MAGA Pushes Back as Pope Leo XIV Defends Palestinians Under Siege in the West Bank
David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel from 2017 to 2021, told the pope he was damaging his credibility — and addressed him as “Your eminence,” a cardinal’s honorific.
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Pope Leo XIV courageously returned to the suffering of Palestinians in the West Bank this week, even as MAGA figures in the United States and Israeli voices attack him for doing it. He keeps speaking a basic moral truth: people have the right to live in peace without others ravaging their homes and communities.
“I renew my appeal for an end to the ongoing violence against the Palestinian civilian population in the West Bank,” he said during his Angelus on Sunday, “and I urgently call on the international community to work toward advancing the two-state solution, for a just and lasting peace.”
He was speaking a week into the siege of Qusra, a village south of Nablus where Israeli settlers had blocked three Palestinian homes with piles of stone and pitched a tent between them, having cut the water and electricity to those houses back in July.
Fifteen people are trapped there, including two children. Notably, one of the families is Palestinian American. This is much closer to home than many Americans want to admit. I hope an American pope can raise the alarm in ways others cannot.
Loui Ridi, who runs a chain of gas stations in Toledo, Ohio, flew in and reached the house on Monday, where he climbed the stairs and raised an American flag over the roof.
Soldiers had cleared the settler encampment by then, though Ridi counted at least three men still near enough to come back if the army pulls out. “If I need to walk outside of my house, I’m not able,” he told the Associated Press. “I have to get a permission and coordination.”
The pushback arrived within hours.
David Friedman, Donald Trump’s ambassador to Israel from 2017 to 2021, quoted the pope’s post that morning and answered him directly: “the overwhelming majority of violence in Judea and Samaria (I assume you have no issue with the Biblical reference to this territory) is initiated by Palestinian thugs.” He instructed Leo to “fully investigate the facts before damaging your credibility with posts like this.” It has been viewed more than 200,000 times.
Friedman opened with “Your eminence,” the honorific for a cardinal, not a pope. This posture toward the papal office is not new. But the fact that a former ambassador to Israel could not use the correct title suggests how little respect he has for the office.
It is below the dignity of an ambassador to lecture the Vicar of Christ on a moral question involving life, death, and the rights of civilians. Leo is not ignorant of what is happening, and the office deserves more respect than Friedman offered it.
A deeper objection had been filed a month earlier, and it was not about Palestinians at all.
Brian Burch, Donald Trump’s ambassador to the Holy See and formerly the president of CatholicVote, told the New York Times in July that “when the pope acts as the sovereign leader of the Holy See, he is coequal with world leaders.”
Leo could not judge the Iran war unjust, Burch said, because he has access to only “a set of limited facts” — and when he condemned that war he did so as the political head of Vatican City State rather than as the leader of the Catholic Church.
Brian Burch tried to narrow Leo XIV to the sovereign of one very small state. But Leo speaks as a moral voice and a pastor to more than a billion Catholics around the world. He is not arguing over the minutiae of a policy memo. He is speaking about life and death, war and peace, and suffering minority communities — matters at the heart of what he is called to do as a priest, bishop, and pope.
Rome answered in four days. Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication, wrote that “the Successor of Peter is not speaking as a head of state. He is simply proclaiming the Gospel.” He never named the ambassador, though nobody in Rome or Washington had trouble working out who he meant. Burch clarified his own position later in July.
He Has Been Saying This Since His First Week
Peace in Israel and Gaza has been Pope Leo XIV’s most consistent call of his pontificate. Of course, he has spoken about peace in Iran, immigration raids here in the United States, and violence against Christians in Africa. But he has talked about Gaza and the West Bank consistently since day one. To act like this is some sudden intervention is nonsense.
If, as Burch and others requested, Leo stayed quiet about questions of war, he would nullify the purpose of the pontificate itself. Jesus’ first words to his disciples were words of peace, and the first external purpose of the papacy is to promote peace.
Leo’s record is plain:
May 11, 2025: In the first Sunday address of his pontificate, he called for a ceasefire in Gaza, humanitarian aid for civilians, and the release of the hostages. “Never again war!” he said.
July 2025: After an Israeli shell killed Saad Salameh, Fumayya Ayyad, and Najwa Abu Daoud at Holy Family Church, he called for a ceasefire again.
September 2025: He spoke about his “profound closeness” to Palestinians living in fear and unacceptable conditions.
