Prince moved by Palestinians’ plight
Prince Charles strode into the IsraeliPalestinian conflict yesterday as he issued an emotional message of support to Palestinians, saying it ‘‘breaks my heart’’ to see their suffering.
In his first official visit to the occupied West Bank, Charles said that he hoped that the future would bring Palestinians ‘‘freedom, justice and equality’’ and ‘‘a lasting peace’’.
The message was the strongest signal of support for the Palestinians from a member of the royal family, and came just hours after United States President Trump announced that he was ready to release the blueprint for a peace deal that would deny the Palestinians their own state.
‘‘It breaks my heart that we should continue to see so much suffering and divisions,’’ Charles told an audience of Palestinian refugees and civic leaders in Bethlehem, having travelled from Jerusalem through the wall that separates the West Bank from Israel.
‘‘No-one arriving in Bethlehem today could miss the signs of continued hardship and the situation you face, and I can only join you in your prayers for a just and lasting peace.’’
Charles’s words were greeted as ‘‘historic’’ by Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian representative to London and a close adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
The prince met Abbas at his residence in Bethlehem, where the president urged the British government to recognise the state of Palestine, in line with a 2014 vote by parliament.
Earlier, Charles paid a solemn visit to the tomb of his grandmother, who sheltered Jews during the Holocaust and whose tumultuous life was marked by exile, mental illness and a religious devotion to serving the needy.
Princess Alice – mother of Charles’s father Prince Philip – is interred at the Russian Orthodox Church of St Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City.
Charles paid tribute to his grandmother the previous night at the World Holocaust Forum, which was attended by dozens of other world leaders and coincided with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
‘‘I have long drawn inspiration from the selfless actions of my dear grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece, who in 1943, in Nazi-occupied Athens, saved a Jewish family by taking them into her home and hiding them,’’ he said.
Alice is one of the Righteous Among the Nations, an honour bestowed by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Charles said this was a source of ‘‘immense pride’’ for himself and the British royal family.