Dr. Terry Lacey

Development Economist

The Pope has been to Bethlehem, the birth place of Jesus Christ, and he has now seen for himself the disastrous mess we have made of the Holy Land. Bethlehem is surrounded by a new wall of Jericho, which will also surely one day come tumbling down. Like the US and the EU, the Holy See now favors the twin state solution. Only the Israelis and the Palestinians no longer seem to believe in it.

If you look around Bethlehem you can understand why.

This Israel of bunkers and barbed wire, of defensive walls and road-blocks and barriers, tells us not that Israel has the moral strength, as yet, to find real solutions, but that Israel takes refuge in these symbols of strength, to substitute for the forward strategies it does not yet have to resolve fundamental demographic and social dilemmas, which cannot be resolved through harsh security policies or military force.

Israel a light unto the nations, or Israel a nation like any other? The fundamental collision between Jewish and Zionist idealism and how to resolve for perpetuity the contradictions in two opposing objectives, a permanent Jewish majority state in the Middle East, or a democratic state?

What amount of wars, manipulation of boundaries and peoples would be necessary in the next 100 years to foster the illusion of the one and deny the oncoming reality of the other?

The whole elaborate construction of a balkanized West Bank divided from a totally separated Gaza Strip, both surrounded by Israeli troops, barely conceals the reality of one divided neo-colonial economy and multi-cultural society in which half the people have full rights, and the other, in a variety of ways, do not.

Israel itself remains half built, unable to give its Arab citizens the full rights that go with full responsibilities, for the two go together, including military service.

Even worse the West started to give full rights to Palestinians and then closed off the democratic route when President Bush refused to let an elected Hamas government learn civic responsibilities and moderation by governing Palestine.

Now there is no legitimacy, except perhaps paradoxically for Hamas, which still retains a valid electoral mandate, but who will dare to let Hamas win an election now in all of Palestine as part of Palestinian national reconciliation?

Such ugly realities in such a beautiful land. And such literal lessons staring us in the face that day by day the realities on the ground in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and above all in Jerusalem, take us further and further way from the dream of two parallel states sharing their capital in the undivided city of Jerusalem.

Where is the contiguous state called for by President Obama in his famous TV interview on Al-Arabiya, the Dubai-based news channel, “with internal freedom of movement and trading with neighboring countries” ? It is in heaven perhaps, but it is not on earth, and certainly not in the Holy Land.

The Muslim critique of the Regensberg speech in September 2006 remains substantively unanswered and His Holiness has not gone far enough for most Muslims. Pope Benedict will go down in history for opening the can of worms rather than the Diet of Worms. Having opened the debate on Islam and violence by quoting the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, he should have said more, not less, and could have contextualized instead of being cornered.

He could have also addressed the spread of Christianity by the cannon and commerce in Asia, by the sword and the Cross in Latin America and by the imperial division of colonial Africa backed by force of arms, hand-in-hand with Christian missionaries. But he did not. It would have made it easier to be comparative.

This would have required the compassionate intellectual companionship of common solutions for three monotheistic religions all of which have been misused, suffering from politicization, extremism and violence, and all of which can be quoted without contextualization. But he did not choose this way out, nor did he apologize.

Similarly, he upset Israelis and Jewish people by not going far enough at the Yad Vashem memorial to dig the Vatican out of the historical hole into which it fell during the Second World War, nor to apologize for, or to explain, or to condemn and move on from the European anti-Semitism that drove the Sephardim from Spain and Portugal to seek refuge in the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and that led to the Holocaust.

So many apologies needed. Almost an Apologia Pro Vita Sua, (an apology for my life).

But great apologies come in threes and the third one is the apology to be given jointly one day by the Vatican, the US and the EU when they failed to see, like the three blind mice, what was staring them in the face in Bethlehem last week.

For how is it possible to see Gaza, Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem or Jerusalem and still pretend we are progressing towards the twin state solution, when every day and in every way the facts on the ground change more and more in the opposite direction?

Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes from Jakarta on modernization in the Muslim world, investment and trade relations with the EU and Islamic banking.

 terrylacey2003@yahoo.co.uk

drterry@c4d-info.org

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