Opportunity ?

JPost.com




May 12, 2009 9:11 | Updated May 12, 2009 10:08
Our World: Opportunity is knocking at Israel's door

By CAROLINE GLICK


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Like nature, Israel's strategic relations abhor a vacuum. In the wake of the Obama administration's decision to drastically curtail the US's strategic alliance with Israel in the interest of American rapprochement with Iran and Syria, the Netanyahu government has been moving swiftly to fill the void.

Pope Benedict XVI walks past an Israeli flag after arriving at the official welcoming ceremony at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.

On Monday, with Pope Benedict XVI's arrival and with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at Sharm e-Sheikh, two potential strategic alliances came into view.

Building effective alliances with the Vatican and Egypt is a delicate process. Each side wants more from the other than the other can reasonably provide. But each side also has much to gain even if it doesn't achieve everything it wants. The art of alliance building is making the new ally both happy with what it gets and comfortable with not getting everything it wants. This is the task that presents itself today, as Netanyahu and his colleagues engage with both the pope and with Mubarak.

The strategic goal that Israel wishes to advance through an alliance with the Vatican is the strengthening of its international position as the sole sovereign in Jerusalem. The strategic goal it wishes to advance with Egypt is the prevention of Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons.

UNDER POPE BENEDICT XVI, the possibility of winning the support of the Catholic Church for Israel's position that Jerusalem will never again be partitioned and will remain under perpetual Israeli sovereignty is greater than it was under his predecessors. Unlike his predecessors, Benedict has been outspoken in his concern for the plight of Christian minorities in Islamic countries. During his visit to Amman he made a point of speaking out for the protection of Iraqi Christians who are under attack from all quarters. Since he replaced Pope John Paul II, Benedict has made repeated calls for religious tolerance and freedom in Islamic countries - most notably in his 2006 speech at Regensberg where he quoted a Byzantine emperor from the Middle Ages criticizing Islam for seeking to spread its message by the sword.

After his words sparked murderous violence throughout the Islamic world, Benedict expressed his regret for the hurt his statement caused. But he never retracted it. Moreover, during his visit to the King Hussein Mosque in Amman on Saturday, Benedict indirectly reasserted his 2006 message. When he said, "It is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society," Benedict was reinforcing - if cryptically - his basic criticism of Islam.

The pope's obvious recognition of the danger jihadist Islam constitutes for Christians puts the Vatican, under his leadership, in a position where it could be more interested than it was in the past in working with Israel to secure the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem by supporting Israeli control of the city.
The pope made this possibility even more apparent in his homily at Mount Nevo. Standing on the mountain where Moses gazed at the Land of Israel, Benedict spoke of "the inseparable bond between the Church and the Jewish people." As he put it, "From the beginning, the Church in these lands has commemorated in her liturgy the great figures of the patriarchs and prophets, as a sign of her profound appreciation of the unity of the two Testaments. May our encounter today inspire in us a renewed love for the canon of sacred Scripture and a desire to overcome all obstacles to the reconciliation of Christians and Jews in mutual respect and cooperation in the service of that peace to which the word of God calls us!"

In saying this, the pope made clear that he views the preservation of Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem as essential for Christian heritage. The Islamic Wakf, which would control the city's holy sites in the event of its partition, has already gone to great lengths to systematically destroy the ruins of the Temple Mount and the Jewish and Christian heritage of the holy basin through archeological theft, illegal building and digging.

ISRAEL'S ABILITY to embrace the Vatican as an ally and so advance an alliance with the Church regarding Jerusalem is constrained from its perspective by the legacy of the Church's behavior during the Holocaust. Politically, this constraint is manifested in the Vatican's stated desire to canonize Pope Pius XII.

Quite simply, no government in Jerusalem has the moral right to ignore weighty allegations that Pope Pius XII collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. It is because of this moral imperative to remain vigilant in seeking justice for our murdered brethren that successive governments have strained relations with the Vatican by objecting to Pius XII's canonization.

What the government can do is encourage Holocaust historians and Yad Vashem to engage their Catholic counterparts in a joint study - through conferences and research - of the allegations against Pius XII. Such discussions have taken place between Vatican scholars and Yad Vashem over the years, most recently in March. Israel should offer to institutionalize them.

Specifically worthy of a joint study are the revelations made in January 2007 by Lt.-Gen. Ion Pacepa, the former head of the Romanian KGB, that the allegations against Pius XII were the brainchild of the KGB. In an article published in National Review, Pacepa, who when he defected to the US in 1978 became the highest ranking Soviet-bloc defector, claimed that in the late 1950s the KGB began perceiving the Catholic Church as the primary threat to its control over Eastern Bloc countries. Consequently, in 1960 the KGB decided to wage a campaign to destroy its moral authority. Since Pius had died two years earlier, the decision was made to castigate him as a Nazi collaborator. Already dead, he was in no position to defend himself.
Pacepa alleged that the 1964 play The Deputy, which opened the floodgates of criticism against Pius, was written by the KGB and that its presumed author, Rolf Hochhuth, was a communist fellow traveler. He claimed that the basis for the play was documents that Romanian KGB agents disguised as Catholic priests had purloined from the Vatican archives. Those documents, he alleged, were then doctored at KGB headquarters in Moscow.

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