We can’t let progress in Holy Land be stalled

As a Catholic with a Jewish father, what happened recently in Israel breaks my heart. The beautiful, peaceful Trappist monastery in Latrun, a place I have visited so many times, was severely vandalized. A door was set alight and graffiti nonsense such as “Jesus is a Monkey” scrawled on the walls. The culprits are almost certainly ultra-orthodox Jewish extremists who have done this sort of thing several times before.

Having said that, such anti-Christian behaviour is almost unheard of in mainstream, often secular Israeli culture. In all of my trips to Israel, I have only once faced insult or abuse because of my faith, and that was from a heavily bearded Jewish man who assumed I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I told him what I thought, as did several Israeli, Jewish friends.

It’s imperative that we keep this in proportion, and that hasn’t been the case in Europe. The French media in particular has been drenched with this story, which is a little surprising in that the attack was immediately condemned by pretty much every Israeli leader and spokesman. This is not Iran, where Christians are arrested and tortured; not Egypt, where Christians are beaten and murdered.

There is, of course, a problem between Israeli and Palestinian, but Palestinian Christians suffer not as Christians but as Palestinians, and are often, perhaps unfairly, better treated than their Muslim compatriots. Yet something Fr. Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the custodian of the Holy Land, said about all this is worth remembering. He stated that some Jewish children in ultra-orthodox schools were being taught to treat Christians and Christianity with contempt, and he has a point. Christian clergy, for example, are spat at by these tiny extremists almost every day now.

Just this year, politician Michael Ben Ari ripped up a copy of the New Testament in the Knesset, threw it into a garbage bin and condemned it as an “abhorrent” book that had led to the Holocaust. True, he is a radical settler, and detested by the majority of his colleagues. But he didn’t face any official punishment for his actions. Imagine if a Canadian or British legislator has acted thus.

My good and dear friend Rabbi Poupko in Montreal has always said, “Jews can’t take yes for an answer.” What he means is, Christians are the best friends the Jews have, but it’s too seldom realized. It has not always been so, but we mustn’t sink into the mud of history. The problem with the emerging Israeli ultra-orthodoxy is one of triumphalism. They are empowered, which is a good thing, but some of them twist this empowerment into a tool for what they perceive as compensation. You treated us and our religion with scorn, runs the argument, so now we will reciprocate.

To be candid, I even see a minimized version of this in North America. While Catholic-Jewish relations are generally sound, I’m tired of hearing misinformed attacks on alleged Church indifference to the Holocaust and venomous abuse of Pope Pius XII. Even the campaign against Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was distasteful. Gibson may have proved himself to be a troubled man, but the movie was inspiring, not at all anti-Jewish, but was targeted even before it had been seen. Dialogue requires two parties, and both willing to listen.

One of the cramping ironies of all this is that the monastery at Latrun is visited by enormous numbers of Jewish Israelis and Jewish diaspora tourists every year, where with mutual respect two communities learn about one another and learn to love one another. A small, hysterical minority is thrusting divide into where unity has been planted, and that’s a dark, soiled action.

Diehard anti-Israelis will try to use this incident to attack an entire country, and their equivalents on the other side will claim it doesn’t matter. The answer is in the middle. In matters a great deal, it must be dealt with and its roots ripped up. But know that around those weeds, in glorious colour, are the blossoms of 60 years of effort, understanding and progress. Time to enjoy the garden.

(Coren’s latest book is Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity. His web site is www.michaelcoren.com.)