Pope: Israelis, Palestinians must continue dialogue

Pope Francis on Sunday told the Israeli and Palestinian presidents that they “must respond” to their people’s desire for peace in the Middle East and to obtain “the strength to persevere undaunted in dialogue,” Reuters reported.

The pope made his appeal to Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas at the end of an unprecedented prayer meeting among Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Vatican gardens, an event that marked the first time the two presidents have met in public in more than a year.

“Peacemaking calls for courage, much more so than warfare. It calls for the courage to say yes to encounter and no to conflict: yes to dialogue and no to violence; yes to negotiations and no to hostilities; yes to respect for agreements and no to acts of provocation; yes to sincerity and no to duplicity. All of this takes courage, it takes strength and tenacity,” the pope said, as quoted by Reuters.

A holy mission

For his part, Israeli President Shimon Peres said at the ceremony that making peace in the Middle East was a “duty” and “holy mission.”

“It is within our power to bring peace to our children. This is our duty, the holy mission of parents,” said Peres, according to Agence France-Presse.

The pope had hoped that the gesture will “re-create a desire, a possibility” of eventually re-launching the Middle East’s stalled peace process.

But the Vatican has played down any expectations that the Sunday evening meeting between Peres and Abbas - billed as a “pause from politics” - will lead to any immediate breakthroughs in the region’s tortuous problems and says it is not meddling in regional issues.

“No one is presumptuous enough to think peace will break out on Monday,” said Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, a Church official in charge of Catholic sites in the Holy Land and a key organizer of the encounter.

“The intention of this initiative is to re-open a road that has been closed for some time, to re-create a desire, a possibility, to make people dream,” he said, adding that the pope does not want to get involved in details of issues such as borders or settlements.

No attendance

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the key Israeli decision-maker, is not attending and he refuses to deal with the Palestinian unity government, backed by Hamas Islamists, that Abbas swore in last Monday. Peres is due to leave office next month.

But the fact that Francis’ bold move has managed to bring the two presidents together shows his desire to engage political leaders on global issues, offering inter-religious dialogue as a building block.

The meeting is taking place more than a month after U.S.-led peace talks collapsed amid bitter mutual recrimination. The pope, in his weekly Sunday address in St. Peter’s Square, said he hoped faithful of all religions “will unite themselves spiritually to our plea.”

The pope made his surprise invitation to the two heads of state while he was in the Holy Land last month.

‘Neutral’ ground

The minutely orchestrated event on a small lawn in the Vatican gardens - a space the Vatican has called “neutral” because it is bereft of religious symbols - will be the presidents’ first public meeting in more than a year.

It will also mark the first time that Jewish, Christian and Islamic prayers will be held in the tiny city state that is the headquarters of the 1.2 billion member Roman Catholic Church.

Both the Palestinian and Israeli delegations will include religious leaders of various faiths. The delegations will pray separately in each others’ presence in the chronological order of the founding of the three religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

At the end of the ceremony, held in Italian, English, Hebrew and Arabic which is expected last about two hours, the pope, Peres and Abbas will make individual addresses, which the Vatican has called “invocations” for peace.

Working together

Peres’ office said earlier he will “call upon leaders of all faiths to work together to ensure that religion and the name of the Lord will not be used to justify bloodshed and terror.”

In an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica published on Sunday, Abbas said: “Nothing should stop the search for solutions so that each of our peoples can live in a sovereign state.”

The three will plant an olive tree that the program calls “An enduring symbol of the mutual desire for peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.”

Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual head of the Orthodox Church, is also attending. Francis invited him to show that the two main branches of Christianity that split in 1054 can work together for peace.

(With Reuters and AFP)