A pontiff in the Promised Land

The Catholic pontiff's visit to the land considered holy by three religious communities did inevitably touch upon the political aspects of the West Asian situation, says KESAVA MENON.

THERE IS a story about the Caliph Omar and the city of Jerusalem which reads like it could have taken place in the present. It is said that the commander of the Muslim armies that had just conquered Jerusalem was in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre when the call for the afternoon prayer was made from the city's mosques. The Caliph immediately came out of the church saying that he did not want to make the mistake of praying inside it since the Muslims might then lay claim to it as a mosque. Last week, the head of another religious order, Pope John Paul II this time, found himself like the second Caliph delicately picking his way through the animosities and suspicions of the three great monotheistic faiths.

The Catholic pontiff's visit to the land considered holy by three religious communities inevitably did touch upon the political aspects of the West Asian situation as well as the religious. As head of the Vatican, his passage through other countries has the status of a state visit. But since his state is basically an administrative apparatus for a religious community his political acts have mainly to do with the securing of space for spirituality. The Pope is perhaps the only world leader who can approach political problems through the spiritual dimension. But so also organised is his religious community that its contacts with other spiritual communities is loaded with political implications. All these unique aspects of the role and position of the Pope in the world today were in evidence during John Paul II's visit to Jordan, Israel and Palestine through the third week of March.

The Pope's spiritual voyage could be said to have started days before he got onto the plane. In a Sunday sermon early in March (marking the beginning of Lent), the Pope pronounced his landmark apology for the sins committed by the Catholic Church or in its name especially over the last millennium. This cathartic exercise was intended to address grievances against the Church harboured by people all over the world and the Pope probably felt that the first Lent (the period of prayer, fasting and reflection) of the millennium was the appropriate occasion on which to do it. But the people of West Asia, more specifically the Jews, decided that its timing had more to do with his upcoming visit. That added another dimension to the intense competitiveness that characterises West Asia.

Competitiveness this time around was in the search for political legitimacy by the two rival nationalities in Israel/Palestine. Israel was accorded official recognition by the Vatican only in 1993 and the Jewish state had not forgotten that the Catholic Church had for long opposed the Zionist dream. Neither had it forgotten how the last Pope to visit these parts, Paul VI in 1964, had breezed through the religious sites, several of them under Israel's sovereignty, without allowing the word ``Israel'' to pass through his lips. For the Israelis, it was high time the Pope acknowledged that the place where the seeds of his religion were planted was in the possession of a nation that had nourished an older religion in the same place. When the Pope touched down in Tel Aviv airport and went past the official reception line he finally accorded recognition to Israel in person.

The Palestinians, struggling for sovereignty in their own land as they are, welcome any indications that they are being treated as a full- fledged state. The U.S. President has paid an official visit to the Palestinian territories but the chief mediator of the West Asian talks has made clear that the issue of sovereignty is something to be yet negotiated. On the other hand, the Catholic Church has for long supported the official demarcation of the homeland for the Palestinians. Then again, unlike in the case with the Jews, the Pope does have a link of authority with those Arabs who are Christians and does in a manner speak for them. When the Pope met the Palestinian Authority President, Mr. Yasser Arafat, on his home territory, shared the dais with him on more than one occasion, and reiterated his support for their aspirations, the Palestinians had reason to be gratified.

There was also fierce competition on the ideological plane. Since the historical experiences of a people shape their ideology and since the action of the Church in the past has impacted on both Jews and Arabs, both sides wanted a Papal validation of their separate histories. The Jews wanted a Papal acknowledgement of their most painful historical experience, the Holocaust, and of how that experience underpins the legitimacy of the aspiration for a Jewish state. (Israel's Prime Minister, Mr. Ehud Barak, was to reiterate in his welcoming speech the Zionist rationale that the Jews would never be safe till they had a state of their own). Most Israelis deemed that the Lent apology and the Pope's visit to the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial in Jerusalem was sufficient as an acknowledgement of their experience and as an act of contrition for the many horrors inflicted on the Jews by the Church through the centuries. But even after the Papal visit, there were die-hard Israelis who thought that he should have specifically apologised for the manner in which Jews had been demonised in Church literature till recent times, for massacres and mass conversion of Jews in the Inquisition, and for the Church's silence and inaction when Hitler was transporting trainloads to the death camps.

If most Israelis thought that the Pope had not been sufficiently remorseful about the Jewish experience, there were even more Arabs who thought that the Church had not sufficiently addressed the negative impact that it had had on the Muslim experience. There were demands that the Catholics should make a specific apology for the Crusades and other historic episodes where Muslims had suffered at the hands of Christians. Palestinians are also bitter that the world does not pay sufficient attention to the Naqba, the ``catastrophe'', the term they use to sum up the terrible plight that has befallen them after they were dispossessed of their homeland. This bitterness often swells up, as it did during this Papal trip as well, into theories that question the magnitude of the Holocaust. (It is an Arab belief that the Jews exaggerated the magnitude of the Holocaust to buttress their claims for a separate state). The political and spiritual tensions of the face-off between Arabs and Jews converge with great intensity in the crowded alleys of Old Jerusalem. As the ``popemobile'' vended its way from the Wailing Wall to the Mosque of Omar to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, John Paul II might have pondered that the second Caliph had an easier time of demarcating the respective political and spiritual spheres of the different peoples. Exercising the rights of the conqueror as he did, Omar could dictate the rights of the people. In these more democratic times they have to be negotiated.

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