Dear Bishop Bonny,
We write to you with profound dismay and urgent concern regarding your planned 30-hour fast this Friday to draw attention to the suffering of children in Gaza.
Whereas we respect your right to personal acts of conscience, this gesture – coming amid a pattern of one-sided, inflammatory rhetoric against Israel – exacerbates divisions in our shared community and undermines the fragile bonds of interfaith dialogue in Antwerp. Your repeated failure to acknowledge the barbaric suffering inflicted on Israelis since October 7, 2023, while amplifying unverified Hamas narratives, is not pastoral leadership but partisan activism that echoes antisemitic tropes and endangers Jewish lives here at home.
Since the Hamas massacre on October 7, in which over 1,200 Israelis – many of them civilians, including children – were slaughtered in their homes, at a music festival, and along kibbutz roads, and 251 were taken hostage (with over 100 still held captive today), you have remained conspicuously silent on Israeli grief.
In stark contrast, your public statements have fixated almost exclusively on Palestinian casualties, as if the Hamas terror attack that ignited this war never occurred. This selective mourning is not compassion; it is erasure. It ignores the ongoing trauma of Israeli families whose loved ones were raped, burned alive, or dragged into Gaza’s tunnels by a terrorist regime sworn to Israel’s destruction. By framing the conflict as an Israeli aggression without context, you perpetuate a narrative that absolves Hamas of its crimes and paints Jews as perennial aggressors – a dangerous distortion that resonates perilously close to historical blood libels.
Your uncritical acceptance of casualty figures propagated by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry is equally troubling. These numbers, often cited without scrutiny, routinely inflate civilian deaths by including unidentified combatants and natural causes, rendering them unreliable for assessing Israel’s defensive operations. Independent analyses reveal that up to 13,000 militants have been neutralised, a fact you omit while parroting Hamas’s totals as unassailable truth.
We look in vain in your letters or homilies for your condemnation Hamas for embedding its fighters among civilians, using human shields as a deliberate strategy to maximize Palestinian suffering for propaganda gains. This omission is not oversight; it is complicity in whitewashing a terrorist group’s war crimes.
Even more egregious is your invocation of “genocide” to describe Israel’s lawful self-defense – a term you wield without evidence, despite its grave legal and moral weight under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Israel’s operations, far from intent to destroy a people, involve unprecedented warnings to civilians, humanitarian corridors, and aid facilitation, resulting in a combatant-to-civilian ratio lower than many urban wars.
You assert, without evidence, that civilians are deliberately targeted, ignoring the reality that Hamas’s command centres, rocket launchers, and tunnels are deliberately placed in densely populated areas, including under hospitals and schools.
Evidence from Al-Shifa Hospital alone – where IDF forces uncovered weapons caches, uniforms, and a vast tunnel network – confirms this cynical exploitation, yet you decry bombings of these sites as indiscriminate atrocities, omitting Hamas’s role entirely.
Your unsubstantiated alarms of “famine” in Gaza further distort the truth, blaming Israel while ignoring Hamas’s rampant corruption and diversion of aid for military purposes. Rigorous analyses expose the IPC’s famine declarations as methodologically flawed, driven by Hamas-supplied data and overlooking ample aid inflows thwarted by the group’s theft and hoarding. Israel has enabled thousands of trucks carrying food and medicine into Gaza, yet Hamas prioritises rockets over rice – a fact you sideline in your rush to indict the Jewish state.
Bishop Bonny, your open letter of November 2023, which dismissed the Hamas attack as a mere “predictable explosion” providing Israel an “ideal alibi” for invasion, while fixating on Gaza’s “children must die,” has already sown outrage in Antwerp’s Jewish community. That missive, condemned by Joods Actueel for its timing and bias, exemplifies a pattern: rejecting as a supersessionist biblical defences of Israel while affirming Palestinian rights, yet never equitably mourning both sides’ dead.
As a shepherd in a city with one of Europe’s largest Jewish populations, your words carry weight – and wield wounds. They fuel protests that spill into antisemitic vandalism against our synagogues and schools, making Antwerp less safe for Jews who have called it home for centuries. We implore you: cease this partisan crusade. Acknowledge the full horror of October 7 and Hamas’s culpability. Speak truthfully of Israel’s restraint amid existential threats. Only then can your fast – or any gesture – truly honour all innocents, Jewish and Palestinian alike.
We stand ready for dialogue, but we will not abide silence on our suffering or the laundering of terror as tragedy. History will judge not just what you fast for, but what you ignore.
In pursuit of justice and peace,