(Crux. John L. Allen Jr.).
Just as Israel continues to deploy its military “hard power” on the Gaza strip, defying international pressure to back down, so too it shows no signs of halting its “soft power” campaign either. On the contrary, Israel is pursuing a relentless war of words against any party it believes guilty of false moral equivalence between terrorism and self-defense, or of trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes. One such “soft power” front is with the Vatican, as Israeli officials, in tandem with a cohort of Jewish leaders from around the world, are asserting that influential Catholic figures are displaying “moral blindness and/or lack of integrity,” to use the language of one such recent protest.
Three skirmishes in just the last ten days capture the dynamics of this soft power standoff.
First up was a May 8 essay published by L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, and on the Vatican News site, written by Jesuit Father David Neuhaus, who currently serves as a professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem and a member of the Justice and Peace Commission for the Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land.