Israel: The tomb of the Jewish soul

Separation Wall around Bethlehem

The compelling report published in ICN on June 29 2026: Holy Land: Settler violence forces Palestinians from their homes into worsening conditions - www.indcatholicnews.com/news/55332 - detailing the impact of settler attacks in the West Bank, has coincided with a further UN Commission of Enquiry report into Israel's genocide in Gaza.

This latest UN commissioned report documents evidence suggesting that Palestinian children are being intentionally targeted as part of "a deliberate strategy to destroy the future of the Palestinians in Gaza", and their "very capacity to exist".

The Financial Times recently reported (May 6, 2026) that after visiting Palestinian villages subject to settler attacks in the West Bank, Tamir Pardo (a former head of Mossad) reflected that, "what I saw reminded me of the events that happened against Jews in the last century. I feel ashamed".

That Israel should prosecute a 'final solution' against another people is an unconscionable twist of history. That the brutalized and dehumanized have now become the brutalizer and the dehumanizer is perhaps the gravest tragedy of humankind since the second World War.

Isaiah's words are prescient; 'this people's heart has become calloused, they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes'.

Are these people - in who's name a genocide is being prosecuted - not moved to vomit by the sight of children's burning, diseased or malnourished flesh? Are they not distressed when high-impact weapons target neo-natal, fertility and paediatric hospitals, or by the sniper coldly focusing on a child's vital organs?

If Isaiah's words were prescient, then *Dietrich Bonhoeffer's should mortify all Israel; "silence in the face of evil is itself evil...not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act".

Further, a faith that once stood beside the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger - and taught the world ''thou shall not kill'' - is now surely betrayed?

In the words of Fr Daniel Berrigan (Washington DC, October 1973) 'Israel is becoming the tomb of the Jewish soul'. I would now contend it is that tomb.

Craig RA Hesketh

(Craig is a former Trade Union Official. He lives Greater Manchester.)

*Bonhoffer was an anti-Nazi dissident and vocal opponent of the persecution of Jews during WW2. He was hung by the SS in Flossenberg Concentration Camp in 1945.