Held Up in Bethlehem

NRO ^ | 04/09/02 | Rod Dreher

[What Is Ain't]

What’s really going on inside the Church of the Nativity.

The standoff between Israeli forces and Palestinian gunmen holed up inside part of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity continues, with no quick resolution in sight, and no good options open to the Israelis. Intense negotiations are reportedly underway between the Israeli government and Vatican representatives, who hope to get the 60 priests and nuns inside the monastery compound released without bloodshed.

The Vatican would prefer not to use the word "released," because that would imply that the Christian clergy are being held against their will. Rev. David Jaeger, spokesman for the Holy Land Franciscan order, whose monastery is inhabited by the 200 or so Palestinian gunmen, told NRO over the weekend that "this is not a hostage situation; we offered [the Palestinians] sanctuary."

But another Vatican source with direct knowledge of the standoff contradicted this, saying that the gunmen in fact shot the locks off the monastery's doors, and are holding priests and nuns as "human shields" — exactly as the Israelis are claiming. It is no accident that the Palestinian gunmen have not taken refuge in the parts of the large Nativity basilica under control of the Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches. They know that only the Vatican has the diplomatic strength to prevent or forestall an Israeli assault.

But if these gunmen are indeed holding priests and nuns at gunpoint, what reason would the Vatican have for engaging in diplomatic doublespeak? Why not denounce those who violated the holy site and kidnapped friars and nuns? The answer is to bring international pressure on the Israelis to prevent their troops from storming the place, which would likely result in great bloodshed and damage to the holy site. Says Fr. Jaeger, who insists that the Franciscan friars are staying in their monastery by choice, "As long as the [Israeli] army says it's a hostage situation, the army can say any move against the church is a police action to rescue hostages, not an act of war."

It is also true, say informed observers, that Vatican diplomacy has, for better or worse, long favored the Palestinians over the Israelis. And, there appears to be overwhelming sentiment within the Vatican leadership to be seen as pro-Palestinian in this current conflict (witness, for example, last week's anti-Israel editorial that ran on the front page of L'Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper). Admitting that the Palestinians are the sort who desecrate Christian holy sites would be a tremendous embarrassment to Vatican diplomats.

"The problem is the Catholic Church has always had to walk an extremely delicate line between not antagonizing the host populations of Muslim countries with Catholic populations by acting pro-Israeli," says David Aikman, a veteran journalist and foreign-policy consultant who has done extensive reporting from the region. "On the other hand, this Pope has done more than all the other popes put together to advance Catholic-Jewish relations."

The Vatican established formal diplomatic relations with Israel in 1993, 45 years after the nation's founding. At the time, John Paul said, "It must be understood that Jews, who for 2,000 years were dispersed among the nations of the world, had decided to return to the land of their ancestors. This is their right." The pontiff has also been forthright in calling for a Palestinian state and for dignity for the Palestinian people.

And now those same Palestinian people so strongly supported by the Vatican and its local representatives are believed by many to have repaid the Church's support by holding priests captive. Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was a leading member of the Reagan foreign-policy team, calls the Church's promulgation of the "sanctuary" line "very imprudent, first of all, because it's not true, and second because it takes all the pressure off the Palestinians, who are the people responding for this hostage situation."

Mideast expert Daniel Pipes agrees, citing an "attitude of indulgence" on the part of Church diplomats toward the Palestinians.

"I don't think it's so much anti-Semitism toward Israel as it is indulgence toward the Palestinians as a poor Third World people who need help. They can get away with a lot; the rules are different for them," Pipes says.

However the standoff ends, if it is ultimately accepted as true that the Bethlehem standoff was a hostage-taking situation, Pipes doesn't expect the Palestinians to suffer any international repercussions for having stormed one of the holiest Christian shrines and held its priests and nuns at gunpoint.

"There's a kind of sympathy for the Palestinians that will overlook almost any trespass, and that's something that Arafat and his colleagues have exploited very well. There's nothing they can do that's unacceptable," Pipes says.

This knee-jerk posture from Western governments, combined with the possibility of diplomatic subterfuge from the Holy See, severely restricts what the Israeli besiegers of the basilica can do to end the crisis.

"I can't see any happy outcome if the Israelis do in fact storm the church," says Aikman. "This is really one of those situations where you want to wait it out and negotiate it. Even gunmen get hungry and bored. The Palestinians are not going to be so dumb as to kill the hostages if their demands aren't met. I don't doubt that it would suit the Palestinians for the Israelis to storm the building."

Aikman believes a plan that is reportedly under consideration, under the terms of which the gunmen would get safe passage to Palestinian-controlled Gaza in exchange for leaving the basilica, is the best of nothing but bad alternatives.

But Jim Phillips, a Mideast analyst for the Heritage Foundation, disagrees. "It would be difficult for the Israelis not to take action," Phillips says. "The stated purpose of moving in was to remove the terrorist infrastructure. Here are people committing a terrorist act right under their noses, and thinking they can get away with it because it's in a historic church. Palestinian terrorists have been hiding among civilians all during this intifada. For the Israelis, it's damned if you do, and damned if you don't."

That's Israel's dilemma in Bethlehem. It is unlikely that the Israelis would take the extreme risk of storming the basilica to capture the terrorists; dead priests and a devastated basilica could inflame Western opinion ("The Israelis aren't fools," says Kirkpatrick). But allowing the terrorists to escape to safe haven in Gaza to secure the freedom of the captives would reward hostage-taking ("You should never negotiate with terrorists," says Pipes.)

However the impasse is resolved, it is to be hoped that the Church becomes more honest and forthright about the discrimination the Arafat regime and its Islamic militant cohort has wreaked upon the Christian minority. There should be no doubt that if, in a post-Arafat world, Hamas, or other Islamist fanatics were to gain control over the Nativity church or other Christian holy sites, those ancient places would likely face the same fate as the giant Bamiyan Buddha statues in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

"One of the stories that is never told is the intimidation that Christians in Bethlehem have felt in past few years at hands of Islamists and the PLO," says Aikman. "A lot of Christians in that area, though they're too terrified to say it publicly, far from being upset with the Israelis, are more resentful of the heavy hand of the PLO."

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