony against Jewish power.
Not because Jewish dissent is illegitimate. Jewish argument is one of Judaism’s oldest arts. But once internal critique detaches from internal solidarity, it stops functioning as family argument and starts functioning as prosecutorial evidence.
The family dispute becomes public exhibit.
And this is where traditional Jewish memory diverges sharply from progressive Jewish moral instinct.
Traditional Jews remember something progressive Jewish politics often struggles to metabolize: the central danger of Jewish history was never Jewish power: It was Jewish powerlessness.
The Holocaust was not a lesson in the abuse of Jewish power. It was a lesson in the consequences of Jewish defenselessness.
Then came 1948 and Jewish agency returned.
And within years, the map of Jewish history changed. Ancient Jewish communities across Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and Morocco collapsed into expulsion, flight, and dispossession. Hundreds of thousands found refuge in Israel.
That memory disciplines judgment. It teaches realism.
Progressive Jewish consciousness inherited a different lesson from modernity: nationalism corrupts, power must be constrained, minorities must maintain moral vigilance.
There is wisdom in that inheritance – as a modifier, not as a ruling ethos. A beleaguered minority does not have the luxury of abandoning all rights and power to satisfy the mob.
That is what Zionism answered, not abstractly but operationally.
German Jews once believed they had solved history. They were cultured, integrated, patriotic, indispensable.
History did not care.
American Jews should similarly be cautious with assumptions of permanence.
Because beneath every synagogue fight, every anguished podcast, every progressive Jewish book tour, lies the same civilizational argument: is Judaism an inheritance to preserve, or a moral vocabulary to deploy?
These have become competing theories of Jewish survival.
For two thousand years Jews prayed toward Zion because history taught them exile was fragile. Progressive Judaism increasingly asks whether Israel deserves that loyalty, while traditional Judaism believes the land is central to Judaism and disagreements are best managed internally.
Whether in public or private discussions, the policies of Israel are becoming an exhibit in the philosophical rift between progressive and traditional Judaism.
There’s a fundamental difference between Yom HaZikaron and how most countries remember their fallen. In many places—think of Memorial Day in the U.S.—remembrance exists alongside distance. Time has passed, wars feel historical, and public life has moved on. The rituals are real, but they share space with long weekends, travel, sales, and barbecues.
In Israel, there is no distance.
Israel is small. Military service is near universal. Loss is not abstract or inherited from history books—it is current, personal, and interconnected. The name read on television is rarely just a name. It is a classmate. A neighbor’s child. A cousin of a colleague. And beyond the battlefield, the victims of terrorism—on buses, in cafés, in homes—collapse any illusion that war lives somewhere else.
There is no clean line between soldier and civilian. The same people who argue politics, build companies, and raise families are the ones who serve, and sometimes die, in uniform. The same streets that carry ordinary life have carried violence. So when the siren sounds, it is not symbolic; it is recognition. The cost of survival has been paid by people just like you—often people you actually knew.
Other countries observe remembrance days. Israel mourns.
In a synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, far from the sirens of Israel, that truth took human form.
At Temple Emanu-El in New York City, before an audience of more than a thousand people, Rachel Goldberg-Polin sat in conversation with Dan Senor. The setting was the diaspora. The subject was the same wound.
Temple Emanu-El in NYC for talk with Dan Senor and Rachel Goldberg-Polin on April 20, 2026 (photo: FirstOneThrough)
Her son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, had been injured during the October 7 Palestinian Arab attacks, taken hostage into Gaza, and held for more than a year before being killed in the tunnels. She had come to speak about a book she wrote in response to a question people kept asking her: how are you doing?
The answer was not linear. It was not hopeful in the way people expect hope to sound. It was precise.
Pain wrapped in love. Love wrapped in pain.
She described her life now in three periods: before October 7, the time of her son’s captivity, and the period after his death. Not stages of healing. Not steps toward closure. Distinct worlds, separated by something irreversible.
And then she said something that lands differently once you understand Yom HaZikaron.
