The violence, which began on 7 October 2023 with the Hamas attacks on Israelis, marks a turning point in the 76-year-old conflict in the Holy Land.
Even now, Hamas holds more than 100 Israeli hostages, and the Palestinian victims of the disproportionate Israeli reaction exceed 30,000. Some 70 per cent of them are women and children; 60,000 are injured; there are 40,000 orphans and over 80 per cent of homes in Gaza are destroyed.
“Something inexorably broke on 7 October 2023,” says the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, speaking from the Holy City. “Not only the pre-existing precarious political balances, but above all those human relations between ethnic groups, cultures and religions that we had built with difficulty over the years, and which now appear compromised.”
It also amounts to an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. The Vicar of the Custos of the Holy Land, Fr Ibrahim Faltas OFM, who has just returned to Jerusalem from Italy, says: “Together with the Italian authorities, we managed to get 150 seriously injured or sick children out of Gaza. It is the most important humanitarian initiative carried out so far. I hope other European countries and Britain follow suit.”
The Christian minority in the Holy Land – 200,000 in a population of nine million – does what it can, but is suffering. Before 7 October, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians crossed the checkpoints to work in Israel: today those checkpoints are closed, and for the past five months thousands of families have had no income.
Christians in particular are employed in the tourist industry, but there are no pilgrims; the hotels are closed, the sanctuaries deserted. From Bethlehem to Jerusalem is only 9km, divided by the horrible separation wall that commuters are now unable to cross. Manger Square in Bethlehem is deserted – it is worse than during the Covid pandemic.
“Christians here,” says Cardinal Pizzaballa, “are distinguished from others because their religious confession is independent of ethnicity. You can be a Christian of Arab origin or be Hebrew-speaking; this puts us in an advantageous situation as instigators of dialogue between opposing parties. But even within us there are different sensitivities.”
Dialogue between religions is essential for peace. This is undoubtedly the biggest change in recent years. Even at the end of the last century, the religious element was not so decisive: Yasser Arafat’s PLO was an essentially secular movement, at whose summits you could also find Christian leaders such as George Habash or Nayef Hawatmeh – it was light years away from the radical Islamism of Hamas.
Equally, on the Jewish front, the great numerical growth of the Haredim population and of the religious nationalists living in the illegal settlements of the West Bank has changed the profile of a society that was formed under the guidance of the founding fathers of the State of Israel, always careful to protect the secularism of public institutions.
Peace needs religious dialogue, but it is also important that the possibility of peaceful coexistence is internalised in the consciences of the two peoples and does not remain limited to the political classes.
“This is the main reason for the failure of the Oslo agreements, 30 years ago,” says Cardinal Pizzaballa. “They were not metabolised by the two national societies.”
From this point of view, Christians play an essential role through the management of around 40 schools which almost 60,000 students of all faiths attend. “It is a very tiring and expensive job,” says Fr Faltas, “to which we dedicate a large part of the resources that come to us from the Good Friday collection for the Holy Land. We hope that even more resources will arrive this year, because we are facing a serious situation.”
For now the central issue remains Gaza and the possibility of a truce. Fr Gabriel Romanelli, Gaza’s Argentinian parish priest, tells us: “For five months, our 650 parishioners have been living camped in the premises of the Church of the Holy Family in pitiful conditions. Their homes have been destroyed. They are comforted by the fact that every evening at 7 p.m. they receive a phone call from Pope Francis, who appears close to them and blesses them.”
Those few who could, escaped. Fr Luke Gregory OFM, parish priest and vicar general on the island of Rhodes, says: “We are used to seeing refugees from Syria and Iraq arriving on boats. Now we see those fleeing from Gaza arriving. Escape is not a solution. We need to stop the war and restart a path of peace by creating two states for the two peoples.”
But the Custos of the Holy Land, Fr Francesco Patton OFM, warns: “Both parties need to move away from the idea of the exclusivity of their own pain. We must learn to recognise and respect the pain of others. Only in this way can forgiveness and reconciliation be achieved.” Photo: Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa in Jerusalem. (Getty Images.)
Roberto Cetera is Jerusalem correspondent for L’Osservatore Romano.
This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald magazine. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking publication and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world clickhere.
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