WASHINGTON (CNS): While Israel has a right to protect its citizens, the security barrier separating Israel from the Palestinian territories and checkpoints along the barrier raise human rights concerns, a United States cardinal said.
“The most tragic thing I have seen is the … wall that separates Jerusalem from Bethlehem and separates families and keeps farmers from the land that has been in their families for generations. It is humiliating and distressing,” grand master of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem Cardinal John Foley told participants at the 11th international conference of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation on October 24.
“I appreciate the Israeli Government’s concern for security” and respect it, he said. “But many of these measures raise serious human rights issues that they refuse to acknowledge and address.”
The wall the cardinal referenced is a series of barbed-wire fences, security roads and looming cement slabs that, if completed as planned, would stretch 644km through the West Bank and restrict the movement of 38 per cent of the residents of the West Bank.
Cardinal Foley said the barrier already limited many Palestinians, who cannot find work or keep their jobs because they were never sure they would be allowed through the checkpoints or how long they would have to wait to get through them.
It also affected students, “eager to learn, who are unable to get to school regularly”, because they were unable to cross the barrier, he said.
“I visited the Catholic seminary over the Christmas holidays last year and was both saddened and inspired by the many seminarians who had not gone home because they were afraid that they would not be allowed to cross over the border between Jordan and Israel or through the (barrier’s) checkpoints and get back to the seminary,” Cardinal Foley said.
He said since Israel was established as a Jewish state in 1948 the Christian population in Israel has decreased “from 18 per cent to less than two per cent”.
“This is a result of both significant immigration of Jews to Israel and the great increase among Muslims and, at the same time, an exodus of Christians from there,” he said.
Christians and Muslims were often the oppressed groups in the area, Cardinal Foley said.
“We believe that Jews, Christians and Muslims – all of whom place high importance (on) Jerusalem and, indeed, all of Israel … can and should live together in peace,” Cardinal Foley said.
The cardinal was the keynote speaker at the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation conference and received the Living Stones Solidarity Award, which honours those who have made “a sustained and extraordinary effort to love, support and stand in solidarity with the Christians in the Holy Land”.
