For this purpose, the Pope invited Palestinian and Israeli presidents Abbas and Shimon Peres to pray for peace at “my home in the Vatican as a place for this encounter of prayer” on June 8. The Pope’s spokesman, Federico Lombardi, told the BBC it was “a papal peace initiative”. This was his second message. 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 US precondition that 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 legitimised Herzl’s colonial settlement project in Palestine. This was his fourth message: Israel is a fait accompli recognised by the Vatican and blessed by the papacy, and Palestinians have to adapt accordingly. The Washington Post, on May 23, went further: “Some are interpreting” the Pope’s act “as the pontiff’s tacit recognition of the country’s Jewish character.”
The pope sent his fifth message to Palestinians when he addressed young Palestinian refugees from the Dehiyshe Refugee Camp in Bethlehem: “Don’t ever allow the past to determine your life, always look forward.” He was repeating the Israeli and US calls on Palestinian refugees to forget their nakba (1948 Palestinian exile) and look forward from their refugee camps for an unknown future in exile and diaspora. 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 US message to them, which after more than two decades of Palestinian commitment produced neither peace nor justice for them.
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 the 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 Vatican legitimacy to all the Israeli symbolic casus belli claims to the land, which justify the Palestinian nakba. This was his seventh message.
All these events took place in Jerusalem, which Israel annexed as the “eternal” capital of the Hebrew state and the “Jewish people”. Reuven Berko, writing in Yisrael Hayom, said that the Pope’s meetings with Peres and Netanyahu were “de facto expressions of the Vatican’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel”. The Pope’s eighth message to Palestinians was on the future of Jerusalem: “From the negotiations perhaps it will emerge that it will be the capital of one state or another…I do not consider myself competent to say that we should do one thing or another.”
The “greatest importance” of Pope Francis’ visit “may lie in the fact that it reflects the normalisation 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 1960s of the last century rejected the collective Jewish guilt for Jesus Christ’s death. Since then the Vatican’s ‘normalisation’ of relations with the Jews and Israel has been accumulating. Rabbi David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs at the American Jewish Committee, was quoted as saying by 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 recognised 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 is highly symbolic,” said Reverend Thomas Rosica, a consultant to the Vatican press office. By laying a wreath of white and yellow flowers, the colours of the Vatican, on Herzl’s grave, the Pope broke another historic precedent. It was an unbalanced act 110 years after Pope Pius X met Herzl and rejected the idea of a Jewish state. The pontiff’s ‘pilgrimage’ could not dispel the historical fact that lies deep in the regional Arab memory that the 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 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 European colonial domination in the 19th century. No pope ever travelled to Jerusalem until Paul VI spent one day in the city, on January 4, 1964, when the holy sites were under the rule of the Arab Jordanians. John Paul visited 36 years later and established a new papal tradition that has been followed by Pope Benedict who visited in 2009, and now Pope Francis. It does not bode well for the Arabs and the Palestinians in particular that the new papal tradition is building on the background of recognising Israel, which is an occupying power and still without constitutional, demarcated borders, as a fait accompli that the Palestinian people should recognise as well.
(Concluded)
The writer 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 Middle East Eye