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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 March - 5 April 2000 Issue No. 475 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 March - 5 April 2000 Issue No. 475
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Zero sum -- still
By Graham UsherHe came, he saw but he did not conquer -- not at least if one of the principle aims of Pope John Paul II's pilgrimage was to foster reconciliation not only between the various faiths that make up the Holy Land, but also between the two peoples that contest it. On the contrary, the pope's historic visit served only to expose how deep the national (as opposed to religious) fractures between them run.
This can be seen in how Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews judge the successes and failures of the Papal journey. As so often in the zero-sum reality of Israel and the Palestinian occupied territories, one side's victory is seen as the other side's defeat.
For the Palestinians, the highlight of the pope's pilgrimage was his day in the Palestinian Authority controlled enclave of Bethlehem. It was there that he affirmed the Palestinians' "natural right to a homeland -- on the basis of international law and the relevant UN resolutions". It was there also -- through his visit to Bethlehem's Deheishah refugee camp -- that he drew unprecedented media attention to the plight of the 3.6 million Palestinian refugees.
In a speech to the around 10,000 of them in Deheishah, he recalled to the world that their flight and expulsion from their homes in what was Mandate Palestine and is now Israel was not only a legal wrong still -- 52 years on -- awaiting redress. It was also a deeply human tragedy. For "you bear the sad memory of what you were forced to leave behind, not just material possessions, but your freedom, the closeness of relatives, and the familiar surroundings and cultural traditions which nourished your personal and family life," he told them.
For the Jewish people and Israel in particular, the most powerful moment was the pope's moving witness at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial to the six million Jews who perished in the Nazi death camps, including three million from his native Poland. It was less the regret that "the Catholic Church.. is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place" that made his testimony so poignant. It was rather the pope's personal memories of being young man in Nazi occupied Poland and his reunion with a 59-year old woman whom he, as a young priest, had saved from the camps. She was crying on their meeting at Yad Vashem and so -- according to one eyewitness -- was the pope.
The failures came when the pope tried to extend these attempts at reconciliation between Christians and Jews to the contemporary, national conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Pope John Paul II kneels in prayer at the Basilica of the Annunciation where Christians say the Angel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary she would bear Jesus Christ
(photo: AFP)
The first low-point was a disastrous "interfaith" conference on 23 March between Jewish, Christian and Muslim clerics at the Vatican's Notre Dame building in Jerusalem. Israel's Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, provocatively thanked the pope for his "recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's united eternal capital." Factually inaccurate and at odds with the Vatican's position that East Jerusalem, along with the rest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, is "militarily occupied territory," the comment unleashed a torrent of abuse from the Muslim "interlocutor," Sheikh Tazir Tamimi. "Religious strife," said the Sheikh, will end once Israel stops "strangling Jerusalem and oppressing its [Palestinian] residents." The pope sat between them, his hands clasped over his ears, in a posture of acute embarrassment.
Nor did matters improve. Two days after the interfaith dialogue, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ikrema Sabri, ignored the pope's words at Yad Vashem that "no one can diminish the scale" of the Nazi genocide. In an interview with an Italian newspaper, Sabri said that the number of Holocaust victims "was less than six million" and that "Israel is using this issue to get sympathy world wide." The Israeli right wing took these comments as evidence of the endemic anti-Semitism of all Arabs. The PLO representative to the Vatican, Afif Safieh, pleaded that Sabri's "blunder" not be used by the Western media to sully the pope's clear endorsement of Palestinian rights.
Israel's constant denial of those rights was made palpable on 26 March in the Old City when the pope visited the mufti on the Muslim Haram Al-Sharif compound, the Jewish Wailing Wall and led Mass at the Christian Holy Sepulcher. In an utterly excessive show of force, the Israeli police not only closed off Jerusalem to thousands of Palestinians who wanted to welcome the pope in East Jerusalem. It also prevented such well-known Palestinian Christians as former PLO spokeswoman, Hanan Ashrawi, from attending Mass at the Holy Sepulcher. According to Ashrawi, the threat the Israeli government made to the local church was that if such "international public figures" as herself were allowed to attend "then so would the entire Israeli cabinet." Not surprisingly, the church backed down.
Nor could it do otherwise, if it was to comply with the pope's wish that the spiritual aspect of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land be held above the political. And that precisely is the dilemma. For no matter how holy this land is to the three monotheistic religions that draw inspiration from it, the basic conflict in Israel/Palestine is not a religious one. It is a national conflict between two peoples over a land and a city that each claims as its own. And that cannot be resolved by piety -- not even if espoused by the figure Catholics believe is the ambassador of God on earth and the Muslim PLO representative for Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini, acknowledged as "a very great man."
