Justice and Peace Commission

Jerusalem (2020)

Portraits of the Holy Land

Transformation and

Tribulation (1917-2020)

1    

Justice and Peace Commission Jerusalem

Portraits of the Holy Land

Jerusalem, 2020

The maps in this booklet (except where otherwise stated) are from of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA) and reproduced with permission. The cover photograph is by permission of Mr. Mounir Hodali.

© Justice and Peace Commission, Jerusalem - 2020

2    

Introduction The land Christians call holy is the land of God’s revelation to humanity. It is the land of the Old Testament and the New. In history it has known many names but today some refer to it as Israel and others as Palestine. It is a land that has endured a tragic history. Conquerors have come and gone throughout the ages and in modern times it continues to witness ongoing strife and violence. We seek here to sketch the troubled past and present of the Holy Land. A brief timeline will take us to our starting point in 1917.

Chronology c. 7000 BC: Jericho, a walled settlement c. 5000-4000 BC: Land of Canaan occupied by Canaanites, then Amorites and Jebusites. c. 1800 BC: Founding patriarch Abraham arrived in the Holy Land c. 1200 BC: Israelites under Joshua entered the Holy Land c. 1000 BC: David captured Jebusite city of Jerusalem and made it his capital c. 970 BC: Solomon built First Temple c. 930 BC: Split into northern kingdom of Israel and southern kingdom of Judah c. 722 BC: Northern kingdom conquered by Assyria 587 BC: Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed Jerusalem, deportation to Babylon 539 BC: Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon and allowed return from captivity 515 BC: Second Temple was completed 332 BC: Alexander the Great conquered Palestine, beginning of Greek rule 175 BC: King Antiochus IV of Syria desecrated the Temple 167 BC: Judas Maccabeus led revolt, rededicated the Temple 63 BC: Roman general Pompey took control of Palestine 26: Pontius Pilate became procurator of Roman province of Judea c. 30: Jesus was condemned to death and crucified 70: Romans destroyed Jerusalem and Second Temple 313: Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity 614: Persians captured Jerusalem 629: Emperor Heraclius I reestablished Byzantine rule in Jerusalem 638: Islamic forces conquered Jerusalem, beginning rule of Arab dynasties 1099: First Crusade captured Jerusalem and established Latin kingdom 1187: Sultan Saladin defeated Crusaders and took Jerusalem 1244: Ruled by Ayyubids and Mamluks until 1517 1517: Ottoman Turks occupied Palestine 1847: The establishment of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem 1917: Ottomans surrendered Jerusalem to the British during World War I and British occupation of Palestine begins

3    

The portraits of the Holy Land we sketch in this booklet illustrate the profound alterations stemming from the events in 1917. Our aim is to explain how and why the Holy Land has become the epicenter of a human conflict that has mobilized nations and faith communities across the face of the planet. Here is how Palestine looked under Ottoman rule in the second half of the 19th century.

