Introduction

In a blatant attempt to influence American politics in a direction inimical to the United States and the State of Israel while presuming to represent the views of all Palestinians, Archbishop Atallah Hanna, Archbishop of Sebastia from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, issued an “open message” to US Vice President JD Vance on October 23, 2025 in advance of the latter’s visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem.

In his message, the archbishop, professing his “belie[f] in the values of truth, justice, and the victory of the oppressed,” urges Vice President Vance “to reject injustice, tyranny, occupation, and oppression” to advance “peace.”

Contrary to Archbishop Hanna’s professed belief in truth and justice and proclaimed desire for peace, his message to Vice President Vance:

• Maligns the State of Israel as guilty of committing genocide and failing to acknowledge Jerusalem’s importance to Christians and Muslims.
• Echoes anti-Jewish tropes that misrepresent American leaders as objects of Zionist manipulation while the archbishop elsewhere casts Israeli leaders as New Testament villains.
• Hypocritically promotes peace while the archbishop elsewhere praises terrorists, opposes peace with Israel, and seeks to destroy the world’s only Jewish State.

False Charges Against the State of Israel

Archbishop Hanna falsely accuses the Jewish State of committing genocide against Palestinians and of ignoring the importance of Jerusalem in Christianity and Islam.

Israel Has Not Committed Genocide Against Palestinians

At various points in his message, Archbishop Hanna charges Israel with committing a genocide in Gaza, asking, “How can a Christian ignore the suffering of the Palestinian people especially what happened during the two years in Gaza which was a War of Holocaust[?]” Later in his message, Archbishop Hanna similarly references “the war of genocide” in describing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

By applying the terms “Holocaust” and “genocide” to suffering experienced by Palestinians over the past two years of war, Hanna misrepresents the nature of what has occurred: namely, an Israeli defensive military response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led massacre of approximately 1,200 innocent Israelis and abduction of 251 hostages in the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

Misrepresenting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in these terms constitutes what Holocaust historian and former U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah E. Lipstadt has called “genocide inversion,” referring to “turning the victims of genocide into perpetrators” (Antisemitism: Here and Now, p. 147). In this regard, it should be noted that the US State Department considers “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” to be an example of antisemitism.

Statements from Israeli political and military leadership contradict Hanna’s incendiary genocide charge. For example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared “Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian population.” Similarly, the Israel Defense Forces has consistently indicated that Israeli military activities have targeted Hamas, not civilians living in Gaza.

Notwithstanding Archbishop Hanna’s references to “this crime committed against our [Palestinian] people” and “conspiring against the [Palestinian] people,” Israeli efforts to avoid civilian casualties have been evidenced in various measures taken by the Jewish State, including the Israeli military’s use of precision guided munitions (PGMs) and technologies as well as employment of tactics boosting the accuracy of non-PGMs. These measures have contributed to the following superlative assessment of Israel’s actions in Gaza by John Spencer (Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point): “Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that’s fought an urban war.”

Israel Has Not Ignored the Importance of Jerusalem in Christianity and Islam

Archbishop Hanna also falsely alleges that the State of Israel identifies the city of Jerusalem as Jewish while failing to acknowledge Jerusalem’s importance to Christians and Muslims in urging Vice President Vance to “remember that Jerusalem is a holy city of the three monotheistic religions” while averring that “it’s not thanks to your host who claims to be a Jewish city ignoring its importance in both Christianity and Islam religions.”

The archbishop here simultaneously dismisses the Jewish attachment to Jerusalem by suggesting the established historical fact of a Jewish connection to the city is merely a “claim” while refraining from using similar terminology to describe Christian and Muslim connections to Jerusalem. In fact, historically, Jewish attachment to Jerusalem preceded Christian and Muslim associations with the city, with Christian and Muslim devotion to Jerusalem deriving from the Jewish bond to the city.

Commenting on the derivative nature of the Christian attachment to Jerusalem, Near Eastern Studies scholar Mark S. Kinzer notes,

Christians are joined to the city through their relationship with Jesus, the Messiah, who suffered, died, and rose from the dead there, and to whom the city ultimately belongs. However, the titulus under which he died identified him as “the king of the Jews,” and the city belongs to him because he fulfills that role as the risen Son of David. Consequently, gentile disciples of Jesus are linked to the city through the Jewish people of which Jesus is the sovereign (Jerusalem Crucified, Jerusalem Risen: The Resurrected Messiah, the Jewish People, and the Land of Promise, p. 258).

