Tuesday, June 03, 2014
Pope’s unbalanced neutrality in Holy Land
By Nicola Nasser*
Pope Francis’ “”pilgrimage” to the Holy Land last week proved to be an unbalanced impossible
mission. The pontiff failed to strike a balance of neutrality between
contradictory and irreconcilable binaries like divinity and earth, religion and
politics, justice and injustice and military occupation and peace.
Such neutrality is viewed by the laity of Christian
believers, let alone Muslim ones, in the Holy Land
as religiously, morally and politically unacceptable.
The 77-year old head of the world’s 1.2 billion
Catholics “is stepping into a religious and political minefield,” Naim Ateek,
the Anglican priest who founded the Palestinian liberation theology movement
and runs the Sabeel Ecumenical Center in Jerusalem and Nazareth, was quoted as
saying by “Time” on last May 24, the first day of the pope’s “pilgrimage.”
Ironically, the symbolic moral and spiritual power
of the Holy See was down to earth in Pope Francis’ subservient adaptation to
the current realpolitik of the Holy Land
in what the Catholic Online on May 26
described as “faith diplomacy.”
The pontiff’s message to the Palestinian
people during his three-day “pilgrimage” to the Holy Land boils down to an
endorsement of the Israeli and U.S. message to them, i.e.: “The only route to peace” is to negotiate with
the Israeli occupying power, refrain from unilateral actions and “violent”
resistance and recognize Israel as a fait accompli.
The UK-based Jordanian-Palestinian journalist Lamis Andoni, a
Christian herself, wrote on May 27: “We don’t need the Vatican blessing of
negotiations … Whoever sees occupation and remains neutral has no justice in
his vision.”
The Vatican
But the Vatican expert John Allen, writing in the Boston
Globe a week ahead of the pope’s visit, had expected it to be a “political
high-wire act,” and that what it truly was, because “religion and politics
cannot be separated in the Holy Land,” according to Yolande Knell on BBC online
on May 25.
Pope Francis would have performed much better had he adhered
“strictly,” “purely” and “absolutely” to making his trip a “pilgrimage for
prayer” and one that is committed to Christian unity and to helping indigenous Christians
survive the highly volatile and violent regional environment.
Instead he had drowned his spiritual role in a
minefield of symbolic political semantics and semiotics.
The pope finished his “pilgrimage,” which was
announced as a religious one but turned instead into a political pilgrimage,
with a call for peace.
However, the
grand mufti of Jerusalem
Palestinian-American Daoud Kuttab on May 25 wrote
in a controversial column that the pope “exceeded expectations for
Palestinians.”
He flew directly from Jordan
to Bethlehem in Palestine
He addressed the Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas as the head of the “State of Palestine,” announced that there must be
“recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to a sovereign homeland and
their right to live with dignity and with freedom of movement” and met with
Palestinian children whose parents were refugees whom Israelis displaced from
their homes in 1948.
And in an undeniable expression of solidarity
with the Palestinians, he made an unplanned stop to pray at Israel ’s apartheid wall of segregation in Bethlehem
However,
the word “occupation” was missing in more than thirteen of his speeches during
his “pilgrimage” as was any reference to world’s “largest open-air prison” in
Gaza Strip or to Dahiyat a-Salam (literally: Neighborhood of Peace) and other
five neighbourhoods in eastern Jerusalem, including the Shu’fat Refugee Camp,
where some eighty thousand Palestinians were cut off from the city services,
including water, since March 2014 and isolated from Jerusalem by Israel’s
segregation wall. His itinerary did not include
the Galilee and Nazareth
Eight
papal messages
However, within less than twenty four hours the pontiff was
to offset his positive overtures to Palestinians and his call for a “just solution” and a “stable peace based on
justice” for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with
eight messages to them.
The pontiff’s arrival in the Palestinian Holy Land
came three days before Israel’s celebration of its 47th anniversary
of its military occupation and annexation of the Christian and Muslim holy
sites in the Arab east Jerusalem and ten days after the Palestinian
commemoration of the 66th anniversary of their Nakba on the creation
of Israel in 1948 on the ruins of more than 500 towns and villages from which
the Zionist paratroops ethnically cleansed forcefully more than 800,000 Arab
Muslim and Christian native Palestinians.
