As university students in the United States approach the end of a college semester, it is worth considering that many in Palestine don’t have that same opportunity. This is true both in Gaza, where most colleges have been destroyed, and amid the West Bank’s chokehold of checkpoints and settlements. Yet American college campuses are almost devoid of protest.
Voices speaking up for Palestinian human rights are regularly silenced by those—in the U.S. government as well as corporate and civic institutions—who conflate criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism. This problematic conflation continues despite public opinion increasingly turning against Israel’s actions toward Palestinians.
It is in this context that David Neuhaus, S.J., in Conquest or Leaven: Reflections of a Catholic Priest in Palestine/Israel, is compelled to state at “the outset loud and clear” that the “just struggle for an end to the genocide in Gaza and the war throughout Palestine, as well as an end to occupation and discrimination in Palestine/Israel as a whole, must not be defined as antisemitic.” He is particularly well positioned to say so.
The book collects several of Neuhaus’s previously published essays, updated to the current moment, as well as new content. Along the way, his autobiography narrates his awakenings and convictions, revealing a multifaceted life.
Coming from a Jewish family in Germany that fled the Nazis in the 1930s, Neuhaus has a profound appreciation for the grievous harms against Jews wrought by historic Christian antisemitism. This also allows him to open his heart to what he views as another catastrophe, that of the Nakba—the loss of Palestine when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled to make way for the establishment of the state of Israel. Having grown up under apartheid in South Africa, Neuhaus is able to recognize similar structural injustices in “ethnocentric Palestine/Israel.”
Whereas American Catholic views toward Palestine/Israel are largely conditioned by North American Jewish-Christian relations and Western Christian complicity in the Holocaust, Neuhaus’s broader set of experiences yields a more holistic view of the crisis in the Holy Land.
As Neuhaus narrates in the book, he arrived in Israel from South Africa at 15, and a Palestinian Muslim Jerusalemite family took him in as their own. He writes of the deep friendship he developed with Oussama, who introduced him to a new world—a “once-and-future Palestine”—and with whom he reads and begins to treasure the wisdom of the Quran. As an Israeli citizen, Neuhaus became a conscientious objector to a military he saw and continues to see as enforcing “occupation, discrimination and aggression.” In his 20s, he was baptized; he later joined the Jesuits and was ordained a Catholic priest.
Over the years, Neuhaus has served as a Scripture professor for Palestinian seminarians, a leader of interreligious dialogue, a minister to Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel, a coordinator of the church’s work with migrants and a member of a committed ecumenical group, “A Jerusalem Voice for Justice,” made up of Palestinian Christians and other Christians who live in solidarity with Palestinians. Leading Palestinian Catholic theologians are among his mentors; Emeritus Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah provides a foreword to this book, which is dedicated, in part, to Father Rafiq Khoury, a renowned priest of the Latin Patriarchate and expert on the Bible and ministry.
Significant chapters of the book parse the realities of life in Palestine/Israel. One chapter reflects on violence in the Holy Land, including how Israel’s occupation serves as a primary source of injustice, and the importance of nonviolent resistance. Another revisits the impact of the 1947 partition plan and questions whether its two-state proposal remains relevant or realistic—given ever-increasing settlements—or is fully just, given ongoing inequality for Palestinian citizens of Israel.
In a chapter exploring the church’s relationship with the Jewish people and its views on the land and state of Israel, Neuhaus clarifies that the church holds profound “respect for Jewish attachment to the land of Israel” and has definitively rejected the pernicious teaching that saw the “exile of the Jews as divine punishment.” At the same time, he makes clear that the church “does not legitimate Jewish ethnocentricity” in Palestine/Israel. He shares prophetic and anguished critiques of Zionism from such seminal Jewish thinkers as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt while pointing readers to the church’s deference to international law to set “criteria for promoting equality, justice, and peace.”
Later chapters challenge the prevailing Zionist approach by looking at four groups on the periphery of Israeli society, each alienated in its own way by the state’s religious-ethnic character: ultra-Orthodox Jews (who largely oppose Zionism), Jews from Arab countries (“Jewish Arabs?”), the 1990s wave of Russian immigrants (many non-Jews) and Palestinian (unequal) citizens of Israel. Connecting these communities—who are not typically grouped together—to help explore alternative horizons in Palestine/Israel is an example of the stimulating and provocative thinking that characterizes Neuhaus’s writing and way of proceeding.
While Conquest or Leaven is not focused on the role of the United States, a chapter on the Abraham Accords provides an important critical analysis of that initiative led by President Trump, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab and Muslim-majority nations while significantly sidelining Palestinians. The book’s thematic focus of calling Christians not to engage in “conquest” but rather to be “leaven” in their society also offers important resources—and a rebuke—in the face of America’s unconditional support for Israel, fueled in part by Christian Zionism.
Neuhaus describes the role of Christians in Palestine/Israel not as one of isolation or of serving merely as a “bridge” between Jews and Muslims, but rather as part and parcel of the Holy Land; in the last three years, he writes, the Christian voice has resounded in protest of Israel’s genocide and apartheid, seeking to shape a politics rooted in human dignity and a future characterized by justice, peace and equality. American Catholics must also take this question of conquest or leaven to heart—both in advocacy for more just U.S. policies and in addressing the impact of Christian nationalism at home.
The book concludes with a deep reflection on the parable of the good Samaritan and what is at stake in the choice to stop (or not) for the person fallen at the side of the road. As the Israeli Haaretz columnist Amira Hass wrote recently of the horrors of Israel’s project of “erasure” of the Palestinian people: “the world stands by.” Neuhaus posits a different possibility and an invitation to readers: “We refuse to pass you by.” He identifies the fear and self-interest that characterize those who don’t pause to help—“What will happen to me if I stop?” they might ask. He then offers a different question, one rooted in the conviction that God desires good for humanity: “What will happen to the wounded traveler if I do not stop, if I do not act and speak out?”
As Americans, we might ask ourselves a further question: What will happen to me if I do not stop? As citizens of the world’s superpower, what transpires when we stay silent in the face of atrocities, especially ones carried out with our weapons? The grave moral injury this does to oneself and one’s nation must also be attended to. As the late poet Wendell Berry wrote, “When you commit crimes against another you are not only hurting them, you are also damaging your own soul.”
In “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo XIV stressed that, in the face of dehumanization, “ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.” Neuhaus is entreating us to consider the state of humanity in a world that turns away from suffering on such a scale as we have seen in Palestine: more than 74,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, including 20,000 children whom we failed.
In the face of such devastation, Neuhaus seeks to shake the world out of its complacency. By recalling God’s love even when it may seem absent, he points us to the good Samaritans who are prompted to act and “in acting, they keep hope alive.” Such hope can save lives—and also keep us from dying inside. It can be a “life force” amid death and destruction. It is Neuhaus’s prayer that this hope not be extinguished. His remarkable book, rooted in a remarkable ministry and witness in Palestine/Israel, makes that ever more possible.
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