Vatican’s “Justice” and “Peace” Official Compares Gaza to Concentration Camp

For some reason, whenever the words “justice” and “peace” are introduced into Christian discourse about the Arab-Israeli conflict, harsh, unreasonable and fantastic anti-Israel polemic is not far behind.

This was demonstrated most recently by the statements from Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace who recently stated in an interview in an Italian newspaper that the Gaza Strip resembled “a big concentration camp.”

Cardinal Martino’s statement provoked an angry response from Jewish groups and from the Israeli diplomatic corps. According to Reuters Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said, “These remarks are untrue, distort the memory of the Holocaust and are only used against Israel by terrorist organisations and Holocaust deniers.”

The New York Times reports that the Vatican has “sought to downplay the cardinal’s remarks.”

The Vatican spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, called Cardinal Martino’s choice of words “inopportune,” and said they created “irritation and confusion” more than illumination.

While calling the cardinal “an authoritative person,” Rev. Lombardi added that “The more authoritative voice and line would be that of the pope.”

This is not the first time Catholic officials have compared Palestinian suffering to that of the Jews in Europe during the Holocaust.

In 2007, a German bishop compared conditions in Ramallah to the Warsaw Ghetto.

Anyone who thinks there are meaningful similarities between the Gaza Strip and conditions in the death camps of Europe during the 1940s should peruse the pages of Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau written by Fr. Jean Bernard. Fr. Bernard, a Dachau survivor, tells a story of regular executions, unending work and tremendous deprivation. While there is suffering in the Gaza Strip, it does not approach the suffering at places like Dachau. And while people were killed at Dachau because they were Jews or members of other undesireable populations, the deaths of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is the consequence of the actions of Hamas, an anti-Semitic authoritarian movement that seeks the destruction of the state of Israel, and targets civilians in an effort to achieve this goal.

Nowhere in Fr. Bernard’s book is there any mention of a desire on the part of the victims at Dachau to perpetrate a genocide against anyone. They just wanted to survive. The vast majority of them did not.