4    

1917 The Holy Land was ruled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire for four hundred years until Ottoman forces surrendered Jerusalem to British General Allenby on December 11, 1917, towards the end of the First World War. The land was mostly inhabited by Arabic speakers (Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze and Samaritans), who were known as Palestinians in this period. In fact, today the Palestinians are the heirs of all those peoples who lived in Palestine continuously over the centuries. The period of the First World War (1914-1918) had brought great suffering, famine, armed conflict and despotic rule to the people of Palestine. On November 2, 1917, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur Balfour, had issued a letter to a leading figure in the Jewish community in England, Lord Rothschild. This letter, which became known as the “Balfour Declaration”, in part committed the British government to the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Jews in Palestine, 60,000 in number, formed only ten percent of the population at the time. Thousands had arrived in the thirty years preceding 1917, fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Balfour, were motivated both by a great sympathy for Jewish suffering in Russia and their interpretation of the Bible, that Palestine, thousands of years ago, had been a Jewish homeland promised to the Jews by God. This interpretation of the Bible, which motivated some to justify modern Jewish claims to the land of Palestine, has had a powerful resonance since the 19th century. Lloyd George and Balfour also looked on the Arabs in Palestine much as they looked upon the inhabitants of Africa and Asia as inferior peoples who should accept the enlightenment brought to them by the British. Jews were perceived as fellow Europeans, while Muslim Arabs were stereotyped as backward and barbarous. The stereotypes of Muslims and Islam as violent have intensified as the century has unfolded, strengthening support for Zionism and antipathy toward the Palestinians. Already at the end of the nineteenth century, some European Jews, like Theodor Herzl, had been promoting a nationalist ideology known as Zionism. It proposed that Jews migrate to Palestine and establish a Jewish homeland there, as a response to the persecution of Jews in Russia and elsewhere. This mirrored the European nationalist movements that eventually led to the breakup of the multiethnic empires in Europe. Whereas most Jews at the time understood their homelands to be the countries in which they lived, Zionists sought to convince Jews that anti-Semitism, the developing 19th century ideology promoting hatred of Jews, would never allow Jews to be integrated as equal citizens in the countries in which they resided. In 1917, many more Jews opposed Zionism than supported it. The British, seeking to encourage support for their war effort, had made promises to both Zionists and Arabs. In return for rising up against the Ottoman Turks, the British promised support for the establishment of an Arab kingdom that would include Palestine. However, it became clear after the British occupied Palestine in December 1917, that they preferred to assist the Jews in achieving autonomy in the Holy Land. In 1922, Palestine became a Mandate under British rule established by the League of Nations. The principles of the Balfour Declaration were included in the Mandatory Statute. The first Governor-General of Mandatory Palestine was a Jewish Zionist

5    

Englishman, Sir Herbert Samuel. He and his successors encouraged Jewish settlement in Palestine, which during the decades of British rule, led to a total transformation of the country. The following map shows Palestine at the beginning of the British Mandate with a growth in the number of Jewish settlements.

6    

The Catholic Church was reticent about these changes in the character of the Holy Land. In his letter to the Secretary General of the League of Nations in 1922, the Holy See’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, wrote that although the Holy See had no objection to the British receiving the Mandate for Palestine, it had great reservations about the implied change in the status of the Jews there. Gasparri, while stressing that “the Holy See does not oppose that the Jews have equal civil rights in Palestine”, stressed that it could not accept that the Jews be granted a privileged position in comparison with the other inhabitants of the land. Whereas the Balfour Declaration’s paragraph calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland was slowly realized, the second paragraph of the Declaration calling for care to be taken that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” was blatantly ignored. Arthur Balfour visited Palestine in 1922 and commented, “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country …the Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires or prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”1

__________________________________________

1947-49 After thirty years of British rule, Palestine was in the throes of a civil war. Two national movements clashed both with the British and each other, each one attempting to take control of as much territory as possible. Clashes between Jews and Arabs in Palestine had broken out sporadically through the 1920s as the Arabs in Palestine realized that British policy promoted the migration of European Jews to the land and assisted the Zionist movement to become a shadow government. By the 1930s, especially after the outbreak of the Arab Revolt (1936-1939), the development of a common Palestinian identity for Arabs and Jews no longer seemed possible. The Second World War put a halt to the national struggle of both Jews and Arabs but the end of the war meant the renewal of the struggle. The aftermath of the war also revealed the atrocities inflicted upon the Jewish communities in Europe that nearly eradicated European Jewry during the Holocaust. The images of the Jewish survivors of the death camps and the harrowing narratives of Jewish suffering during the war years left an indelible impression, nurturing a strong solidarity with the Jews and strengthening support for Zionism. Many, including world leaders like US President Harry Truman, felt that the Jews deserved a safe homeland and nowhere better than in their “ancient Biblical land”. Less thought was given to what this would mean for the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, particularly Muslim and Christian Palestinian Arabs, who were expected to make way for the Jews who poured in from Europe and later from other parts of the Arab world. As the British faced ever greater opposition from both Jews and Arabs, they decided to turn to the newly created United Nations (which had replaced the League of Nations), asking it to end the Mandate for Palestine. On November 29, 1947, an important majority of member countries of the United Nations voted to declare that Palestine should be partitioned, allowing for the creation of a                                                                                                                          1 Lord Balfour quoted in D. INGRAMS, Palestine Papers 1917-1922, Seeds of Conflict, (London, 1972), 73.

7    

Jewish state (on 56% of the territory) and a Palestinian state alongside it (on 44% of the territory). Jerusalem and its surrounding neighborhoods including Bethlehem were not part of the territories allocated and became a “corpus separatum” due to be administered by the UN for ten years until further negotiations would decide the fate of these sensitive areas in which the Holy Places of Jews, Christians and Muslims are to be found. These maps show the consequences to Palestinian villages in the ensuing years.

Jerusalem and its environs including Bethlehem would remain under international custodianship. At the time, Jews constituted one third of the population (630,000) while Palestinian Arabs constituted two thirds of the population (1,324,000). The vast majority of Jews had arrived in the country within the three decades preceding 1947 and were perceived by the Palestinians as Europeans who should return to their countries of origin. The Jews rejoiced at the partition plan even though they had hoped to receive much more. The Palestinian Arabs and the citizens of the entire Arab world were horrified that at a time when European colonialism seemed to be coming to an end in Asia and Africa, the international

8    

community sought to cede the major part of Palestine to predominantly European Jewish migrants, who had never even bothered for the most part to learn the local language, Arabic, or respect the local culture. Violence broke out once again as Jewish and Palestinian militias clashed and the British looked on, sometimes aiding one side and sometimes the other. During the months that followed the publication of the partition plan, Zionist militias engaged in a process of ethnic cleansing, terrorizing Arabs and encouraging them to flee. One of the most infamous massacres of Palestinians by Zionist militias took place on April 9, 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin, on the outskirts of Jerusalem when tens of Palestinian men, woman and children were killed. Attack and counter-attack, a continuing cycle of violence and reprisal resulted in many victims on both sides. On May 14, 1948, the British withdrew from Palestine and the Zionist leadership immediately proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. War raged on, now a war between an Israeli army comprised of skilled militia fighters who formed a well-organized military of the new State and Palestinian Arab forces supported by the armies of the surrounding Arab countries. The new State of Israel received military and economic help from the Soviet Union, its allies in Eastern Europe and from the United States of America and Western European countries, enabling Israeli forces to defeat the ill-equipped Arab armies. In addition, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan reached a secret agreement with the Israeli leadership on a new partition, whereby Jordan would become the ruler of part of the West Bank of the Jordan River in return for not supporting the Arab forces. By January 1949, the War had run its course. One percent of the Jewish population had died in the violence. For the Palestinian people as the aspiration of a Palestinian state was crushed. The Israeli forces had taken control of 78% of historical Palestine (rather than the 56% that had been provided by the partition plan) and the vast majority of Arabs who lived there became refugees, either having been expelled from their homes or having fled. The Israeli authorities immediately enacted laws ensuring that the refugees would never be allowed to return and took control of the Palestinian properties left behind. The vast majority of the Arabs who stayed in the State of Israel after 1948 were placed under military rule. Even though they were citizens of the State, they were deprived of many basic freedoms, a regime that was only lifted in January 1966. At the same time, the Israelis passed legislation that allowed for the migration of hundreds of thousands of Jews into Israel where they received immediate citizenship. The remaining 22% of the land was divided between the Jordanians (who annexed East Jerusalem and the West Bank) and the Egyptians, who set up their administration in the Gaza Strip. Any remaining Jews in these areas were expelled. In the following two maps, one can see the division of territory proposed by the United Nations in 1947 and the borders that were, in fact, established by the armistice agreement in 1949. Whereas the 1947 Partition Plan had ceded 56% of Palestine to the Jewish State, the borders that were defined by the ceasefire in 1949 (known as the “Green Line” – although in red on the map below) ceded 78% of Palestine. The remaining 22% were occupied, the “West Bank” of the Jordan River occupied by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. The blue line running up from the Dead Sea is the Jordan River. The beige part to the left, with the word Jordan on it, is the West Bank.

