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Israel closed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and set off a Holy Week firestorm
Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week for Christians, the lead-up to Easter, when Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Usually, it’s observed in large services with liturgical readings, where palm leaves are distributed to parishioners to commemorate the day that Jesus arrived in Jerusalem before his crucifixion.
But this Holy Week, that wasn’t possible due to the war in Iran, which has limited gatherings in Israel due to safety concerns.
Still, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem — the Catholic representative in Jerusalem, where many Christian denominations share custody of Christian holy sites — had planned to observe Palm Sunday with a smaller, private prayer in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem’s Old City to, as he said, “preserve the idea of the celebration in the Holy Sepulchre.”
Israeli authorities, however, turned Pizzaballa and another priest away. “Life-saving restrictions have been applied to all holy sites in the Old City — this includes for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike,” said a spokesperson for the Israeli police forces.
The decision — despite being quickly overturned — has set off a conflict, with American Christians worrying that Israel is persecuting Christianity
. The incident has chipped away at one of Israel’s strongest allies: the U.S.
The reaction to the Holy Sepulchre incident
Usually, Holy Week is a big deal in Jerusalem, the site where the events Christians commemorate during the holiday took place. So when Pizzaballa was denied entry to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, outcry began immediately.
U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — a staunch Christian Zionist who is not Catholic — called for Israel to lift the restriction for Pizzaballa. Emmanuel Macron, president of France, condemned the decision, as did Pedro Sanchez, the prime minister of Spain. A statement from the Latin Patriarchate said the refusal “constitutes a manifestly unreasonable and grossly disproportionate measure.” Middle East journalists and commentators pointed out that the restrictions limit gatherings to 50 people, far more than the two Pizzaballa arrived with, and that both Jewish and Muslim religious leaders had been allowed to privately pray at their respective holy sites despite the restrictions.
Most loudly, outraged Christian influencers, such as Carrie Prejean Boller, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson seized on the incident. They posted decades-old videos of Palm Sunday processions to show how things once were and photos of churches in Lebanon and Gaza that had been hit by bombs in the war over the past several years, implying that Israel has been targeting Christianity and framing the nation as a religious enemy to be defeated.
“This is the deliberate denial of Christian worship,” wrote Prejean Boller on X. “Allies don’t do this … enemies do.”
After being turned away, the cardinal took his prayer to Gethsemane, another holy site with a view of the gate by which Jesus entered Jerusalem, and mourned the war in a speech. “Today, Jesus weeps once more over Jerusalem,” Pizzaballa said.
The next day, Tucker Carlson released a nearly 90-minute conversation with Bishop Joseph Strickland about the church’s closure. (Strickland has publicly defended Carrie Prejean Boller from accusations of antisemitism and reprimand from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.) Throughout the conversation, Carlson pushed the idea that Israel has been “targeting” Christians, both physically and on some sort of spiritual plane.
“I wasn’t aware that the government, the secular government of Israel, owned the Holy Sepulchre. Where does this authority come from that you can just close someone else’s church?” said Carlson. “It suggests that there’s something else going on here, perhaps influenced by the spiritual war going on around us, that Christians would be the targets,”
Strickland responded with a theological ramble about Jesus being truth incarnate, culminating in implying that Israel is trying to get rid of Christians the way the Jews of the New Testament killed Jesus.
“Certainly that was the threat that the Romans and Jewish leaders wanted to get rid of. That’s historic reality, they plotted to rid themselves of this truth problem,” the bishop said. “In many ways we see the same thing repeated.”
A crumbling Judeo-Christian alliance
Israeli leaders quickly apologized for the police who prevented Pizzaballa from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and promised to ensure the patriarch’s access to holy sites for the rest of the week. The cardinal — who, as a figure who relies on a pact with Israel but leads a largely Palestinian flock, is known for measured statements — thanked them and called it a “misunderstanding.”
But Christian suspicion of Israel as a trustworthy religious ally and custodian of holy sites has been building for years. This is not the first time this year that Carlson has harped on the idea that Israel discriminates against its Christians, who are largely Palestinian; last year he did a podcast in February interviewing a Palestinian Anglican priest about limits on Christian worship and a declining Christian population
Videos of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem spitting at Christian pilgrims go viral several times a year. Every church destroyed by Israeli strikes in Gaza or Lebanon is shared among Christians online as proof that Israel targets Christians.
“The United States, the most important Christian country in the world, is funding this,” Carlson said.
Historically, much American support for Israel has come not only from Christian Zionists — who believe that Israel’s existence as a Jewish state is theologically ordained — but from Christians who simply believe that Israel is a safer custodian of Christian holy sites, thanks to their shared so-called Judeo-Christian values, than a Muslim country might be. American Christians have historically seen Israel as an ally not only geopolitically, but spiritually.
That’s all changing. Earlier this year, Pizzaballa’s Patriarchate had also released a statement condemning “damaging ideologies, such as Christian Zionism, mislead the public, sow confusion, and harm the unity of our flock.” And now, conversions to Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches, both which oppose Christian Zionism, are spiking, with some converts citing Israel as a reason for their conversion.
And as Israel limits or decreases access — however temporarily, or for whatever reasons — to Christian holy sites, the idea that it shares a set of cultural values, like freedom of religion, with the U.S., has begun to erode. Online commentators are building a narrative not only that Israel limits Christian worship, but that it is a spiritual enemy of Christianity itself.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid shared his concerns about the growing phenomenon in a statement posted on X. “The entire Catholic world is turning against us,” he wrote. “No one is stepping up to say: ‘This is not a Jewish declaration of war on the Christian world.’”
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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