Whatever disappointment there may have been in Israeli government circles that the Pope did not go further in his speech at the ceremony for victims of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem yesterday, it was not evident last night.
Indeed, it is doubtful whether, considering the complexity of the Israeli response to the visit to date, it could have been more positive. It was also a response which was in many ways predicated by the cordial and generous speech by the Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, during the same ceremony, when he said Pope John Paul had done more than anyone else to bring about "the historic change in the attitude of the Church towards the Jewish people".
Last night, a senior government minister, Mr Haim Ramon, reiterated that view. Pope John Paul was "the first [Pope] to visit a synagogue in Rome; he was the first to define anti-Semitism as a sin; and he was the first to visit Yad Vashem and to honour the memory of six million Jewish people who died in the Holocaust," he said.
Mr Ramon, who is Minister for Jerusalem Affairs and serves in Mr Barak's office, praised the Pope's "tremendous contribution" to reconciliation between Christians and the Jewish people. He described the road to reconciliation as "a process" and yesterday's events as "a further step" in that process which he felt would be complete in the near future. "There is very little which has to be done for full reconciliation," he said.
He also expressed pride that the Jewish people had come so far in 60 years. Then "the Jewish people perished in Auschwitz, Treblinka and the ghettoes. Now we receive the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church and give him the opportunity to freely practise and worship according to his beliefs in a very safe way. I think we can be proud."
However, Mr Ramon's view is by no means unanimous in Israel. Dr Racelle Weiman, of the Israel Centre for Negotiation and Conflict Management at Haifa University, described the Pope's speech at Yad Vashem as "a regression".
He was "reading someone else's script", she said, and referred to his otherwise "very excellent leadership in Jewish/Christian relations".
She pointed out that what he had said in the Palestinian National Authority territories on Wednesday was "totally consistent with what he has said in the past" about the Palestinian issue. But she said "he didn't go as far as he normally does [in Jerusalem yesterday] where Jewish/Christian relations are concerned."
Dr Weiman, who has written a book on reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people which is to be published shortly, felt Pope John Paul had "gone back to the politically correct position of the Vatican Secretary of State [Cardinal Sedano]."
It was also "absolutely inappropriate" for him to place anti-Christian sentiment by the Jewish people on a par with anti-Semitism, she said. She was not surprised, however, that the Pope made no reference to Pius XII in his speech. "I can't imagine one Pope speaking against another." But she felt Pope John Paul was acting as "a moral man" in tackling "Judaeo-phobia, rather than being guided by political considerations", as she felt Pius XII had been.
She also believed that Jewish people tended to differentiate between the institutional Church and Pope John Paul. "Jews still distrust the Church as an institution." It had yet to address the past demonisation of the Jewish people, she said.
Father Michael McGarry, rector of Jerusalem's Tantur Ecumenical Centre, felt that there had been "a set-up" of expectation generated before the Pope's speech so that if he didn't say what commentators said he should say, then there would be "great disappointment". It was, he felt, "an unfair set-up" and that what the Pope had said was "essentially a religious comment in a religious place".
Given that, he felt that what was said "was unfortunate" for Catholics. The "very special relationship" between Jews and Christians had not been addressed, he said.
For his own part Father McGarry felt that "during the Shoah Christians were not Christian enough". This was not simply a lack of courage but had more to do with "the way we Catholics thought about the Jewish people for 2,000 years."
He said these thoughts included the idea that the Jews had killed Christ, that they had been abandoned by God and that their religion was an anachronism. He referred to the faulty understanding of Roman history which underpinned these views and the equally faulty theology. In that context he spoke of the Good Friday liturgy, which spoke of "the perfidious Jew" until the 1960s. In fact, the word "perfidious" in Latin translated simply as "unbelieving", he said. These realisations for him had been "very painful", he said.