The last time Pope Francis called the Palestinians of Gaza and gave them his blessings was two days before he passed away on 21 April. His funeral was held on Saturday in St Peter's Basilica, drawing mourners from around the world.

Ever since Israel embarked on its extermination campaign in Gaza in October 2023, the Pope - unlike the majority of Western leaders complicit in the genocide - maintained close and consistent video contact with the colonized Palestinians.

He offered prayers, encouragement and solidarity to Gaza's small Christian community and to the besieged population more broadly.

A lone Western voice in their defense, he is being mourned in Gaza with deep sorrow - even as some in Israel celebrate his death.

In his final months, the Argentinian Pope became increasingly condemnatory of Israel's war on the Palestinian people. He decried its extermination of Gaza's civilians, tens of thousands of whom have been killed, describing its crimes bluntly: "This is cruelty, this is not war."

At the Nativity Scene and Christmas Tree inauguration last December in St Peter's Square, he displayed a baby Jesus wrapped in a keffiyeh in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Earlier in 2024, he wrote: "According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies."

Last month, after Israel resumed its genocidal war, the Pope expressed his concern yet again: "I am saddened by the resumption of heavy Israeli bombing on the Gaza Strip, causing many deaths and injuries. I call for an immediate halt to the weapons; and for the courage to resume dialogue, so that all hostages may be released and a final ceasefire reached."

Changing relations

The Vatican's relations with the Palestinian people have changed enormously over the last millennium.

Pope Francis is a far cry from Pope Urban II, who declared in November 1095 the necessity of conquering Palestine by launching the First Crusade. Addressing the European converts to the Palestinian religion of Christianity, the Crusading Pope declared:

Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves…This royal city, therefore, situated at the center of the world, is now held captive by His enemies, and is in subjection to those who do not know God, to the worship of the heathens. She seeks, therefore, and desires to be liberated and does not cease to implore you to come to her aid. From you especially, she asks succour.

As the majority of Jerusalem's native inhabitants at the time were Arabic-speaking Christians, or what the Crusaders called "Suryani", Pope Urban sought to "rescue" them from the Muslims, even though no Eastern Christians had ever complained or appealed to the papacy for help.

In contrast, Pope Francis did not seek to conquer the Palestinians, but to protect Gaza's Palestinian Christians and Muslims from Israeli conquest and genocide.

In the 17th century, the Vatican's new evangelisation project, known as the Propaganda Fide, included Palestine.

A German priest named Dominicus Germanus de Silesia visited Palestine to learn Arabic and retranslated the Bible into Arabic, which was published by the Vatican in 1671 - Arabic translations of the Bible date back at least to the 8th century, when most Christians and Jews in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt switched from Aramaic and Coptic to Arabic. Still, missionary activity remained limited.

The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, established by the Crusades in 1099 and dismantled after the final expulsion of the Frankish Crusaders in 1291, was, however, re-established in Palestine under the Ottomans in 1847.

Latin revival

With the revival of the Latin Patriarchate, French missionary efforts also increased. Aside from proselytizing the Arab Christians of Syria and Palestine in the 17th century, the goal had also been to induce the Eastern Catholic churches to accept the authority of the Pope over their churches.

The missionaries' proselytizing activities on behalf of the Latin Church were most successful with some Palestinian Orthodox merchants.

In the wake of the Crimean War, Latin schools and charities sponsored by the French increased by leaps and bounds, including Les Soeurs de Saint-Joseph, Les Soeurs de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul and Les Filles de la Charite.

The College des Freres school was first established in Jerusalem in 1875, reflecting the growing influence of French Catholic education in Palestine. Although my own family is Orthodox Christian, my father attended the College des Freres branch in Jaffa before the Nakba, and I later attended its Amman branch after the Nakba.

In the modern period, particularly after the Zionist Crusade succeeded in conquering Palestine and establishing the State of Israel in 1948, the attitude of the papacy wavered.