She does not believe things should get better with time. She does not understand why much of the world holds that as aspiration. The wound is there. Permanent. The task is not to erase it, or soften it, or move beyond it. The task is to carry it—together with the love that created it—in full.
Forever.
That is not just a mother speaking. It is the emotional grammar of a country.
Yom HaZikaron is not designed to heal. It is designed to remember without dilution. To hold loss and love in the same space and refuse to let either fade. To insist that what was lost remains present, not as history, but as part of the living fabric.
In other places, remembrance days ask for reflection. In Israel, and for those bound to it, the day asks for something harder: to accept that some wounds are not meant to close.
A siren sounds. A country stops. And what fills the silence is not only memory.
It is love that refuses to let go, and pain that refuses to fade.
The talks in Gaza are stuck on a single question: when does Hamas disarm? Hamas wants Israeli withdrawal first. Israel wants the dismantling of Hamas’s military capacity. Gazans want Hamas to retain weapons. Every side is waiting and pointing.
So the sequence matters.
In Washington, the argument has hardened around pressure on Israel. Democratic senators like Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, Tim Kaine, and Chris Van Hollen have pushed versions of the same idea: use U.S. leverage to change Israeli behavior now. The assumption is clear. The U.S. can influence Israel. It cannot influence Hamas.
It is backed by far-left pro-Palestinian groups like J Street. It is juvenile, dangerous and devoid of critical strategic thinking.
J Street, once again, on the wrong side of history
If all the pressure is on Israel, Hamas learns the simplest lesson in negotiation: wait. Let outside actors squeeze your opponent. Hold your position. Time becomes leverage.
That is where the current approach sits and breaks. And everyone suffers.
A negotiation like this needs a visible incentive on both sides. Hamas has faced pressure only from Israel – military and economic – but almost no credible pathway that links its own actions to a reduction in the conflict.
That is the missing piece.
Set a clear rule: as Hamas verifiably disarms, Israel correspondingly reduces its military posture and need for resupply. Less threat, less armament.
Now the logic runs forward, and resets the debate in Washington. The current fight among Democrats—arm Israel or restrain it—misses the hinge. If Hamas is disarmed, Israel needs fewer arms. That is mechanics, not politics.
Using a pressure stick as the far-left senators are attempting, rewards the antisemitic genocidal terrorist group, ensuring the fighting never ends. Using a pressure carrot entices Hamas to give up its weapons, allowing the US to pull weaponry from Israel.
The world has long only thought of pressure as a stick with the only variable being to whom to apply it. It is time to imagine a pressure carrot, especially when the party with the greatest power believes it has no influence on the entity that blocks every path forward.
At Buchenwald concentration camp, the ground holds ash. It exists for a single purpose: to remember the industrial murder of Jews. The expectations are clear without being written—restraint, silence, humility.
Buchenwald concentration camp
Bring a keffiyeh into that space and call it “expression” and the word collapses under the weight of context. Symbols do not travel untouched. In that setting, it reads as intrusion—present politics laid over a site of extermination. Memory for mockery.
Yet the pro-Palestinian Arab mob wants to remind Jews that the genocide of Jews is not just in the past but in the present. They want their right of “free expression” precisely where it can hurt Jews the most. The right to bring a cause onto ground that was meant to remind people “never again” was targeted with “again now.”
In their antisemitic zeal, they push the opposite at Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. For centuries, Jewish prayer has pointed toward this place. Yet the pro-Palestinian crowd demands Jews be barred- not only no free expression but no freedom of religion.
“Status quo!” and “Provocation!” used very selectively, when Jews are the target.
The same principle—expression—stretches in one place and shrinks in another.
Expanded to override the norms of a concentration camp. Constrained to block prayer at Judaism’s holiest site.
That is the pattern.
It is not only a double standard. It is a antisemitism squared.
The past is diluted when a site of Jewish death is treated as open terrain for contemporary symbolism. The present is constrained when Jewish prayer is treated as a threat rather than a right.
Buchenwald should demand humility before the dead. The Temple Mount should allow the living to pray.
