This Problem Will Have To Be Solved

The usual howls over this:

“The Holy Scriptures cannot be used to justify the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of the Palestinians, to justify the occupation by Israel of Palestinian lands,” Monsignor Cyril Salim Bustros, Greek Melkite archbishop of Our Lady of the Annunciation in Boston, Massachusetts, and president of the “Commission for the Message,” said at Saturday’s Vatican press conference.

“We Christians cannot speak of the ‘promised land’ as an exclusive right for a privileged Jewish people. This promise was nullified by Christ. There is no longer a chosen people – all men and women of all countries have become the chosen people.

“Even if the head of the Israeli state is Jewish, the future is based on democracy.

The Palestinian refugees will eventually come back and this problem will have to be solved,” the Lebanese-born Bustros said.

All he is saying is that Jesus is the Messiah. With everything that that entails. Call that "supersessionism" or "replacement theology" if you will. But the technical term for it is "Christianity". You know, the foundation of Western civilisation.

Which side would you expect the Church to be on, given the imposition of martial law on the Catholics of the West Bank, and the bombardment of the Catholics of Lebanon? But we are not allowed to know about them. It's all about Islam. Isn't it?

As for the suggestion of Monsignor Bustros that the Palestinian refugees are going back, they probably are not, but Israel could lance that boil perfectly easily by declaring that she was now a settled rather than a settler society, so that the Law of Return would be repealed, thereby cutting the ground from under any wildly impractical demand for something comparable on the other side.