MIDDLE EAST the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Jerusalem, Judaea and Samaria, Mgr

Keesing's Record of World Events (formerly Keesing's Contemporary Archives), Volume 21, January, 1975 International, Page 26879 © 1931-2006 Keesing's Worldwide, LLC - All Rights Reserved. MIDDLE EAST The Greek Catholic Archbishop of Jerusalem, Judaea and Samaria, Mgr. Hilarion Capucci, was on Dec. 9 sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment by the Jerusalem district court after being found guilty of smuggling arms and explosives into Israel on behalf of Al Fatah Syrian-born Mgr. Capucci was remanded in custody on Aug. 18 on suspicion of having acted as a courier for Al Fatah Prior to his initial arrest on Aug. 8, police had found weapons, explosives and ammunition concealed in the archbishop's car after he had returned to Israel on July 25 from Beirut. Israeli suspicions in respect of the archbishop's activities had been aroused earlier in the year when it had been established that $750,000 had been stolen from his Jerusalem residence. The arrest of the archbishop caused immediate protests to be lodged by (i) the Patriarch of the Greek Catholic Church in Beirut, who accused the Israelis of seeking to discredit Mgr. Capucci as part of a campaign to disperse the Christian communities in Jerusalem and complete the Jewish takeover of the holy city, and (ii) other Christian leaders in the Arab world, who claimed that the archbishop had been “framed” by Israeli agents because of his outspoken anti-Israel views. Moslem religíous leaders also joined in condemning the arrest. A statement issued after a meeting of Christian and Moslem religious leaders in Amman on Aug. 28 said : “We are thoroughly convinced that repressive Israeli measures against Christians and Moslems alike are in fulfilment of Israeli designs aimed at the judaization of Jerusalem and obliterating anything and everything that is not Jewish.” The statement claimed that Christianity and Islam now faced the threat of extinction in the holy land, and went on: “Israeli actions increase our firm conviction that if the holy city remained under lengthy Israeli rule, sites sacred to millions of believers throughout the world will face inevitable destruction.” The índictment against Mgr. Capucci, which was presented to the Jerusalem district court on Sept. 8 by the state prosecutor, alleged that he had maintained contacts with foreign agents, had illegally carried and possessed arms and had performed services for an unlawful association (i.e. Al Fatah). The first charge carried a maximum sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment and the other two 10 years each. The foreign agents allegedly contacted were Mr. Abu Jihad, the head of the Black September Palestinian guerrilla movement and also of the military arm of Al Fatah and Mr. Abu Firas, who was described as one of the senior officers directing Fatah operations on the West Bank. The archbishop was said to have met the Fatah leaders in the home of a relative in Beirut and to have agreed to transfer arms and sabotage materials from Beirut to Jerusalem. The indictment stated that the materials were intended for use in sabotage operations in Jerusalem. Although no details were given of the operations for which the materials had been, or were intended to be, used, the list of prosecution witnesses included three Arab brothers—Muhammad, Zaki and Zuhayr el Malabi—who had been arrested in May on charges of setting up rockets and planting explosives in Jerusalem at the time of a visit by the U.S. Secretary of State, Dr. Kissinger. [see 26565 A] Mgr. Capucci's trial opened before the Jerusalem district court on Sept. 20, with his defence counsel, Mr. Aziz Shehadeh (a West Bank Arab lawyer) contending that Israeli law did not extend to east Jerusalem (where the trial was taking place), and that in any ease his client enjoyed diplomatic immunity because he held a Vatican passport. These pleas were, however, rejected by the court on Sept. 24, whereupon Mgr. Capucci pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him. In the course of the trial the archbishop claimed that a confession made by him to the Israeli authorities had been extracted after an Israeli intelligence agent had promised that he would be freed if he made a full confession and killed if he did not. After hearing testimony from the agent in camera on Oct. 11, the court ruled that the confession was admissible evidence, although the defence continued to insist that it was inoperative and that the court was not competent to try Mgr. Capucci In a further development on Oct. 18, Mr. Zuhayr el Malabi, who had been called for the prosecution, denied telling the Israeli police that he had obtained rockets for an intended attack in Jerusalem from Mgr. Capucci claiming that he had found the rockets under a bridge. The court thereupon acceded to the prosecution's request that Mr. el Malabi be declared a hostile witness. With the defence refusing to call any witness in view of its rejection of the court's jurisdiction, the trial ended on Dec. 9 with Archbishop Capucci being found guilty on all three charges, for which he was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment. The