Bethlehem - The Pope gave his most forthright endorsement of a Palestinian state yesterday as his Holy Land pilgrimage took him to a refugee camp in the shadow of Israel’s controversial “separation barrier”.
“The Holy See supports the right of your people to a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of your forefathers, secure and at peace with your neighbours, within internationally recognised borders,” Benedict XVI told Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President.
The German pontiff, who had incurred Israeli anger for not appearing to show enough remorse during a visit to the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, was greeted with exuberant warmth in Aida, a shabby suburb of Bethlehem that started life as a camp for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war with Israel.
He called the huge concrete wall tragic and a symbol of the impasse in the conflict, and urged both sides to put aside past grievances and work under international guidance for a solution to a struggle that erupted into full-scale war exactly 61 years ago.
“Towering over us is a stark reminder of the stalemate that relations between Israelis and Palestinians seem to have reached,” he said in an address in the yard of a UN-run school. He stressed the need to demolish the “walls that we build around our hearts” and bring the conflict to an end. He added: “My earnest wish for you, the people of Palestine, is that this will happen soon, and that you will at last be able to enjoy the peace, freedom and stability that have eluded you for so long.”
Behind the pontiff loomed a concrete watchtower, spattered by paint bombs to resemble a giant Jackson Pollock canvas and overlooking the 30ft-high wall adorned with graffiti denouncing the occupation.
After the pomp of Mass on Manger Square, next to the church where Jesus is said to have been born, the dusty, rundown streets presented the Pope with a grim insight into the lives of millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants in camps scattered across the West Bank, Gaza and the Arab world.
“It is understandable that you often feel frustrated,” the Pope, flanked on a podium by Mr Abbas and Salaam Fayyad, the Prime Minister, said. “Your legitimate aspirations for permanent homes, for an independent Palestinian state, remain unfulfilled. Instead, you find yourselves trapped in a spiral of violence.”
He implored both sides to break that spiral, as Palestinian children performed a dance with giant keys, the symbol of lost ancestral homes inside what is now Israel.
President Abbas took the opportunity to call on the new right-wing Government of Israel, which has refused to endorse the once-conventional idea of forging a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, to renew peace talks held under its centrist predecessor, which had failed to yield any tangible results.
“I call upon them to renounce occupation, settlements, arrests and humiliations,” he said. “Their security can only be attained through peace and their acceptance in this region will only be attained through peace.”
At Mass earlier outside the Church of the Nativity, a hulking Byzantine stone fortress marking Jesus’s traditional birth site, the Pope blessed thousands of Palestinian Christians who had made it past Israeli roadblocks and travel restrictions to see the head of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Pope appealed to Christians in the Holy Land not to leave their homes, as so many do because they are caught between Israeli occupation and frequent animosity from Muslims, who make up the majority of the population in the Palestinian territories.
Minerva Jerassa, 35, a Christian and a social worker, welcomed the Pope’s message of hope but said that the Christian minority were emigrating. “If they have an opportunity, they will leave. There are tremendous problems between Muslims and Christians. The smallest problem erupts into a big problem,” she said.
Many Muslims accuse the Christians of receiving more favourable treatment from the Israelis, while the continuing conflict has led to radicalisation among some Muslim communities. “The older generation had a better relationship. The young generation don’t seem able to deal with each other,” she said. “We Christians are being squeezed between Israelis and Muslims.”
During his trip to Jerusalem the Pope was criticised by a number of leading Israelis for not showing enough empathy when attending a memorial service at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. Given his background as a boyhood conscript in the Hitler Youth, Israeli commentators said that he should have gone further in his condemnations of Nazism.
The Vatican, exasperated at the focus on the Pope’s background, tried to deny that he had been a member of the movement, despite his own earlier admissions that he had been registered in it.