For those keeping track of Pope Benedict's progress in The Holy Land, press agencies say that he just landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, where he made a statement calling for free access to Jerusalem for the faithful of the three religions that venerate sites in that city.
I'm not there, but I do know a bit about the spell Jerusalem can cast over people, even those that are not particularly religious. I spent some time there in the seventies and the eighties, mostly on the Arab side, before travel between Arab East Jerusalem and its natural Palestinian hinterland became a nightmare for the inhabitants.
Here's what brought me to use the Promised Land in the title of this post, rather than the "Holy Land" of Vatican parlance. It was the sight of the Pope on Mount Nebo in Jordan, purported to be the place where Moses first saw "the Promised Land." His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, had also made the pilgrimage to Mt. Nebo in 2000. He too wanted peace, but little of that has happened in the interim.
It's probably sacrilegious of me to say this, but isn't it a bit presumptuous of a religion to claim a particular territory based on a promise by its own deity? How about the Philistines? Maybe they had a promise too? I guess theirs wasn't written on tablets.
Fast forward a couple of thousand years to the late 19th and early 20th century, and the Philistines - now as Arab Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian - got to deal again with foreigners bearing more promises, this time from Europeans called Sykes, Picot, and Balfour. Promises that compromised their rights to a home and a country.
Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi wrote about how 19th century Zionists sent a delegation of rabbis to Ottoman Palestine, to scout out prospects for settlement by European Jews. They reported back: “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” The "bride" was the Holy Land, but the "other man" were the Palestinian inhabitants who had seen Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and British rulers come and go. But they couldn't withstand the people to whom the Land had been Promised.
You can get mired in controversy about Palestinians and Philistines, about whose land - those promises - and about something called the Middle East Peace Process. I suppose the Pope has to give the MEPP a try, and he does bear a responsibility for the welfare of the Middle East's dwindling Christian population. But the Pope will come, and he will go.
In yesterday's Toronto Globe and Mail, Fouad Twal, the Pope's Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem, told reporter Patrick Martin that "at the end of the visit the Pope goes back to Rome and I stay here with the consequences.” He might have added that when the Pope returns to Rome, all those restrictions that make life hell on earth for Christian (and Muslim) Palestinians - temporarily eased during the Pope's visit - will be reinstated.
And the "Palestine" that remains after continuous Israeli chipping, walling, and bypassing will still look like this.