Israel on Sunday slammed critical remarks made by Middle East Catholic bishops after a meeting chaired by Pope Benedict XVI as "political attacks" on the Jewish state. "We express our disappointment that this important synod has become a forum for political attacks on Israel in the best history of Arab propaganda," Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said in a statement.
"The synod was hijacked by an anti-Israel majority," he added.
Bishops and patriarchs from across the Middle East on Saturday called on the international community to end the occupation of Arab lands in an official statement following a two-week synod held at the Vatican.
"Recourse to theological and biblical positions which use the Word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable," the synod said.
Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros, head of the commission which drew up the statement, went one step further, saying: "The theme of the Promised Land cannot be used as a basis to justify the return of the Jews to Israel and the expatriation of the Palestinians."
"For Christians, one can no longer talk of the land promised to the Jewish people," the Lebanese-born head of the Greek Melkite Church in the United States said, because the "promise" was "abolished by the presence of Christ."
| That's the old view. The Catholics don't speak publicly about supercession (I think that's the term, but I'm not up on the latest Catholic theological philosophy) anymore. |
Most religious Jews believe the land of Israel was given to them by God, and Jewish settlers often cite biblical justifications for holding onto the West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories seized in the 1967 Six-Day War.
| Not quite. Most Jews believe they are a people like all others as well as a religion, and therefore as entitled to their historical homeland as a nation as any other people. They see the Bible (aka Old Testament) as the written historical record cum early literature collection that actually records what happened -- or at least the stories told about it -- back in the day when we were working up to, and then owned, the land they now claim as the national homeland of the Jewish people. Some believe that the first five books were dictated to Moses as he was leading the descendants of Abraham's grandson Jacob back to the land that A. had purchased from the locals after God promised it to him and his seed, then repurchased from the local landowners in the 19th and 20th centuries of the modern era, the bits occupied by Jews continually since ancient times not being enough to hold the immigrating population. Some take a more materialistic view, but all regard it as a historical record of more or less historical accuracy matched by the archeological record of the region. But one doesn't expect trained journalists to understand the subtle difference in those two statements. |
He also pointed out that Israel's Christian population had grown since the establishment of the Jewish state, while in much of the rest of the Middle East Christians have fled in large numbers because of war, instability and economic hardship.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat, meanwhile, welcomed the synod's call for a two-state solution and blamed Israel for the emigration of Christians from the occupied territories.
| "Good dhimmi. Perhaps we won't kill you just yet." |
The United States convinced Israel and the Palestinians to renew direct peace negotiations in early September but the talks ground to a halt later that month when a 10-month partial Israeli moratorium on settlements expired.