It was not until January 1964 that Pope Paul VI, an Italian who reigned from 1963 to 1978, visited East Jerusalem, then held by Jordan, and spent a few hours in Nazareth (designated as part of the Palestinian state by the 1947 UN Partition Plan, but occupied by Israel since 1948).  

The rest of his two-day visit was spent in Jordan. It was the first time a reigning pope had visited Palestine. At the time, the Vatican did not recognize Israel.

Diplomatic shift

It was only after the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) surrendered to the settler colony by signing the Oslo Accords in September 1993 that the Holy See established full diplomatic relations with Israel in December of that year, followed by the exchange of embassies in January 1994.

In March 2000, the right-wing Polish anti-communist Pope John Paul II, allied with the U.S. Ronald Reagan administration, visited Israel, where he toured the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and prayed at the Western Wall, known to Palestinians as the Buraq Wall.

He also travelled to Bethlehem, where then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat warmly welcomed him. He spent only one day in the West Bank, where he held mass in Manger Square. "Welcome to our land," Arafat told John Paul at a formal reception with Palestinian leaders, diplomats and clerics.

It was nine years later, in May 2009, that the German Pope Benedict XVI - who, as a teenager, joined the Hitler Youth and later served in the German military - arrived on a tour of Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank. 

During his visit to Israel, where he spoke of the horrors and crimes of his native Germany, the Pope called on Israelis and Palestinians to "live in peace in a homeland of their own within secure and internationally recognized borders".

Following his address at a scripted interfaith ceremony in East Jerusalem, Taysir Tamimi, the Palestinian chief of Muslim Sharia courts in the West Bank and Gaza, grabbed the microphone and criticized Israel in Arabic to the applause of many in the audience. The Pope did not react, but the Vatican issued a condemnation, saying in a statement that "this intervention was a direct negation of what dialogue should be."

While in Bethlehem, Benedict criticized Israel's apartheid wall and expressed support for the Palestinians in Gaza, who had just endured a murderous attack by Israel, which killed more than 1,400 people.

As expected, Israel was appalled. The Pontiff offered a large bas-relief of the Tree of Jesse, sculpted by Polish artist Czeslaw Dzwigaj, to the Church of the Nativity as a gift to the Palestinians of Bethlehem.

Palestine solidarity

When Pope Francis visited in 2014, he made an unscheduled stop at the apartheid wall between Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

According to his driver, they were driving near a section of the wall covered with graffiti comparing Bethlehem and the Warsaw Ghetto, when the Pope asked to be let out.

The image of him praying at that spot "excited Palestinians and angered Israelis".

In his last public message on Easter Sunday, Pope Francis again spoke against the war on the Palestinian people and of the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, whom Israel is currently starving by blocking all food supplies from entering: "I think of the people of Gaza, and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation."

The death of Pope Francis, who persistently cared for Palestinians, earned him the schadenfreude of official Israel, which denounced his opposition to its genocide.

The Israeli foreign ministry deleted condolence posts about the late Pope from its official X (Twitter) account and directed its missions around the world to do the same. It also issued an internal order for ambassadors not to sign condolence books at the Vatican embassies.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not send any condolence messages, although Israel's President Isaac Herzog, whose position is merely titular and ceremonial, did.

Yet despite all his support for the people of Gaza facing the genocidal Israeli military machine, Pope Francis did not impose any sanctions on Israel.

He did not expel the Israeli ambassador from the Vatican, nor did he withdraw the Vatican ambassador from Israel. No suspension of diplomatic relations was even considered, though states like Colombia, Bolivia, Honduras, Belize, Chile, Chad, Turkey, Brazil and South Africa withdrew their ambassadors or their entire diplomatic missions.  

Whatever support the pontiff might have offered to the Palestinians with his personal touch was never translated into the diplomatic realm.

Despite his personal compassion for Palestinians, Pope Francis ultimately remained constrained by the western political structures that, for centuries, have supported conquest and colonialism. His death may be mourned by Gaza's survivors, but the institutions that enabled their ongoing extermination endure.