When those principles reverse, the fracture is not rhetorical. It is civilizational. And the pro-Palestinian camp continues to reveal the profound “deformity in its culture,” and how it revels in Jew hatred.
Spring break arrives and the terminals fill. Families in flip-flops inch forward. Teenagers clutch boarding passes. Parents juggle passports, snacks, and patience. The line barely moves. Weeks later it repeats on Passover and Easter: travel with checkpoints.
While it feels like inconvenience, it is much more.
It is memory. It is cost. It is consequence.
The line begins with the September 11 attacks, when operatives from the genocidal jihadist group al-Qaeda boarded planes as passengers and turned them into weapons. Nearly three thousand civilians were killed in a single morning. The attack followed a clear logic: target civilians in the West, maximize scale, use the openness of modern Democratic systems against themselves.
Out of that morning came the Transportation Security Administration. The bins. The scanners. The choreography of shoes, belts, and laptops. A system built to harden what had already been breached.
It continues today at scale.
The United States still designates a range of these Islamic superiority groups as terrorist organizations:
al-Qaeda
Islamic State (ISIS)
al-Shabaab
Boko Haram
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan
Hamas
Hezbollah
They differ in leadership, geography, and strategy yet converge in one place: the justification of violence against western civilians in the name of radical Islam.
Hamas makes the convergence unmistakable. Its founding charter is replete with calls to kill Jews and destroy the Jewish State. Its leadership has framed the conflict in absolutist terms. And on October 7, its fighters carried out coordinated attacks that deliberately targeted civilians—families in homes, people at a music festival—turning them into instruments of terror in a way that was both intentional and public.
Different names and different flags. Same methodology and targets.
Those jihadi ideas do not stay contained to a battlefield. They reshape daily life.
It shows up in synagogues and churches where doors are locked and guards stand watch during prayer. In stadiums and concerts where bags are checked and perimeters hardened. In city streets lined with barriers. In subway systems with armed patrols. In office buildings where access is controlled and monitored.
Islamic extremist Salman Abedi and his brother Hashem Abedi bomb Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, UK
Everyday life has been redesigned around the possibility of civilian targeting.
Every traveler standing in a TSA line is paying part of that price. Every secured synagogue, every guarded stadium, every hardened entrance carries the same cost.
TSA lines at American airports
Aviation remains a focus for a reason. It concentrates civilians. It symbolizes openness. It offers reach. So the security system stays because the threat did not disappear.
As in Israel, faced with daily threats.
Spring break travelers do not think about jihadi ideology when they remove their shoes. Families heading to a Passover seder or an Easter gathering do not connect their delay to Islamic extremist networks.
But they are connected.
To a morning in September. To an idea that still circulates. To organizations that still recruit, plan, and attack.
Which are now being promoted and protected by elected officials and a socialist-jihadi alliance growing inside the West.
Civilization reveals itself most clearly on a highway. Not in speeches, not in policy, but in how people move when no one is in charge.
Watch long enough and you will see the whole of society pass by.
There is the nervous driver. Hands clenched. Eyes darting. Checking mirrors, shoulders, blind spots, and then checking them again. Twenty miles an hour in a lane built for sixty. Every decision delayed, every movement tentative. They do not mean harm, but they cause it anyway. Traffic bunches. Others brake. The rhythm breaks. Their insecurity becomes everyone else’s problem.
Then there is the other kind. The overconfident driver. No signal. No glance. No pause. They cut across lanes as if physics were optional and other people were props. High beams on, blinding anyone in their path. They do not doubt themselves, which is exactly the problem. They move fast, loud, and wrong, leaving everyone else to react.
And then there is the third type. The one you barely notice. The competent driver. They check their mirrors, but not compulsively. They signal, they merge, they move with purpose. They understand the road is shared space. They are neither timid nor reckless. They are simply capable.
And this is not a story about driving. It is a map of how people move through the world.
Every organization, every community, every institution, every family is filled with these same three types. The insecure. The reckless. And the competent. We like to pretend the difference is about intention or ideology or background. It is not. It is about capacity. The ability to function in a shared system without forcing everyone else to compensate for you.
