In Gaza, Easter Looks Like Gethsemane

"The weakness of the United States creates a great dilemma, because, until now, there has always been someone to put things in order. Now there is no longer anyone to play this role, and we have to do it ourselves. I don't know if, how, or when this will be possible." The statement from the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, broadcast on TV2000 on March 22, 2024, is decisive.

After almost seven months of war in Gaza, the situation is increasingly deteriorating and made even more complicated if we consider the role played by the current tenant of the White House, on the campaign trail for reelection. The Biden administration finds itself confronted with the contradiction between its declarations of principle and its weakness of action.

If it has clearly increased pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, it seems incapable at this stage of regulating military aid to the Jewish State. Joe Biden is also seeing the war transform into a subject of partisan confrontation.

“Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” Donald Trump recently stated. He recently won the Republican nomination for the White House race. But the era when the United States--after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989--assumed the role of “police of the world” is over, and inhabitants of the Holy Land are learning that at their own expense.

“It is objectively intolerable. We have always had many problems of all kinds, and even the economic-financial situation has always been very fragile, but there has never been hunger before. It’s the first time we have to deal with famine,” the cardinal laments. A small consolation prize, Patriarch Pizzaballa obtained the free movement of pilgrims in the holy places during the Easter feasts.

“We’ll get the permits,” he stated. “We insisted, saying that as they had given permits to Muslims for Ramadan, they should also give them to Christians for Easter. Even if the numbers are smaller, we will have several thousand permits both for Palm Sunday and for Easter. It will be a difficult Easter,” the Patriarch said. “I think of the loneliness of Jesus in Gethsemane, which is now shared by all of us.”

This loneliness is experienced even more cruelly in the Gaza Strip, where battles have been raging since the terrorist attack of October 7. On site, the Church of the Holy Family is the only Catholic parish, and it shelters around 600 Christians who have been displaced since the start of the conflict.

“The other day my vicar, Father Youssef Asaad, who is inside Gaza, told me: You can’t imagine the pain we are feeling and the desperation of the people,” Fr. Gabriel Romanelli stated recently. The parish priest of Gaza, detained in Israel, receives daily news from the only priest who remains on site.

And his testimony is chilling: “We are surrounded by the smell of death, we feel it, strongly, everywhere. We are buried under mountains of rubble, rubbish, the sewers have exploded,” says Fr. Asaad, who is holding on with his flock. “Despite everything, every day they pray for peace and offer their suffering and deprivation for the ceasefire and for the release of the hostages,” Fr. Romanelli concludes.