judge, Mrs. Miriam Ben-Porat, said in passing sentence that the archbishop had abused his office to smuggle arms, weapons and sabotage material, which were “activities not associated with the cloth of a minister, which symbolizes love”. The archbishop, the judge went on, had abused Israel's hospitality and had worked for Black September, bringing in weapons of destruction knowing they were for use by terrorists to spill blood. The arms found in his car could alone have caused extremely high casualties, she added. Before he left the court, Mgr. Capucci made a declaration addressed to “the lord Jesus”, in which he said that “as you look down on Jerusalem you will find it as you visualized when you wept for it [t.o. on the Mount of Olives, where Jesus was reported in the Bible to have said: ‘But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near’] and you will weep again”. The archbishop described himself as a “prisoner of conquerors… a sacrifice held by oppressors”, adding: “We follow your steps in spite of the suffering and torture.” Denouncing the shame of those who desecrated the holy land, he ended with a prayer to Jesus to “sanctify this precious land whose name is Palestine”. The Vatican on Dec. 10 said in a statement that the sentencing of Archbishop Capucci conflicted with the holy land's tradition of respect for religious leaders and would aggravate Arab-Israeli tension. The following day government sources in Jerusalem expressed “surprise” at the Vatican's statement, noting that it contained no mention of Mgr. Capucci's alleged crimes; the sources also rejected press speculation that the archbishop would be deported rather than made to serve his sentence. In July and October 1974 the policy of the Israel Government towards the territories which it had captured from the Arab states in the 1967 war came under severe strain when groups of Israeli religious extremists established unauthorized settlements on the West Bank and were forcibly evicted by troops. From the 1967 war until the end of 1973 the Israel Government had pursued a general policy of initiating building and settlement projects in the occupied territories only where strategic considerations rendered them desirable; at the same time It had insisted that land could only be bought in the occupied territories through the state land-buying authority, reiterating as recently as April 1973 that private purchases of such laud by Israeli citizens were banned. Major development plans drawn up in pursuance of the first part of this policy included the construction of a new city (to be called Ophir) on the tip of the Sinai peninsula at Sharm-el-Sheikh (which was linked to Eilat by a road built soon after the 1967 war); the building of a deep-sea port at Rafah south of the Gaza Strip; and the establishment of an industrial centre on the Golan Heights. in addition to these large-scale projects, many agricultural settlements had been founded by Nahal (the military youth movement) and other groups, mainly in the Golan Heights and in Sinai, but also on the West Bank, where by October 1974 there were reported to be 15 such authorized settlements. [The Israel Government had also undertaken widespread non strategle development and building projects in the former Jordanian sector of Jerusalem in accordance with its view that the unified that was now an integral part of Israel.] In the course of 1973, however, pressure was exerted by right-wing and orthodox religious circles in Israel, as well as by the Rafi faction of the ruling Labour Party led by General Moshe Dayan, then Defence Minister, in favour of a relaxation of the restrictions on Jewish settle-ment of the occupied territories. While General Dayan and the non-religious right-wingers supported such settlement for security reasons, the orthodox religious campaign was based on a belief that Jews had the right to inhabit all of the biblical land of Israel, in which they included the West Bank despite its overwhelmingly Arab population. As a result of this pressure the Dayan faction won a tactical victory in September 1973 (shortly before the general election of December 1973) when it persuaded the Labour Party to retreat from the policy of opposition to individual land purchases in the occupied territories and to adopt instead a compromise formula whereby the state land authority would “acquire land by every effective means”, with individuals being allowed to buy land both in co-ordination with the authority and where the authority was “unable to make or not interested in such purchases”. On the eve of the general election, this modified stance was incorporated into the Labour Party's programme under a generally-worded pledge that Israel would” continue to consolidate settlements in accordance with decisions taken by the Government from time to time, with priority for security considerations”. [see 26367 A] A group of Israeli families totalling about 150 persons on July 25, 1974, installed themselves on the site of Sebastia (the ancient capital of the Jewish kingdom) about 10 miles from Nablus, with the declared intention of founding a Jewish settlement. The families were accompanied by several hundred supporters, including the leaders of the right-wing