How the pope triumphed over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Francis’ unorthodox ideology saved him from traps that have ensnared other world leaders, and helped him score a victory for the Catholic Church

By Haviv Rettig Gur

The strange, lukewarm visit of Pope Francis to the Holy Land is now a couple days past. The rhetoric and imagery produced by the visit have been assessed and reassessed from every imaginable perspective, and something close to a consensus has developed: the pope didn’t make any mistakes.
It is hard to convey, perhaps, the scale of this achievement, but it must be attempted because it reveals much about the conflict, and about the pope.

The Holy See has no hard power. The pope can’t tax or arrest the estimated 1.2 billion adherents of the Catholic Church. His only influence over them is voluntary, driven by powerful images and narratives of redemption and belonging. In an important sense, then, the pope is a symbol, a stand-in for a higher reality, and all his statements and actions are consciously undertaken as part of his symbolic role.

So when the Palestinian Authority brought the pope to a concrete-walled portion of Israel’s West Bank security fence, the pope was hardly confused by the intentions of his hosts. They wanted to create a symbol, and he, a master of symbolism, gave it to them willingly.

(To those who insist, as former PLO legal adviser Diana Buttu did in a recent debate with this reporter on Huffington Post Live, that the trip to the wall was unplanned but simply happened to be on the path of his itinerary in the Bethlehem area, the graphics of this Palestinian Authority flyer reveal that the PA’s itinerary had no purpose other than to create that image.)

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