In Allowing a Palestinian Embassy to the Vatican, Pope Francis Sends Exactly the Wrong Message

Jan. 23 2017

On January 14, Mahmoud Abbas visited Rome to attend the opening of a Palestinian embassy in Vatican City, thus cementing the Holy See’s formal diplomatic recognition of a notional Palestinian state. Giulio Meotti comments:

[While in Rome, Abbas] met with Pope Francis for the third time since the start of his papacy four years ago. The high-profile get-together took place in the middle of the Palestinian attempt [in Paris and at the UN] to bypass peace talks with Israel and to internationalize the Israel-Palestinian conflict. . . . By opening the Palestinian embassy during this critical time of intensified anti-Israel animosity, was the Pope justifying the Palestinian-Arab attempt to isolate the Jewish state and to impose on it unacceptable conditions of surrender through international pressure?

Unfortunately, Francis’s papacy has been marked by a long list of anti-Israel gestures that do not advance the cause of peace that the pope claims to champion. When the pope visited Israel in 2014, he was photographed praying at Israel’s security barrier, which had been created simply to stop the wave of Palestinian suicide-bombing attacks against Israeli civilians. The pope stood before graffiti that compared Palestinians with Jews under the Nazis. . . .

Pope Francis then accepted an invitation to visit—along with Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, the grand mufti of Jerusalem—the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most sacred site and also the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. But this is the same Palestinian mufti who justifies terrorism against the Israelis by saying, among other inflammatory declarations, that “the hour of resurrection will not come until you fight the Jews.” . . .

During these four years, Pope Francis has continually put significant barriers in the way of peace between Israelis and Palestinians—a peace based on dialogue, mutual respect and the end of conflict. Instead, this supposed man of peace has strengthened Abbas’s refusal to negotiate with the Jews—the Christians’ “elder brothers,” as Pope John Paul II bravely called them—and to end hostilities with them.

Read more at Gatestone

More about: Israel & Zionism, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian statehood, Pope Francis, Vatican

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict