Speaking on September 28 to the United Nations General Assembly, cardinal secretary of state Pietro Parolin reaffirmed for the umpteenth time that “the only viable solution” to ensure peace between Israel and the Palestinians “is a two-state solution with Jerusalem having a special status.”
In reality one must go back three decades, to the Oslo Accords of 1993 and then to the failed Camp David Accords of 2000, to latch onto the only span of time during which the two-state solution appeared feasible. Because afterward it was ever less so, and today it remains alive only in the words of governments that continue to evoke it, as in an empty ritual.
And so it is for the Holy See, too. In its official statements nothing has changed since 1947, when it endorsed the UN plan to partition the Holy Land into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab-Palestinian, with a special status for Jerusalem.
But in the meantime, in the upper echelons of the Catholic Church a different solution has been under consideration for some time, a sort of plan B. It too would be tough to bring about today, but in perspective is seen as the only real way forward: not two states but just one, with equal rights for all, Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians.
This is the solution publicly indicated for the first time by the Catholic bishops of the Holy Land — including the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa — in a statement of May 20, 2019:
“All the talk about a two-state solution is empty rhetoric in the current situation. In the past we lived together in this land, why could we not live here together in the future too? The fundamental condition for a just and lasting peace is that all in this Holy Land have full equality. This is our vision for Jerusalem and for the whole territory called Israel and Palestine, which lies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”
And it is the solution argued for repeatedly in “La Civiltà Cattolica” — the magazine of the Rome Jesuits, published only with the prior review of Vatican authorities — by a specialist on the subject with a very singular profile: David M. Neuhaus, from a German Jewish family that emigrated to South Africa in the 1930s, born in Johannesburg in 1962, sent to Israel as a teenager to study and there fascinated upon encountering nuns from Russia, baptized into the Catholic Church at the age of 25 and then admitted into the Society of Jesus, first in the United States and then in Egypt, but always remaining Jewish and Israeli, indeed, from 2009 to 2017 vicar of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel, as well as professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute of Jerusalem.
There are at least six articles, the latest of them quite recent, in which Neuhaus has advocated for the Holy Land not two separate states, but a single state for all.
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The first article bears the date of September 19, 2020, and the title “People of Israel, Land of Israel, State of Israel.”
In it, Neuhaus registers the protest of the Jews over “the persistent reluctance of the Church to explicitly recognize the theological significance of the Jewish claim to the land and state of Israel,” a claim founded on the promise of the land made to them by God in the Bible.
He countenances the fact that Jews should consider the state of Israel an integral part of their identity. At the same time, however, faith in Christ has universalized the biblical tradition of the land promised and given, has expanded its boundaries beyond all limits. And these two visions must understand and integrate each other, all the more so to heal “the multiple forms of discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion that ‘non-Jews’ continue to experience in the Jewish state.”
These too, in fact, “must have a voice, not only in the political arena, but also in the theological debate on the land and the state of Israel.”
This is because “whatever framework may be established for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — whether it be two states living side by side or a single state for all — the ultimate principle for a lasting solution is the equality of the human person in rights and duties.”
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The second article is from November 19, 2022, and goes even more directly to the heart of the matter, already made explicit in the title: “Rethinking the Partition of Palestine?”
First of all, Neuhaus points out that it was the Arabs who rejected right away the division into two states approved by the UN in 1947. It was war, and the winner was Israel, which awarded itself three fourths of the territory, from which 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee, whose even more numerous descendants are still confined to the refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan.
This forced exodus was given the Arabic name of Nakba: a “catastrophe” that only a sure homeland could remedy, just as for the Jews the state of Israel was their safe haven after the Holocaust.
But “is the two-state solution still relevant today?” Neuhaus asks. And his answer is no. Because “if one looks at the reality on the ground after decades of Israeli invasion of the lands further occupied in the war of 1967, with the incessant construction of Jewish settlements, Israeli roads, and other infrastructure, the two-state solution today seems hardly realistic.”
The consequence that Neuhaus draws from this state of affairs is that in the political and diplomatic fields “attention is slowly shifting toward a changed vocabulary,” whose key word is “equality.”
In short, “since the possibility of partition — in a reality in which Israel has practically annexed most of the territories occupied during the war of 1967 — seems more doubtful by the day, this could be the right time to strengthen the awareness of the need for a struggle for equality between Israelis and Palestinians, whatever political shape the situation may take.”
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The third article is from May 6, 2023, bears the title “The Jews of Arab Culture,” and sketches a fascinating historical profile of “the time when a Jew could also be an Arab,” as an integral part of society, in numerous Muslim countries stretching from Morocco to Iraq and then on to Iran, Turkey, and Central Asia, before their expulsion following the birth of the state of Israel.
Today in Israel — Neuhaus points out — the leadership of the political parties is almost entirely in the hands of Jews originally from Eastern and Central Europe, called “Ashkenazi.” But it must be recognized that also those originally from the Muslim world, the “Mizrahi,” also called “Sephardi,” are an important component of society. And they have an approach more open to the Arab world.
At the beginning of the article, Neuhaus cites a revealing episode from a few weeks earlier: the devastation by Jewish settlers of the town of Huwara, near Nablus in occupied Palestine, in revenge for the killing of two Israelis. In the governing coalition, he writes, the majority justified that cruel action. But among those who strictly condemned it were above all the members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish party Shas, a direct expression of the “Mizrahi,” decidedly on the right, but “whose members have sometimes surprised political observers by their moderation and openness to dialogue with Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular.”
This is to highlight that, just as there was a time when many Jews were “an integral part of the Arab world,” still today there are those in Israel who “offer the prospect of a future in which Jews could live alongside Arabs in a just peace and reconciled equality.”
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The fourth article is also the first after the massacre of October 7, 2023, by Hamas; it bears the date of March 2 of this year and the title “Israel, Where Are You Going?”
Neuhaus first outlines the crisis into which Israel has plunged, the “worst crisis since its foundation,” which erupted at the height of the radicalization of the conflict “between Judaism and democracy,” or “between two different visions of the state: on the one hand, a Jewish state conceived of as a homeland for all the Jews of the world; on the other, a democratic state conceived of as the country of all its citizens, Jews and non-Jews, predominantly Arabs.” A clash in which, before October 7, “the Palestinian threat seemed to belong to the past.”
Not only did October 7 tragically dispel this last illusion, it raised “the awful question of whether the state of Israel is truly the safe haven that it seemed to Jews fleeing violence in a world where they had been a marginalized and often persecuted minority.”
But who has brought about this state of crisis? As in the previous article, Neuhaus answers that “the main protagonists still come from the Zionist ‘Ashkenazi’ elites who have dominated the history of Israel since 1948.” An elite whose conceptual world “is entirely centered on a Jewish state for a Jewish people.”
When instead there is more to Israeli society. It is also made up of “vast peripheries that constitute a significant part of the population.” And it is from them that there could emerge “a creativity so necessary today to help Israel in formulating answers to its internal and external existential questions.”
Among these minorities are the Arab citizens of Israel, mostly Muslims but also Christians and Druze, the descendants of non-Jews who remained within the borders of the new state of Israel after its foundation in 1948.
They number about 2 million and formally “have political rights like all Israeli citizens,” but in fact are “excluded from most decisional procedures.”
And then of course account must be made of the “Mizrahi,” the Jews from Arab countries already described in the previous article. Underway among whom is a cultural renaissance that accentuates “the affinity between them and the surrounding Arab world: an affinity that could suggest the possibility of coexistence.”
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The fifth article is from May 18, 2024, and is entitled “Jewish-Catholic Dialogue in the Shadow of the War in Gaza.”
Here Neuhaus returns again to the question of the state of Israel as part of Jewish identity, “as the physical place of the covenant between the Jews and God.”
“Yet it should be remembered,” he writes, “that that land is also the home of the Palestinians. Today in Israel-Palestine there are seven million Israeli Jews and seven million Palestinian Arabs.” Hence the two-state solution, which if implemented “would certainly facilitate relations between Israel and the international community, including the Holy See.”
But as to whether this solution is practicable, it has already been seen that Neuhaus greatly doubts this. He believes it is more constructive to look beyond, with a dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, as well as between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, carried out in the spirit of the May 18, 2024 embrace in Verona, beside the pope, between the Israeli Maoz Inon, whose parents were killed by Hamas on October 7, and the Palestinian Aziz Sarah, whose brother died under the strikes of the Israeli army.
And he concludes: “Could not Israelis and Palestinians put their hope in such a prospect, in the end of hostilities and the construction of a shared future in a land called to be holy, in Israel-Palestine?”
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The sixth and so far last article is from September 21 and is entitled “The Ultra-Orthodox in Israel.”
Neuhaus masterfully sketches the complex profile of this current of Judaism. In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox are showing the most rapid demographic growth; they are at almost one and a half million, and at school one child out of four now comes from their ranks. Their conviction is that “it cannot be a Jewish state that guarantees security and well-being for Jews,” because the study of the Torah takes precedence over the state and over secular laws. They still think they are living “as if in exile, contrary to the Zionist religious claim that the state of Israel is the beginning of redemption.”
So it comes as no surprise that the ultra-Orthodox should present themselves as an alternative to the “Ashkenazi” political and religious establishment. In fact, their most significant political expression, the party called Shas founded in 1984 by the Iraqi-born rabbi Ovadia Yosef, is made up of “Mizrahi” from Arab and Muslim countries. Neuhaus writes that they are strongly opposed to both military service and “a leftist agenda on social issues, like gender equality, LGBT, etc.,” but they also oppose the fanaticism of the far right and “instead support peace negotiations with the Palestinians and the Arab world, as well as territorial compromise.”
In short, Neuhaus concludes: “Today in Israel the ultra-Orthodox community is a vital and growing component of society. Its history shows that it is capable not only of surprising, but also of challenging the ruling elites of Israel and the dominant ideologies. It could play an important role in the drama that is unfolding in Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East.”
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Meanwhile, the war continues and is increasingly extended on multiple fronts. Israel is fighting to defend its very existence against enemies, Iran foremost, that want its annihilation. And even among Israelis there are ever fewer who still believe in two states for two peoples.
But the fortune of the Jewish people is that it is a complex and creative society, as the Christian Jew Neuhaus so often brings to light. A society to which God has promised and given a land called to be hospitable to the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the Palestinian.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.