August 15, 2025

Dear Bishop Bambera and the USCCB Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs,

We are writing in response to the document Translate Hate, published by the USCCB on December 11, 2024.

430 days prior to this publication, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced he would cut off food, water, and electricity for 2.3 million people – or “human animals” as he called Palestinians. Without food, water, and electricity, of course, a human cannot live; and so Yoav Gallant was promising to carry out genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza.

In the 430 days between Yoav Gallant’s announcement and your publication, Israel worked to deliver on this promise. Israel killed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people, carpet bombed all infrastructure a society depends on to survive, and intentionally starved millions of people. Israeli soldiers routinely shot children in the head, raped and tortured thousands, assassinated hundreds of journalists, left premature babies to decompose in incubators and left countless Palestinians to be buried alive under rubble.

In America, a Catholic man forced us to watch our tax dollars spent burning men to death in hospitals beds still attached to an IV, little boys carrying the remains of their dead siblings in backpacks, fathers holding headless toddlers, children hanging limbless by ceiling fans, men with Downs Syndrome killed by attack dogs set on them by soldiers. Biden and his administration lied to us every single day, telling us that what we witnessed was not real, that a six year-old girl shot with 335 bullets at close range was not evidence of an army targeting civilians.

This was agonizing.

Yet 430 days into this agony, the USCCB did not call upon American Catholic President Biden to stop arming violence against Palestinians, but instead chose to publish a 60-page document which repeatedly and explicitly endorses Zionism, an ideology that depends on ongoing violence against Palestinians. These endorsements include the following passages:

“Antisemitism… encompasses virulent anti-Israel animus.” – page 9

“While advocating for Palestinians to have their own state or promoting human rights for Palestinians is to be lauded, the elimination of the State of Israel as part of such an approach implies that the Jewish people do not have the right to self-determination or that the Jewish people are to be eliminated. Both of these ideas are antisemitic.” – page 19

When the “settler colonialist” label is used to say Jews do not have the right to national self-determination or to deny Israel’s right to exist, that is antisemitism. – page 47

“Such criticism [of Israel] becomes antisemitic when it goes beyond legitimate critique of government policies to questioning the right of the State of Israel to exist or the right of the Jewish people to self-determination.” – page 48

Zionism is a nationalist movement to create an ethno-religious state for only Jewish people through the colonization of Palestine. This ideology depends on two things, by definition: 1) The ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and 2) The continued supremacy of rights for Jews over Palestinians.

These are well-established facts of history as well as common sense; you cannot create a state in an existing country without expelling its current population. Israel’s Basic Laws declare that, “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” the fulfillment of which is abundantly obvious in its practices of omnipresent, violent apartheid. For the USCCB to claim that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and dispossession of Palestinians is something that Catholics must support is clearly contrary to Christianity.

This document, published 430 days into the first live-streamed genocide in history, serves as a clear attempt to silence objections to the State of Israel and its ongoing mass slaughter and destruction of Palestine, to an audience whose taxes are funding this slaughter.

Jesus promised us: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” By spreading false facts about Zionism and by conflating a militant nationalist movement with a religion, this document is an attempt to separate Christians from the truth, and therefore to separate Christians from Christ.

It is our hope that you will retract this dangerous endorsement of Zionism, and join us in seeking truth, justice, and peace for all from the River to the Sea.

Signed,

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Micaela O'Herron
Siobhan O’Herron
Tiffany Hunsinger
Dr. Teresa Foley
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Justin Duffy
María José Miranda
Caroline M.
Rafael Salas
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Maureen Morello
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Mark Scibilia-Carver
John Heagle
Reverend Harry J Bury PhD
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Suzanne Belote Shanley
Thomas Brayton Shanley
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Robert Morris DDS
Janice P.Leary, M.Div., Ph.D.
Badre Rachidi
Ryan O'Connell
Thomas P Casey
Efua Agyare-Kumi

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