Palestinians Use Papal Visit to Reassert Jerusalem Claim

The pope is still 40 miles away, but here in Jerusalem the jockeying has commenced.

Sovereignty over Jerusalem is the single most intractable disagreement dividing Israelis and Palestinians, and who better to resolve it than the pope?

Maybe that’s what the Palestinians were thinking Monday when they hoisted a 10-foot-high brightly colored hot-air balloon high above Orient House, their de facto headquarters in East Jerusalem. Festooned with one very large Palestinian flag, and a much smaller Vatican flag, the balloon was visible for miles.

Gathered at Orient House, and with plenty of television cameras present, Palestinian activists also released into the sky hundreds of smaller balloons in the colors of their flag: red, black, green and white. A few dozen doves were also sent aloft.

“It is our city and we can raise our flag any time we want,” declared Faisal Husseini, the Jerusalem representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization. “The pope’s visit is proof of the Palestinian rights over Jerusalem.”

To further press the point, Husseini is circulating a petition, which he plans to present to John Paul II, urging the pontiff to speak out on behalf of the Palestinian claim to the holy city.

The Israelis were having none of this.

Alarmed rumors began circulating that Israel was threatening to shoot down the balloon. No shots were fired, and the Palestinians eventually agreed to lower it.

Israeli police officers, meanwhile, were deployed throughout East Jerusalem to climb telephone poles and remove Palestinian flags that had also sprouted in the excitement.

The seemingly irreconcilable differences over Jerusalem are but one example of the political quagmire threatening the papal visit. Israel captured the eastern part of Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East War and maintains the undivided holy city as its eternal capital, a claim not recognized by the international community or the Holy See. The Palestinians covet East Jerusalem as the capital of an eventual state.

Israeli officials castigated the Palestinians for their “childish” attempts to divert the pope’s spiritual and personal mission onto a political footing. After all, said Haim Ramon, the Israeli Cabinet minister in charge of papal arrangements, Jerusalem is under Israeli sovereignty, and this visit will not change “the status quo.”

“Do you think this balloon will change the Israeli position on Jerusalem, or strengthen the Palestinian position on Jerusalem?” Ramon asked. “The right place to discuss [Jerusalem] is in Washington, not during the pope’s visit.”

Ramon was referring to Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that resume today in Washington. The status of Jerusalem is high on the agenda, though not likely to be resolved any time soon.

The pope arrived Monday in Jordan on the first stop of his weeklong tour of the Holy Land. He flies into Israel’s airport near Tel Aviv later today and then takes a specially outfitted helicopter to Jerusalem’s Mt. Scopus.

Also Monday, Israeli police announced the arrest of three people who allegedly belong to Kach, an outlawed Jewish extremist organization held responsible for graffiti and posters critical of the pope. The arrests came after someone painted a swastika on the pope’s helipad and sprayed paint on welcome banners, despite what authorities describe as an unprecedented security deployment.