The Vatican’s daily newspaper, known for antisemitism, has accused Israel’s founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion and current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of weaponizing the Bible to obliterate Gaza.
L’Osservatore Romano, in an August 7, 2025, op-ed by Father David Neuhaus, says Israel’s leaders have used the conquest narratives in Deuteronomy and Joshua to justify extermination of the Palestinians.
Father David Neuhaus, says Israel’s leaders have used the conquest narratives in Deuteronomy and Joshua to justify extermination of the Palestinians.
For Ben-Gurion, Joshua “was the historical model for the conquest of the Land of the Bible by the People of the Bible, then as now,” writes Neuhaus, a member of the Holy Land Catholic Church’s Justice and Peace Commission. He argues Ben-Gurion’s “biblicism” was responsible for the “the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israeli territories, and the entrenched discrimination against Arab citizens in the State of Israel.”
Neuhaus cites Ben-Gurion’s testimony to the Peel Commission in 1937: “On behalf of the Jews, I say that the Bible is our Mandate, the Bible that was written by us, in our language, in Hebrew, right here in this country. This is our Mandate. Our right is as old as the Jewish people.”
Netanyahu is “heir to Ben-Gurion’s legacy of using the Bible to legitimize and further consolidate the occupation,” Neuhaus contends, noting that the prime minister’s quoting of Deuteronomy 25:17 (“Remember what Amalek did to you”) at the start of the Gaza war is “a chilling reminder of how the Bible can be used to promote war and hatred.”
“Amalek, described in Exodus 17, is the archetypal enemy of the Israelites, and they are commanded to exterminate him and his descendants. Netanyahu, his allies, the Israeli settler movement, and those who commit acts of violence against Palestinians continually draw on biblical language to justify their acts of death and destruction,” Neuhaus observes.
Biblical scholars and experts on Israel criticized Neuhaus for cherry-picking Ben-Gurion’s testimony and distorting Netanyahu’s allusions to Scripture. “Netanyahu is offering a historical example of hazardous times as a beacon of contemporary warning,” Dr. Gavin Fernandes, Hebrew Bible scholar and research associate of the University of Pretoria, explained. “This is not the same as taking ancient utterances that granted a divine mandate to a people existing thousands of years ago and transposing them directly into contemporary geopolitical claims.”
“Neuhaus’s ideological hostility to the nation of Israel beggars belief.”
As per Ben-Gurion, Gerald McDermott, distinguished professor of Theology at Jerusalem Seminary, explains, “Neuhaus alleges that Ben-Gurion’s testimony to the Peel Commission used the Bible to justify extermination of Palestine’s Arab population, yet Ben-Gurion said the land is also ‘their country,’ the Jews want to grant them ‘full rights,’ and vowed ‘nothing shall be taken away from them.’” He continued, “This is a reckless distortion of history and irresponsible inversion of facts. While the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] have overseen the delivery of millions of tons of food and Hamas has stolen food for its terrorists, Neuhaus uses the discredited ‘starvation’ smear,” McDermott, author of Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity, noted. “Neuhaus’s ideological hostility to the nation of Israel beggars belief.”
Speaking from Israel, Andrew J. Nolte, director of the Israel Institute at Regent University, explained how “the paradigm that Israel’s applying is not Joshua; it’s existential survival after 10/7.” Nolte stressed: “The paradigm that Christians should be applying is the Just War paradigm, which requires an analysis of military necessity as Israel applies it, and this requires this reckoning with Hamas’s repeated violations of the Geneva Convention.”
Neuhaus’ column was not the first calumny he published in L’Osservatore Romano. On May 7, 2025, he published a column entitled “Anti-Semitism and Palestine,” in which he blamed Israel’s “ruthless war against the Palestinians” for the rise in antisemitism, drawing a moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the Palestinian flight from Israel in 1948.
“History is filled with examples of religious scriptures ... being used either in the service of good or manipulated to carry out evil.”
Unfortunately, for L’Osservatore Romano, Neuhaus’ antisemitism is the rule rather than the exception. In 1898, a year after the novel Dracula was published, the paper accused Jews of being vampires thirsting for Christian blood. A July 1892 article on a German ritual murder trial noted: “Many unimpeachable witnesses have already established that Jews practice ritual homicides so that they can use Christian blood in making their Passover matzoh.” When the ritual murder trials resulted in acquittals, L’Osservatore Romano claimed that “the judiciary is entirely in the synagogue’s control.”
Israeli Ambassador to the Vatican Yaron Sideman explained that “history is filled with examples of religious scriptures, in any religion, being used either in the service of good or manipulated to carry out evil. Perhaps the most striking example of the latter is the perverse interpretation of religion by radical Islamic groups—such as Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah—to justify the most horrific acts of violence they commit, in the name of God, against any group of people who do not adhere to their version of Islam.” Sideman cited the shouts of “Allahu Akbar” [God is great] by Hamas terrorists as they murdered, raped, tortured and kidnapped on October 7, 2023, as one example. “When Israel, however, takes security-related decisions, decision makers don’t open a Bible and interpret texts, as Mr Neuhaus might suggest. Rather, Israel takes the best course of action it deems necessary to defend itself against very tangible, existential threats levelled against it. Christian-Jewish religious polemics are neither needed nor relevant in this case.”
The Holy See Press Office did not respond to a request for comment.