The insecure person does not trust their own judgment, so they slow everything down. Meetings drag. Decisions stall. Progress waits for reassurance that never fully arrives. They believe they are being careful. Others experience them as paralyzing.
The overconfident person has the opposite problem. They trust themselves too much without the discipline to match. They move before understanding. They decide before listening. They assume outcomes will bend to their will. Others experience them as chaos.
Here is the part people do not like to say out loud: both types resent the third. They do not just resent competence; they reinterpret it as wrongdoing and personal slight.
The insecure look at the competent and see a threat. Proof that the world can move without constant hesitation. So they question them. Undermine them. Suggest they are reckless or insensitive. “You do not know your place,” and “you are too big for your britches” and other insults fly. Anything to explain away the gap.
The overconfident look at the competent and see a constraint. Someone who refuses to play along with their improvisation. Someone who insists on reality. So they attack them. Call them rigid. Accuse them of stealing. Anything to avoid confronting their own lack of discipline.
In both cases, the reaction is the same. Lash out at the person who works within the system, rather than confront the behavior that breaks it.
Over time, this creates a quiet moral inversion. The people causing friction claim victimhood. The people maintaining order are cast as the problem.
The people who cannot act blame those who can. The people who act without thinking blame those who impose structure. And the people in the middle, the ones who actually keep things functioning, absorb the cost.
Competence rarely gets credit because its success looks like nothing happening at all. Meanwhile, those who cannot function easily do not just flail on their own but pull down as many as they can.
On elite campuses, something more consequential than protest is unfolding. Jewish life is being redefined by extremists.
Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and “Jews for Liberation” present themselves as the authentic moral voice of Jewish students. They speak in the language of justice, liberation, and equality that resonates with their peers. But strip away the branding and the position is blunt: the Jewish state is illegitimate and cast as a project of racial supremacy, apartheid, even genocide.
That is not critique. That is an argument for erasure.
The danger is not only that these claims are false. It is that they are being laundered into the mainstream through the fig leaf of Jewish identity. When anti-Israel activism is voiced by non-Jews, it is political. When it is voiced by Jews, it is marketed as moral truth. Then the fringe becomes credible and slogans become scholarship. Eliminationist ideas acquire the authority of internal dissent.
That shift matters.
Once Israel is no longer seen as a flawed state – much like others – but as an illegitimate one, every boundary collapses. If the state itself is the crime, dismantling it becomes justice, and whatever follows can be rationalized as liberation.
This is how language is turned into a weapon.
Mainstream Jewish campus institutions have not met this moment with equal clarity. Groups like Hillel are focused, rightly, on building Jewish life: community, ritual, continuity. They create space. They avoid litmus tests. They keep doors open. But when the central attack is not on Jewish practice but on Jewish legitimacy, generality reads as hesitation.
When others define Zionism as racism, it is not enough to respond with programming and belonging. The argument has moved to first principles. It demands an answer at that level.
And so a vacuum has opened.
Into that vacuum have stepped the loudest voices, not the most representative ones. The result is a distorted picture of Jewish opinion, one in which the extremes are visible and the center is absent.
That center needs a voice of its own.
Not a mirror image of the anti-Zionist fringe. Not a reaction that turns legitimate security concerns into collective hostility toward all Arabs. But a clear, unapologetic articulation of what most Jews actually believe, and what a sustainable future requires.
That position is not complicated.
The Jewish people have a right to sovereignty in their historic homeland. Israel must remain secure and capable of defending itself against those who seek its destruction. Terrorism and the glorification of violence are disqualifying, not contextual. No serious political future can be built on a culture that celebrates October 7 or teaches that murder is resistance.
The “two-state solution” is treated as moral doctrine, as if repeating it resolves the conflict. It does not. Self-determination is not a slogan tied to a single map. It can take different forms across different political arrangements. Millions of Palestinian Arabs have held Jordanian citizenship. Others live under varying structures of autonomy. The real question is not whether self-determination exists in theory, but whether any proposed structure can produce stability rather than violence.
