A Middle East peace?

In the annals of the on-going Middle East conflict, the recent occupation and siege of Bethlehem’s church of the Nativity will surely stand out as a defining moment.

The Franciscan friars and the Orthodox and Armenian monks and nuns, whose selfless presence surely prevented a massacre at this sacred site, are the heroes in this saga.

However, neither the Palestinians nor Israel have emerged from the stand-off with much honour.

Those who took refuge in the church did so with guns at the ready and therefore by force. However justified their motivation, the desecration of a church, never mind one of Christianity’s holiest shrines, is objectionable.

Likewise, the Israeli forces deserve condemnation for shooting with apparent intent to kill inside the church and withholding food as a weapon of war.

Both sides exhibited contempt for a sacred site that represents, in the words of Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Vatican’s nuncio to the region, “love, justice, peace and reconciliation.” In this instance, neither party may claim the moral highground.

The astute observer will not have missed the irony that it was a perceived act of desecration of Islam’s third-holiest mosque by Israel’s Ariel Sharon that served as a pretext for the eruption of the present intifadah.

Indeed, the crisis is often ascribed erroneously to religious strife when it really is a struggle over political control and land. Religion serves only as an emotive rationale, invoked or scorned when expedient.

Intractable though the conflict seems, its eventual outcome is inevitable. The reality of the state of Israel is immutable and non-negotiable. Any peace will require that Israel’s neighbours acknowledge and respect its peaceful existence. Likewise, Palestinians must be granted their own state, within feasible borders and guaranteed sovereignty.

This will involve painful concessions from all sides involved. Selling such a deal, self-evidently unavoidable though it is, to the respective constituencies will pose added difficulties.

Messrs Arafat and Sharon, and their associates, know that dialogue between the two sides (and presumably other interested parties) will sooner or later become obligatory.

One may be hopeful that the negotiations that ended the Bethlehem stand-off–protracted though they were–will serve as a catalyst towards peace talks, hopefully sooner than later.

If so, it would represent another irony: one of the mainly non-Christian antagonists in the conflict stumbling on to the path leading to peace from the birthplace of the Christian Lord, at least metaphorically so.