“Usually we talk, here in the Middle East, especially in [the] Holy Land, about the need to defend ourselves, our borders – identity borders, physical borders, political borders and so on,“ said Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa.

“In our Christian tradition, the role of Jerusalem is to be open and the gates are there to ‘define’ the identities but not to ‘defend’ from the others,” he continued. “This is a completely different perspective. We have to let people know that we want to be inclusive without ‘cancelling’ different identities.”