A future Palestinian state, if it is ever to emerge, must come after a profound transformation: demilitarization, institutional reform, and an educational shift away from incitement and toward coexistence. Statehood is not an entitlement. It is a responsibility.
This is baseline reality, yet it is rarely stated plainly on campus.
A new kind of Jewish student group is needed, one that is explicit where others are cautious and disciplined where others are reckless. A group that centers Israel not as an abstraction but as a living, embattled state. One that can say, without hedging, that Jewish self-determination is legitimate, that its delegitimization is dangerous, and that moral seriousness requires both strength and restraint.
Such a group would do three things differently.
It would reject the language trap. Words like apartheid and genocide would be treated not as serious analysis but as distortions that inflame rather than illuminate.
It would refuse the false binary. Supporting Israel does not require abandoning moral judgment. Rejecting terror does not require rejecting an entire people.
It would re-anchor the conversation in reality. Israel exists. Threats are real. Peace requires conditions, not just intentions.
The goal is not to win an argument in a seminar room. It is to prevent a generation from being taught that the existence of the world’s only Jewish state is a moral error to be undone.
Campus Jewish life needs a mainstream voice that is willing to speak clearly – and be heard.
There are moments when language has to carry more than meaning. It has to carry memory. It has to carry consequence. When the subject is the death of Jesus and the role of Jewish leadership in that story, every word is loaded with two thousand years of fallout.
That is the backdrop to a recent homily reported by Vatican News, where the Pope recounts how members of the Sanhedrin planned to put Jesus to death and frames the decision as a political calculation rooted in fear.
On its face, this is familiar terrain. The Gospel of John tells that story. The Pope emphasizes fear, power, and the instinct of leadership to preserve order when threatened. He broadens the lesson, warning about “hidden schemes of powerful authorities” and concluding that not much has changed when we look at the world today. It is a universal moral frame, the kind clergy have used for centuries to draw a line from ancient texts to modern behavior.
But this is not a normal moment, and that is not neutral language.
We are living through a surge in antisemitism that is not subtle, not isolated, and not theoretical. Jews are being targeted in cities, on campuses, and online. The State of Israel is being recast in mainstream discourse as uniquely illegitimate, even genocidal. The old accusations have not disappeared. They have been updated, rebranded, and redeployed. In that environment, the space between what is said and what is heard narrows dangerously.
The Catholic Church knows this better than anyone. For centuries, Christian teaching around the Passion narrative fed the idea that Jews, as a people, bore responsibility for the death of Jesus. That charge—deicide—did not stay in theology. It moved into law, into mobs, into expulsions and massacres. It became part of the architecture of antisemitism in Europe.
The Church confronted that history in Nostra Aetate, a landmark statement of the Second Vatican Council. The declaration made clear that Jews as a whole, then or now, cannot be blamed for the death of Christ. That was not a minor clarification. It was a doctrinal line drawn after catastrophe, an effort to shut down a pattern of interpretation that had proven lethal.
Successive Popes understood what that required in practice. Pope John Paul II did not rely on implication. He spoke directly, repeatedly, calling Jews “our elder brothers” and making visible gestures that reinforced the message. Pope Benedict XVI went further in precision, arguing explicitly that references to “the Jews” in the Gospel of John describe a specific leadership group, not a people across time. They closed interpretive doors because history showed what happens when those doors are left ajar.
That is why the current language matters. “Religious leaders saw Him as a threat.” “Hidden schemes of powerful authorities.” “Not much has changed.” None of these phrases, standing alone, violates Church teaching. None explicitly assigns blame to Jews today or draws a line to the modern State of Israel. But they operate in a space that has been misused for centuries, and they leave enough room for that misuse to return.
In a different era, that looseness might pass without consequence. Today, it does not. The categories are too easily mapped by those already inclined to do so. “Religious leaders” becomes “rabbis and synagogues.” “Powerful authorities” becomes a stand-in for Jewish power, whether the government of Israel or leaders in the Jewish diaspora. “Not much has changed” becomes an argument for continuity from the first century to the present. And in a climate where Israel is already being portrayed as a moral outlier among nations, the slide from scripture to contemporary politics is not a leap. It is a small step.
