Pizzaballa: Holy Land Peace Needs the Religious Element
At a Madrid gathering, the Latin Patriarch said purely political deals will fail where faith shapes identity, nation, and daily life.
Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, said the conditions for a swift end to the conflict in the Holy Land do not exist and that the struggle is likely to continue for several generations. His remarks were screened Sunday, Nov. 8, 2026, at the close of the 23rd gathering in Madrid, under the theme “All seek a good confusedly and strive to attain it.”
Christians, he insisted, should not live this reality in frustration or despair. It is instead “the place where we must give expression to our vocation as Church.”
A bubble of competing victimhood
The patriarch described a social and political “bubble” in which Israelis and Palestinians each cast themselves as the sole victim and treat empathy toward the other as betrayal. “This dynamic has not yet been broken,” he said. More than three years after the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, Israel still has not established a commission of inquiry into what happened that day.
Words such as coexistence, dialogue, and justice have grown worn, he noted. Believers must still use them, but “with more restraint” and rooted in concrete situations rather than empty slogans.
Why past accords fell short
Pizzaballa’s central argument draws on his pastoral letter “They Returned to Jerusalem with Great Joy,” published April 27. In the East, he said, religion is inseparable from nation and identity: marriage exists only in religious form; Israel defines itself as a “Jewish and democratic state”; Arab states affirm Islam as the state religion. “You Westerners will never understand this,” he remarked.
The accords associated with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat were “exclusively political.” As a result, “in the synagogues, the mosques and the churches another language was spoken.” Nowhere was the omission clearer than in Jerusalem, where life turns on the Holy Sepulchre, the mosques, and the Western Wall.
Leaving religions out of peacemaking was an error, he argued: “It is exactly the opposite: it is religions that will make any agreement real.” He called for religious leaders less bound to political and national agendas—a detachment he said is “more or less taken for granted” among Christians.
Without that religious dimension, he concluded, no lasting settlement in the Holy Land will hold.