The recognition by Roman Catholicism’s Pope Francis of a phantom “Palestinian” people’s phantom “State of Palestine” is but the latest abomination committed by this faith community against the Jewish people.
It has, though, its benefits. Not for the first time has a pontiff paid homage to the historical hoax of a “Palestinian” nation. Pope John Paul II (1978-2005), the “Polish Pope,” welcomed to his inner sanctum in the Vatican several times the greatest Jew-killer since Adolf Hitler, Yasir Arafat. And when that Pope visited “Bethlehem in Judea” in March 2000, he said he was glad to be in “Bethlehem in Palestine” even though “Bethlehem in Judea” is the language used right there at the beginning of Christian scripture, Matthew: 2:1.
Indeed, Judea appears another forty-one times in what Christians call the New Testament. “Samaria” appears eleven times, but today’s Roman Catholic clergymen never speak of “Judea and Samaria,” only “Palestine” and/or the “West Bank.”
Their “man from Nazareth” surely never did. His death on a cross along with maybe another quarter-million Jews is reckoned for the year 34 of the Common Era — when the term Palaestina would not be invented for another century by Roman Empire Hadrian, the greatest Jew-killer (after Der Fuhrer) in history. Christendom’s deity surely never used the terms “Palestine” or “West Bank,” so why do today’s popes? And why do they recognize “Palestinians,” a people their man had also never heard of, let alone to be the legitimate owners of Judea and Samaria?
So one of the benefits of the Pope’s recognition of the phantom “Palestinians” as the rightful owners of the “West Bank” is more evidence that greater than fidelity to its own Holy Writ is Catholicism’s continuing hostility to the Jewish people.
One had thought that since 1965 the Church had outgrown its animus. At that time, after three years of debate, the Second Vatican Council, convened by the remarkable Pope John XXIII, issued its revision of Catholic doctrine called Nostra Aetate, meaning, significantly, “In Our Time” because post-Holocaust, the Church finally confronted not only the perhaps millions of Church-sanctioned Jew-killings throughout history, but the truth that so many of World War II’s top Nazis had been baptized in their Church too.
The new doctrine annulled thousands of years of teaching of deicide according to which all Jews were “murderers,” i.e. all were guilty of, in the vernacular, “killing God.” The new dispensation perpetuated the anti-Jew charges against the Jews two thousand years ago found in the Greek texts that Christians append to the Hebrew Tanakh (Bible), but henceforth their guilt would no longer adhere to living or future Jews.
Still, it took another three decades for the Vatican to recognize the State of Israel, and that happened only after the onset of Oslo’s deceitful “peace process” when Israel’s post-Zionist Leftists shook hands with Arafat, Abbas, and other antisemitic murderers.
And as for the second benefit of this latest outrage by the Church of Rome: it is the reinforcement it gives to the truth that many enemies of the Jewish commonwealth remain motivated by religion, not politics.
As for the politics: in November 1967, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242 that called on the belligerent states in the Six-Day War of the previous June to negotiate peace. Not a word about any “Palestinians,” let alone the need to create a state for them.
In fact, exhaustive research into UN archives by this writer discovered no reference to any “Palestinians” in any UN General Assembly or Security Council resolution until 1970, three years after the Six-Day War.
Mountains of other evidence also show how this phantom nation was invented actually to block peace. Res. 242 called on the belligerent countries to negotiate, which the Arabs would not do, and as part of their resistance, they came up with this ahistorical myth of “Palestinians” whom Israel had to make peace with first.
It is said in the Passover Haggada, “In every generation, they rise up against us to put an end to us,” and one might add “for ever-changing reasons depending upon the times.”
Antisemitism can be defined very simply: it is “lying about Jews.” In every generation, gentiles have told whopping lies about alleged Jewish evil, and on the basis of these horror stories license themselves to murder, rape, mutilate, rob, drive Jews from their homes, turn them into penniless refugees forced to flee to a foreign country whose language they do not know and begin their lives again.
In the 14th century, Jews were massacred by the thousands for allegedly poisoning the wells that (it was believed) brought on the Black Death that carried off maybe a third of Europe.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, they were accused of being capitalist warmongers, for capitalists make the most money during wartime and to hell with all the death and destruction they cause.
And now in our generation, Jews are believed to have stolen Palestine from the “Palestinians” and won’t return at least some of it so that this putatively Paleolithic community can have a state of its own just like the greedy Jews who won’t share Palestine with them.
And here is the Pope of Rome having swallowed this poisonous antisemitic fantasy like a communion wafer.
The Big Lie of “Palestinian” Nationalism is this generation’s form of Jew-hatred.
About the Author: Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com and www.deprogramprogram.com.