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”.

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