The Terrible Duty of US Bishops to Condemn Anti-Arab Prejudice

It is jarring to read the recent letters Palestinian Christian leaders have sent directly to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) pleading with them to stand in solidarity with the suffering Church in Gaza and the West Bank.

“Homes, churches, and hospitals have been destroyed,” they wrote in a letter just this month. 

Over 50,000 people, the majority of whom are women and children, have been killed. This is not a conflict between equals. It is a campaign of destruction carried out by a powerful apartheid state, supported militarily and financially by the United States and a number of European countries.

In an earlier letter, dated March 25, the same coalition of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christian leaders in the Holy Land called out the USCCB’s collaboration with the American Jewish Committee to promulgate a “Translate Hate” document that the Palestinian Christians said rendered them “invisible and nonexistent in a discourse that directly impacts our lives and communities.”

Notably, the American Jewish Committee is not merely an organization that speaks against anti-Jewish hate. It has also loudly supported the devastating actions of the Israeli military in Gaza under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

And according to the Palestinians’ letter, the “Translate Hate” document our bishops collaborated with the American Jewish Committee to produce fails “to address hate speech propagated on the Israeli side,” rendering it “fundamentally biased” and “effectively turning it into a form of hate speech against Palestinians.” 

In fact, the document 

misrepresents our struggle and seeks to silence voices advocating for truth and justice in the Holy Land. It negates also the immense injustices inflicted upon Palestinians, including the indigenous Christian community whose presence in the Holy Land is on the verge of extinction.

What’s jarring about the language in these letters is just how foreign the pleas sound to our American ears—despite the fact that they amount to a timely lesson in Christianity 101: a call for a modicum of that love between Christians by which Christ said “all people will know that you are my disciples” (John 13:35).

I am in no position to call on the USCCB to condemn anti-Arab hate. 

When I honestly reflected on it last year, I came to the conclusion that, despite my Catholic faith, I’m as prone to anti-Arab (and in particular anti-Palestinian) bigotry as any other American. But upon further reflection, I truly believe that speaking against this deeply-held prejudice is an even greater and more terrible duty now than it ever has been before. 

It takes no courage for me to speak up about it, and I’m sure doing so will cost me nothing—at least nothing of value to me. No, the terrible duty belongs to our bishops.

And I pray that my little effort here will help them find the courage to execute a great effort—the task of roundly, decisively, and publicly renouncing anti-Arab prejudice. Our brothers and sisters in Gaza deserve the effort. And whatever it may cost our bishops, I believe Our Lord will make it up to them a hundredfold.

I call it a terrible duty for three reasons. 

First, because it is urgent in light of the current starvation, killing, and ethnic cleansing being perpetrated against the people of Gaza. 

Second, because anti-Arab sentiment is so thoroughly ingrained in American culture that tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children can die under siege without any disturbance to the collective conscience of the American public.

But that brings me to the third and most terrible reason: Jesus Christ, as He approached His Passion, made a point of associating Himself most intimately with the “least of these brethren”—the vulnerable people who are most undervalued, most directly under threat, and most likely to be ignored even as they face the harshest persecutions and attacks on their dignity as fellow human beings made in the image and likeness of God.

What’s more, Jesus promised that Christians who fail to recognize and live in solidarity with such people will, in the end, be rejected from His kingdom. That’s how intimately our God loves the vulnerable—so fervently that He views those who mistreat the vulnerable exactly as if they had mistreated Christ Himself.

But by the same token, I am writing this to drive home to our bishops what a great honor it is to call these vulnerable people our brothers and sisters.

As you can read on the U.S. Bishops’ website, Our Lord tells us in the Gospel of Mark, 

there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come. (Mark 10:29-30)