Basilica burning

Jonathan Cook in Nazareth was caught up in the attack on the Basilica of the Annunciation The news swept across Nazareth last Friday like wildfire. There had been a terror attack on the Basilica of the Annunciation, the huge church in the city centre built over a grotto where Christians believe the archangel Gabriel revealed to Mary she was bearing the son of God. By 6pm, half an hour after the first explosion, I was with a crowd of Nazarenes pushing their way through the only open gate into the walled-off courtyard of the church. Just visible, as final darkness fell, were faces etched by a mixture of anger and anxiety. Christians and Muslims, who share Nazareth, were equally shocked at the violation of one of the Holy Land’s most sacred spaces. The attack had begun at 5.30pm, half way through a special service for Lent, attended by hundreds of local Roman Catholics and a handful of tourists. Twelve-year-old Subhi Espanioly, who was there with his grandmother, said he had been startled by a loud explosion followed by coloured smoke. Subhi and the other members of the congregation huddled together for several terrifying minutes as a series of further explosions were set off. During a lull, a priest and several Nazarenes overpowered a grey-bearded man in jeans, 44-year-old Haim Habibi, an Israeli Jew who was with his wife, Violet, and the couple’s 20-year-old daughter Odelia. Subhi said that when he arrived for the service he had seen the three of them wheeling a baby’s pushchair around the courtyard, looking at a permanent exhibition of murals and paintings of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus donated by international churches. After angry bystanders started beating Habibi, priests and a small contingent of local policemen hurried the three intruders into an annex of the church, where they were locked up for their own safety. By the time of my arrival, the church courtyard and the approach road, Casa Nova, were nearly full. Most of the crowd were silent but young hotheads stood on the roof of the annex building, jeering at the terrorists they assumed were inside. No one was ready to leave the courtyard. Nazarenes were gripped by the need to show communal solidarity in the face of the latest assault by a Jew on an Arab holy place and on a Palestinian community. Six months ago, in an attempt to stop the disengagement, an Israeli soldier, Natan Eden Zada, used his army rifle to spray a bus with bullets, killing two Christians and two Muslims, in the neighbouring community of Shafa’amr. He apparently believed he was following in the footsteps of another soldier, Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire at the mosque in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994. Other Jewish religious extremists have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to blow up the Haram al-Sharif complex of mosques in Jerusalem in the hope of building the Third Temple in its place. Read more...