9    

10    

1967 The establishment of the State of Israel brought a new wave of great instability to the Arab world. After 1948, many Arab regimes fell and new regimes came to power. In 1956, Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, leading to a new war, in which Israel sided with the Britain and France against Egypt, which was supported by the Soviet Union. The United States ultimately took sides against Egypt. From this time onwards, the two opposing superpowers in the developing Cold War took opposite sides in the Israeli-Arab conflict. The United States supported Israel, promoting it as its valued ally while the Soviet Union supported the Arabs. On January 1, 1965, after almost two decades of silence on the question of the Palestinians, many languishing in refugee camps in the surrounding Arab countries (particularly in Jordan and Lebanon), the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded to fight for Palestinian rights. In June 1967, a new war broke out as Israel engaged in a preemptive strike against the armies of Syria and Egypt, loosely united under the leadership of Pan Arab nationalist President of Egypt Jamal Abd-al-Nasser. Supported by the United States, the Israeli armed forces were able to conquer all that remained of historic Palestine, seizing the West Bank (including East Jerusalem and the Old City) from the Jordanians and the Gaza Strip from the Egyptians. These territories contained not only the Biblical heartland, including Jerusalem and its Jewish Holy Places, Hebron, Nablus and Bethlehem, but also a large Palestinian Arab population (Muslims and Christians) and the densely populated camps of refugees who had fled their homes in 1948. Immediately after the war, the Israeli authorities established military rule over the West Bank and Gaza and annexed East Jerusalem (including the Old City with its Holy Places). They then began to colonize the occupied territories with Jewish Israelis (known as “settlers”), who built homes and other infrastructure that would transform these last remaining areas of Palestine. This colonization of the territories constituted a flagrant contravention of international law that forbids the transfer of civilian populations into military occupied areas. The map below shows the territories seized by the Israelis during the war.

11    

12    

The Israeli regime of occupation over the territories meant that the Palestinian population was deprived of many of its basic human rights. Palestinians could not move freely from place to place, could not build their homes freely, and could not organize their political, social, economic and cultural life freely. All aspects of life were controlled by a military regime that established a system of permits that were given or withheld in order to control the local population. The Palestinian Liberation Organization and other Palestinian political organizations attempted to raise awareness in the Western world about the plight of Palestinians. Sometimes these groups engaged in acts of violence against the State of Israel and its citizens. The Israeli military response was sometimes more brutal than the Palestinian attacks. For twenty years, the regime of military occupation imposed greater restrictions to control the local population until, in December 1987, a popular civil uprising (called the Intifada) broke out, challenging the Israeli military and demanding civil freedom and national self-determination. Pope Paul VI became the first Pope to call the Palestinians a people in 1975. He evoked the suffering of Jews and Palestinians in his Christmas address: “Although we are conscious of the still very recent tragedies which led the Jewish people to search for safe protection in a state of its own, sovereign and independent, and in fact precisely because we are aware of this, we would like to ask the sons of this people to recognize the rights and legitimate aspirations of another people, which have also suffered for a long time, the Palestinian people.”2 After the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church entered a new age of dialogue and reconciliation with the Jewish people. This is undoubtedly one of the great fruits of the Council and the Church is deeply committed to a respectful and collaborative friendship with the Jewish people. However, the Church is profoundly committed to the language of international law when it comes to the conflict in the Holy Land. As the Church succinctly teaches: “Christians are invited to understand this (Jewish) religious attachment which finds its roots in Biblical tradition, without however making their own any particular religious interpretation of this relationship (cf. Declaration of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, November 20, 1975). The existence of the State of Israel and its political options should be envisaged not in a perspective which is in itself religious, but in their reference to the common principles of international law.”3

_________________________________________

                                                                                                                         2 PAUL VI, “Christmas message (1975),” Documentation catholique, n. 1690 (18.1.1976), 55-56. 3 COMMISSION FOR RELIGIOUS RELATIONS WITH THE JEWS, Notes on the correct way to present Jews and Judaism in preaching and catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church (1985), VI, 1.

