Weaponising Scripture?Vatican Newspaper Under Fire for Anti-Israel Op-Ed

Weaponising Scripture? Vatican Newspaper Under Fire for Anti-Israel Op-Ed

An August 7, 2025 opinion piece in L’Osservatore Romano—the Vatican’s official daily—has ignited fierce criticism after accusing Israeli leaders of “weaponising” the Bible to justify the destruction of Gaza. The controversy was first brought to light by journalist Jules Gomes, whose reporting has exposed both the substance of the accusations and the deeper historical context of the paper’s editorial record.

The op-ed, written by Jesuit Fr David Neuhaus, a member of the Holy Land Catholic Church’s Justice and Peace Commission, alleges that former prime minister David Ben-Gurion and current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have invoked the conquest narratives in Deuteronomy and Joshua to legitimise war and even “extermination” of Palestinians. Neuhaus cites Ben-Gurion’s 1937 testimony to the Peel Commission—“the Bible is our Mandate”—as emblematic of this approach, interpreting it as an ideological basis for ethnic cleansing and entrenched discrimination.¹ He further claims that Netanyahu’s quotation of Deuteronomy 25:17 (“Remember what Amalec did to thee”)* (cf. Exod. 17:8-16)² at the start of the Gaza war is a modern echo of the biblical command to destroy Amalec, applied to contemporary enemies.

Scholarly Rebuttal: Distortion and Context Omitted
As Gomes reports, multiple scholars and analysts have rejected Neuhaus’s framing:

• Dr Gavin Fernandes (Hebrew Bible scholar, University of Pretoria) stresses that Netanyahu was offering a historical analogy for resilience in crisis, not transposing a divine mandate into present-day policy.³
• Prof Gerald McDermott (Jerusalem Seminary) calls Neuhaus’s reading a “reckless distortion,” noting that in the same Peel Commission testimony Ben-Gurion affirmed that the land was “their country” for Arabs, pledging “full rights” and promising that “nothing shall be taken away from them.” McDermott also denounces Neuhaus’s revival of the “starvation” accusation against Israel, contrasting it with evidence of extensive humanitarian aid deliveries and Hamas’s theft of supplies.³
• Andrew J. Nolte (Regent University’s Israel Institute) argues that Israel’s actions are governed by existential survival post-October 7, not by conquest narratives, and urges Christians to assess the conflict through the Just War tradition, particularly in light of Hamas’s repeated Geneva-Convention violations.³

A Pattern of Accusation and Historical Echoes
Gomes notes that this is not Neuhaus’s first L’Osservatore Romano column targeting Israel. In May 2025, Neuhaus published “Antisemitism and Palestine”, blaming Israel’s “ruthless war” for rising antisemitism and drawing a moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the Nakba—a comparison widely criticised for its historical and moral incoherence.³

In tracing the newspaper’s past, Gomes recalls that such polemics are consistent with L’Osservatore Romano’s late 19th-century editorial line. In 1898, a year after Dracula was published, the paper ran articles accusing Jews of being “vampires thirsting for Christian blood” and claiming “ALL JEWS need Christian blood every seven years.” In July 1892, during a German ritual-murder trial, it reported that “many unimpeachable witnesses have already established that Jews practice ritual homicides so that they can use Christian blood in making their Passover matzoh.” Even after acquittals, it asserted that “the judiciary is entirely in the synagogue’s control.”⁴

Israeli Diplomatic Pushback
Quoting from Gomes’s coverage, Israeli Ambassador to the Holy See Yaron Sideman responded that history is filled with examples of religious texts being twisted to justify atrocities—citing Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah as contemporary cases. He contrasted this with Israel’s decision-making, which he insists is rooted in concrete security assessments of existential threats, not in biblical interpretation. “Christian-Jewish religious polemics are neither needed nor relevant in this case,” Sideman stated.³

The Holy See Press Office has declined to comment on the matter.

1. Ben-Gurion’s statement to the Peel Commission (1937): “The Bible is our Mandate” (also rendered as “the Mandate is not our Bible but the Bible is our Mandate”), as cited in Gomes’s reporting on Neuhaus’s op-ed.
2. Deuteronomy 25:17: “Remember what Amalek did to thee…,” a text historically interpreted as recalling the enmity of Amalek (cf. Exodus 17:8–16).
3. Scholarly and diplomatic responses: Fernandes, McDermott, Nolte, and Sideman, as reported in Gomes’s August 13, 2025 article.
4. Historical antisemitism in L’Osservatore Romano: archival quotations from 1892 and 1898, documented in Gomes’s investigative account.