Likud front, Mr. Menahem Begin and General Ariel Sharon, as well as by leaders of the National Religious Party. Following demonstrations by the Arab population of Nablus, protesting against the action, the illegal occupation of Sebastia was ended on July 29, 1974, when the Israeli Army physically removed the settlers, who offered only passive resistance. A meeting of the Cabinet on July 26 had issued a statement that it was not forbidden for Israelis to settle in any part of the “land of Israel” (Eretz Israel, signifying biblical Israel, which included the West Bank) but that government plans should not be contravened. In a further confrontation with official policy, hundreds of young religious extremists on Oct. 9, 1974, defied a police and military cordon to establish three token West Bank settlements—one between the Arab towns of Ramallah and Nablus, a second near Jericho and a third at Maaleh Haadumin on the Jerusalem- Jericho road. The settlers were all evicted by the Israeli Army by Oct. 11 without serious incident, it being apparent that the intention of the settlers was to achieve publicity for their cause rather than to remain on the West Bank. Further attempts to set up a camp at Meskha in the Samaria region on Oct. 15–16 were also broken up, with the Israeli authorities arresting some 160 people. The Prime Minister, Mr. Rabin, on Oct. 9 again stated that the Government would not permit illegal settlements in the occupied territories, while the National Religious Party, which joined the Government at the end of October stated that, although it supported the occupations in principle it could not condone the establishment of settlements which were not authorized by the Government. Nov. 24. two days after the U. N. General Assemby had adopted a resolution supporting the “inalienable right of the Palistinians to return to their homes and property” [see 26861 A]–the Israel Government formally endorsed a plan to build a massive new industrial zone on former Jordanian territory to the east of Jerusalem The plan, which was strongly attacked by West Bank Arabs would have the effect of completely encircling the Arab section of the city with areas of Jewish settlement. An escalation in military tension between the major Middle Fast protagonists in the latter part of 1974, which in mid-November brought Israel and Syria to the verge of renewed active hostilities, was accompanied by an intensification of the arms race, as both sides sought to replace equipment and materials destroyed in the war of October 1973. After the Israel Government had on Aug. 11 announced that a trial mobilization of reservists would be carried out later in the month, the Syrian Government on Aug. 14-in the first such accusation since the October 1973 war—claimed that Israel was preparing to provoke another conflict by carrying out a large- scale attack against Syrian territory and was for this purpose massing troops and arms along the Syrian, Lebanese and Egyptian borders. It was reported on Aug. 23 that Syria had mobilized its forces as a precautionary measure, while Israel's trial mobilization was successfully accomplished on Aug. 25–26 and was followed by large-scale manoeuvres in the Sinai desert in late August and in the Golan Heights in mid-September. During the Israeli mobilization and manoeuvres Soviet mine-sweepers engaged in clearing mines from the Gulf of Suez prior to the re-opening of the Suez Canal (which was scheduled for spring 1975) entered Israeli waters off the western shore of Sinai on four occasions and were warned off by Israeli gunboats. The Israel Government submitted a complaint about the incidents to the United Nations. In the Golan Heights the death of four Austrian soldiers of the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) in a land-mine explosion on June 25 had been followed by mounting tension on the cease-fire line in July-September. as charges and counter-charges alleging violations of, or failures to implement, the disengagement agreement of May 1974 [see 26565 A] were made by both sides. Israeli troops in the Golan Heights having been placed on the alert on Oct. 3 in response to Syrian manoeuvres, a partial mobilization of Israeli forces was ordered on Nov. 15 on the basis of intelligence information that massive shipments of Soviet arms were being unloaded at the Syrian port of Latakia. In the next two days strenuous diplomatic efforts were made to avert a full-scale confrontation between the two sides, notably by the U.S. Secretary of State, Dr. Kissinger, who was reported to have consulted with the Soviet Union in order to give an assurance to the Israel Government that Syria would not mount an attack. Partly because of Dr. Kissinger's efforts, from Nov. 17 tension on the Golan Heights abated (although both sides maintained partial mobilization), and at the end of the month the UNDOF mandate was extended for a further six months with the agreement of both sides. The continuing fragile nature of the Israel-Syria ceasefire was, however, clearly demonstrated at the end of 1974 by (i) an assertion by the Israeli Defence Minister, Mr. Peres, on Dec. 17 that 3,000 Soviet soldiers were stationed in Syria, some of them manning SAM missile installations in