13    

1993 After more than twenty years of military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in 1987, the Intifada, the civil uprising of young Palestinians against the Israeli military, ignited the consciousness of the outside world. As the Israeli army severely injured or killed protesters, world opinion began to shift and some expressed sympathy for a Palestinian people, whose full rights had gone unrecognized for decades. The Palestine Liberation Organization, as representative of the Palestinians, recognized the State of Israel in 1988, demanding recognition too for a State of Palestine. Finally, on September 13, 1993, Israeli and Palestinian leaders, strongly supported by the United States Administration of President Clinton, signed an accord that seemed to promise an end to the conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhaq Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat shook hands on the lawn of the White House in Washington DC. The accords were supposed to facilitate a progressive end to the conflict through territorial concessions and the establishment of a Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians were to be given self-government in phases. Pending a permanent agreement, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were to be divided into three zones: Area A, which would be under the Palestinian Authority's full administrative and security control and include Palestinian cities and surrounding areas with no Israeli settler presence; Area B, which would be under the Palestinian Authority's civil control and Israel's security control and include areas with Palestinian population and no Israeli settler presence; and Area C, which would be under full Israeli control and overseen by the Israeli military (this area constituting 60% of the territory of the West Bank). The following map illustrates this division of territory:

14    

15    

The first phase, in 1994, gave Palestinians control over Gaza and Jericho, allowing for the return of Yasser Arafat and many other leading figures from exile. The rule of the Palestinian Authority was extended in 1995 to other Palestinian cities. At the beginning of 1997, the Palestinian Authority took control of parts of Hebron, leaving the city divided because of the Jewish settler presence there. The Israelis continued to rule a part of the city. In 2000, the negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians at Camp David, which were supposed to lead to a permanent agreement, failed. Each side blamed the other. Many Israelis were unwilling to cede territory or sovereignty to the Palestinians and many Palestinians saw that life had not changed as all they had received were little pockets of densely populated territory surrounded by the Israeli army. Furthermore, the Israelis continued to build and develop settlements throughout all the West Bank and especially in the Palestinian parts of Jerusalem. Within a few months of the signing of the initial accords, in 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv by a Jewish extremist opposed to the peace process. Extremist Jews and Palestinians, both often driven by religious nationalist ideologies, made manifestly clear that they were not ready for an end to the conflict. Sporadic outbreaks of violence marked the end of the 1990s and many more Israelis and Palestinians lost their lives. In September 2000, Israeli leader of the opposition and future prime minister Ariel Sharon, surrounded by Israeli police, went into the Haram al-Sharif (the area where the holy Muslim places are and which the Jews claim as the Temple Mount) in the Old City of Jerusalem, provoking Muslims, many of whom believed that Israel sought to take over the sacred compound and initiate the building of a Third Temple there. A second popular uprising (Intifada) erupted, attempting to end Israeli occupation. In the ensuing violence, the peace process completely broke down and life under a dysfunctional Palestinian Authority and under Israeli occupation continued. Large Israeli settlement construction continued unabated. A Separation Wall or other barriers were constructed that encircled Palestinian Authority lands, which were taken by the Israeli military when needed for the Wall construction.4 The Wall in many places has separated Palestinian farmers from their lands and separated Jerusalem from the Palestinian territories. Entry from Bethlehem or from other parts of the West Bank into Israel was highly restricted, as was travel from one Palestinian Authority city to another. A system of Israeli checkpoints was established throughout the West Bank and Israeli – controlled territory. A map of the planned Wall separating Palestinian areas from those areas controlled by Israel reveals a further fragmentation of Palestine. (Some of the Wall identified in the map below has already been completed, including the stretch between Bethlehem and Jerusalem.)

