Churches Close in Protest of OK for Israel Mosque

Churches across the Holy Land closed Monday in protest over an Israeli government decision allowing Muslims to build a mosque near a revered Christian shrine in this biblical city.

The protest, coming in the very birthplace of Christianity and just weeks before its millennial celebration, jolted the delicate balance of religious coexistence in this region and disappointed scores of pilgrims and tourists.

At the heart of the dispute is concern among the Christian minority that its numbers are dwindling and that the survival of its community and status is under threat.

“We do not like what we did, but in such a case we had to,” Father Nourhan Manougian, grand sacristan of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, said of the protest, which will continue today. “What the government did is not right. Today it’s Nazareth, tomorrow it’s somewhere else. We are thinking, who’s next?”

Christian leaders, including the Vatican and U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, joined to express anger over Israel’s granting of a Muslim request to build a mosque alongside the Church of the Annunciation, the site where Christian tradition holds that the angel Gabriel told Mary she would give birth to Jesus.

Israel said its decision was the best possible compromise, since Muslims also stake a historical claim to the land.

The Church of the Annunciation was one of scores of Christian sites that were closed Monday. About 100 yards away, bulldozers cleared earth in preparation for the ceremonial laying of the mosque cornerstone, scheduled for today.

In Jerusalem, tourists from Southern California, Argentina, Ireland and elsewhere milled about in the stone plaza in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the site where many Christians believe Jesus was crucified and buried. Some caressed the heavy wooden doors through which they could not pass, and posed for pictures.

Like many pilgrims who make the Church of the Holy Sepulcher their most cherished destination, members of the California group hauled a huge wooden cross on their backs, stopping at each of the Stations of the Cross that mark what they believe to be Jesus’ final path along the Old City’s Via Dolorosa, and ending up in the church plaza.

“We came from very far, with great sacrifice and with enormous hope and faith,” moaned Frances Gurdian, from Corona, Calif. “This is disastrous! Our faith has nothing to do with governments and politics.”

Other pilgrims were supportive of the planned closures, which were announced earlier this month. “I am deeply disappointed, but someone had to take a stand,” said Roger Power of Kern, Ireland.

In Bethlehem, at the Church of the Nativity, where Christian tradition says Jesus was born, nuns wept and sang “Silent Night” before the bolted doors.

In Nazareth, many Muslims who stood viewing the patch of land where the mosque will be built alternated between anger and sadness. “This is a miserable step to decide to close the churches, because Muslims and Christians have been neighbors for many years,” said Said Bakarni, 26, a history teacher.

The Israeli government said the two-day strike was “lamentable” and unjustified. Shlomo Ben-Ami, minister of internal security, met with church officials up to the last minute to try to avert the closures.

Ben-Ami said the government tried to reach a compromise acceptable to both sides. Muslims also consider the site sacred. They say it is the burial place of a warrior who was the nephew of Saladin, the Muslim hero who drove the Christian Crusaders from the Holy Land 800 years ago.

“It is our responsibility at all times to strike a . . . delicate, sometimes even a precarious, internal balance,” Ben-Ami said. “It was never our intention and is not our intention today to infringe, to impose on the natural and legitimate rights of the Christians in Nazareth or anywhere else, not at all.”

For the three Christian denominations that are leading the protest--Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian--and the many other Christian congregations in the region, the larger problem is that, as a minority in the Holy Land, they fear loss of influence and power to the much larger Muslim and Jewish communities.

The Israeli government, at the same time, faces the challenge of working with a minority whose religion is unfamiliar to the average bureaucrat. Christians make up less than 3% of Israel’s population, according to official statistics. Most of them are Arab.

“The litmus test of the health of a society is how its minorities feel,” said Rabbi David Rosen, who heads the Anti-Defamation League in Israel. “If Christians feel threatened, marginalized, pushed out of their historical place here in the land of their faith’s birth, then that’s bad news for everybody.”

Yasser Arafat, president of the Palestinian Authority, tried to intervene, asking the Christian leaders to exempt churches in the Palestinian territories and urging Nazareth’s Muslims to delay construction of the mosque in the interest of Arab unity.

Both Arafat and the Israelis have an eye on tourism and the potentially disastrous impact that a festering dispute could have on the thousands of tourists expected in the coming weeks. While not every church in the land joined in the protest Monday, the most important Christian shrines were shut.

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Wilkinson reported from Jerusalem and Trounson from Nazareth.