In terms of the derivative nature of the Islamic attachment to Jerusalem, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill archaeologist Jodi Magness observes that an Arabic term Muslims applied first to the Temple Mount and subsequently to the entire city of Jerusalem (Bayt al-Maqdis) reflects the earlier Hebrew term Jews applied to the temples in Jerusalem (Beit ha-Miqdash), while Muslims recognize the Haram as connected to important figures mentioned in the Jewish Bible (Jerusalem Through the Ages: From Its Beginnings to the Crusades, p. 387). The construction of both Jewish temples occurred long before the emergence of Islam, while the figures to whom Jewish biblical texts refer are believed to have existed centuries before Muslims arrived on the scene.

Recent passion expressed by Muslims for Jerusalem effectively constitutes what scholar of Islam Khalid Durán describes as an “attempt to Islamize Zionism…in the sense that the importance of Jerusalem to Jews and their attachment to it is now usurped by Palestinian Muslims” (Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated, p. 15). Similarly, Middle East historian Daniel Pipes notes, “Jerusalem’s importance [for Muslims] only revived when the whole city came under Israeli control in 1967” (Ibid., p. 22) following the Six-Day War.

In fact, far from ignoring the significance of Jerusalem for Christians and Muslims, Israel’s Declaration of Independence explicitly declares the state’s commitment to “guarantee freedom of religion” and “safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of the shrines and Holy Places of all religions.” While Archbishop Hanna identifies the Holy Sepulchre as “the holiest sacred place for Christians in the world,” nowhere in his message to Vice President Vance does he ever acknowledge that the Temple Mount is the holiest site in the world for Jews.

While Archbishop Hanna incorrectly faults Israel for ignoring the importance of Jerusalem to Christians and Muslims, a 2009 document he helped author, “A Moment of Truth: A Word of Faith, Hope and Love from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering,” also called The Kairos Palestine Document, fails to acknowledge the existence of a Jewish nation or the Jewish nation’s connection to the Land of Israel (Peace and Faith: Christian Churches and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, p. 291). This failure to acknowledge the existence of a Jewish nation is significant, as the existence of a Jewish nation helps explain how Jews relate differently to territory than Christians and Muslims. Whereas Christians and Muslims are members of strictly religious groups who “have a common holy land but no common homeland,” Jews are members of an ethnoreligious group who have “a combined homeland and holy land.” To deny the existence of a Jewish nation as the archbishop does borders on the absurd. As Pepperdine University Middle East historian Scott Abramson observes,

Jews are not only one of antiquity’s few surviving peoples, they are the only one whose self-understanding, national consciousness, language, and culture show multi-millennial continuities. To deny that the Jews are a people is as impudent and irrational as claiming that the Democratic Party (one of the first modern political parties and the oldest continuously active one) is not a political party or that Britain’s Royal Society (one of the first learned scientific societies and the oldest continuously active one) is not a learned society.

Anti-Jewish Tropes that Misrepresent American and Israeli Leaders

Archbishop Hanna’s message echoes the anti-Jewish trope that Jews constitute an international cabal bent on dominating others through financial and political influence. For example, Hanna’s message states that “his [US President Donald Trump’s] mind and […] his opinion [have been] distorted by the Zionist lobby that controls […] the United States.” Similarly, the archbishop’s message asserts, “When the racist Zionist lobby controls the government and they direct the policies and attitudes, it means that America is undercover occupation even if it claims to be an oasis of democracy, freedom and human rights defense.”

The claim that a “Zionist lobby” controlling the United States is primarily responsible for American policymaking and attitudes is wildly fanciful. As the University of Notre Dame historian of Christian Zionism Robert O. Smith has observed:

[P]opular American affinity for the State of Israel draws from the taproot of apocalyptic hope informing American identity and national vocation from the revolutionary era to the present […] Given this Judeo-centric tradition’s direct contribution to American popular Christianity and civil religion—through varying degrees of national-covenantalism, premillennial dispensationalism and cultural fundamentalism—claims that American popular affinity for the State of Israel is generated primarily by external manipulation or lobbies strain the bounds of credulity (More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism, p. 185).

