I very much appreciate Gianluigi’s DMs this week on the Gaza tragedy—a horror unfolding before our eyes daily and in great part being paid for by American tax dollars.
The relationship between Palestinians and Israelis is, as he points out, very complicated. But that does not mean we can ignore it or excuse the new lows to which Netanyahu is taking his government and ours.
I recently watched on Netflix the movie Operation Finale, the most recent film about the capture of Adolf Eichmann, often called the “architect of the Final Solution.” The events happened in 1961 when John F. Kennedy was president.
The film focused mostly on Eichmann’s capture by a Mossad team while he was hiding in Argentina under an assumed name. He is played brilliantly, it seems to me, in another great performance by Ben Kingsley. Some have criticized the film for its “contrived” elements, and it ends with a modest amount of footage from his actual trial. But I am not writing to review the movie.
What I am writing about is the Fall—the great fall—of Israel from a country that had a purpose and a sense of morality back in 1961, when this historic capture occurred, to what it is today, when more than 64,000 victims have been killed in Gaza to avenge the horrific murders of 1,250 Jews.
Under Prime Minister Ben Gurion, the treatment of Eichmann himself had a humane dimension to it. Yes, they wanted to bring him back alive to put him on trial so the world could hear of his crimes and the background to the murder of six million Jews.
They wanted a public display of evil—and they got it. The world got it. Justice prevailed in a public forum that the whole world was able to watch. That is a good thing.
They sentenced Eichmann to death and executed him in 1962. He was allowed to see his wife before he died, as was promised in order to get him to sign a document that the airlines required to fly him to Israel. A kind of relationship was forged between Eichmann and one of his captors, Peter Malkin, that enabled this compromise to take place.
The point I am making in this DM is that the moral conscience of the state of Israel and its accomplice, the United States, has sunk immeasurably from 1961 to 2025. Many people rightly feel this in their hearts and bones.
Not only Donald Trump but President Biden, too, failed to check Netanyahu’s revenge on Gaza in any meaningful way. Frankly, I think that had a lot to do with Harris’s defeat. Refusing to distance herself from Biden on this issue influenced some of the 90 million Americans who chose not to vote in the 2024 election, and spurred a significant portion of the Palestinian-American electorate to a protest vote for Trump or third-party candidate Jill Stein.
Last fall, when Rabbi Michael Lerner knew he was going to die and called me to his home for a private good-bye, he spoke with me about many subjects, beginning with the topic of resurrection. But after 50 minutes, when it was time for me to leave, he apologized for not having talked about the Gaza situation.
There was no need for an apology—I knew where he stood on the subject and, as usual, we were on the same page. He was horrified and chagrined by the Israeli government and its attitude toward the Palestinians and was not afraid to let everyone, including his own community, know about it.
And here we are today, nearly a year and roughly 35,000 dead Palestinians later. The oppressed have become the oppressor.
See Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society.
And Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.
And Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
And Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.
And Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine.
And Fox, Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ.
Banner Image: Women in Columbus, Ohio protest against the Israeli occupation and engineered starvation in Gaza. Photo by Paul Becker on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you see a noticeable decline in morality in the Israeli and American governments from the time of Eichmann’s capture to today? How to improve on this?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society
Visionary theologian and best-selling author Matthew Fox offers a new theology of evil that fundamentally changes the traditional perception of good and evil and points the way to a more enlightened treatment of ourselves, one another, and all of nature. In comparing the Eastern tradition of the 7 chakras to the Western tradition of the 7 capital sins, Fox allows us to think creatively about our capacity for personal and institutional evil and what we can do about them.
“A scholarly masterpiece embodying a better vision and depth of perception far beyond the grasp of any one single science. A breath-taking analysis.” — Diarmuid O’Murchu, author of Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
In A Spirituality Named Compassion, Matthew Fox delivers a profound exploration of the meaning and practice of compassion. Establishing a spirituality for the future that promises personal, social, and global healing, Fox marries mysticism with social justice, leading the way toward a gentler and more ecological spirituality and an acceptance of our interdependence which is the substratum of all compassionate activity.
“Well worth our deepest consideration…Puts compassion into its proper focus after centuries of neglect.” –The Catholic Register
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Matthew Fox lays out a whole new direction for Christianity—a direction that is in fact very ancient and very grounded in Jewish thinking (the fact that Jesus was a Jew is often neglected by Christian theology): the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, the Vias Positiva, Negativa, Creativa and Transformativa in an extended and deeply developed way.
“Original Blessing makes available to the Christian world and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the natural world wherever these may have originated.” –Thomas Berry, author, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Fox’s spirituality weds the healing and liberation found in North American Creation Spirituality and in South American Liberation Theology. Creation Spirituality challenges readers of every religious and political persuasion to unite in a new vision through which we learn to honor the earth and the people who inhabit it as the gift of a good and just Creator.
“A watershed theological work that offers a common ground for religious seekers and activists of all stripes.” — Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice.
