FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Every day, hundreds of people gather in a makeshift worship center on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.They profess their Judaism in prayers, pictures, and words. They’re hoping to be heard most immediately by authorities in Israel, which they call the Promised Land. Many left spartan farm lives in the rural north of this ancient east African nation and moved to the city years ago in hopes that they, like thousands before them, would be taken to Israel.

Ethiopian Jew: Our members are suffering. They are destitute. They don’t have places to sleep.

Ethiopian Jew: I come to follow God’s word. He said, as I disperse you I shall bring you together. Because of that I want to go back to the Jewish home.

DE SAM LAZARO: Their pleas have fallen mostly on skeptical ears even though more than 75,000 Ethiopians, including many relatives of these people, were accepted in recent years into Israel.Their acceptance into Israeli society, however, has been difficult. Many in Israel’s religious leadership have questioned whether the Ethiopians are truly Jewish. Many were subjected to conversion rituals upon their arrival in Israel. In recent years, Ethiopians, particularly in the second generation, have taken to street protests.

Ethiopian Jewish Demonstrator: I think what we are looking here today is thousands of Ethiopians saying here to the Israeli society: no to discrimination, no for racism. All of us we came here to Israel to be equal with Israeli society.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Ethiopian Jewish tradition dates back hundreds of years—many believe more than 2,000 years.

MESFIN ASSEFA (Scholar-Activist): The origin of Ethiopian Jews dates back to biblical times when the Queen of Sheba or Magda first went to visit King Solomon, and she returned bearing a child conceived during this visit. The young prince, later King Melenik, went to Israel to meet his father when he was 20, and he returned to Ethiopia accompanied by 1000 members from each of the tribes of Israel.

DE SAM LAZARO: Other migrations followed from ancient Israel, he says, but this account has a number skeptics.

GETACHEW HAILE: It’s more of a legend than historical truth.

DE SAM LAZARO: Getachew Haile, a religion historian now in Minnesota, says there’s no evidence of any trail linking Ethiopia directly with ancient Israel.

GETACHEW HAILE: We have Greek inscriptions, Arabic inscriptions. There is nothing in the sort of Hebrew inscriptions.

DE SAM LAZARO: More likely, he says, Jews came here from the Arabian Peninsula or Yemen centuries later and settled amid certain isolated populations, helping convert them from the Orthodox Christianity that predominated.

HAILE: One possibility, this is a theory, is that some people might have migrated from over the Red Sea, come into Ethiopia, and converted them. The other is within the Ethiopian community, within the Christian community, who rejected Christianity.

DE SAM LAZARO: Through the ages, he says, some Ethiopian kings enforced a rigid conformance to the predominant Orthodox Christianity. Those outside this system, called falasha or foreigners have been marginalized.

HAILE: They are considered outcasts, and I have no doubt that they have been treated like that within the Ethiopian Christians.

DE SAM LAZARO: Thanks in large part to this persecution, the so-called falasha became Ethiopia’s poorest people, and this has complicated the transition for many who went to Israel from medieval poverty to a First World economy. Still, for the Ethiopians it is a huge improvement in the standard of living. Mengistu Kebede, who’d returned to Addis Ababa on vacation recently to visit family, gave us some perspective. It was a difficult adjustment to life in Israel, he says, but well worth it.

MENGISTU KEBEDE: It’s significantly better. Everybody wears shoes, they get enough pay for work, their clothes there are nice. Everything is much better.

DE SAM LAZARO: As part of earlier groups who were airlifted amid Ethiopia’s famine and civil war in the 1980s and ’90s, Kebede received a relatively warm welcome under Israel’s law of return. Today, however, the issue of economic motivation has clouded the politics of migration.

ASSEFA: I understand that there’s a perception that people coming from poor countries, from Africa, are coming for the economic benefits. But the issue is it’s the national law of Israel as well as the religious law to allow all Jews to return to Israel. It’s what God promised. As far as we know, all who have applied are bona fide Jews, and while there are advantages, the true motivation is a religious one.

