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 Centre in Jerusalem and Nazareth, was quoted as saying by Time on 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 US 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 recognise Israel as a fait accompli. The UK-based Jordanian-Palestinian journalist Lamis Andoni, a Christian herself, wrote on May 27: “We do not need the Vatican blessing of negotiations…Whoever sees occupation and remains neutral has no justice in his vision.” The Vatican and the pope himself had insisted that his visit to the birthplace of the three monotheistic ‘Abrahamic faiths’ of Islam, Christianity and Judaism was “purely spiritual”, “strictly religious”, a “pilgrimage for prayer” and “absolutely not political”. 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 is 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”, 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, Muhammad Hussein, while welcoming the pontiff inside Islam’s third holiest site of Al-Aqsa Mosque on May 26, said: “Peace in this land will not happen until the end of the (Israeli military) occupation.” 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 without passing through any Israeli entry procedures, implicitly and symbolically recognising Palestinian sovereignty. 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 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 because, as he said, “The time has come to put an end to this situation which has become increasingly unacceptable.”
However, the word ‘occupation’ was missing in more than thirteen of his speeches during his “pilgrimage” as was any reference to the world’s “largest open-air prison” in the Gaza Strip or to Dahiyat a-Salam (neighbourhood of peace) and the other five neighbourhoods in eastern Jerusalem, including the Shu’fat Refugee Camp, where some eighty thousand Palestinians were cut off from city services, including water, since March 2014 and isolated from Jerusalem by Israel’s segregation wall. His itinerary did not include Galilee and Nazareth, where most Palestinian Christians are located. However, within less than 24 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 the 47th anniversary of its military occupation and annexation of the Christian and Muslim holy sites in Arab East Jerusalem and 10 days after the Palestinian commemoration of the 66th anniversary of their Nakba (catastrophe) 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 US strategic ally have been sending to Palestinians for 66 years, but especially since 1967: Palestinians should be held hostage to exclusively bilateral negotiations with their occupying power. This was the Pope’s first message to the Palestinians.
(To be continued)
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