JERUSALEM, May 11 -- Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Israel on Monday and issued a quick and strong condemnation of anti-Semitism, along with a call to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by finding a way that "people can live in security in a homeland of their own."

The five-day trip to Israel and the occupied West Bank is part of a Middle East tour in which Benedict hopes to promote peace, while also trying to smooth over disputes with the Jewish and Muslim communities that share common and ancient roots in the region with Christianity.

"I come to pray. To pray especially for peace," Benedict said during brief remarks at Ben-Gurion airport. Highlighting what have become the central issues of his journey, Benedict said he wanted his trip to "honor the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims" of the Holocaust, and issued a warning against religious discrimination.

He said the church would "combat anti-Semitism wherever it is found."

Benedict made his implicit call for Palestinian statehood in the presence of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has expressed deep skepticism about the prospect even as it is embraced by the United States and others. The pontiff urged a resolution of the "outstanding differences" between Israelis and Palestinians and said each people should have a homeland with internationally recognized borders. Benedict was greeted at the airport by Israeli President Shimon Peres and an array of Israeli officials, a full state welcome made possible by the late Pope John Paul II's establishment of diplomatic ties between the Vatican and Israel in the early 1990s.

Benedict's trip will include outreach to the region's small Christian community, but is being more closely watched for some of its more symbolic moments -- perhaps most notably Benedict's arrival on Monday afternoon at the Yad Vashem memorial to victims of the Holocaust.

There he will make remarks and meet Holocaust survivors at the memorial's Hall of Remembrance, a solemn space lighted by a perpetual flame and inscribed with the names of the major camps where Jews and other minorities were put to death. It includes the entombed ashes of some Holocaust victims.

The visit is a sensitive one. As a young man in Bavaria during World War II, Benedict served in the Nazi Youth Corps and later in the German army -- virtually unavoidable given the situation in Germany at the time, but part of a biography that makes him a rarity at Yad Vashem.

He is not the first high-profile German with a wartime background to visit Yad Vashem, a sprawling complex on a Jerusalem hilltop that includes an extensive museum and research facility. Former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a Hitler Youth and member of the army, visited as a private citizen in 1985, after he was out of office. A decade later, then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who also was in the Nazi youth group but was too young to be drafted, made an official visit in which he referred to the "deep shame" Germany felt over the organized extermination of millions.

But Benedict's arrival at the memorial promises to tap even deeper issues, at the core of relations between Catholics and Jews.

His decision in January to lift the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop, Richard Williamson, is only one of the points of contention. Benedict also reauthorized use of a Latin prayer that asked for Jews to be "delivered from their darkness" and accept the divinity of Jesus. While the language eventually was toned down, the prayer still harkened to age-old tensions between the two faiths.

And the Vatican has its own complaints. The museum at the Yad Vashem complex -- which Benedict, like his predecessor John Paul II, will not enter during his visit -- includes a highly critical portrayal of wartime Pope Pius XII. Under his picture, an accompanying plaque says that Pius, among other things, remained silent even as Jews were deported from Rome to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Pius is on track to Catholic sainthood, and the Vatican has argued that he deserves a different portrayal because more was done behind the scenes to thwart the Nazis than the Yad Vashem display indicates. Vatican and Yad Vashem researchers are working together on the issue. Yad Vashem has asked that the Vatican archives from the era be opened to allow a closer examination of Pius's record.

The complexities of Benedict's visit have been apparent in the public debate leading to his arrival -- with a parliamentarian from Israel's ultra-conservative National Union party asking for a Knesset investigation into the trip and calling Benedict an anti-Semite, and a Knesset member from the liberal Meretz party slamming Benedict's strict views on abortion and other social issues.

A group upset about the Vatican's request for more control over some Catholic holy sites in Israel, particularly ones in Jerusalem close to Jewish holy places, was planning a protest as well, urging people to gather in the center of the city to blow the ceremonial shofar, or ram's horn, as Benedict visits Yad Vashem.

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