DE SAM LAZARO: Amid the social, political, and economic challenges involving Ethiopian migration, Israel’s government has restricted the number it will allow in. In 2010 the government, in a move that it said should absorb all remaining Jews in Ethiopia, authorized visas for 8,000 new migrants. They’ll be allowed in in phases through 2016. Most of these worshipers did not make the cut. Deliverance to the Promised Land for these people, whose numbers are estimated in the low thousands, could take years, if it happens at all.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: In an ancient, crowded land with wide religious diversity, Judaism has a tiny footprint. In New Delhi, it’s in this quiet enclave. A small group of worshipers gathers here every Friday, a mix of foreigners and Indians. In India’s ancient religious mosaic, Judaism is a newcomer. Its roots go back only two millennia.

EZEKIAL MALEKAR (Judah Hyam Synagogue): When Israel, the oldest Jewish community, landed, they were shipwrecked, and they came to India about 2,000 years ago.

DE SAM LAZARO: There were at least two subsequent mini-waves that brought Jews to India: people fleeing the Inquisition and people who came during British colonial days as traders. There were perhaps 30,000 Jews across the country at one time, but many moved to Israel after its formation in 1948.

MALEKAR: Now we have only 5,000 Jews all over India, and in Delhi we have just 5, 6 Indian-Jewish families. We are like a drop in the ocean.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ezekiel Malekar is the keeper of Delhi’s tiny synagogue, built in 1956 on land donated by the Indian government. A lawyer and retired civil servant, he’s not an ordained rabbi, but for three decades Malekar has volunteered to lead this congregation, reconciling its ancient rituals and traditions with the practical modern reality.

MALEKAR: In order to read this portion of the Torah you require a quorum of 10 men, what we call in Hebrew minyan, so here we take into consideration the presence of women also. Some people don’t like it, especially those who are very Orthodox when they come to the synagogue. But I said that we are such a small community that if I have these practices I won’t be able to conduct the services in the synagogue.

DE SAM LAZARO: The majority of India’s remaining Jews live in the commercial capital, Mumbai. It was in this city during the 2008 terrorist attacks that six people were killed at a Jewish community center that mainly served Israelis and Western visitors and businesspeople. Since then, the Delhi synagogue has also come under 24-hour protection from the Indian government—the first time Jews here have ever faced the specter of violence.

MALEKAR: Jews have been living in India for the last 2000 years and without anti-Semitism and persecution, and therefore I always say that India is our motherland. I am an Indian first and Jew second. When Mr. Shimon Peres came here…

DE SAM LAZARO: …the president of Israel…

MALEKAR: The president of Israel. I was asked by the BBC media that what is your feeling about Israel and India? And I said that Israel is in my heart, but India is in my blood.

DE SAM LAZARO: But those who call themselves Indian and Jewish are fewer and fewer. One of Malekar’s sad tasks is to tend the cemetery, whose census now exceeds the congregation in the synagogue next door.

MALEKAR: This is the last place, where we go to the divine abode.

DE SAM LAZARO: On a happier note, Malekar will soon preside over his daughter Shulamit’s wedding, which will be a historic event in Delhi’s Jewish community.

MALEKAR: I don’t remember even after 1956 there has been a single wedding in the synagogue.

DE SAM LAZARO: At 66, Malekar will finally witness a marriage here between two Indian Jews, leaving only the worry about who from the handful of young congregants might be willing to take over from him.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in New Delhi.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Nestled in the hills between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is a small village called the Oasis of Peace—in Hebrew, Neve Shalom and in Arabic, Wahat al-Salam. While the Middle East conflict continues to churn all around, here they are trying to create a different reality, one that says Israelis and Arabs can live side-by-side in peace.

ABDESSALAM NAJJAR (Oasis of Peace): It’s possible. We need to learn how to make the impossible possible. We don’t take in our consideration impossible. It’s possible, let’s do it now.

LAWTON: Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam was founded more than 30 years ago by an Egyptian-born Dominican monk, Father Bruno Hussar, who died in 1996. He wanted to create a place where Jews, Muslims, and Christians intentionally lived together in mutual understanding and respect.

NAJJAR: His interest was to deal with the conflict. Why do we have a conflict? How can we influence the dynamics of the conflict and how can we change it for dynamics for peace building?

LAWTON: Abdessalam Najjar is an Arab Muslim from the Galilee region of Israel. He was part of the first group to move here 33 years ago.

LAWTON: Why did you want to do this? Why did you want to be part of this?

