Meir had the feeling that the weight of the world bore down on the pope’s narrow shoulders, threatening to crush his diminutive white-clad figure. At the end of the audience, in reply to her question, Paul said he would visit the Holy Land, and spoke of his pontificate being a pilgrimage. When she asked him about the possibility of Israel establishing formal ties with the Holy See he sighed and said the “time is not yet appropriate.” Golda Meir gave him a leather-bound book depicting the Holy Land; he handed her an inscribed copy of
On her way out of the Vatican, Golda Meir told Zamir that the Holy See seemed to have a clock different from the rest of the world’s.
The Black September terrorists—who had taken part in the Munich massacre of Israel’s Olympic athletes—were taken to a hospital and, after they recovered, were allowed to fly to Libya. But within months they would all be dead—killed by Mossad’s kidon.
The biblical eye-for-an-eye retribution Golda Meir had authorized met with distaste from Pope Paul, whose entire pontificate was rooted in the power of forgiveness. It also strengthened the Vatican’s ties to the PLO, which John Paul II continued following his own election in 1978.
Since then the pope had received Yasser Arafat and senior aides in several lengthy private audiences, during which John Paul had each time reiterated his commitment to actively pursue a search for a Palestinian homeland. The PLO, now based in Tunisia, had a permanent liaison officer attached to the Secretariat of State, and the Holy See had its own envoy, Father Idi Ayad, assigned to the organization.
With his frayed cassock trailing in the desert dust, padre’s hat planted squarely above his pinched face, Ayad served with equal devotion pontiff and the PLO, even to having his bedroom wall decorated with framed and signed photographs of John Paul and Yasser Arafat. Ayad had helped Arafat draft a letter in 1980 to the pope that had delighted him: “Please permit me to dream. I am seeing you going to Jerusalem, surrounded by returning Palestinian refugees, carrying olive branches and spreading them at your feet.”
Ayad had suggested Arafat and the pontiff should exchange courtesies on their respective holy days: Arafat began to send John Paul a Christmas card, while the pope sent Arafat greetings on the prophet Muhammad’s birthday. The tireless priest had also brokered the meeting between the PLO foreign minister and Cardinal Casaroli, the Holy See’s secretary of state. Afterward the Middle East desk had been expanded and the papal nuncios, the Holy See’s ambassadors, were instructed to persuade governments to which they were accredited to support the PLO’s aspirations to nationhood. All these moves had dismayed Israel. Its official contacts were still limited to infrequent visits by a government official who would be granted only a few minutes in the papal presence.
The chilly relationship on both sides stemmed partly from a bizarre incident following the creation of Israel in 1948. The then secretary of state had sent an emissary to Israel’s attorney general, Haim Cohn, carrying a request that Israel should restage the trial of Christ and, of course, reverse the original verdict. Once that was done, the Vatican would formally recognize Israel. The importance of such a diplomatic tie was not lost on Cohn. But to achieve it in such a way he had found “capricious almost beyond belief. Such a trial would be pointless and anyway we had more pressing matters to settle—surviving against the onslaughts of our Arab neighbours. Rattling the bones of Christ’s biography was very low down on my list of priorities.”
After the monsignor was brusquely seen off by Cohn, the Vatican all but turned its back on Israel.
Since then there had been a glimmer of hope only when John Paul’s immediate predecessor, the frail Albino Luciano, hinted during his thirty-three days on the Throne of Saint Peter that he would consider establishing diplomatic ties with Israel. His death from a heart attack, allegedly brought about by the responsibility of his high office, had led to the election of Karol Wojtyla. Under his pontificate the Bronze Door of the Apostolic Palace remained all but closed to Israel as the papacy moved even further into international politics, encouraged to do so by its reestablished links with the CIA.
In 1981, William Casey, a devout Catholic, was the CIA director. He had been among the first men the pope received in private audience after being elected. Casey had knelt before the charismatic Polish pope and kissed the Fisherman’s Ring on his finger. In every word and gesture, the CIA director was a humble supplicant, not like the bombastic, hard-bitten men his predecessors had been. But Casey shared their and the pope’s deep distrust and fear of Communism.
