Op-Ed: The Vatican has Always Tried to Inflict Damage on the Jewish State
A few days ago, before his deplorable meeting with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the Vatican choose to recognize the “State of Palestine” in a historic move severely criticized by Israel. The Zionist Organization of America rightly condemned it as “the Pope recognizing Jew/Christian-Hating Palestinian State”.
After
the pro-Jewish Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Vatican’s opposition to
Jewish territorial sovereignty grew more entrenched. In the years after
the Holocaust, Vatican anti-Zionist policies attempted to block
the partition of Palestine at the United Nations, and to secure
Jerusalem as an international, sovereign “corpus separatum”, which was
meant to prevent the Jews from setting a foot in the Old City of
Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount.
Two
major cardinals were active in British Palestine in the first twenty
years of the 20th century: the British Francis Bourne and the Italian
Filippo Giustini. Cardinal Bourne in 1919 sent a letter to the then
British government, writing that Zionism had not received the approval
of the Vatican, and that if the Jews would “ever again dominate and rule
the country, it would be an outrage to Christianity and its Divine
founder”.
Cardinal
Giustini in that year cabled the Pope from Jerusalem asking for his
intervention “to prevent the re-establishment of Zionist Israel in
Palestine”. In another letter from Jerusalem, Cardinal Bourne defined
Zionism as “contrary to Christian sensitivity and tradition”.
“There was no real reason why the Jews should be back in Palestine. Why should not a nice place be found for them, for instance in South America?”.
Cardinal
Pietro Gasparri, who was Secretary of State under two Popes (Benedict
XV and his successor Pius XI) said that “the most dangerous threat is
the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine”. Gasparri claimed that, “It
is better [to have] the internationalization of the Holy Sites rather
than see Jerusalem in the hands of the Jews”. Then Latin Patriarch of
Jerusalem, Luigi Barlassina, condemned the creation of an “autocratic
Zionist domination” in many articles and dispatches to Rome.
And
during the ‘30s, while the Jews were under attack in Germany and Italy,
Domenico Tardini, the Vatican Undersecretary of State, told a British
diplomat in 1938: “There was no real reason why the Jews should be back
in Palestine. Why should not a nice place be found for them, for
instance in South America?”.
The
Vatican not only opposed the Balfour declaration at the League of
Nations, it also endorsed the British “White Paper”, which fought the
Jews’ right to immigrate to their Holy Land.
Even
Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, later to become Pope John XXIII and
recognized by some Jews as a friend, wrote that he was “uneasy about the
attempts of Jews to reach Palestine, as if they were trying to
reconstruct a Jewish kingdom”.
At
the peak of the Holocaust, the Vatican’s main thought was to oppose the
creation of a Jewish State, which if it would had been established
before could have saved many Jews fleeing Hitler. Pope Pius XII made his
opposition toward a Jewish homeland known to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Dated June 22, 1943, the letter sent by Amleto Cicognani, the Pope’s
special representative to the US, to Ambassador Myron Taylor,
Roosevelt’s emissary to Pius XII, made Pius’s policy against Zionism
crystal clear.
On 10 April 1945, while the war was still going on in Europe, Moshè Sharet of the Jewish Agency,
was received by Pope Pius XII. He hoped for the “moral support” of the
Catholic Church for “our renewed existence in Palestine”. But he did not
receive any support; on the contrary the Vatican started a new campaign
for “the internationalization of Jerusalem” supported by France,
another name used to deprive the Jews of their homeland.
Giorgio
Hakim, then Catholic bishop of San Giovanni d’Acri, in 1947 delivered a
letter by the Muftì of Jerusalem to the Pope in the Vatican — who had
been an ally to Hitler in the “final solution” — against Israel’s
projected establishment. Pius XII reacted “very cordially”. In 1948,
when Israel was fighting six Arab armies which wanted to annihilate the
tiny and fragile Jewish State, the Catholic press and the Vatican
officials attempted to tie the Arab Christian refugee crisis into its
general critique of “Israeli incursions” and “Jewish imperialism”.
In 1949 the Italian embassy in the Vatican dispatched a message that the Holy See had the opinion that “the Israelis are using against the Arabs the same methods that the Nazis used against them”.
I
could go on with this list of Vatican’s attempts to derail the creation
and survival of the State of Israel. Emanuel Ringelblum, the great
historian of Polish Jewry who was killed during the Holocaust, noted
that during the war “when the blood of Jewish students was shed and
anti-Semitic savages rioted, the clergy either kept silent or approved
these deeds...”.
Those
words, pronounced by a hero of the Warsaw ghetto, could be used also
today for the Vatican’s indifference to Israel’s mortal siege. And just
as it did in World War II, by
choosing to recognize the “State of Palestine,” the Vatican made common
cause with an evil Palestinian Arab Islamic power in a vain attempt to
buy temporary security for their own communities.
But despite these attempts, the Jewish people will grow in its land and city. All the land is theirs. Period.