NAJJAR: You ask me a very difficult question. You assume that I know the answer. I don’t know. For me, I said, ah, it’s a way that we can deal with the conflict in an alternative way. Cooperation instead of confrontation. Dialogue instead of fight.

LAWTON: Today, 55 families live here, and another 30 families are in the process of moving in. Others are on a waiting list if space becomes available. The community screens applicants and chooses who will live here.

NAJJAR: We need groups that are capable to understand that differences between us and not trying to change the other, mainly to work on the self, and the transformation will start from within and not transforming the others.

LAWTON: In Neve-Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, there’s a big emphasis on education, not just for those who live here, but for the greater community as well. The bilingual Hebrew Arabic primary school has 200 students, the vast majority from outside the village.

NAJJAR: The most important thing that we are keeping, trying to keep equality between Arab and Jewish pupils and the staff, also Arab and Jewish teachers.

LAWTON: And there’s adult education as well. Nava Zonenshein directs programs at the School for Peace, which sponsors encounter groups and conflict-resolution seminars.

NAVA ZONENSHEIN (Oasis of Peace): People have to learn history they didn’t know of the other side, learn power relations and how to share more equally, learn how to change the images that they have of the other side. So these are challenges we have to deal all the time with.

LAWTON: Zonenshein, who is Jewish, also moved to the village more than 30 years ago. She raised her three children here.

ZONENSHEIN: They don’t see the other as an enemy. Everywhere they go they will fight for equality, for justice, so it’s something very deep in their experience, not just they heard about it but they lived this.

LAWTON: Rabbi Ron Kronish says Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam is one of several interfaith projects taking place despite the ongoing tensions in the region.

RABBI RON KRONISH (Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel): These things don’t make the news. I often joke, because we don’t kill anybody, we don’t make the news and we don’t make page one anyway. So I’d like people to know that there are a lot of people in this country who are into dialogue, education, getting to know one another, trying to live together.

LAWTON: Kronish has lived in Israel for 32 years and directs the Interreligious Coordinating Council based in Jerusalem. Interfaith work here has two tracks. One is promoting dialogue inside Israel proper between the majority Jewish population and the 20 percent who are Arab Muslims and Christians. The other track is promoting dialogue between people from Israel and the Palestinian territories, which can be especially difficult given security concerns. Kronish says the ongoing political stalemate does complicate all their work.

KRONISH: When there’s not a war or lots of terror and counterterror and all that, it’s easier to bring people together, on the one hand. On the other hand, the lack of political hope and the lack of political progress keeps people from coming out in larger numbers. Some people say, what for?

ISSA JABER ABU GHOSH (Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel): When sometimes there is something on the political arena, the conflict, some, let me say, violence, terror events somewhere, the whole issues became very complicated, very mixed.

LAWTON: Kronish works closely on the council with Issa Jaber Abu Ghosh, a Palestinian Muslim who lives just outside Jerusalem in the Arab town of Abu Ghosh, which is named for his family. They believe building relationships between individuals lays the groundwork for peace.

KRONISH: We don’t invite people to our dialogues to solve the problem. We invite them to get to know one another, to be in place, to do what you can, to mitigate violence and hatred.

LAWTON: Kronish admits the lack of political progress can be discouraging, but he takes heart in his interfaith work with kids.

KRONISH: My hope is more in the younger generation, to tell you the truth, who are less cynical and less tired and who don’t have easy political solutions, because we don’t have those around here, but who are reaching out to know each other, to encounter the other, to work with each other, to do small things together, to do what’s feasible at the current time.

LAWTON: At Neve Shalem/Wahat al-Salam many say spirituality is also a key part of building the framework for peace.

NAJJAR: I believe, and there are some others believe, that peace education and the peace actions in the absence of the spiritual factor will be not complete, and if we will use the spiritual factor, we will be more able, more courage to do a peaceful action.

LAWTON: Here there are many places where people of all faiths, and those of no faiths, can pray or meditate. One of the most unusual spots is called the Space of Silence.

NAJJAR: See in the shape, very beautiful, you can come inside, you can pray, you can meditate as Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, anything, but everything should be in silence.

LAWTON: Here there are no walls and no sharp edges. Najjar says the founder, Father Bruno, believed you can’t talk to others until you talk to God and yourself. His vision was that by pursuing peace, people are doing God’s work, whatever their belief system may be.