Christmas Day: He asked the basilica to remember the families in Gaza living in tents through rain, wind, and cold.
February 2026: The Vatican declined Trump’s invitation to join his Gaza “Peace Board.”
Since this conflict began, Pope Leo and his predecessor have been clear and consistent about ending it and protecting children and the innocent. Pope Francis got attacked consistently for standing up for the Palestinian people, but he forged ahead because he knew it was the right thing to do. Leo XIV is doing the exact same thing.
Pope Francis said that a shepherd takes on the smell of the sheep, perhaps one of the most famous lines of his pontificate, and he did that consistently with the people of Gaza. Leo XIV is taking on that role as well.
Francis called Holy Family Parish nearly every night beginning October 9, 2023. He spoke with Father Gabriel Romanelli and the people sheltering in the compound. He made his final call on Holy Saturday, two days before he died. The children called him their grandfather. Leo has continued those calls, though not as often.
A pastor who doesn’t accompany his people is no longer a pastor but a bureaucrat. Francis understood that. Leo understands it too.
The Cost Has Landed Inside His Own House
Though the Israeli nation-state under Netanyahu wants to minimize these attacks on Christians, they are in fact growing, and it’s deeply concerning that his government has not been able to temper them down. It says that he is aligning himself with a movement he cannot control and unleashing the darkest forces within them.
Three of those attacks landed on the pope’s own flock, and I have reported each of them in these pages. The first was the parish bombing in Gaza City. On Palm Sunday in March, Israeli police stopped Cardinal Pizzaballa at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They would not let him enter. His Patriarchate called it “a grave precedent” and “manifestly unreasonable.” It said the heads of the Church had not been barred from Palm Sunday Mass there for centuries.
Then, on April 28, a forty-eight-year-old French religious sister doing research at the École Biblique was thrown onto a rock in front of the Cenacle on Mount Zion and kicked while she lay there. Father Olivier Poquillon, who directs her school, condemned “this act of sectarian violence.” Pizzaballa had written the previous day that the holy places, “which should be spaces for prayer, are becoming battlegrounds about identity.”
The Rossing Center counted 155 documented attacks on Christians in Israel and East Jerusalem during 2025, against 111 the year before, with physical assaults climbing from 46 to 61. Sister Mary Meline told NBC News last spring that people spit on her in the street.
Every life in this region is sacred. Everyone has a right to live in peace, but to ravage the land and the homes of the Palestinians is an affront to that dignity and, most ultimately, an affront to God. Leo XIV is exactly right, and while many leaders across the globe wallow in fear, he stands for truth.
He Is Not Carrying This Alone
Pizzaballa said this in Assisi on August 6: “We need new faces, new leaders. The voters will decide that.” He also said violence “has become the general lens through which relationships are experienced in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Palestine.” His fear was that “we may remain trapped in this condition of neither war nor peace.”
Pizzaballa is correct: Benjamin Netanyahu has had power and control in some way for nearly 30 years. It’s time for a new generation of leaders to rise up in this region, but that requires the powers that be to willingly and purposely step aside.
Trump’s Ambassadors Can’t Agree on Who Is Doing the Killing
In January, Ambassador Mike Huckabee had singled out Pizzaballa in an essay about Jerusalem.
Then on August 13, Huckabee wrote this about Qusra: “Actions by those who carried out this horrific act of terror meant to intimidate and harass this family are disgusting. No excuse for such thuggish behavior.” He said the embassy had asked the IDF and the police to remove “the Israeli terrorists doing this.”
Huckabee doesn’t deserve a lot of credit here. He got it right: this is settler violence. It is terrorism. The idea that this is the fault of Palestinians is asking us to not believe our lying eyes.
Friedman’s post came three days after Huckabee’s, blaming Palestinian “thugs.” So which is it? Huckabee says Israeli terrorists. Friedman says Palestinian thugs. Both men served Donald Trump. Leo is not the confused party here.
A good priest always challenges everyone in the congregation, and a good pope does the same. If we limit the pope to only speak when we agree with him, we no longer have a pope. We have a partisan football, a partisan cudgel that we can bring out for our purposes alone, and not a prophetic pastor.
Thank God that Leo XIV is the latter.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, with Cardinal Pizzaballa, and with the Palestinian and Israeli families who have buried more children than the rest of us can bear to count. None of them has ever enjoyed the luxury of treating this war as a position to hold.
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