The Pope inspires no hope

While ready to pay homage to shrines of Jewish suffering, Pontiff Benedict XVI consigns to despair millions in refusing to visit Gaza or speak out about the Israeli military occupation of Palestine, writes Nicola Nasser*

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Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled, from 8- 15 May, to be the third pontiff to visit the Holy Land, following in the footsteps of Paul VI in 1964 and John Paul II in 2000, on a mission officially described as a "pilgrimage" and one of "peace and reconciliation".

However, the Pope will be stepping into a diplomatic minefield, where the highest Catholic spiritual authority will be unmercifully scrutinised by the protagonists of the 100-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict for the Holy Father's every step, word and handshake. This will surely force him onto the defensive and into an impossible balancing act that will rule out any hope his presence is supposed to inspire, especially among the downtrodden Arabs of Palestine, whether those who are "Israelis" living as second class citizens since 1948 or those living under Israeli military occupation since 1967.

Even the pontiff's own diminishing Catholic flock in the Holy Land seems confused over the timing and itinerary of his pilgrimage. "We will ask him why he came, what he intends on saying... and why he isn't coming to Gaza," Father Manuel Mussalam, the pastor of the only Catholic church of about 300 believers in Gaza out of 3,000 Christians in the Israeli besieged Strip, was quoted by AFP as saying. "We'll tell him that this is not the right moment to come and visit the holy places, while Jerusalem is occupied," Mussalam added.

In November 2006, long before Gaza came under the control of the Islamic movement Hamas, which is cited as the casus belli for the latest Israeli three-week bloody and destructive war on Gaza as well as for the nine-year old Israeli military blockade of 1.5 million Gazans since 2000, Father Mussalam described the situation: "Gaza cannot sleep! The people are suffering unbelievably. They are hungry, thirsty, have no electricity or clean water. They are suffering constant bombardments and sonic booms from low flying aircraft... They have no income, no opportunities to get food and water from outside and no opportunities to secure money inside of Gaza. They have no hope and no love. These actions are war crimes!"

Vindicating Mussalam's statement, the World Bank reported on 24 April that a serious environmental threat is evolving in Gaza where only one tenth of the available water meets world health standards, a fact that is responsible for a quarter of all cases of disease, creating a water crisis similar to that in Sudan and Congo.

Nonetheless, the Holy See is determined to rule out Gaza from the Pope's itinerary. In a recent letter to the Vatican, 40 prominent Christians from the occupied Palestinian territories appealed to the Holy See to add Gaza to his itinerary. They could not understand how the Pope has been to Auschwitz to pray for the people murdered there, "as a duty to truth and to those that suffered," as he said, but could not similarly heal the wounds of those who are still suffering in Gaza.

The Vatican cites security reasons, according to the spokesman of the Apostolic Nuncio to Israel, Father Peter Madros. Israel recently barred the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Antonio Franco, from Gaza. But security did not prevent Ban Ki- Moon, the UN secretary-general, from visiting Gaza when the guns were still smoking, nor did it prevent Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams from doing the same, to name only two.

The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Archbishop Fouad Twal, in an interview provided by the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land and published by Zenit.org on 22 April, acknowledged that the Pope's trip has undoubtedly a "political dimension". "We mustn't fool ourselves: there is 100 per cent a political dimension... everything will have a political connotation. Here, we breathe politics; our oxygen is politics."

Twal has three explanations. First, "it is difficult to find a good balance and to maintain it." Second, "imagine the negative consequences it would have on the pilgrimage industry, if the Pope himself was afraid of coming on pilgrimage." Third, "what should be done? Wait for better times... until the Palestinian question is resolved? I'm afraid that two or three Sovereign Pontiffs will pass before it is definitively settled."

The three reasons Twal cited are shocking, but his conclusion devastates whatever hope the papal visit might inspire. "The more the Vatican is a friend of Israel, the more it will be able to draw profit," otherwise, "we will all lose, we Christians and we Arabs".

When the Pope is to meet on 14 April with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has dispelled all hope for even the resumption of a peace process let alone peace, both by his on- record political platform as well as by the composition of his extreme right ruling coalition, and when he will meet with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, the spiritual capital of Christianity and Islam, which his Israeli hosts are determined to Judaise as their only eternal capital, and to visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, the Islamic Al-Buraq Wall as the Jewish Western (Wailing) Wall, and when Israel forces his protocol team to drop from the list of his Arab audience in Nazareth the Palestinian mayor of Sukhnin, Mazen Ghanaim, because he rallied against the Israeli war on Gaza, then the itinerary of his pilgrimage could be described as anything but apolitical or "balanced".

In his Easter message on 12 April, Benedict XVI noted world food shortage, the present financial turmoil, old and new forms of poverty, disturbing climate change, violence and deprivation, "the ever present threat of terrorism," concluding that, "it is urgent to rediscover grounds for hope," and urging his audience to inspire others with the courage to do good even when it costs dearly. His oversight in failing to mention military occupation and the vast refugee problems emanating from it -- as is the case in Palestine, to where he is heading as a pilgrim -- dispels all hope that he will say, let alone do, anything that would be the courage he calls others to exhibit.

* The writer is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, the West Bank of Israeli-occupied Palestine.