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BERLIN - "This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad
Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto." Several
hours earlier on Sunday you probably would not have heard German Bishop
Gregor Maria Franz Hanke choose such a divisive analogy.
But then on Sunday morning he was still in Israel and the rhetoric was
considerably different than the one elected by the German Bishops'
Conference once they crossed over in to the Palestinian Authority on
Sunday evening.
The visit of 27 members of the German Bishops' Conference to Israel
included a historic first-time visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust
memorial museum in Jerusalem as well as guided tours of sites holy to
Christianity and meetings with Christian congregations in Israel and in
the Palestinian Authority.
During their time in Israel the bishops uniformly made moderate and
balanced statements, but once in the PA they provided German reporters
accompanying them with a plethora of harsh proclamations against Israel.
Their criticism received widespread coverage in the German media on
Monday.
While crossing one of the checkpoints into East Jerusalem the Archbishop
of Cologne, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, told reporters: "This is something
that is done to animals, not people." Meisner, a resident of eastern
Germany, said that the fence reminded him of the Berlin Wall and that in
his lifetime he did not believe he would see such a thing again. As the
Berlin Wall was brought down so will this wall be brought down, he said,
adding that the fence served no purpose.
The delegation's visit to Ramallah took place several hours after their
visit to Yad Vashem and several of the bishops chose to equate the
situation in the Palestinian Authority with the Holocaust.
"Cages in the image of ghettos," said the Bishop of Augsburg of the
territories. Augsburg was once under the spiritual leadership of Pope
Benedict XVI, who was Archbishop of the Munich-Freising Archdiocese and
his brother Monsignor Georg Ratzinger still resides there.
"Israel has, of course, the right to exist, but this right cannot be
realized in such a brutal manner," said Bishop Hanke, who later stated
that he intends to amend this year's Easter message to German churches
so as to include the delegation's political impressions from their visit
to the territories and a demand to change the situation.
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