NAJJAR: This is the most important thing, the outcome, the results. If the results is what God wants from us to do, we do it, everybody with his own way.

LAWTON: And that’s the work they intend to continue and expand, no matter what happens in the political world outside.

I’m Kim Lawton in Israel.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s Sunday morning in the West Bank town of Bethlehem. Christians have gathered for worship at the ancient Church of the Nativity, which marks the traditional birthplace of Jesus. Local Christians like John Tawil say they feel a special tie to their faith.

JOHN TAWIL: Being a Christian in Bethlehem is something wonderful because it’s the place where Jesus was born.

LAWTON: But the 2,000-year-old Christian community here has been diminishing at an alarming rate, and some question whether Christianity can ultimately survive in the land where it began.

PROFESSOR BERNARD SABELLA (Al-Quds University): The places are important, but you need to make these places to come alive, and you cannot do that without indigenous Palestinian Christians in the Holy Land.

LAWTON: The overwhelming majority of Christians here are Arabs. They were among the hundreds of thousands displaced in 1948, when the State of Israel was established and in the wars that followed. For decades now, Palestinian Christians have continued to emigrate at disproportionately high rates, and their birth rates are much lower than those of Muslims. Roughly 150,000 Christians live in Israel proper—about two percent of the population. In the Palestinian Territories, it’s estimated that Christians make up just over one percent of the population. There are also small Christian minorities in disputed East Jerusalem. The circumstances for Christians vary in each of those places and, like most things here, a lot of it is shaped by the ongoing conflict.

SABELLA: The challenge, I think, to Palestinian Christians, in my view, and to Christian communities in Israel and the Middle East, is really to stay put.

LAWTON: Bernard Sabella is a sociologist in Jerusalem who has studied the emigration patterns of his fellow Christians, especially younger Christians, in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

SABELLA: The political situation and the economic situation together make it very hard for young people. Even when they are earning good money, and they have a secure job, relatively secure job, they feel that the prospects for the future are very dim.

LAWTON: That’s the case for John Tawil and his friend, Mary Abu-Ghattas, who are students at the Roman Catholic-run Bethlehem University. Both are 20 years old and both were born under Israeli occupation. They say Israel’s strict security policies toward all Palestinians make West Bank life untenable.

MARY ABU-GHATTAS: First of all, challenges in moving, which is like a basic human right, to be able to move from one point to another. Challenges in Israel controlling the water supply, Israel controlling basically any supply that comes into Palestine.

LAWTON: Mary’s Greek Orthodox family has lived for centuries in the Christian town of Beit Jala, just outside Bethlehem. She’s close to them, but also dreams of traveling to faraway places.

ABU-GHATTAS: Even though if I don’t care, like, if I have a lot of money. I just care to really be able to see the world, so, yes, that is definitely my dream, but it’s not going to—it’s not that easy to make come true considering our situation in Palestine. It’s very tempting to leave. Do we try? Yes, of course we try, like basically, obviously no one wants to leave their country, but it is hard. It’s a challenge.

LAWTON: John is part of the tiny Syriac Orthodox community. Several of his extended family members live in France and Britain. He’s a chemistry major who wants to study medicine, and he’s planning to do so abroad.

TAWIL: I would like to stay here, but I see that the peace, the peace process that they are moving in, will not achieve itself within the coming few years or within the coming 200 years. So why to suffer and struggle? Living under the occupation is not a normal life. It’s a stressed life, and we have to get out of this.

LAWTON: Bethlehem University was founded in 1973, and today about 30 percent of the students are Christians, 70 percent Muslim. University administrators are aware of the challenge they face.

BROTHER VINCENT NEIL KIEFFE (Bethlehem University): The difficulty with education is once you’ve educated someone they become mobile, and so they have opportunities elsewhere. Our goal is to try and encourage people to stay in the Holy Land. That’s why we’re here to start with.

LAWTON: Leaders of the Holy Land’s historic churches have been trying to encourage their flock to stay. For example, while the Anglican Church provides social services for all people, it’s also been developing scholarship and employment programs specifically aimed at Christians.

BISHOP SUHEIL DAWANI (Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem): We encourage them, and we do whatever we can within our capacity to keep them here in the land.