Damascus; and (ii) a warning by President Assad of Syria on Dec. 19 that a future Middle East war would be of a sufficiently long duration to exhaust Israel's will to fight, despite present Israeli military strength. During an official visit to the United States on Sept. 10–13 (his first since becoming Prime Minister of Israel in May), Mr. Rabin secured agreement from the U.S. Administration on increased U.S. military and economic aid to Israel. While a total of $2,500 million had been available for regular and emergency security assistance from the United States to Israel in 1973-74 following Israel's losses in the October 1973 war, additional authority for security assistance to Israel was not requested in the 1974-75 budget because of the uncertainty of the Middle East situation, although it was stated that such authority might be sought at a later date [see pages 26177, 26505]. The U.S. commitment to the security of Israel and to furnishing economic aid was reaffirmed during President Nixon's visit to Israel in June 1974. [see 26597 A] Although no details of the agreement reached by Mr. Rabin in Washington were officially disclosed, it was reported that President Ford had undertaken to submit to Congress a request for security assistance for Israel totalling $4,500 million over the three fiscal years beginning May 1, 1975, July 1, 1975, in order to finance the supply of sophisticated military equipment which would come into service with the Israeli forces at the end of the decade. It was also reported that Israel had secured agreement in principle on the speeding up of immediate deliveries of U.S. armaments, the items ordered by Israel including 50 Phantom jets, 200-250 Patton M-60 tanks, laser-guided “smart bombs”, missile-firing helicopters, surface-to-air missiles and certain ground-to- ground missiles. Following the build-up of Soviet arms supplies to Syria in mid-November, it was further reported that President Ford had authorized an acceleration of the supply of certain items to Israel, including Phantom planes and missiles. On the Arab side, the Syrian armed forces were reported to have been completely re-equipped by the Soviet Union by late 1974, while Soviet arms supplies to Egypt, which had been suspended following the October 1973 war, were reported to have resumed in September. Considerable significance was attached, particularly in Israeli military circles, to the supply to Syria of Mig-23 jets (the world's fastest operational warplanes), SAM-9 surface-to-air missiles (the most sophisticated variety), and ground-to-ground missiles (code-named Scud by NATO) with a range of up to 185 miles and therefore capable of hitting Israeli population centres. [During the October 1973 war Seud missiles had been delivered by the Soviet, Union to Egypt but President Sadat had declined to use them.] It was reported in late November that since the beginning of 1974 the Soviet Union had sent Syria nearly 130 warplanes (including 45 Mig-23 jets), 320 tanks, 110 armoured personnel carriers, 115 Frog-7 tactical surface-to-surface missiles and about 30 Scud strategic missiles. Deliveries of Mig-23 jets and other Soviet military equipment were reported to have been made to Egypt from mid-September, amid an improvement in Egyptian-Soviet relations. In the earlier part of 1974 relations between the two countries had remained very cool, with President Sadat accusing the Soviet Union of failing to honour arms supply agreements following Egyptian losses in the October 1978 war. The improvement in relations was denoted by a visit to Moscow by the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Mr. Ismail Fahmy, on Oct. 14–18, although following a further visit to Moscow by Mr. Fahmy at the end of December it was announced on Dec. 30 that a visit which the Soviet Communist Party Secretary, Mr. Brezhnev, had planned to make to Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad in January had been postponed with the agreement of all parties concerned and that a new date for the visits would be announced later. After the lifting of the French embargo on arms supplies to the Middle East in August 1974 [see 26751 A], France in November began deliveries to Egypt of an initial quantity of 36 Mirage-5 fighter-bombers, which were to be paid for by Saudi Arabia. France was also reported to have offered to supply Syria with radar equipment of an advanced design. In a speech delivered on Dec. 2, 1974, the President of Israel, Professor Ephraim Katzir, said that Israel had assembled all the knowledge and equipment to make nuclear weapons. Addressing visiting Western science writers, he said : “It has always been our intention to provide the potential for nuclear weapons development. We now have that potential. We will defend this country with all possible means at hand. We have to develop more powerful and new arms to protect ourselves.”—(Times - Guardian - Daily Telegraph - Financial Times - New York Times - International Herald Tribune -Le Monde - BBC Summary of World Broadcasts) (Prev. rep. United Nations, 26861 A; Rabat Summit, 26813 A. Disengagement Agreements, Egypt, 26317 A; 26367 A; 26493 A; Syria, 26565 A; Palestinian Guerrillas, 26624 A; Jerusalem and Holy Places, page 26321.)