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15 August 2006

Palestine issue root cause of Israeli-Lebanon conflict says delegation

Annette Young
Jerusalem (ENI). The root cause of the Israeli-Lebanese conflict is the failure to resolve the Israel-Palestine issue, an international church delegation visiting Jerusalem has said.

Following a United Nations-brokered truce between Israel and Hezbollah, a delegation under the auspices of the World Council of Churches also urged a return to the negotiating table by all parties "with no one left aside due to pre-emptive designation as terrorist.".

Led by the president of the Conference of European Churches, the Rev. Jean-Arnold de Clermont, the delegation said any negotiations must include "recognition of the importance of secure Israeli and Palestinian states in internationally recognised borders".

In the delegation was also Roman Catholic Archbishop Bernard-Nicolas Aubertin of Tours in France. It left for Lebanon on 9 August, and visited Beirut, Jerusalem and Ramallah but was unable in the time available to go to affected areas in southern Lebanon and northern Israel.

"Hezbollah is part of a resistance to the whole situation in the Middle East and you cannot simply say this war just happened because Hezbollah was there," said de Clermont, who also heads the Protestant Federation of France.

While praying the cease-fire will hold, de Clermont raised reservations on behalf of Lebanese church leaders about the UN resolution that led to the truce. They said it failed to deal with the root cause of the current crisis, which they said was the need to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a statement read out, the delegation reported that while visiting Beirut during the conflict, it had "heard the voices of religious leaders who could not understand the violence of destruction" leading to the deaths of more than 1000 Lebanese. "They could not understand the violence of the military offensive except that the intention was to destroy Lebanon," the delegation said.

"We also heard the voices of the same Christian leaders in Lebanon, condemning without reservation, the attacks of Hezbollah, which cost the lives of eight Israeli soldiers and the capture of two others, and condemning any form of violence and the killing of civilians.

"But the same leaders supported the resistance of the Lebanese people underlying the unity of this country as a model of multicultural and multi-confessional understanding of democracy."

While in Jerusalem, the delegation met the heads of local churches as well as Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yona Metzger and the chief Islamic justice, Sheikh al Tamimi, said de Clermont. It also met representatives of Israeli and Palestinian civic groups.

In Ramallah, the delegation met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and it left for Geneva on 15 August. There it was to issue a report on its visit at a media briefing the following day.

© 1994 - 2006 Ecumenical News International.

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