LAWTON: Christians outside the region are also trying to help. The Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation [HCEF] is a US-based group with the mission of “preserving the Christian presence in the Holy Land.” HCEF runs several investment and social service projects, such as this senior citizens day-care center in the West Bank town of Birzeit. Here, they try to celebrate traditional Palestinian culture and heritage. HCEF has also renovated or built more than 300 homes for low-income Palestinian Christians. This family of six was living in one rundown room. Now they have a brand-new three-bedroom home.

Church leaders worry that without a living Christian presence, the Holy Land could become like a museum or a theme park. The region’s Roman Catholic leader is Fouad Twal, who has the ancient title of Latin Patriarch. He wants pilgrims to visit not only the holy sites, but also the local Christians, whom he calls the Holy Land’s “living stones.”

PATRIARCH FOUAD TWAL (Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem): Only with the living stones, with people, with community, it has a meaning of holy. It is not a question of building and archaeology; it is a question of life.

LAWTON: Top Western Anglican and Roman Catholic leaders have just launched a new campaign to help Christians in the Holy Land. But that can be a complicated and sometimes controversial endeavor. Many Christians, especially in American and European evangelical communities, are strongly pro-Israel. When the US and other countries moved their embassies from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv for political reasons, one group of Christians founded their own institution to support Israel. They called it the Christian Embassy.

DAVID PARSONS (International Christian Embassy Jerusalem): We were founded in 1980 as an expression of comfort and solidarity with the Jewish people and their 3,000-year-old attachment to Jerusalem, and we’ve been standing on the principle of a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty for 30 years now.

LAWTON: David Parsons says people in his community worry that some efforts to support Christians in the Holy Land can be “anti-Israel.”

PARSONS: There is this temptation when you have this sympathy for the plight of Palestinian Christians that, you know, in order to help them you have to start bashing Israel. It is a divisive issue.

LAWTON: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams contends that his campaign is actually very pro-Israel.

ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS (Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury): To put difficult questions to the government of Israel is a sign that we take the government of Israel seriously. It’s quite the opposite of delegitimation or whatever. It’s saying we expect the government of Israel to have a response. We expect for them to be able to bear criticism and to engage with it.

LAWTON: Parsons asserts that Christians are treated better by Israel than by other Middle Eastern nations, and he raises another controversial question: the role rising Islamic fundamentalism may play in the Christian exodus.

PARSONS: A lot of people look at the conflict, they look at the plight of Palestinian Christians, they look at so many of them leaving, and they want to understand why, and most of them know that the main culprit in this is Islamic militancy, both towards Jews and towards Christians.

LAWTON: Palestinian Christian leaders acknowledge there are some tensions with Muslims but say overall the two communities have lived together peacefully for centuries.

SABELLA: Our relations have been really normal relations, like neighbors. There are sensitivities in the sense that sometimes Palestinian Christians would like less of religion in the public sphere, yes. But that is not the cause for leaving.

LAWTON: Sabella says many Christians here see themselves as bridge-builders for peace and democracy.

SABELLA: If you lose the Palestinian Christians, then you lose, in a sense, the promise of a multireligious and open and democratic and pluralist society, and I’m saying that not simply to the Palestinian Territories; also to Israel.

TWAL: I consider all the inhabitants—Jews, Muslims, Christians—as my faithful, my people, my children, and I must take care of them. My dream is to see our children playing together in a normal life, a normal way in this holy, holy land. Until now, this dream, my dream, is only a dream.

LAWTON: And as peace remains elusive, many church leaders say their biggest challenge may be keeping their flock from despair.

DAWANI: Jerusalem for us Christians is a city of hope, because it is the city of the resurrection, and it is the city of hope, and hope is a very important concept in our lives. If we lose hope, we lose everything. But we still have hope.

LAWTON: The leaders believe that is the ultimate message of their faith, which was formed in this land.

I’m Kim Lawton in Israel and the West Bank.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Top Roman Catholic and Anglican leaders from around the world this week launched a new effort to support Christians in the Holy Land who are caught in the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. They also called on politicians to jump-start the stalled Middle East peace process. The new campaign got underway at a high-level meeting in London. Kim Lawton was there.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Christian leaders from Europe, North America, and the Middle East gathered at the historic Lambeth Palace, residence of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The meeting was co-hosted by Williams and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols.

ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS, Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury: We cannot wait for the politicians to sort it out before we as civil society, as active agents, as people of faith, get on with making the differences we can make.

