© Photos : Pax Christi Italia

Who knows what our Palestinian friends from the Kairos delegation, who visited Italy a few days ago, thought as they passed through our quiet everyday life and compared it with the life they are forced to live every day in Bethlehem, Ramallah and throughout the West Bank. Perhaps they were disgusted by the (more or less unconscious) racism of our politicians, by the misinformation and by the insensitivity of part of our public opinion. “First of all, we must ask forgiveness from these three Palestinians for what we should be doing and are not doing”, Alex Zanotelli eloquently began as he welcomed them in Naples, the first stop of a visit to Italy that then took them to Rome, Florence, Bologna, Padua and Venice.

Meeting of Kairos Palestine with the city council of Naples

The three members of the delegation were the Reverend Munther Isaac, theologian and pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Bethlehem and dean of the Bethlehem Bible College; Rifat Kassis, coordinator of Globa Kairos for Justice and Sahar Francis, a human rights lawyer who has directed Addameer for twenty years, an association that offers legal aid to Palestinian political prisoners. During their visit to Italy, invited by the campaign “Ponti non Muri” of Pax Christi Italia with the contribution of Fair Square (non-profit organisation that combine thorough, hard-hitting research with impactful advocacy to promote systemic change and stop human rights abuses), they participated in a full calendar of discussions with the institutions, with the ecclesiastical world and associations, of vigils and public meetings, always accompanied by don Nandino Capovilla. They were welcomed in some major city councils and universities; they met bishops, scholars and activists. They participated in a meeting at the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chamber of Deputies. They were also supposed to attend a general audience with Pope Francis in the Vatican which unfortunately was cancelled at the last minute due to the health conditions of the Holy Father.

At each stop, the three Palestinian Christians narrated how Bethlehem has become an open-air prison – “a new Gaza” – because Israel has blocked and closed all the roads leading to the city with checkpoints, gates, concrete blocks, controlling every movement in and out. They told us about the Israeli settlers supported by the Tel Aviv government who attack villages and rural areas daily and drive out the population to confiscate their land.

“Even in the absence of an official and organized plan,” Kassis explained, “people are leaving because of curfews, attacks and snipers, widespread destruction and cuts in electricity and running water.” “To all this we must then add the loosening of the rules of engagement in the West Bank, which allows Israeli soldiers to shoot and kill anyone even for the simple pleasure of doing so.” Unfortunately, we have long been accustomed to hearing terrible stories and tales of real apartheid from Palestine. But this time, also considering Donald Trump’s utterances about his idea of making Gaza “the Riviera of the Middle East”, we are facing what we could define as the final solution to the Palestinian question.

In a picture that appears more dramatic every day, the Kairos delegates have tried to shake our consciences of those who govern us. The nonviolent Christian-Palestinian movement was born in 2009 from an appeal signed by the heads of the thirteen Christian denominations of the Holy Land to support the end of the Israeli occupation and the liberation from the most extremist positions of both sides to achieve reconciliation between the two peoples. In a certain sense, it intends to follow in the footsteps of what was done exactly forty years ago in South Africa, when Christian churches played a central role in overthrowing the apartheid regime and in marking the path towards a just peace. At the time, they succeeded by pushing Western countries to boycott the economy of the South African state, which had long subjected black people to brutal persecution.

Today, many analysts, experts and representatives of civil society have long been repeating that the only way to dissuade the state of Israel from its policy of apartheid and genocide would be to follow the path traced in South Africa. But as it is well known, Europe with Italy and the United States are going in a diametrically opposite direction: they are blind and deaf to the desperate cry of the Palestinian population and justify in every way the actions of Tel Aviv without realizing – as Reverend Munther has repeatedly underlined during his visit to Italy – that at stake is not only the future of the Palestinian people but also the fate of the world in which we want to live.

“Gaza today represents a test for all humanity, the moral compass of our times. And even those who remain silent become accomplices”, he said. Then, he underlied the gravity of the situation in the entire West Bank, “where the violence of the settlers is in fact chasing the native Christian population from the birthplace of Christianity.”

During this visit to Italy, a stark and almost blasphemous contrast was soon evident between the composure, reliability and poetic courage of the Palestinian delegation, that came to launch yet another desperate cry of alarm, and the obtuse obstinacy of the highest Italian political institutions that continue to blindly support the government of Israel despite the thousands of civilian victims and the incessant disregard for international law in order not to risk damaging the economic and political relationship with Tel Aviv.

On the very day that the Kairos delegation was supposed to meet Pope Francis in the Vatican, Israeli President Isaac Herzog was received with full honors at the Quirinale by Sergio Mattarella, before going to meet with President Giorgia Meloni at Palazzo Chigi. Neither Mattarella nor Meloni spent a word on the crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli army in Gaza: they limited themselves, in yet another bath of hypocrisy, to reiterating Italy’s closeness to Israel in its fight against Hamas. Yet Herzog is the same one who not long ago had his picture taken while writing “I trust you” on missiles destined to hit homes, hospitals, schools and tent cities in Gaza. He is the same one who attacked the UN, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court because they dared to condemn the crimes committed against Palestinian civilians.

Meeting of Kairos Palestine with the city council of Florence

Although they have seen first-hand the blind pro-Israel drift of our highest institutional positions, we are certain that our friends of the delegation of Kairos Palestine will have returned home comforted and with hearts full of hope, because at every stage of their visit to Italy they found many representatives of civil society, young and old, welcoming them, increasingly aware of their suffering and ready to mobilize to help them. We have the duty not to disappoint them.

By Riccardo Michelucci, friend of Pax Christi Italia and contributor to Avvenire.