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PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOLY LAND - May 8-15, 2009

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I found this enterprise story by John Allen very informative but I did not realize it would provoke me to articulate some of my strong convictions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I'm not claiming to be an expert of any kind on the subject, but I started following this conflict as a journalist back in 1967, so I think I have a fairly informed handle on it, though it be my own alone.


Church in Israel struggles
to find its Hebrew voice


Arab Christians, Israeli Jews
on opposite sides of
a cultural-political divide



By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.

May 14, 2009


In theory, the Catholic presence in the Middle East ought to be a natural bridge with the other two great monotheistic faiths of the region, Islam and Judaism.

As far as Islam goes, that's long been a practical reality: Arab Christians share both language and culture with their Muslim neighbors, and, for the most part, a common political perspective.

With Judaism, however, the picture is far cloudier. Arab Christians tend to be on the opposite side of a cultural and political divide from many Israeli Jews, limiting the possibilities for face-to-face contact, and sometimes making those occasions more likely to spark tension than understanding.

Largely unknown to outsiders, however, the Catholic presence in Israel is not limited to Arab Christians. For the first time on this trip, Benedict XVI today acknowledged another face of the church, one that may have much greater potential for engaging both Judaism and civil society: its small Hebrew-speaking community.

"I greet the Hebrew-speaking Christians, a reminder to us of the Jewish roots of our faith," the Pope said during an evening vespers service in Nazareth.

Some experts believe the development of Hebrew-speaking Catholicism is the only way for the Church to find its voice in Israeli life.

"Otherwise, in addition to the religious divide, the Church and Christianity will always be viewed as foreign," said Fr. David Jaeger. "This is an added, and crushing, burden on our ability to communicate."

Jaeger, a Franciscan priest who was born a Jew in Israel in 1955, serves as the delegate in Rome of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land. He is also a legal advisor to the Vatican in its negotiations with the Israeli government on the tax and legal status of church properties.

Officially, the number of Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel is estimated to be only a few hundred, composed in part of converts from Judaism, including a handful of Holocaust survivors.

Given Jewish sensitivity to purported Christian proselytism, this community tends to maintain a deliberately low profile -- sometimes regarding itself, observers say, almost as a "hidden leaven" with the mass of Israeli society.

It's that bit of diplomatic tact, Vatican officials told NCR, that helps explain why Benedict XVI has not mentioned the community more often or more prominently, or why the pontiff has not visited any of its four centers in Israel.

Jaeger, however, said there's potentially a much larger pool of faithful in the country.

Official Israeli statistics identify 27,000 non-Arabic speaking Christians, though Jaeger said the number is likely larger because many do not have official state documents.

Some are Christians who settled in Israel under the "law of return," which allows entry to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent. Experts say that tens of thousands of Christians from the former Soviet Union, for example, have immigrated to Israel in recent decades.

In addition, Jaeger said, there are also many migrant workers who are in effect permanent residents, even if they don't have that status legally. For example, a considerable number of Filipino immigrants are living and working in Israel.

While these non-Arab Christians are mainly immigrants, their future is within Israeli society. They and their children, assuming they remain in the country, will become Israelis speaking Hebrew.

Many of these Christians aren't Catholic -- those from the former Soviet Union, for example, are mostly Orthodox -- but their presence nonetheless suggests that the number of Catholics who could form the basis of an Israeli voice for the church is considerably more than a few hundred.

Right now, Jaeger said, they amount to "a flock without a shepherd."

[Does this not speak to the perhaps understandable but also pastorally questionable partisanship of the Latin Patriarchs of Jerusalem - both Archbishop Sabbah who was Patriarch for 20 years and the present Patriarch, Archbishop Twal?

Why have they neglected the Hebrew Christians - we have no reason to doubt Fr. Jaeger - because of their overriding identification with the Palestinian cause? Their outspoken partisanship is most impolitic in every sense of the word. Who's to say that it is not a contributing factor to Israel's foot-dragging on the pending diplomatic issues with the Vatican?]


Israel has a robust culture of political debate, and Jaeger said there are many discussions to which the Church could contribute, citing as examples abortion, end of life issues, workers' rights and the new economy as examples. Yet, he said, usually its voice is not heard.