“I am reading Liberating Gifts for the People of the Earth by Matt Fox. He is one that fills my heart and mind for new life in spite of so much that is violent in our world.” ~ Sister Dorothy Stang.
The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine
To awaken what Fox calls “the sacred masculine,” he unearths ten metaphors, or archetypes, ranging from the Green Man, an ancient pagan symbol of our fundamental relationship with nature, to the Spiritual Warrior….These timeless archetypes can inspire men to pursue their higher calling to connect to their deepest selves and to reinvent the world.
“Every man on this planet should read this book — not to mention every woman who wants to understand the struggles, often unconscious, that shape the men they know.” — Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election
Matthew Fox tells us that he had always shied away from using the term “Anti-Christ” because it was so often used to spread control and fear. However, given today’s rise of authoritarianism and forces of democracide, ecocide, and christofascism, he turns the tables in this book employing the archetype for the cause of justice, democracy, and a renewed Earth and humanity.
From the Foreword: If there was ever a time, a moment, for examining the archetype of the Antichrist, it is now…Read this book with an open mind. Good and evil are real forces in our world. ~~ Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit and Conversations with the Divine.
For immediate access to Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election, order the e-book with 10 full-color prints from Amazon HERE.
To get a print-on-demand paperback copy with black & white images, order from Amazon HERE or IUniverse HERE.
To receive a limited-edition, full-color paperback copy, order from MatthewFox.org HERE.
Order the audiobook HERE for immediate download.
6 thoughts on “The Gaza Horror and Israel’s & America’s Decline in Morality”
More of the mask is off than a moral decline. Israel is a colonial settler enterprise faciliated by the US that has been oppressing and murdering Palestinians for over 70 years. The goal was always ethnic cleansing and appropriating land for greater Israel. This is a Zionist project, an ideology which has little resemblance to Judaism.
Yes!!! Even though the US administration not only continues to support militarily racist Zionist Israeli government’s genocidal campaign in Palestine against our sisters and brothers there, under Trump’s authoritarian and inhumane administration the US government continues to block the United Nations representing most world countries from taking immediate humane action (such as sending a Peace Force) and stopping the genocide/beginning the World food aid/and starting a just political peace process for the Palestinians and their right to self-governance.
What about Hannah Arendt’s comment on the trial that the reaction was banal?
To be clear, Ben Gurion adored Adolf Eichmann. The Zionist project of building an ethno-nationalist Jewish state in Palestine gained momentum after 1933, when Adolph Hitler rose to become the chancellor of Germany. Seeing a golden opportunity David Ben-Gurion negotiated a transfer or Haavara agreement with Adolph Hitler that became realized and signed on August 25, 1933.
One the most notorious escapades of the alliance took place in the summer of 1944 when the Nazi extermination program was in full swing. A Zio-Supremacist from Hungry named Rudolph Kastner paid the Nazi psychopath Adolf Eichmann the equivalent of over 1.6 million dollars in gold, diamonds, and cash to transport 1684 affluent Hungarian Jews, including Kastner’s family and friends, to freedom in Switzerland by train. In turn, Kastner had to agree not to alert his fellow Hungarians, mostly rural farmers, that when they boarded that train, they were headed to a Nazi death camp. In the words of investigative journalist Steffan Moore, “Between May and July 1944, 437,000 Jews — almost the entire rural Jewish population of Hungary were deported to Auschwitz, where most were gassed on arrival.”
The Eichmann/ Zionist alliance continued until 1962 when he was executed. After WW II and Previous to this, Eichmann would take his vacations in Israel without interruption.
What is difficult about using the word genocide? It can’t be too harsh. Of course some will react, because they don’t want to think about it. Who does! But that discomfort is little compared to the imperative to react responsibly. Canada is one of the signers of the International Court of Justice. We are obligated to do all we can to stop the genocide we see. Instead we complicity send arms and do not take the strong stand like other nations such as Ireland. Each of us must do all we can, and each must decide what that is.
From Omar El Akkad (Egyptian-Canadian author), “. . . when it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments like this so dangerous, so clarifying, is that everyone is forced to answer.”
https://www.friendsofroots.net – these are peace keepers I wish to succeed, but they rely on donations, while the US sends eye-popping big numbers of dollars of munitions for decades. What do we expect with such disparities?!
Thanks for this post. I feel deeply the loss of the deep integrity and attention to justice of so many of the Israeli and Jewish people, and our complicity as a country in the genocide by starvation of Gaza. I have always admired the way the Jewish doctors and scholars I have known worked to put justice as a priority in their thinking. I loved Rabbi Michael Lerner, also. I have prayed and hoped we (the USA) would finally say “enough” and stop it. But I still know people who think this is excusable, and that the Israeli people are God’s people, and have the right to oppress and even kill the others in the Palestinian land they have come back to after all these millennia. To not recognize that all people are loved by God, and that there is no single tribe that matters more than others, is what we are facing. And to justify violence is not ok. Did you see the presentation on the Atomic People, the elders from Japan who survived the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima? It is a great documentary!