Pope calls for two-state solution to end wars

POPE Benedict XVI called for a two-state solution to end Middle East wars and “terrorism” and slammed the Holocaust as “brutal extermination” as he concluded his Holy Land trip.

“Let the two-state solution become a reality,” he said at a ceremony at Ben Gurion Airport, near Tel Aviv, before he left for Rome aboard an El Al plane.

“No more bloodshed. No more fighting. No more terrorism. No more war,” the pontiff said at the conclusion of his eight-day pilgrimage to Jordan, Israel and the occupied West Bank. “Let it be universally recognised that the state of Israel has the right to exist and to enjoy peace and security within internationally agreed borders.

“Let it be likewise acknowledged that the Palestinian people have a right to a sovereign independent homeland, to live with dignity and to travel freely,” said the Pope.

He also spoke out forcefully against the Holocaust saying the world should never forget that “so many Jews... were brutally exterminated under a godless regime that propagated an ideology of anti-Semitism and hatred”.

Following his visit to Israel’s Yad Vashem Memorial on Monday, the German Pope had faced criticism that he failed to apologise for the murder of six million Jews, did not use the word German or Nazi and showed little emotion.

But Israeli president Shimon Peres told the Pope at the airport that his statements on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism “touched our hearts and minds”. Earlier, the Pope knelt in silent prayer in a tiny cavelike room revered as the tomb of Jesus and again at the spot where most Christians believe Christ was crucified, both in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

In the church, Christianity’s holiest site, the leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics repeated his call for peace in the land revered by the world’s three monotheistic faiths that has been wracked by decades of violence.

His visit to the 11th century church in the Old City of Jerusalem came on the same day that Palestinians marked the 61st anniversary of what they call the Naqba, the “catastrophe” of Israel’s creation in 1948.

During his pilgrimage, the Pope prayed at some of Christianity’s most sacred destinations, visited Muslim and Jewish holy sites at the heart of the Middle East conflict, stood in silence at Israel’s Holocaust memorial and saw the conditions in which Palestinians refugees live.