This is not about intent. The Pope is speaking in a long Christian tradition of drawing moral lessons from the Passion. The emphasis on fear and political calculation is, in fact, a move away from older, more dangerous framings. But intent does not control reception, especially when the subject has such a charged history.
The standard here cannot be whether the words are technically defensible. It has to be whether they are tight enough to prevent foreseeable distortion.
Because the distortion is not hypothetical. It is already happening in the broader culture. Jews are being pushed out of public spaces, treated by default as representatives of a state and a government they may or may not support, whether they live there or not. Israel is singled out in ways that strip context and complexity, recast as uniquely evil in a world that has no shortage of brutality. In that environment, any rhetoric that can be bent toward those narratives will be bent.
The Church has done the hard work of confronting its past. It has the doctrine. It has the precedent. What it needs, in moments like this, is the discipline to match.
Abraham had two sons. That is not only history; it is the underlying structure of the Middle East.
From Isaac came Jacob (Israel) and the Jews. From Ishmael came peoples that would become much of the Arab world. One father. Two lines. A separation that began in a household and expanded into history.
“And the thing was very grievous in Abraham’s sight… and he sent her [Hagar and Ishamael] away” (Genesis 21:11–14)
A rupture in youth. Ishmael into the wilderness. Isaac remaining with the covenant, inheritance, and land. Two trajectories set before either became a nation.
They meet again only once.
“And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah” (Genesis 25:9)
The text records a moment that refuses to disappear: the separated sons standing together over their father.
History widened the gap.
The descendants of Ishmael became many: spread across vast geographies, largely Muslim, with enduring Christian communities. The region became overwhelmingly Arab.
The descendants of Isaac became few. Driven out, dispersed, conquered repeatedly, yet carrying something that would not yield: memory, covenant, and a fixed orientation toward their promised land.
Eventually, they returned. A small people, back in a narrow strip of that land, surrounded by a region that traced itself, at least in part, to the other son.
That imbalance defines the present.
Then something shifted.
The Abraham Accords – named for their common forefather – introduced a different possibility. Arab states choosing open relationship with Israel, shaped by economics, technology, security, and a recognition that the region was already changing beneath older narratives.
A shared pressure point sharpened that shift: Iran.
A Muslim non-Arab power, Persian in identity and imperial in ambition, projecting influence across Arab capitals and against Israel alike, forcing alignments that would have seemed implausible only years ago.
The Accords opened a door for a new future. Now widen it.
Bring the Abraham Accords to Hebron.
Bring them to the Cave of Machpelah, the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Jewish matriarchs as well. The place where the text records Isaac and Ishmael standing together.
Let the leaders of Israel and the Arab world stand there.
Let it be an invitation – especially to Saudi Arabia – to step fully into this framework, not only as a strategic actor but as a central inheritor of the Abrahamic story.
Let it also be a reminder closer to the ground.
To Jews and Arabs living in the disputed lands east of the 1949 armistice lines (E49AL) that includes Hebron, that their conflict sits inside a much older relationship. They are not strangers placed side by side by accident. They are descendants of a shared origin, living out a divergence that began long before modernity created borders.
Ishmael did not return to neutral ground. He came back to the land understood to be Isaac’s inheritance. He stood with his brother there and buried their father.
That moment carries a clarity that history has often obscured: the land of Israel is the Jewish home.
The Arab world does not disappear in recognizing that. It becomes something stronger—anchored in reality, aligned with its own long-term interests, and reconnected to a shared origin that was never erased.
The Abraham Accords can move from alignment to acceptance.
Hebron is where that truth can be stated without abstraction.
The region has spent centuries replaying the separation.
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States can choose, now, during their common battle against Iran, to stand again at the place where Isaac and Ishmael met thousands of years ago, and acknowledge what each brought with them when they arrived: a common bond and their own roots in the region.
First One Through 