San Francisco -- The latest cycle of terror and repression was three days away, but Palestinian Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, had the war-weary look of someone who knew it would happen again, and soon.

Sabbah, the highest-ranking Roman Catholic cleric in the Holy Land and the first Arab to head the Jerusalem patriarchy, had just flown from Los Angeles to San Francisco on a pastoral visit to the Arab Catholic community in California.

The 68-year-old patriarch was sitting at a table with leading members of St. Anne of the Sunset Church in San Francisco, the gathering place for Bay Area Catholics who are Palestinian, Jordanian and from neighboring lands.

"Palestinians are not terrorists," Sabbah told a reporter. "They are people like any beings on Earth. They have their rights. The only way to make reconciliation and end all this conflict is to give them back their freedom and their lands in the occupied territories."

Three days later, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in a pizza parlor in the heart of downtown Jerusalem, killing at least 14 innocent people, along with himself. Israel responded across the Palestinian Authority with bulldozers, tanks and jet fighters, and the prospects for peace grew ever
dimmer.

On Friday, newspapers around the world ran a photo of suspected suicide bomber Izzadine Masri, raising an M-16 rifle in his right hand and a copy of the Koran in his left.

Once again, the image of Palestinians and "Islamic terrorism" etch deeper in the mind. And public awareness of Palestinian Christians such as Michel Sabbah fades away.

BORN IN NAZARETH
Sabbah was born on March 19, 1933, in the town of Nazareth, where the Bible says Jesus was miraculously conceived. He began his seminary studies in Bethlehem, where the Gospel says Christ was born.

He was ordained a priest on June 29, 1955, and began working in a parish in Madaba, across the river Jordan.

After studying Arab language and literature at the University of St. Joseph in Beirut, Sabbah became director of schools for the Latin Diocese of Jerusalem.

After the Arab-Israeli war in 1967, when Israel occupied eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank, Sabbah taught Arabic and Islamic studies to Europeans in the East African nation of Djibouti.

He continued his doctoral studies in 1973 at the Sorbonne in France and in 1980 was named president of the University of Bethlehem.

TAPPED BY POPE JOHN PAUL II
In 1987, he was picked as the new Latin patriarch of Jerusalem by Pope John Paul II.

Sabbah replaced a 77-year-old Italian, Archbishop Giacomo Beltritti, one of a long line of Italian clerics to oversee the Latin Rite church in the Holy Land and its dwindling number of indigenous Catholics.

The Rev. Labib Kobti of San Francisco, one of three priests to serve under Sabbah, said the patriarch has become "a national hero" for Arab Christians in the Holy Land. "He represents their dreams and hopes," said Kobti, who was born in Beirut and educated in Bethlehem.

"The Church of Jerusalem was an Arab Christian church, before Islam," he said. "Without a Palestinian patriarch, the Israelis could call us strangers. But we are the people of this land."

Sami Odeh, an Orange County real estate agent who accompanied Sabbah from Los Angeles to San Francisco last week, said the patriarch is "a major source of pride" for Arab Christians in California. "He understands our pain," said Odeh. "He is one of our own."

Odeh's brother, Alex, was killed in a 1985 bombing of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee in Southern California. Federal officials suspect Jewish extremists were responsible for the still-unsolved attack.

FRUSTRATED WITH VIOLENCE
Sabbah's speeches over the years show his increasing frustration with the cycle of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

"Every believer who is sincere -- Jew, Christian or Muslim -- must ask himself in anguish: How long will religion be the cause of war and disputes between believers?" he said in 1992.

In his Easter message of 1997, Sabbah said, "Blood is still being shed. . . . The blood being shed is innocent blood."

Last month, in a speech to the U.S. Bishops Conference, the patriarch said, "Violence is only the visible aspect of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. The press, the media, politicians, even statesmen, try to reduce the conflict to various manifestations of violence, as if quelling the violence is sufficient to resolve the underlying problem.

"Violence has a cause," he said, "and the cause has to be removed in order to remove violence. That cause is the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian land."

Last week, Sabbah told The Chronicle that he is only talking about the 22 percent of the historic Palestine that Israel seized in 1967. "Why isn't Israel satisfied with 78 percent of the Palestinian land?" he said.

Sabbah said Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat cannot control extremist elements, because there is no way he can tell his people, " 'No. We cannot have our land, and we have to accept the Israeli occupation.'

"No leader can control that situation," Sabbah said. "You can't side with the occupier."

E-mail Don Lattin at dlattin@sfchronicle.com.