Thank you for sharing a text that I would not have seen/read otherwise.
The salient parts that support your view:
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There can be no peace without freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of expression and respect for the views of others.
Nor is peace possible without true disarmament! The requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament. The light of Easter impels us to break down the barriers that create division and are fraught with grave political and economic consequences. It impels us to care for one another, to increase our mutual solidarity, and to work for the integral development of each human person.
I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development. These are the “weapons” of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death!
May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
> I express my closeness to the sufferings of Christians in Palestine and Israel, and to all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people. The growing climate of anti-Semitism throughout the world is worrisome. Yet at the same time, I think of the people of Gaza, and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation. I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace!
Tangentially related: why do so many people call for a ceasefire, when a ceasefire is generally temporary. It wouldn't resolve any of the underlying reasons for the war. He should be calling for surrender.
Who should surrender, though? At this point in time, if Hamas were to surrender, the Israeli occupation of Gaza would just get worse. That wouldn't be peace, or justice, for people of Gaza. I certainly don't support what Hamas has done, but Israeli rule will probably be pretty brutal for Palestinians.
israel literally are able to cut off food, water, electricity, internet at their own whim, they're doing it as we speak. They are actively blocking aid and food from going in. Read the news. There are many anti-zionist jews as well speaking up against the atrocities and war crimes israel has been committing for a very long time now.
I'm not even sure I'd go so far as to call them anti-zionist.
How long do people imagine Israel survives as a state with a brutally-oppressed population under its care?
It's a rational position to be pro-state-of-Israel and want them to find peace (and integration) with the Gazans because the consequences of perpetual animosity and aggression are the single biggest threat to the state's survival.
I'm sure you don't seriously intend to bring up American treatment of the Japanese in its territory as a positive example.
As you are not American, I forgive you your apparent lack of knowledge of the concentration camps, or the theft of property that was never returned to innocent Japanese Americans.
Go watch the many documentaries about Gaza, then tell us it is not brutally oppressed. The fact of the matter is that Palestinians have been treated atrociously for over 75 years now. The West Bank is not much better off either by the way.
Given the history, I can appreciate their rage. The point stands that you don't get a state with long-term stability by just dropping a lid on a pressure-cooker. Solutions that lean in that direction start to look disquietingly like final solutions.
Timeline-wise, the Palestinians were there long before the Israelis in modern Israel. I don't think forcing them out is a reasonable starting point. At best, that becomes a perpetual shame like the US treatment of native Americans.
Personally, I look to Ireland and England as a potential model. People have been conflating Hamas and Gaza in this thread... At the height of the Troubles, more Irish supported the IRA than Palestinians support Hamas, and I don't think anyone ever suggested the solution was to relocate the Irish.
Wikipedia: Yasser Arafat[a] (4 or 24 August 1929 – 11 November 2004), also popularly known by his kunya Abu Ammar,[b] was a Palestinian political leader
Yasser Arafat was Egyptian. He was born there and his tribe is there. He's as Palestinian as every Turk or Houthi.
It's public knowledge.
Also Wikipedia is known for it's progressive stance. Can't trust it for anything that intersects with culture war issues where everything is a conspiracy.
He was Palestinian. It's public knowledge. Secondly, let's say he's from Mars, does that maean the rest of the millions of Palestinians are also all Martians? LOL
I'm sure I'm misreading you; you didn't intend to say you can't trust Wikipedia because it doesn't indulge conspiracy theories, but I'm having a hard time understanding your meaning in any other form. Can you clarify?
Ask the Arabs and Levantine Muslims where all their Jews are. Why Lebanon is Muslim. Why their states are Islamic and why they have issues with religious and cultural states that they aren't a majority of.
That's not really been the standard the world holds itself to since World War II.
Yes, aggressors in a just war are expected to care for the civilian population in conquered territory. Starvation as a war weapon against civilians is a war crime.
In fact, the only place it's currently legal (though generally frowned upon) is in the context of a civil war, and if this is a civil war we're back to asking the question: how does Israel expect to find peace when 9 million citizens are oppressing 5 million with brutal military violence?
Gaza isn't a separate country, the Palestinians are still Israelis in terms of international responsibility and national membership, seeing as how Palestine is not a recognized independent nation.
How do we know this? Because Israel isn't under sanction for the activities they are undertaking that would be considered war crimes if done to another nation.
It is a long-standing civil war that a couple generations of national leadership have failed to find a long-term resolution to. The current resolution of trying to ghetto the Palestinian people into controlled territories ("reservations," if you will, a common strategy used by colonizers to "handle" the native population) doesn't seem to be bearing fruit other than intergenerational violence.
I personally know such jews actually. We salute anyone standing against oppression of the Palestinians from the brutality they have been facing for over 75 years now.
> Nor is peace possible without true disarmament! The requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament.
The sentiment sounds great but I think we now see in the real world with Ukraine that if you rely [too much] on others (re: US), you have a real problem if they are no longer there for you. Peace through strength is real.
that fragment references Easter theology. at a fundamental level love is stronger than everything, including the unsurpassable frontier, death. nothing could kill Jesus, not slander, not hatred, not envy, not even the cross.
and btw, in that little collection of booklets we call the Bible, the story doesn't end all flowery and pink either. Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed, early disciples are martyred in troves and everybody is aware the story of that Jesus guy and Mary and Mary Magdalene and Junia and all the others just has begun.
and it's clear it has to be written by us...
so regarding the recent world events yes PP Francis was heavily displeased (he talks about several of them in the very text we respond to here) but the Jesus thing gives us confidence and hope and justification to actively do something about it and to nudge the world into being a better place, for all of us.
that's how I think PP Francis meant what he said. and it's definitively how I see it.
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
I don't know. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but it sounded like he was referring to something broader, especially given the explicit political references he made later.
... He's referring to "Christ is risen". That's way more broad (conceptually) and very in-character for the Pope, compared to some transient current events.
His speech yesterday (he dictated it I guess) was very very political, not on the usual level, felt like a finally "all out" for me.
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/urbi/do...