In part, he said, that's because "the existing Church structures have more than enough to do paying attention to the concerns of the national minority to which they minister so admirably." The reference is to Israel's Arab population. [Fr. Jaeger is being moooost diplomatic!]

After spending even a short time here, however, it seems clear that the problem is not simply time and resources. It's also that the vast majority of Arab Christians here are themselves Palestinians, meaning that they identify strongly with Palestinian resentments.

Two vignettes from Pope Benedict XVI's swing in Israel and the Palestinian Territories this week makes the point.

Earlier in the week, Israeli authorities shut down a press center for Palestinian journalists that had been opened at a hotel in East Jerusalem.

When asked if the Vatican would condemn the move, Fr. Peter Madros, an advisor to the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, said: "The Vatican does not need to condemn every move of Israel. Otherwise, the Vatican would be condemning every other day."

Yesterday, Benedict XVI visited the Aida refugee camp on the Palestinian-controlled West Bank, in Bethlehem. Rana Bishara, a local Palestinian artist and a Catholic, was on hand for the event, but she wasn't thrilled about what she had seen and heard from the Pope during this trip.

"The Pope visited the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, but we've been living the Holocaust for 61 years*," Bishara said, referring to the events of 1948 which led to the creation of the State of Israel and the beginning of exile for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

In general, Bishara said, she's now convinced that the Pope -- her Pope -- is "in the pocket of Israel."

However understandable those frustrations, they're unlikely to make the basis for a "natural bridge" with Israel and Judaism.

The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which is the official Catholic structure covering Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, does have an arm for the Hebrew-speaking community: "The Apostolate of Saint James the Apostle," founded in 1955 with centers in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Haifa and Beersheva. It's currently led by Fr. David Neuhaus, a Jesuit born in South Africa.

The group describes its aims as:
- To establish Hebrew-speaking Catholic communities in the state of Israel for Catholics integrated into Israeli Jewish society.
- To be a bridge between the universal church and the people of Israel by strengthening the relationship of Jews and Christians, and by reminding the church of her Jewish roots.
- To bear witness to values of peace and justice, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Jaeger, however, believes that if the Church is to find its voice within Israeli society, a separate ecclesiastical structure is required -- one that would have its own identity.

"There's a huge interest in the Church in Israel," Jaeger said. "People are very willing to pay attention and to listen, if not always to agree. But right now, a cultural, linguistic, and mental screen prevents that from happening."


*Even if I am not Jewish, I protest most strongly Bishara's equating the Jewish Holocaust - which was naked programmed genocide - to the vicissitudes of the Palestinians, which is the result of a welter of circumstances not entirely caused by Israel alone or the Palestinians alone, or even both together, but by a historical chain of events that involves so many other nations and interests, and worse, that cannot be undone, only resolved by compromise.

Leave aside the international geopolitics that led to the colonial partitioning of the Middle East between the Britsh and the French after World War I, and how the United Nations voted to recognize a new State of Israel on what had been the historic Jewish homeland (antedating Islam by centuries). Let's fast-forward to when the State of Israel was created.

Would the Palestinians living then in the territory of the new State of Israel (an estimated 700,000 at the time) have been expelled by the Israelis after May 14, 1948, assuming the Arab countries had not immediately gone to war to prevent that state from becoming a reality?

But they fled when war broke out, perhaps expecting to come back without a problem since they expected the nascent state to be crushed easily by the Arab coalition. They bet on the wrong side, and as it happens, Israel's War for Independence was followed by three other wars declared against Israel by the Arabs in the course of the next 20 years, Israel winning every time, David over Goliath.

And yet, the Israelis gave back most of the Arab lands they had conquered, keeping only what they deem essential to their identity as a Jewish state - which includes Jerusalem, their historic capital since the days of King David, longer than anyone else.

Then, they ceded the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to give Palestinians a territory on which to build a state eventually, And all they got for it was an unrelenting hate campaign from the Palestinians who invented the intifada and massacre by terror bombing just to wreak vengeance on Israel!

Given the record of relentless Arab aggression since Israel became a state in 1948, how can Israel be blamed if it takes security and defense measures it considers appropriate to defend its own citizens? Even if such measures may seem excessive - or are actually excessive - because the weaker adversary necessarily incurs more deaths, injuries and damages.

