FATHER MICHAEL PRIOR was a biblical scholar who spent much of his life writing and campaigning about the rights of the Palestinians in the Holy Land. A radical priest, he was also an outspoken critic of Zionism, which, he argued in his books, articles and lectures, was unbliblical.

Born in Cork in 1942, Michael Prior was educated by the Christian Brothers. He studied science at University College Dublin, completing his theological studies in 1969. After ordination he joined the Vincentians and went to Rome to study Semitic languages under Dermot Ryan, later to become Archbishop of Dublin. Prior gained his licence in sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in 1972.

Upon his return to Ireland, he spent three years as director of Vincentian formation before moving to Coventry, where he taught at Ullathorne Grammar School for two years. In 1977 he was appointed lecturer in theology and religious studies at St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, Middlesex. He gained a PhD from Kings College London, taking as his thesis Paul’s second letter to Timothy.

In 1982 he co-founded Living Stones, an ecumenical organisation building links between Christians in Britain and Christians in the Holy Land. Living Stones promoted pilgrimages from Britain and was concerned primarily with the daily lives of local people rather than with the holy sites.

Father Prior spent a sabbatical year in Jerusalem in 1983-84. It was during this time that he questioned his view that Israel’s occupancy was justified in terms of its own security needs. “The aggressive programme of Jewish settlement in the territories during that period, and the religious fervour of the terrorist group caught in the act of attempting to blow up the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque raised for me questions about the role of the biblical narrative of promise and possession of land in the expansionist activity of Jewish settlers,” he later wrote.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he made frequent visits to the Holy Land, culminating in his tenure as visiting professor at Bethlehem University and scholar in residence at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, Jerusalem. He became head of the department of theology and religious studies at St Mary’s College in 1987.

In 1997 he published The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique which examined the way the Bible had been used to support colonialism in Latin America, South Africa and Palestine. He pointed to what he called acts of genocide and “ethnic cleansing” in the Old Testament. He wrote that “a God who insists on the destruction of people as an act of devotion to him is one from whom most decent people should recoil” . In Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Enquiry, published in 1999, he pursued his theme, tracing the history of modern Zionism from its founder Theodor Herzl to the present day. He claimed that the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a consequence of the Holocaust but that it had been planned by Herzl from the beginning.

In an interview in Witness in 2003, Father Prior said: “The God they portray looks to me to be a militaristic and xenophobic genocide who would not be even sufficiently moral to conform to the Fourth Geneva Convention. How, I constantly ask myself, are such people so unconcerned about others being kicked out of their homes, children being shot, people struggling for survival against very oppressive forces of occupation?” Needless to say, he was sometimes accused of being anti-Semitic. But he was careful to distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. He believed that Muslims, Jews and Christians could and should live in equality and harmony. In his last article, published in The Tablet shortly before his death, he warned that the Catholic-Jewish liaison committee’s decision to equate antiZionism with anti-Semitism was a grave mistake. He was convinced that Zionism flew in the face of the Hebrew Scriptures.

He believed that Zionist ideas dominated thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict in the West, even in the Church “The situation within the Christian churches and mainstream Christian theology is even more alarming.

“They, too, have been seduced into accepting a Zionist rendering of all Jewish history. I am disturbed that some sectors of these agencies concur, either by direct support or silence, in the ongoing humiliation of an innocent people.”

Prior was a tireless campaigner for justice for the Palestinians and for peace in the Holy Land. Genial and with a lively sense of humour, he was never worried about getting into controversy. St Mary’s College, University of Surrey, honoured him with a professorship in 2004.

Father Michael Prior, priest, lecturer and activist, was born on March 15, 1942. He died on July 21, 2004, aged 62.