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The pope's promise
By Uri Dan

(March 23) - I shall always remember what the pope said to us, in English, at the Vatican in April 1999.

"I shall come to visit the Promised Land," he said. "I have decided to visit terra promessa," emphasizing the Latin with a friendly smile on his face.

This week the pope is fulfilling his promise.

The pope revealed his plans at an audience that followed his half-hour t�te-ˆ-t�te with then-foreign minister Ariel Sharon.

Afterwards, Sharon told those of us in the small entourage that accompanied him to the Vatican, that he had invited the pope to visit Israel and had said to him "You know that you will not need a new guidebook, only the Bible, since all the names have remained the same in Hebrew: Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Mount Carmel."

The pope at this point joined in and continued: "Mount Tabor, Mount Gilboa, Jericho."

Sharon explained to the pope that, despite all the persecutions and exiles, Jews have always continued to live in Eretz Yisrael:

"We have decided that Jerusalem will always remain the united capital of Israel," stressed Sharon.

In talks in the Vatican held later that day, the pope's advisers asked Sharon to ensure that Israel would protect the rights of its Christian Arab citizens, in the light of attempts, such as those by Moslem Arabs in Nazareth, to squeeze them out and to built a mosque near the Basilica of the Annunciation. Sharon also heard that the Vatican was very concerned about the fact that the Christian Arab community in Bethlehem was rapidly shrinking under Palestinian Authority rule.

In the meantime, the government has changed, and the current one has promised to permit the building of a mosque in Nazareth.

During our audience with the pope, Sharon presented him with an old and rare 17th-century map, indicating the regions of Judea and Samaria and the division of the country between the tribes. At this point the pope said: "I shall come to the Promised Land."

The pope used this expression twice, although Christians generally say "the Holy Land." The pope thus displayed sensitivity to the fact that his guests were Jews from Israel: only for Jews is this area the "Promised Land." The pope repeated this on Mount Nevo this week, when he followed in the footsteps of Moses.

When I had the honor of shaking the pope's hand, I remembered that I was not only a journalist hearing a scoop from the pope, but first and foremost a Jew and an Israeli.

I remembered the lessons I was taught at school in Tel Aviv about the terrible persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition under the rule of the Catholic Queen Isabelle, which wrought, in Christianity's name, European Jewry's first Holocaust. I remembered my father, Yosef, of Thessaloniki, telling us how our family, in the wake of the Inquisition, fled from Spain to Amsterdam, and finally settled in Greece.

When the pope shook my hand, I also remembered that one of his predecessors, Pius XII, had in the Forties maintained a terrible silence while the Nazis slaughtered the Jews of Europe. I therefore never knew my grandfather, Rabbi Haim Uri of Thessaloniki or any of my mother's family from Poland, since they were all murdered in Auschwitz, while the pope remained silent.

I therefore felt, there in the Vatican, that the rivers of blood produced by Christianity's attitude to the Jewish people were slowly turning into a high tide of changes in the Vatican's attitude to Israel - as indicated by the pope saying "I will visit the Promised Land." I had the great privilege, as a Jew, to hear this myself from the lips of a pope who has contributed more than any of his predecessors to reconciliation and normalization between the Church and the Jewish state.

It is true that the representatives of the current Israeli government have capitulated, as usual, to the Vatican's demands to remove any political significance from the visit. They even waived the accepted official ceremony by the Jerusalem Municipality for welcoming official guests in the capital of Israel.

However, the very fact that the government of Israel, the Jewish state, welcomes the pope in the airport bearing the name of Ben-Gurion, the state's founder, demonstrates to the entire world that the organized wall of hate has fallen between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people in its land - the Promised Land.

How much would Theodor Herzl, the greatest prophet in the last 2,000 years, have been ready to pay to see with his own eyes this pope in Hebrew Jerusalem? He, Herzl, only 100 years ago, pleaded in vain in the Vatican to help him to realize his dream of establishing the Jewish state.

It arose without the aid of the Vatican, of course. It thus fell to the current pope to open a new and exciting chapter in Jewish-Christian relations for the third millennium.