The Vatican Against Israel

For over a century, and for over 50 years after the Holocaust, the Vatican has been hostile to the creation of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East with its capital as Jerusalem. For 60 years after the Jewish State gained independence in 1948, the Catholic Church adopted a policy fitting to Israel's Arab-Islamic enemies: total non-recognition of Jewish statehood and peoplehood.

Despite acceptance by every Western nation, Israel was not accorded formal diplomatic recognition by the Vatican before 1993. The Church formally recognized Israel's existence only two decades after Israel's foe, Egypt's Sadat, signed a peace treaty with the Jewish State. Apparently only the Vatican considered the State of Israel undeserving of its recognition.

How do we explain this refusal?

Catholicism had long viewed Judaism as a pariah faith and the Jews a group destined to wander the earth for their complicity in the death of Jesus. Although the Second Vatican Council partially revoked this anti-Semitic doctrine in 1965, since then the Vatican rapprochement with the Jewish people took place at two levels, which the Vatican separated, theologically and politically. Each advance on the first plane was counterbalanced by a deeper regression on the second, as if the two movements were synchronized. The closer the Vatican seemed to draw toward reconciliation and dialogue with Judaism, the louder grew the clamor supporting the Arab cause against Israel.

The Vatican Against Israel: J'ACCUSE deciphers, for the first time, the Vatican's criminalization of the State of Israel and its appeasement of anti-Semitic terrorism in the period between 1945 and 2013.

This book urgently matters not only to Jews, but also to Christians, since the two religions share moral values and a common scripture. Jesus was Jewish, and for better or worse, Jews and Christians have lived together in Europe and the Middle East for 2000 years. In fact in many parts of the Christian world, Christians have rediscovered their Jewish roots.

With its more than one billion adherents and strategic influence in the Middle East where Israel is under existential threat by Islamic terror groups and an Iranian apocalyptic revolution, the Vatican has an intrinsic relationship with Israel different from Israel's relationship with any other group. How the Vatican will relate to Israel and its Jews will affect future relations between Christians and Jews. With Israel still establishing the terms of its existence and the Zionists' current struggle for their own future, the Vatican has the chance to redeem its past mistakes. Will it do so?