Archbishop Hanna’s false accusation that the Jewish State poisoned him reflects another conspiratorial belief he holds. In fact, the archbishop experienced “aftereffects of a pest control treatment in his residence.” Archbishop Hanna has also referred to the Israeli government as “money changers in the Temple,” falsely casting  leaders of the world’s only Jewish State in the role of New Testament villains. In this regard, Archbishop Hanna would do well to heed a message shared by the ancient Judaism and rabbinics scholar Yehuda Kurtzer:

I identify neither with the imagined Jew of the evangelical prosperity gospel […] nor as the moneychanger object of Jesus’ scorn in the Temple, as many progressives seem to want to see Zionists […] Christians bear the responsibility to exhibit the humility of not casting as protagonists and antagonists the real human beings between the river and the sea.

The aforementioned statements by Archbishop Hanna prompted the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations to correctly conclude that the archbishop “is not merely ‘a strong critic’ of Israel,” but rather someone whose “views should not automatically be believed when he makes accusations against Israel without evidence.”

Praising Terrorists, Opposing Peace with Israel, and Aspiring to Destroy the Jewish State

In his message, Archbishop Hanna claims he “want[s] [peace],” “pray[s] for peace,” and is “with peace” and “hungry for peace,” mentioning the term “peace” almost 20 times. However, his praise of those who have attacked Israelis, opposition to making peace with the State of Israel, and use of rhetoric as well as support for a movement and policies associated with the aim of eliminating the Jewish State would seem to indicate otherwise.

Praising Terrorists and Opposing Peace with Israel

Archbishop Hanna has praised suicide bombers as “Arab heroes” while using rhetoric demonizing the Jewish State in opposing Palestinian concessions for peace:

Israel is the Great Satan, and therefore one is not allowed to negotiate with Israel or even consider a cease-fire. Any kind of peace with Israel means making concessions, and that defeats the Arab strategy to resist and oppose the Jewish state (Anti-Zionism in the “Electronic Church” of Palestinian Christianity, p. 29).

In addition to praising suicide bombers and opposing efforts to achieve peace with Israel, Archbishop Hanna has expressed support for Palestinians imprisoned by the State of Israel for committing terrorist acts against Israelis:

There are more than 8,000 Palestinian prisoners in the prisons of the Occupation. They are the pick of Palestinian youth, of honorable strugglers, who served the Palestinian cause. They were sentenced to the prisons of the racist Occupation because they defended the cause of their people, because they resisted, because they struggled, because they waged Jihad, because they were not those who were silent, who kept apart, who stood with their arms crossed, in the face of what was committed against their Palestinian people. They are prisoners of freedom.

While Archbishop Hanna approvingly references comments by the late Pope Francis about peace, the archbishop neglects to mention relevant remarks the pontiff reportedly made in the pontiff’s meeting with a delegation from the World Jewish Congress in 2015: “There may be political disagreements between governments and on political issues, but the State of Israel has every right to exist in safety and prosperity” and “To attack Jews is anti-Semitism, but an outright attack on the State of Israel is also anti-Semitism” (Peace and Faith, p. 189).  These reported remarks from Pope Francis recognizing the right of the State of Israel to exist and condemning attacks on the State of Israel stand in marked contrast with the archbishop’s rejection of peace with Israel and support for Palestinians who have attacked Israelis.

In the above passage, the archbishop’s message to Vice President Vance, and The Kairos Palestine Document, the archbishop never specifies the territorial dimensions of the land described as occupied. However, the archbishop’s rhetoric suggests he is not referring to land occupied by Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War, but rather the whole land of Israel, rendering the whole Jewish State illegitimate in Archbishop Hanna’s eyes.

Aspiring to Destroy the Jewish State

Using Eliminationist Rhetoric

The archbishop has employed rhetoric associated with calls for the elimination of the Jewish State in expressing support for a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” given that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea encompasses the entire State of Israel.

