Christian vocation is to remain in the Holy Land, says Palestinian bishop

Christians have ‘a vocation to remain in the Holy Land and be a factor in peace and reconciliation’, Bishop William Shomali of Jerusalem has said.

Speaking at Knock Shrine in Co Mayo at the invitation of Aid to the Church in Need, the Palestinian prelate said the “temptations to leave are real” and “emigration has drained more than one and a half million Palestinian Christians into the diaspora”.

Bishop Shomali underlined that Christians in Gaza, the West Bank and in Israel proper live with the same fears, the same frustrations, the same daily humiliations as their neighbours. But they are “a community that spans the divide, that can speak to both sides because it belongs fully to neither”.

Warning of the challenges posed by extremists, he said that on one side was “Hamas – a terrorist organisation that does not speak for all Palestinians but that has sown destruction and used human suffering as a political tool. Their attack on 7 October was not resistance, it was atrocity.”

“On the other side are extremist settlers – a violent fringe – who attack Palestinian villages and speak of Palestinians as obstacles to be removed rather than neighbours to be loved.” He told The Tablet that these extremist settlers are armed, “violent” and “really nasty”.

“The attacks are not only on Palestinian Muslim, but also on Palestinian Christians, without differentiation. Everyone suffers. We should solve this diplomatically through the courts, not by violence,” the 76-year-old prelate told The Tablet.

Describing the Christian presence as one “of service”, he said, “Our schools educate both Muslim and Christian children. Our hospitals heal both Palestinian and Jewish patients. Our parishes are places where people can breathe, pray, remember that they are more than their political identities.”

The “narrow path to peace”, he underlined, will “require Israelis to risk their perfect security for a peace that is by nature uncertain. It will require Palestinians to renounce the dream of total repatriation and accept a state smaller than their historic homeland.”

Of the current plight of Gaza, he said, “Many people are hungry and sick.” Gaza is uninhabitable and unhealthy.

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