NAZARETH // As Pope Benedict XVI prepares to leave Jordan and
head for Israel tomorrow on the next step of his tour of the Holy Land, the city
of Nazareth is in a race to complete an amphitheatre to host tens of thousands
of pilgrims expected to celebrate his main public Mass in Israel on Thursday.
Officials in Nazareth, renowned as the hometown of Jesus, are
revelling both in the Vatican’s choice of their city for the Mass and in the
Israeli government’s agreement to invest US$5 million (Dh18.4m) – nearly half
its total budget for the visit – to construct the venue.
Nazareth, the largest Arab community in Israel, has had only six
weeks to build the 40,000-seat amphitheatre and design a new road system, after
the Vatican was put under pressure from local Arab Christian leaders into a
last-minute switch of locations.
With the world watching, Nazareth officials privately admit, the
Israeli government wanted the Papal Mass staged in Israel’s biggest northern
city, Haifa.
Nazareth, overcrowded and poorly developed, was not considered
the right showcase.
But the new amphitheatre on the Mount of Precipice overlooking
Nazareth is fuelling hopes that the city will soon rival Tel Aviv and Jerusalem
as a destination for major events, including concerts.
“Nazareth, the home of the Holy Family, should be the most
important Christian site in the world,” said Tareq Shihada, the director of the
Nazareth Cultural and Tourism Association. “After decades of neglect, we are
finally getting the chance to put our city back on the map.”
It is only the third time a pope has arrived in Israel, the last
occasion being John Paul II’s visit for the millennium.
The Israeli government, which is hoping to cash in on a rise in
Christian tourism both during and in the wake of the visit, has invested more
than $10m on a facelift of the country’s major pilgrimage sites.
Of the Holy Land’s three important Christian cities, only
Nazareth is under full Israeli sovereign control. Bethlehem is ruled by the
Palestinian Authority and the holy places of East Jerusalem are considered by
the international community to be under illegal Israeli occupation.
But despite the significance of Nazareth to Christians and its
imposing Basilica marking the spot where Mary is believed to have been told she
was carrying the son of God, city leaders have long complained of being
shortchanged in government funding.
Noam Shoval, a geographer at Hebrew
University in Jerusalem who studies Israel’s historic cities, said that for many
decades Nazareth had faced obstacles to its development. In particular,
successive governments had given preferential grants to the neighbouring Jewish
city of Tiberias, attracting developers and hotel owners.
Today, Nazareth receives the same development priority, he said,
but in practice tour operators rarely allow groups to visit the city for more
than an hour or two.
A report last year by the Galilee Society revealed a general
picture of underinvestment in Arab communities. It showed that Jewish local
authorities received nearly three times as much funding from the government as
their Arab counterparts, despite 61 of Israel’s 69 poorest communities being
Arab.
Ihab Sabbah, a Nazareth official who headed
the lobbying over the location of the Papal Mass, said the city was still
smarting from its failure to be chosen for the Mass conducted by John Paul II in
2000.
Instead, it was staged at the Mount of Beatitudes, close to
Tiberias, although the Pope did briefly visit Nazareth’s Basilica.
“This time we made Vatican officials very conscious of the
affront they would cause Israel’s Christian community if Nazareth was not
chosen,” said Mr Sabbah, a nephew of Michel Sabbah, who retired as the Latin
Patriarch of Jerusalem last year.
“Although many government officials were pressing for Haifa, we
pointed out to the Vatican in the strongest terms that that city has no
connection to Christianity.”
Mr Sabbah said Nazareth had lost out on hosting the Mass in 2000
after the election in 1996 of a right wing government under Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mr Netanyahu reneged on some of the funding for Nazareth’s renovation pledged by
the previous government of Yitzhak Rabin, he said.
The Rabin government, he added, had been sensitive to criticisms
that Nazareth’s ramshackle infrastructure would reflect badly on Israel when the
Pope visited.
In the end, much of Nazareth’s Old City, close to the Basilica,
was spruced up for the millennium, but only the foundations of the amphitheatre
were ever built.
“We are now completing the amphitheatre in record time – we are
achieving in six weeks a project that was originally intended to take six
years,” he said.
Mr Shihada said there was an irony that Mr Netanyahu was
overseeing the completion of the amphitheatre, when his earlier government had
halted the same project more than a decade ago.
There are about 140,000 Christians in Israel – comprising a tenth
of the country’s Arab minority – among a general population of seven million.
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