One year ago, Israel experienced a large-scale, coordinated attack by the Palestinian-Islamic terrorist group Hamas, marking one of the most violent and deadly incidents in the region in years. The attack resulted in the deaths of more than 1,400 Israelis in one single day — including women, children and elderly people. The scale of death in such a short period was unprecedented in Israel’s modern history.

More than 200 individuals were taken hostage in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack, with only half accounted for now — one year later. In retaliation, Israel launched a significant air and ground operation in Gaza, resulting in heavy casualties there, as well, with thousands of Palestinians, including civilians, being killed. 

The deliberate targeting of civilians by Hamas, including the massacre of entire families, the execution of innocent people and reports of brutal acts like torture, rape, and desecration of bodies, shocked the global Jewish community and much of the world. The horrifying nature of the attacks recalled memories of genocidal violence and persecution against Jews throughout the short history of the nation of Israel and, of course, the Holocaust. 

Hamas attacked Israel as part of its goal to eliminate Jews and the Jewish state, a core tenet of its ideology. Since the creation of modern Israel in 1948, Jews have faced continuous existential threats from neighboring Arab nations and terrorist groups. Unlike other countries created after 1948 in the Near East, Israel is the world’s only Jewish-majority state. While there are 157 Christian-majority countries and 57 Muslim-majority ones in the world, Israel is the sole Jewish-majority nation. 

Twenty-one percent of Israel’s population is non-Jewish, including Muslim Arab Israelis, Christian and Aramean (non-Arab Christian) Israelis, Druze and other religious and nonreligious minorities. And the reality of being targeted and hated is not unfamiliar to me as an Eastern Catholic of Egyptian-Armenian extraction. Last year was also a devastating year for the Armenian nation, as 120,000 of us were literally starved to death and eventually kicked out of our ancient homeland known as the Nagorno-Karabakh region in the Near East. 

I often speak to my Jewish friends about the shared vulnerability and the sensibility that, after literally thousands of years, we are still a targeted and hated nation. After the Hamas massacre Oct. 7, just a couple of weeks after the Armenian expulsion, Jews have felt that fragility in a singular way. 

Adding salt to the wound is, of course, the betrayal in some quarters of the West. I have felt this betrayal keenly as a first-generation American. My family came here to enjoy freedoms born from the dignity of the human person as understood from the Book of Genesis. And yet, there is lately so much hostility in America to the roots of our freedoms. The Hamas attack exposed a resurgence of hatred that I never imagined witnessing despite the reality that antisemitism had been on the rise well before the war started. 

I met a recent college graduate — a Jewish girl also of an Egyptian background — whose sorority tried to kick her out twice after the attack. Of course, this is one comparatively undramatic story of the hundreds of violent attacks against Jews before or since Oct. 7. In other words, antisemitic manifestations disguised as anti-Zionism. 

One of the accusations against Israel is that its inhabitants are of Eastern European extraction and not native to the land. We know this is biblically and historically untrue; and in this girl’s case especially untrue, as her family are Jews from Egypt. In fact, most Jews in Israel are Mizrahi Jews — Jews expelled from Arab countries.

My parents, who were born and raised in Cairo, had Jewish friends — friends who eventually had to flee to Israel, the only safe space left for them as Egypt became more radicalized. For Armenians, Egypt was our safe space from the Ottomans — until that same radicalization that affected our Jewish neighbors led to our emigration to the United States in the 1970s.  

This pattern of Jew hatred transitioning to Christian hatred is neither new nor surprising. My grandmother, who lived through the complexities of life as a Christian in the Middle East, was once told by a Muslim grocer, “Today the Jews; tomorrow you.” This chilling statement reflects a reality that many of us, especially in the Christian-minority communities of the region, have known for generations: When Jews are persecuted, Christians are next. Indeed, Pope Benedict XVI reminded us that to be antisemitic is also to be anti-Christian. The hatred of the Jews is never limited to just them. A Jewish friend of mine reminded me of a recent billboard in Philadelphia that said something to the effect of “Christians, you are next.”  

And when it comes to the Jews, the phrase “From the River to the Sea” is not a phrase invented in 2023 after the Hamas attack or a peaceful call for a two-state solution. It’s another phrase for another “final solution” (to borrow Hitler’s words): No Jews or Israel at all.  

Cardinal Francis George famously said he expects to die in his bed, his successor in prison, and his successor’s successor as a martyr in the public square. The same people who hate Jews and Israel, at the same time, hate Christians, America and the West.

This hatred is in Islamist theology. Supporting Jews and Israel is in ours, albeit not in the same way as it is for non-Catholic Christians. Catholic Zionism (Zionism simply meaning the right of Israel to exist apart from any other unnecessary connotations) is not about eschatology or dispensationalist theology. Its essence is captured and expressed most simply in the words of Pope St. John Paul II, who said during his 1986 visit to the Great Synagogue in Rome:

“We therefore have relations with you that we do not have with any other religion. You are our beloved brothers and, in a certain way, one could say our elder brothers.”

One of the most moving gestures of Jewish-Catholic relations moving off the pages of an ecclesial document and into real life is when Franciscan Father Dave Pivonka and Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, opened up their doors to Jewish university students who felt unsafe on their college campuses due to being targeted in the aftermath of Oct. 7. The gesture of hospitality did not go unnoticed among my Jewish friends and colleagues. Even before Oct. 7, the university was immersed in the planning stages of a conference that became the launching pad for the founding of the Coalition of Catholics Against Antisemitism. The signatories are the names, faces and voices our Jewish brothers and sisters need to hear these days. Jewish-Catholic relations must not remain a lofty theological concept but a lived reality with the deep and profound conviction of St. Paul the Apostle, in his Letter to the Romans 11:18: “You do not support the root, but the root supports you.” 

In the most recent aggression against Israel, this time from Iran, which launched 181 ballistic missiles on Oct. 1, 2024, a Jewish friend of mine wrote — In my (bomb) shelter everyone was singing. The eternal people are not afraid of the long road.

And neither should we be afraid. To speak up and stand up for our Jewish friends is not a sentimental act, but in a real and true spiritual sense, an act of solidarity with our own people.