A "deep rift" could develop between the Jewish people and the Christian world if the government of Israel did not retract its decision to permit construction of a mosque opposite the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, representatives of the Vatican warned this week.
Speaking at Monday's session of a special ministerial committee that has been set up to review the issue, two Vatican representatives – Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the papal nuncio in Israel, and Dr. David Jaeger, the Holy See's legal advisor on Israeli affairs - stressed that the mosque would not merely affect Israel's relations with the Vatican, but would also prejudice the relations of the entire Jewish people with the Christian world.
Jaeger defended this broad threat Thursday, saying it was Israel that had first defined itself as the representative of the Jewish people as a whole: When it negotiated the establishment of relations with the Vatican in 1992-93, he said, Israel had insisted that the agreement explicitly stated that it had been signed "in the context of the reconciliation between the Jewish people and the Catholic Church."
Jaegar added that this agreement included a promise of mutual respect for the symbols of each other's religion, noting that the basilica was the chief symbol of Christianity in Nazareth. Construction of a mosque at this site, therefore, "is like a fist in the face," he told Ha'aretz. "It is a wound that can never be healed... It will be a cancer in the body of the relations between the Vatican and the Jewish people."
The ministerial committee has finished hearing testimony from both sides, and sources close to its members - ministers Natan Sharansky, Meir Sheetrit, Matan Vilnai, Uzi Landau and Avigdor Lieberman - say the panel will almost certainly not leave the Barak government's decision to permit construction of the mosque intact, but are weighing two alternatives for changing it.
One option is to forbid construction at the current site, but give the Muslims an alternative plot of land in downtown Nazareth, plus generous compensation. The second is to permit a mosque to be built on the site, but a smaller one - in terms of both area and height - than had originally been planned.
Construction of the mosque was approved by both the Netanyahu and Barak governments, but the current government agreed to reconsider the issue in response to heavy pressure from the Christian world.