Page 50 - October 7 - Teresa Pirola

Israeli-Palestinian conflict (5 May 2019).
However, the refusal to ‘take sides’ can also be a flawed position. As reasonable as it sounds, it doesn’t always fit the facts, especially in the current crisis, where on one ‘side’ of those doing the fighting is an officially designated terrorist organisation named Hamas.
On the side of Hamas stands two other designated terrorist organisations, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, backed by the regime in Iran—all entities with a violent and openly antisemitic agenda. Together, they seek the destruction of the State of Israel and the genocide of Jews. They make no secret of this. The failure to oppose Islamist or Iranian extremism is horrendously problematic for a Catholic’s moral conscience. ‘Not taking sides’ in this situation is like saying we shouldn’t side against the Nazis. We’ve been here before, and it didn’t end well— not for Jews, and not for the moral standing of the Catholic Church either.
The ‘we mustn’t take sides’ stance overlooks this problem and shows little interest in distinguishing the extremist agenda of Hamas from legitimate Palestinian aspirations and causes for justice.
The other difficulty with the ‘we mustn’t take sides’ position is its unspoken subtext: taking sides is perfectly acceptable if you are subtly siding against Israel. There are many examples of Catholic media focusing their coverage of the Middle East crisis almost entirely on the horrific suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, with little or no attention given to the atrocities that occurred against Israelis on October 7, the ongoing attacks on Israel and displacement of its citizens, the plight of the hostages or the dramatic surge in antisemitism that followed October 7.
There are also those Catholics who blame Israel for the massacre, citing ‘75 years of Israeli oppression of the
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