ROME — The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has blasted Pope Francis for picking “sides” against Israel in the ongoing conflict in Gaza.
The pope “has taken a side in the Hamas-Israel war. The headlines all have ‘pope,’ ‘Israel,’ and ‘genocide’ in them—a great victory for anti-Israel forces,” the board stated in an op-ed this week.
As Breitbart News has reported, in a book-length interview with Hernán Reyes Alcaide titled Hope Never Disappoints: Pilgrims Towards a Better World, the pontiff called for a “careful investigation” by international experts to see whether Israel’s military actions in Gaza meet “the technical definition” of genocide.
“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” the pontiff stated in the book, excerpts of which were published last Sunday.
Pope Francis had already described Israel’s military incursions in Gaza as “terrorism” and a “massacre,” but significantly escalated his rhetoric by suggesting that Israel’s actions may constitute genocide.
“There is something disturbing about a pope accusing Jews — the victims of genocide themselves — of genocide while they are fighting for survival on several fronts against enemies aiming to destroy them,” the journal’s op-ed asserts.
“Especially after the barbarous Oct. 7 massacre of unarmed Israeli civilians that started the war, and the follow-up Hamas strategy of using innocent Palestinian civilians as human shields,” it adds.
By his use of the word genocide, “Pope Francis has not moved Gaza any closer to peace,” the WSJ editors state. “All he has done is give aid and comfort to the enemies of the Jewish people and all civilized society.”
Pope Francis’s words also sparked a swift reaction from the Israeli Embassy to the Holy See, which refuted any comparison between Israel’s military operations and a genocide.
In a statement published on X, the Embassy said: “The massacre of October 7 was a genocidal massacre against the people of Israel. Israel is acting in accordance with international law and in self-defense. Any attempt to call this self-defense by another name is to single out the Jewish state.”
This past week, an Italian Holocaust survivor also rebuked Pope Francis for suggesting that Israel’s actions in Gaza could be considered “genocide.”
“Genocide is something else. When a million children are burned to death, then you can talk about genocide,” said the 93-year-old Edith Bruck in an interview Monday with the Italian daily La Repubblica.
A Hungarian-born Jew and survivor of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen, Bruck said that the bloodshed in Gaza is a “tragedy that concerns us all,” but insisted that Israel is not attempting to eliminate the entire Palestinian population.
That is rather “something Hamas wants to do,” she said, noting that Hamas has said it “wants to wipe out all the Jews in the entire world.”
The risk of using the word “genocide” too easily is that it diminishes “the gravity of real genocides, using the word when it is not appropriate. Genocides are something else,” she said.
“The Armenian genocide was a genocide. The million children burned in the ovens of Auschwitz was a genocide, along with the other five million Jews, who also burned in the concentration camps,” she declared.