The pope had nothing to say or do on both
occasions to alleviate the ensuing plight of the Palestinians except prayers,
because “the concrete measures for peace must come from negotiations … It is
the only route to peace,” according to the pope aboard his flight back to Rome
That was exactly the same futile message the
Israeli occupying power and its U.S.
For this purpose, the pope invited Palestinian and Israeli
presidents, Abbas and Shimon Peres, to pray for peace at “my home in the Vatican
His third message to Palestinians was to “refrain from initiatives and actions which
contradict the stated desire to reach a true agreement” with Israel, i.e. to
refrain from unilateral actions, which is again another Israeli and U.S.
precondition which both allies do not deem as deserving Israeli reciprocity.
By laying a wreath at the grave of Theodor Herzl, the atheist founder of Zionism who
nonetheless believed in God’s promise of the land to His Jewish “chosen people,”
the pope legitimized Herzl’s colonial settlement project in Palestine Israel is a
fait accompli recognized by the Vatican
The pope sent his fifth message to Palestinians when he
addressed young Palestinian refugees from the Dehiyshe Refugee Camp in Bethlehem U.S.
On the same occasion he sent his sixth message: “Violence
cannot be defeated by violence; violence can only be defeated with peace,” the
pope advised the young Palestinian refugees. This is again the Israeli and U.S.
The pope prayed at the Holocaust memorial, the western
al-Buraq Wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which Israelis call “The Wailing Wall,” the
memorial of the Israeli victims of Palestinian resistance, laid a wreath at
Herzel’s grave, visited Israeli president
at his residence where he “vowed to pray for the
institutions of the State of Israel,” which are responsible for the Palestinian
Nakba, and received Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Notre Dame
complex. The pontiff was in fact blessing and granting the Vatican
legitimacy to all the Israeli symbolic casus belli claims to the land, which
justify the Palestinian Nakba. This was his seventh message.
All those events took place in Jerusalem ,
which Israel Vatican 's
recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel
The pope’s eighth message to Palestinians was on the future
of Jerusalem
Normalization
with Israel
The “greatest importance” of Pope Francis’ visit “may lie in the fact that it
reflects the normalization of relations between the Vatican and the State of
Israel,” head of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, wrote on May 23.
The Second Vatican Council early in the sixties of the last
century rejected the collective Jewish guilt for Jesus Christ’s death. Since
then the Vatican ’s
“normalization” of relations with the Jews and Israel
Rabbi David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs at the
American Jewish Committee, was quoted as saying by the USA Today on May 26: There
“has been a revolution in the Christian world.”
At Ben-Gurion airport on May 25, Pope Francis reiterated his predecessor Benedict’s call for “the right of existence
for the [still borderless] State of Israel to be recognized universally,” but
was wise enough not to reiterate his “thanks to God” because “the Jews returned to the lands of their ancestors.”
To emphasise interfaith coexistence he broke the
precedent of including a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim sheikh in his official
delegation. “It’s highly symbolic,” said Rev. Thomas
Rosica, a consultant to the Vatican press
office.
By laying a wreath of white and yellow flowers, the
colours of the Vatican
The pontiff’s “pilgrimage” could not dispel the
historical fact that lies deep in the regional Arab memory that papacy was
“still linked to the Crusades of the 11th through 13th
centuries” when the successive popes’ only link to the Holy Land was a military
one, according to the international editor of NPR.org, Greg
Myre, on this May 24.
Of course this does not apply to Christianity. The indigenous oriental
churches’ link to the land has never been interrupted while the Catholic Church
was cut off from the region since the end of the Crusades until it came back
with the European colonial domination since the nineteenth century.
No pope ever travelled to Jerusalem
It doesn’t bode well with the
Arabs and the Palestinians in particular that the new papal tradition is
building on the background of recognizing Israel, which is an occupying power
and still without a constitutional demarcated borders, as a fait accompli that
the Palestinian people should recognize as well.
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based
in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. An
edited version of this article was first published by the Middle East Eye. nassernicola@ymail.com
