Israelis walling off the Holy Land

You can tell people it is happening, you can show them pictures and let them meet others who have been there. But at some point, when you go to the Holy Land, you realize that there are indeed Palestinian Christians, and that the conflict between Muslim and Jew is literally destroying the Holy Sites:

“The wall cuts through sacred sites,” said Rooney, administrator at St. Mary Catholic Church in Fredericksburg. “The character of the Holy Land is being changed by the wall.”

The wall will run directly across the path Jesus took from Bethphage and Bethany to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Rooney said, ending the centuries-old annual re-creation of that event beginning Holy Week.

On his most recent trip to Jerusalem, in mid-March, he was distressed to find the Israeli government building a wall that cuts across the property of a Franciscan monastery, the Greek Orthodox Church and a Daughters of Charity convent on the Mount of Olives.

The Israeli government started building the 480-mile-long barrier in 2002 as a defense against terrorist attacks. In most places, it is a chain-link fence topped with razor wire and equipped with surveillance cameras.

Sobering to think that I was one of the last people to walk the same road Christ walked on Palm Sunday.