Israel is considered unjust because it happens to be stronger, even if it only deploys its military might when it is directly challenged - as in the months-long daily rocket attacks from Hamas extremists in Gaza which provoked the Israeli military reaction last December.

Ariel Sharon withdrew Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip as a practical measure more than two years ago. It is almost a mercy that he went into coma before Gaza was thereafter converted into the military base for Hamas terrorists to strike at Israel.

I wonder how many liberals would be so totally on the Palestinian side and see nothing but evil in Israel if, say, the Palestinians had the full material and economic support of super-rich allies like Iran and Saudi Arabia and declared full war on Israel, something they can't do now on their own because they do not have the resources for it, and Iran is helping Hamas only just enoough to enable them to inflict pinpricks on Israel. Pinpricks that are occasionally lethal but not enough to drive the Israelis into the Mediterranean, because that is a 'pleasure' that Iran wants to reserve for itself?

What most pro-Palestine partisans (and conversely extreme Israel haters) choose to ignore is that Israel has never initiated any armed aggression against the Arabs (except the Six-Day War, which was a preemptive strike that caught the Arab armies by surprise before they could launch the offensive they planned) - it has always and only been in reaction to Arabs attacking first, whether from Lebanon, or Syria, or the Palestinian territories, or from the Arab states that went to war against it four times between 1948 and 1968.

Of course, they have been guilty of excesses - who isn't in war conditions? But does anyone doubt that if the shoe were on the other foot - Israel would get absolutely crushed underfoot over night with no quarters given?

Ehud Barak made almost every concession Arafat wanted back in 2000, and still Arafat turned down the deal brokered by President Clinton. Time and again, in Oslo, in Madrid, at Camp David, it is Israel that makes concessions even if it has all the cards - and all it gets back is intifada, terror bombings, rocket attacks on its cities.

One can see why the Palestinians are so intractable and don't want to make any concessions on their part - such as agreeing to a negotiated settlement, perhaps, in liew of 'right of return' which has become a practical impossibility after 60 years from the Israeli point of view, because there just is no room to accomodate the three million or so into which the originally 700,000 have grown. And even if there were room, the sheer number of these returnees would immediately dliute the Jewish population and make a mockery of Israel being a Jewish state, the Jewish homeland, which is its raison d'etre!

More important, is not the so-called 'right of return' an obvious ploy for eventually 'reclaiming' all the region in the manner of the camel who is allowed to put his head into the tent and soon ends up occupying the entire tent. Never forgetting Arafat's famous threat that the Arab womb was their best weapon: "If we can't defeat them in war, let's outbreed them!"

[But it must be said Israel's infamous strategy of establishing Jewish settlements in territory they had ceded to the Palestinians is its own version of the camel's ploy, and it is just as unacceptable. And to what effect, except as a show of naked bad faith? It may have started the strategy thinking of these settlements as advance military posts, but the Israelis who volunteered to build these settlements all happen to be militants who have planted themselves where they were sent and have stood their ground ready to die as martyrs if the government forced them to strike camp and go home.

Meanwhile, are the Palestinians not just playing a waiting game, a war of attrition until they can get their camel's head into the Israeli tent and claim it fully for their own?

The unfairness of the international community with respect to Israel makes enough Jews angry enough to vote for someone like Netanyahu who takes a very hard line that has no patience with playing the Palestinian game and says so outright.

Let us hope his bark is worse than his bite, because he may be a hardliner, but he does not strike me as fanatic. So maybe he will leave the door ajar for negotiations although he realizes that it could all be futile even in the short run, let alone for a 'durable and lasting peace based on justice' that the Holy Father prays for, and all right-thinking people along with him.

I apologize for using this space to express my views on the Arab-Palestinian conflict, but after all, a new impetus to the peace process between them was part of the Holy Father's intention for this pilgrimage.

Even if I am obviously puzzled that the Vatican - and presumably, the Holy Father himself - has seemed always ready to condemn Israeli reprisal for attacks initiated against them, but not the Palestinians for initiating the attacks. Is it just compassion for anyone who is weaker? But weakness does not justify or excuse wrong actions!....


[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/05/2009 01:22]
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