Vatican Diplomacy and Palestine, 1900-1950

The aim of this article is to shed light on Vatican diplomacy’s interaction with events in the first half of the twentieth century to redraw the geopolitical map in the Middle East and especially in Palestine where, after thirty years of British Mandate rule, the state of Israel was proclaimed in 1948. What was the Holy See’s reaction to these developments and how did the Vatican’s envoys to the region analyze events and try to influence the rapidly changing picture? In response to these questions it is necessary to bear in mind not just the changes that, in 1929 and 1948, led to a profound alteration of the Vatican’s structure in the region, but also, more generally, the organization of the Catholic church in the Holy Land since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The article is thus divided into five parts: the first looks at the consolidation of the Catholic presence from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries; the second examines the reaction of Catholic institutions to the revolutionary transformations after the First World War and the establishment of the British Mandate; the third addresses institutional and political changes that happened in 1929; the fourth looks at changes in Vatican policy during the 1930s; and the fifth deals with the Vatican’s reorganization of its presence in Palestine after the Second World War and the first Arab- Israeli war, and how it engaged the political and (especially important from a Catholic standpoint) theological novelty of Jewish sovereignty.