The Church of Ireland primate and archbishop of Armagh, Dr Alan Harper, has called on Israel to use the Irish peace process as a model for peace in the Holy Land. Reporting to the Church of Ireland Synod in Galway on his recent joint visit to the Middle East with the leaders of the Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist churches in Ireland, the archbishop said that right-minded Israelis and Palestinians – including the Holy land’s small Christian community – longed for justice, peace, stability and hope.
But he said he had been "deeply moved” by seeing at first hand the resilience of the Palestinian community in the face of what he termed “intolerable hardship, denial of dignity and severe restriction of freedom of movement."
Dr Harper said that as long as Palestinians suffered what they experience as Israeli occupation, aggression and oppression, and as long as Israelis endure guerrilla attacks undertaken by militant Palestinians, there could be no justice, no peace, no stability and no hope.
“If the vision of peace and an interdependent future can take root in Ireland, aided by the patient commitment and enlightened self interest of the governments of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Republic of Ireland, may not a similar vision overtake the embattled peoples of Israel and Palestine?” Dr Harper asked.
Condemning a car bomb attack on a policeman in Castlederg, Co Tyrone, the archbishop described the perpetrators as “yesterday’s men” who did not represent the aspirations of any significant body of opinion in Ireland.
He said a new vision of an Ireland that “lives with its past but not in it” was slowly emerging and was being shaped by a recognition of the “interdependent nature of life in an interdependent Europe and in global economic interdependence”.
He said the view that there had to be winners and losers in a conflict was also waning.
“Either all must be winners or all will be losers - no conflict is ended and no economic benefit assured until all parties derive some, preferably equal, advantage” Dr Harper declared.
He said that any perception that one group in Northern Ireland was gaining at the expense of another remained a threat to consolidating peace.
Such an outcome was of equal importance to the “grievously suffering” people of Israel and Palestine, he said.
He said security for Israel would not be guaranteed by force of arms, but “by the creation of circumstances that disarm hostility”.
“Any country which takes upon itself the responsibility to annex additional territory also takes upon itself the responsibility to treat the inhabitants of the annexed territory with the same respect, care, justice and equality it accords to its own citizens”.
Archbishop Harper said that in Israel and Palestine, just like Ireland, religion was a component of the conflict about land and identity.
But if religion were part of the problem it must become part of the solution, he suggested.
“Three great faiths have the Holy Land as both meeting place and common ground”.
“In these days of inter-faith dialogue might it be possible to pursue the search for peace and parity of esteem by an exploration and articulation of shared ethical values?” he asked.
He said the pursuit of “shared ethical values” could offer build upon factors that Christians, Muslims and Jews have in common, “namely monotheistic faith and some shared spiritual roots in Old Testament scripture”.
Meanwhile, the Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Neill told delegates to the Synod said that he believes current divisions in the Anglican faith caused over differing attitudes to homosexual unions, can be viewed positively and that the Irish experience may be also relevant to seeing them through.
Preaching in St Nicholas’s Church in Galway at a Eucharist for the Synod, he said Anglicanism’s current tensions are enabling it to discover what it means to “wrestle with the recognition of diversity and the call to unity”.
Archbishop Neill, who will shortly partake in the ten-year international Anglican conference in Canterbury said that "to settle too easily for one at the expense of the other is to miss something of the challenge of the Gospel."
He said the international Anglican Communion has had “a very difficult few years” of divisions among its ranks but the Church of Ireland had set great store by its ability to have remained united itself in times of deep political division and “in spite of the fact that our ministry, North and South, is in a very different context”.
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