Episcopal Press and News
Tutu's Controversial Remarks in Israel Touch off Fierce Protest
Episcopal News Service. January 10, 1990 [90005]
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Primate of Southern Africa, ended a five-day Christmas visit to Jerusalem amid fierce protests when he compared Israel's handling of Palestinians to the treatment of blacks in South Africa. Tutu's comments have ricocheted around the international community to charges that he was insensitive to Jews.
"In the methods of resistance used by Palestinians, and in the ways the Israeli government deal with resistance, we experience an extraordinary sense of being at home," Tutu said. "The land that gave birth to the Prince of Peace is wracked by violence, hatred and hostility."
"We say very firmly that Israel has a right to existence as a sovereign state," Tutu said. "But I pray, too, that Israel hear the cry of the Palestinians, that they, too, are created in the image of God. We support the Jewish people in their right to exist as an independent nation. We pray for the day to come soon when the Palestinian state will exist side by side with the Jewish state and Arab and Jew will hold hands together as those who say 'Shalom' and 'Salaam.'"
Tutu's remarks during a Christmas pilgrimage billed as a pastoral visit drew fire from many political factions in Israel. Some Palestinians were apparently unsatisfied with Tutu's reluctance to express support for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, while many Israelis were angered over the criticism of government efforts to end the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The archbishop said, "We are aware that the Israeli Government is very sensitive over suggestions that it treats Palestinians the way the South African Government has treated black South Africans. But our faith compels us to state what we perceive to be the truth and to speak up for justice everywhere, whether in South Africa, the rest of Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe or China. Denouncing injustice is for us a religious duty, not a political act."
Although Tutu did not meet with members of the Israeli government nor travel to the refugee camps, he said that the Christmas visit convinced him "that reconciliation in the Middle East is possible." Tutu said he saw evidence that "Arab and Jew, Palestinian and Israeli can work together."
Tutu reported that he had met "many Palestinians who agree with our call that Israel must be assured of its right to exist with territorial integrity as a sovereign state." And, he added, "At Beit Sahour, we were told that many Israelis recognize the right of the Palestinians to self-determination in their own state."
Tutu further angered Israelis when he suggested that Israelis should pray for and forgive those responsible for Nazi genocide. His comments were recorded after a visit to Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. "Our Lord would say that in the end the positive thing that can come is the spirit of forgiving, not forgetting, but the spirit of saying: God, this happened to us," Tutu said. "We pray for those who made it happen, help us to forgive them and help us so that we in our turn will not make others suffer," he continued.
Although supporters of Tutu have said that the bishop's comments were consistent with Christian doctrine of forgiveness of adversaries, some observers charged the remarks displayed an insensitivity toward Jews on the part of the South African leader.
In an apparent reaction to the archbishop's comments, protesters scrawled "Black Nazi pig" on the walls of St. George's Cathedral in Arab East Jerusalem where the archbishop was a guest of Bishop Samir Kafity, Anglican bishop in Jerusalem and the Middle East.
In the United States, former mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, lambasted Tutu's remarks in a column in the New York Post as "standard Third World radical, and clearly an act of malice." Koch accused Tutu of engaging in "pro-Arab politics," charging that Tutu blindly overlooked a litany of Arab atrocities. Tutu has denied such charges, noting that he has condemned injustice across the board and pointing out that he "condemns any Arab countries which may be breaking the oil embargo of South Africa as strongly as he condemns Israel's reported military and nuclear collaboration with South Africa."
Koch further charged that Tutu does not understand the Jewish concept of forgiveness, "that forgiveness can only be offered by the actual victim." Koch said that "Bishop Tutu can 'forgive' the Nazis if he wants," but insisted that only the victims of Nazi atrocity could legitimately forgive the perpetrators.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, charged that "Bishop Tutu showed the arrogance of medieval crusader who came to Yad Vashem with a bag full of his brand of Christian morality. The bishop surely knows where that Christian conscience was when millions of Jews and others suffered at the hands of the Nazis."
Henry Siegman, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, echoed Hier's comments, suggesting that if Tutu "could not get himself to say anything about the culpability of a Christian civilization that did so little to help the victims of the Holocaust, he might at least have observed a respectful silence."