                                                                                                                         4 In an advisory opinion issued in 2004 by the International Court of Justice the route of the Wall was deemed to be contrary to international law.

16    

In 2009, during his visit to the Holy Land, Pope Benedict XVI said, “One of the saddest sights for me during my visit to these lands was the wall. As I passed alongside it, I prayed for a future in which the peoples of the Holy Land can live together in peace and harmony without the need for such instruments of security and separation, but rather respecting and trusting one another, and renouncing all forms of violence and aggression.”5 On May 25, 2014, in a gesture that spoke loudly even though he prayed silently, Pope Francis during a visit to Israel and the West Bank, stopped at the wall, placed one hand on it, and at a spot next to red graffiti that read, "Free Palestine", he stood in silent prayer.

___________________________________________

                                                                                                                         5 POPE BENEDICT XVI, Discourse at Ben Gurion Airport, (15.5.2009).

17    

2020 In 2020, President Donald Trump unveiled his proposed “deal of the century” plan for peace in the Holy Land. Flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and with no Palestinian representation present, President Trump’s plan was entitled “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People”. The plan was divided into two parts. Part A presented a political framework which proposed the redrawing of the boundaries that separate the state of Israel from the territories it had occupied in 1967. This redrawing of boundaries would incorporate the vast majority of illegal Israeli settlements into Israeli territory and provide for the annexing of the Jordan Valley. According to the plan, Jerusalem would be the undivided capital of the State of Israel6, whereas a tiny slither of one of the city’s outlying northern neighborhoods would be the capital of a future State of Palestine. The plan insisted on the full demilitarization of the tiny and fragmented state of Palestine in order to ensure Israel’s security. The Palestinians would gain control of only 70% of the territories that had been conquered in 1967, meaning only 15.4% of historic Palestine. Furthermore, they would also have to forego any return of refugees. The second part of the plan contained an economic framework which promised enormous investment in the State of Palestine and the development of infrastructure including the digging of tunnels that would guarantee passage from Gaza to the West Bank and among the other fragmented territories of the future state. The following map accompanied the plan.

                                                                                                                         6 The United States had already recognized Jerusalem on December 6, 2017 as the eternal and undivided capital of Israel and President Trump ordered the relocation of the United States embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

18    

19    

Much of the international community objected to the exclusion of the Palestinians in the preparation of the plan and to the plan itself. The Palestinians rejected it outright as an attempt to legalize the occupation and reward Israel with huge parts of the territories occupied in war. Although the Israeli authorities officially welcomed the plan, over the months that followed its publication, it became more and more clear that many Israeli settlers and a large part of the Israeli population were hostile to the very idea of a Palestinian state, even the small and non-viable state that the US administration was proposing. The Latin Patriarchate as well as the other Christian heads of Churches published an important reaction to this plan, saying: “The American peace plan that was announced (…) in the White House in the presence of the Israelis and the absence of the Palestinians, invites us to request from the U.S. administration as well as the international community to build on the vision of two states and develop it in line with international legitimacy, in addition to opening a political communication channel with the Palestine Liberation Organization, the internationally recognized sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, to ensure that its legitimate national aspirations are also satisfied within the framework of a comprehensive and durable peace plan to be accepted by all relevant parties.” Echoing this, Pope Francis alluded to the plan during the meeting of the heads of Churches from the Middle East in the Italian city of Bari in February 2020, referring to “the danger of not fair solutions, and, thus, presaging new crises”. In the aftermath of the publication of the plan, the Holy Land remained as divided as it had ever been. The separation wall constructed by the Israelis over the past three decades, a wall that Israelis have argued is important for their security, has cut off Palestinians from their own lands and established Israeli rule over large tracts of Palestine, perpetuating a reality of continuing occupation and discrimination. Furthermore, the Israeli authorities have continued to expand existing settlements and build new ones, plan infrastructure, and confiscate land from Palestinians. Palestinians continue to live with the daily realities defined by military occupation: the legalization of Israeli property confiscation and construction on private Palestinian land, military incursions, arbitrary arrests, administrative detention and collective punishment, destruction of houses, checkpoints limiting the freedom of movement, even for worship,7 and creating numerous obstacles for economic development and the unification of family members separated by the Wall, a violation of the natural right of members of the same nuclear family to cohabitate together.

