The violence of the clash between Israel and Hamas cannot leave theology indifferent—not even Christian theology. If only because the merciless situation it has produced since October 2023 is taking place in a land that is in some way “holy” to the three Abrahamic religions that inhabit it.
But above all because every time there is an innocent victim in the world, the cry for justice that they represent is not directed only to the unfathomable God, but must also be heard and considered by theology.
So I started reading… Shaul Magid, Judith Butler, Atalia Omer—people who, from within Israel, are trying to find a way to bring justice to the victims. Justice that implies building a new coexistence between two peoples, characterized by a common citizenship that recognizes both of them equally—because both peoples have the right to exist and live in a land they call “theirs.”
In reading these texts that imagine a shared and equitable citizenship to come, I felt I could grasp a kind of common musical fugue—certainly not explicit, but like a background sound clearly present and planted in the hearts of these Jewish scholars. The more I returned to those texts, the more that musical fugue imposed itself on my listening. Yet even for me, who am outside Israel while sharing part of its Holy Scriptures, it was difficult to name the disturbing movement of that fugue.
Because it meant entering the “Holy of Holies” of a faith that is not mine, of a history that belongs to a people to which I do not belong. What right does a foreign theology have to enter into the mystery of the evil suffered by another people, by another religion, by a faith to which, as a Catholic, I owe the historical possibility of being what I am?
But then I thought of the history of my Church, which is also made up of evil inflicted on others, which over the centuries has produced thousands of those innocent victims (in the name of God) whose cry for justice demands to be heard as a duty by the theological thought.
It is precisely the gaze cast not only by other religious faiths, but also by the secular world, that has allowed my Church to see its institutional violence—not only of the past, but also the one still perpetrated today. And so I have tried to take up this call for justice that struggles to find an «heart that listens» (H. Rosa) to it—that fails to prevail over the destiny that two peoples choose or are being forced to choose.
I have looked to Israel and the Jewish people not because they are the only agency of inhumanity that desecrates the “holy” name of the land where our shared humanity is being destroyed, but because the Jewish people—and Israel as its political and institutional expression—preserve something that is unique in the history of Western civilization. Something we call the immensity of the Holocaust.
This is precisely what the musical fugue unfolding in the thoughts of these three Jewish scholars says: that the reaction of the State of Israel, now beyond all proportion (as the Holy See’s diplomacy recently stated), represents a betrayal of the Holocaust—and of the duty of justice that its memory over the centuries entails not only for the Jewish conscience but also for Israel’s politics.
After listening to that musical fugue over and over again, after deciphering it, I enthusiastically wrote a WhatsApp message to the Head of my Department for Geopolitics to tell him that I would like to write something about it. I was convinced that, in this case, theology could say something that politics and diplomacy, for a thousand reasons, could not.
When I saw that the Department’s Head reply was not only immediate, but that he was typing it frantically on his cell phone—and that the dots “Director is writing” kept reappearing on my cell phone screen—I decided to call him to avoid spending the whole morning arguing with the tiny digital keyboard in his hands.
I would summarize the content of our phone call as follows: the article I was proposing on behalf of the Department was a “moral appeal,” but at this moment, the State of Israel and the Jewish people, both those who identify with it and those who condemn it, desperately need to find a way out: concrete, practical, viable, realistic. And a simple “moral appeal,” however well argued, justified, or legitimate, cannot offer what Israel (and, together with it, the Palestinian people) needs.
In other words, if the contribution of theologies to overcoming the dramas and tragedies of our time, the violence of evil that claims victims who should not be, is limited to “moral appeals,” it is than politically, and therefore practically, useless. The reaction of (Catholic) theology to this declaration of uselessness is usually to brand Realpolitik as inhuman cynicism—children are dying, for God’s sake… Ultimately, this is a convenient “armchair quarterback” reaction, because it hides its own inability to offer viable and concrete solutions behind accusations of cynicism directed at the harsh geopolitical reality.
Theology must tear away this veil of self-justification if it wants to honor the victims of both peoples, if it wants to be a public agency of justice and equity in human life precisely where these are denied. Is this also just a “moral appeal”? Perhaps, but I believe it could be more than that.
How can we escape the conditional tense that reduces theology to a mere “moral appeal” in matters of geopolitical affairs? Some steps seem essential to me:
- Do not ask Realpolitik to renounce its “cynicism,” but consider the latter as a legitimate challenge to which theology must respond appropriately.
- Realize that if theology thinks about human affairs, in all their tragic violence, only on its own terms, its “moral appeal” will remain ineffective—capable only of making its own conscience feeling righteous while shifting onto others, in this case geopolitics, the responsibility for failing to stem injustice.
- Theology can honor the justice that is yet to come, of which every innocent victim of violence is the embodiment and representation, only in a counterfactual way—this makes it a “weak” discipline in proposing effective ways out of the reciprocity of murderous violence. On the other hand, the harshness of Realpolitik, which represents its “strength” in outlining possible solutions to the violent degeneration of conflicts between peoples, also comes up against the resistance that the pure actuality of human affairs opposes to the evidence of its reasoning.
- In their own ways, both geopolitics and theology must come to terms with a weakness that hinders their efforts to concretely overcome violence—human, political, and institutional. For this reason, theology and geopolitics should begin to engage with each other with less mutual suspicion. The political weakness of the counterfactual force of theology can be a resource for a geopolitics that does not intend to surrender to the indomitable opposition of the actuality of violence which is constantly regenerating itself among human beings and in international relations among states.
- An alliance between the harsh realism of geopolitics and the counterfactual force of “weak” theology could prove fruitful in shaping a reality of human affairs that can bend the brutality of actual facts as they are in a more just and equitable direction for all.
- Now this alliance needs places where it can be practiced—places that cannot be only academic, however important they may be. Counterfactual ideas and harsh reality must work together in weaving those threads of diplomatic strategy without which the recognition of one side’s reasons will always mean the defeat of the other side’s struggles. Imagining a citizenship shared equally between two peoples, to free them from terrorist violence on the one hand and state violence on the other, identifying within them not only trustworthy subjects but also those willing to trust each other, is the urgent task that geopolitics and theology must undertake together.
