Bless the Peacemakers

by Editor · April 8, 2015

During the Israeli election campaign last month, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, ruled out the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state.

Members of the clergy hold candles during a procession for the traditional washing of the feet ceremony on Holy Thursday, April 2, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem’s Old City. (CNS photo/Ammar Awad, Reuters)

In declaring the two-state solution dead, Mr Netanyahu unwillingly found some common ground with a growing Palestinian consensus that there cannot be an independent Palestine.

Since illegally occupying the West Bank in 1967, Israel has annexed portions of what until then was Jordanian land, and built hundreds of settlements on land that isn’t theirs to take.

Settlements are now also built in East Jerusalem, which is the Palestinian part of the city, with people who have lived there for many generations being forced from their homes.

It is these settlements, erected in violation of international law, which form an obstacle to the notion of a Palestinian state, since these cannot be simply dismantled nor feasibly incorporated into such a state.

It is the continuing construction of settlement on Palestinian land and the occupation by the Israel Defence Force (IDF), as well as Israel’s eight-year-long siege of Gaza, which is at the heart of much of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

The conflict is not about Israel’s existence. While Palestinians and Arab states might argue, with good cause, that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 came at an unacceptably high cost to the people who had lived there for centuries, nobody seriously believes that Israel can be undone.

Of course, Israelis remember well the external pressure that was applied by its neighbours in the early years of their state, and they seem to have internalised a siege mentality which those with no interest in peace exploit.

It is also true that the rhetoric and ineffectual rocket attacks by Hamas feed these fears. Hamas, quite obviously, are not agents of peace.

But the Israeli occupation of the West Bank where the moderate Fatah party, not Hamas, is strong does not discriminate between political views or even religious background. Christians, too, are the victims of often random repression and targeted dispossession.

Farmers are cut off from their land by the separation wall which Israel has built in the occupied territories; olive groves and crops are systematically burnt to drive people off their land; water is rationed for Palestinians in their own land while it runs freely for Israel’s illegal settlements; detention without trial, sometimes lasting for years, is widespread, with even children as young as five being arrested; and so on.

Even the city of the birth of the Prince of Peace, Bethlehem, is totally ringed in by a wall that is twice the height of the hated Berlin Wall. As a result of the wall and the IDF-manned checkpoints, the residents of Bethlehem have no freedom of movement to work outside their city, creating rampant unemployment in what once was the region’s most important Christian city.

Palestinian Christians, most of whom are Catholics, are leaving the Holy Land in great numbers because of the occupation, and in smaller part because of growing Muslim intolerance towards them. The land of Our Lord and Our Lady would be irreparably diminished should the Christian community there disappear.

As Catholics, we are called to pursue all avenues for justice and peace. And it is to this end that The Southern Cross is staging a Pilgrimage of the Peacemakers to the Holy Land next February, under the leadership of Archbishop Stephen Brislin.

The pilgrimage seeks to gain an understanding of the situation in the Holy Land by engaging with the history of the conflict, by observing the realities on the ground, and by encountering those on both sides who seek peace. The participants will see and be seen, and they will pray at the holy places of Our Lord, who called us to be peacemakers.

And in our prayers, the ultimate goal will be the peaceful coexistence between the people of the Holy Land in a secular, constitutional democracy in a unitary state which grants all citizens equal rights with provisions made for the concerns of minorities.

This is the only way in which peace will come to the land of Christians, Muslims and Jews.