LAWTON: A main focus was how to shore up the minority Christian community in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Because of emigration and low birth rates, Christians now make up less than two percent of the population there.

WILLIAMS: That’s the very specific and the very practical challenge: Have these people a future in their ancestral home? We hope and pray that they do.

ARCHBISHOP VINCENT NICHOLS, Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales: The Holy Land and the holy sites could become something like the Colosseum, you know, the remnants of something that is of great historical interest and maybe of cultural interest, but not lived in, not living and breathing centers of life and prayer.

LAWTON: The leaders discussed concrete ways to help the predominantly Palestinian Christian community, such as financial support, building more relationships between congregations, and increasing public policy advocacy. As part of that, the group specifically called for an end to security restrictions that prevent local people of faith from visiting their holy sites. Conference organizers denied criticism from some quarters that supporting Palestinian Christians makes one “anti-Israel.”

NICHOLS: What we want to be in being pro-Christian is also being pro-Israeli and pro-peace.

LAWTON: The group heard from a variety of voices, including Jews and Muslims. Participants all agreed that working for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be the biggest help of all.

BISHOP GERALD KICANAS, Catholic Diocese of Tucson: Ultimately, what we need is a two-state solution where these two peoples can live together in peace, each in their own sovereign states, respecting the boundaries and respecting the rights of those states. But we’re not there yet.

LAWTON: The leaders said the conversation was valuable. But, as always, the big challenge will be turning talk into action.

I’m Kim Lawton at Lambeth Palace in London.

ABERNETHY: Kim will have a special report from the Holy Land next week.

Read an excerpt from JERUSALEM, JERUSALEM by James Carroll

JAMES CARROLL (Author, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World”): Jerusalem in the ancient world was the cockpit of violence. It was the place where all the warring armies of the empires intersected.

Beginning with that first experience of exile in Babylon, Jews came into a new awareness of who they were and who their God was by looking back at Jerusalem, and they claim their identity by refusing to forget it.

Augustine was arguing for the survival of Jews as Jews in Christendom who would witness to the truth of Christian claims by their degradation, and that’s been the source of tremendous anti-Jewish and ultimately anti-Semitic behavior, contempt, and one of the most powerful forms of the degradation was the Jews are to be permanently in exile from Jerusalem, from the Jewish home.

It’s so important to emphasize that the Islamic arrival in Jerusalem was nonviolent and respectful of the Jewish tradition, so that when the caliph beheld the Temple Mount, which to him was to be revered because that was the place where God had stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son, he’s astounded to discover that the Christians have been treating it as a garbage dump, and the caliph, Umar, ordered the Temple Mount cleaned up, reverenced; he invited Jews back into the city who had been exiled by the Christians. Those first generations of Muslims were honoring the Jewish holy place without any sense of conflict with it, and we know that that was lost.

In the year 1096 when the pope calls for the crusade to take Jerusalem back from the infidel who have been occupying it since the seventh century, it sears the European Christian imagination with violence, holy war, God wills violence, and it centers the Christian imagination on—guess what?—Jerusalem.

The return of the Jewish people to Jerusalem, to Israel, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries especially, culminating in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, is a reversal of this ancient fate that was generated by the Romans and then theologized by the Christians. And I would just add that we Christians have been reckoning with this, and that’s the meaning for us Catholics of the tremendously important visit to Jerusalem by Pope John Paul II in the year 2000. He prayed at the Western Wall as a Jew would pray, without invoking Jesus, and he offered his act of repentance there—a tremendously important reversal of theology, the example of the kind of reckoning with the past that has to keep happening, actually.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims all have a sacred connection to it, each in a very different way. That sacred connection to this place, even though at the present moment it’s a source of contention, is actually a profound source of union.

I don’t see any hope for peace between Israelis and Palestinians until two things happen. One, Palestinians have to somehow reckon with the authentic return of the Jewish people to the Jewish homeland is a fulfillment of Jewish history. On the other side, I don’t see much hope for peace until Israelis reckon with their part in the dispossession of the Palestinian people, and in particular I’m troubled by the settlements and the ongoing occupation.

The holy one we all have in common is the one God, which makes us brothers and sisters, so the place itself is a source of peace, and so I love Jerusalem, including the mess of it—the Christian mess, certainly, but all of the messes of it.