Archbishop Hanna has also described Zionism as “a racist, terrorist movement.” The use of this kind of defamatory rhetoric to describe Zionism—a movement Zionist founder Theodor Herzl described as “a moral, lawful, humanitarian movement directed toward the age-old goal of our people’s longing” (Herzl’s Zionist Writings: Volume II: The Zionist Movement: 1897-1900, p. 182)—is intended to delegitimize the existence of a Jewish State. As Indiana University Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism Director and Jewish Studies Professor Alvin H. Rosenfeld has stated, “A racist state is absolutely illegitimate. If it is possible to demonstrate that a state, any state, is inherently, structurally, implacably racist, then it does not have legitimacy and does not deserve to continue” (Israel’s Jewish Defamers: The Media Dimension, p. 31). In fact, ethnic and religious diversity is a feature of Israeli society, with all Israeli citizens accorded equal rights under the law and members of different ethnic and religious groups serving in various Israeli governmental positions and voting in Israeli elections.

Supporting the “Palestinian Right of Return”

The archbishop is also an advocate for the so-called “Palestinian right of return” to Israel of Palestinians who left the land in 1948 along with their descendants. If all such Palestinians returned to the land, the majority of the state would cease to be Jewish, effectively ending the Jewish State. Given the uniquely perilous experience of Jews throughout much of the last several centuries in which Jews were deprived of political power while living in various Christian host-countries, it is striking that the archbishop devotes no serious consideration to the consequences that implementing this policy would entail for the Jewish people.

Supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement

Archbishop Hanna has supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement whose leaders aspire to destroy the world’s only Jewish State. While Archbishop Hanna falsely describes Zionism as “racist,” leaders of the BDS movement he supports have directed their boycott efforts at non-Israeli Jews, like the singer Matisyahu, but not Arab Israelis, indicating that BDS supporters are targeting Jews.

Conclusion

Archbishop Hanna ends his message with a quote from the Sermon on the Mount attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the children of God who are called (Matthew [5]:[9]).” His earlier comments suggest the archbishop believes Zionists and Israeli leaders are not interested in peace, but the historical record demonstrates otherwise. In his Opening Address at the First Zionist Congress, Herzl declared, “Zionism is simply the peacemaker” (Herzl’s Zionist Writings, p. 181). The peaceful approach Zionists adopted is evident in the building of the Jewish State:

[T]he building of Israel represents the most peaceable in-migration and state creation in history […] Against th[e] tableau of unceasing conquest, violence, and overthrow, Zionist efforts to build a presence in the Holy Land until 1948 stand out as astonishingly mild, as mercantile rather than military.

In the same address, Herzl also noted that Zionism “suffers the usual fate of peacemakers: it has to do the most fighting” (Ibid.). While Israel has faced numerous attempts to destroy it over the decades following its establishment, leading some analysts to describe Israel as “the world’s most besieged state” (e.g., George Gilder’s The Israel Test: Why the World’s Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy), successive Israeli governments nevertheless managed to achieve peace with neighboring countries that previously waged war against the Jewish State once the leaders of those countries chose to make peace, as happened with Egypt and Jordan. More recently, as part of the Abraham Accords, Israel has normalized ties with other Arab countries, like Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates.

While Archbishop Hanna has expressed opposition to Palestinians making any concession to Israel to achieve peace, Zionist and Israeli leaders have demonstrated flexibility and a willingness to compromise on numerous occasions, as evidenced by Zionist acceptance of deals that would have divided the land between Jews and Arabs in 1937-1938, 1947-1948, 1967, 1993, 2000-2001, and 2007. However, Palestinian Arab leaders have consistently refused to accept such deals that would have led to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Israel has also demonstrated its willingness to concede territory to achieve peace, as when Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt following Israel’s acquisition of the territory in a war to defend itself.

In assessing Archbishop Hanna’s message’s invocation of lofty principles of “justice” and “peace” in light of the archbishop’s propagation of falsehoods, use of anti-Jewish tropes, indulgence in conspiratorial thinking, praise of terrorists, opposition to peace with Israel, and aspiration to destroy the Jewish State, readers would do well to reflect on another biblical verse featuring powerful words about hypocrites said to have been uttered by Jesus: “Do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach” (Matthew 23:3).