RAMALLAH, 25 December — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat confirmed he would not be able to attend Christmas mass in the West Bank city of Bethlehem because of an Israeli ban, and called it a "crime," in a speech on Palestinian television and radio last evening.
This blatant Israeli move also invited the Vatican’s ire which flayed Israel’s ban on Arafat attending Christmas services in Bethlehem and pushed for the Jewish state to reverse its decision. The Vatican’s own newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, dedicated an outspoken editorial yesterday to the controversy.
"The place of the Nativity seems to have been desecrated and teaches us a hard lesson on the fragility of politics when it takes the shortcut of conflict and does not seek to make peace or to find mutual forgiveness," it said.
A Palestinian official said on Sunday that Arafat could have reached Bethlehem using the car of Jerusalem’s Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah. But Sabbah left on his own for Bethlehem yesterday after a meeting with Arafat.
He later said: "The Palestinian president might not be able to be with us tonight even though I would like him to be there." He, too, condemned Israel’s attitude, describing it as "aggression".
Arafat, in his speech, said: "Palestinians, I speak to you with a heart filled with grief because the unjust Israeli tanks, cement barriers and guns prevent me from participating with you in the annual celebrations."
Arafat labeled the Israeli ban "a crime depriving me of my right to participate in the commemoration of the messenger of peace and a crime preventing my Christian brothers in West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem to exercise their religious rites at the holy sites."
Bethlehem began Christmas Eve in a somber mood yesterday as West Bank violence flared in retaliation for Israel’s ban on Arafat’s annual pilgrimage to the town revered as Jesus’s birthplace.
Israel said it would stick to its decision to bar the Palestinian president from visiting the Palestinian-ruled West Bank town unless he immediately arrested the killers of a far-right Cabinet minister.
Israel’s ultimatum was followed by a West Bank ambush in which an Israeli settler was critically wounded by Palestinian gunmen near the West Bank city of Nablus.