____________________________________                                                                                                                          7 SOCIETY OF ST. YVES – Catholic Center for Human Rights, “Life Restricted: Freedom of Movement and Access Restrictions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” (2018).

20    

Conclusion In his 1993 Pastoral Letter on Reading the Bible in the Land of the Bible Today, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem His Beatitude Michel Sabbah poignantly asked, “Could we be victims of our own salvation history, which seems to favor the Jewish people and condemn us? Is that truly the Will of God to which we must inexorably bow down, demanding that we deprive ourselves in favor of another people, with no possibility of appeal or discussion?”8 The past century has not been kind to the Palestinian people, who have lost their land, faced exile and the threat of death and, today, call out for justice as a necessary condition for a true peace in the Middle East. Understanding the developments in the Holy Land over the past century is a necessary part of working for justice and peace so that the Holy Land can live its vocation as a land blessed and chosen by God to be a model for all lands. It is also an essential component in the struggle to preserve the Christian communities and work for the equality of all individuals and communities in the Holy Land. In 2014, Pope Francis called the leaders of Israel and Palestine to the Vatican in order to pray together for peace. In his invocation at the prayer in the Vatican Gardens he said, “We know and we believe that we need the help of God. We do not renounce our responsibilities, but we do call upon God in an act of supreme responsibility before our consciences and before our peoples. We have heard a summons, and we must respond. It is the summons to break the spiral of hatred and violence, and to break it by one word alone: the word “brother”. But to be able to utter this word we have to lift our eyes to heaven and acknowledge one another as children of one Father.”9                                                                                                                          8 MICHEL SABBAH, Reading the Bible Today in the Land of the Bible (1993), n. 7. 9 POPE FRANCIS, Discourse at the Invocation for Peace, (8.6.2014).

21    

Appendix 1: A map summarizing the fragmentation of the Holy Land

Appendix 2: The population of Palestine between 1890 and today

1890 Arabs 489,000 (Muslims 432,000 and Christians 57,000), Jews 43,000 1922 Arabs 660,000 (Muslims 589,000 and Christians 71,000), Jews 84,000 1947 Arabs 1,324,000 (Muslims 1,181,000 and Christians 143,000), Jews 630,000 In 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees. Between 1948 and 1951, 688,000 Jews arrived in the State of Israel, a wave of migration that continued in the years to come.

Population of the State of Israel in 2019 Total 9,136,000 (including all residents of East Jerusalem and settlers in the West Bank)

6,772,000 Jews 1, 916,000 Arabs

(1, 636,000 Muslims, 145, 000 Druze, 137, 175 Christians), 448,000 Others (including 39,825 Christians)

Population of the State of Palestine in 2018

Total 4,980,000 (including Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem) 4,615,683 Muslims 46,850 Christians 1,384 Others (including Samaritans)

(In these figures, the 372,000 Palestinian Arabs of East Jerusalem are counted both by the Israelis and by the Palestinians).

The Justice and Peace Commission of the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land serves as a “think tank” to help the Catholic Ordinaries, the clergy, the religious and the laity to reflect on issues pertaining to justice and peace in the Catholic dioceses of the Holy Land. It also seeks to raise the consciousness of the Universal Church with regard to the challenges affecting the Church in the Holy Land.