A story widely reported last week posed in acute form a dilemma for Catholics not only over how we should regard the state of Israel, but also over how we should respond to what really does sometimes seem a condition approaching paranoia determining the way in which Israelis regard us.
 
In a typically rumbustious editorial comment, the Jerusalem Post summed up its reaction to the Synod of Catholic Bishops from the Middle East which has just ended in the Vatican. The paper began by describing the “devastating persecution” suffered by Christians in the Middle East. “From the Gaza Strip and Egypt to Iraq to Turkey, Christians have been murdered, had their churches burned to the ground and their holy books destroyed, and have been demoted to second-class citizens, exposed to libels and exploitation by Muslim neighbors.” Despite all this, the Post complained, they were still, incomprehensibly, not on the side of Israel against the Palestinians: