ROME - A public spat over the Vatican's attitude to terrorism - and to Israel - is straining relations between Israel and the Holy See just three weeks before Pope Benedict XVI is due to make a historic visit to a synagogue in his native Germany.
The dispute erupted a week ago, when Israel protested that the pope had "deliberately failed" to include terrorist attacks in Israel in a July 24 condemnation of recent terrorism in Egypt, Britain, Turkey and Iraq. "We expected that the new pope, who on taking office emphasized the importance he places on relations between the church and the Jewish people, would behave differently," an Israeli Foreign Ministry statement said.
Citing the July 12 suicide attack in Netanya that killed five Israelis, the statement called on the pope to condemn attacks "against Jews in the same way he condemns terror attacks against others."
Escalating salvoes from both sides culminated July 28 with an unusually harsh Vatican statement that accused Israel of breaking international law in its actions against Palestinians and declared that Vatican policy would not be dictated by Jerusalem.
"It's not always possible to immediately follow every attack against Israel with a public statement of condemnation," Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls said in the statement.
This was partly because "attacks against Israel were sometimes followed by immediate Israeli reactions not always compatible with the norms of international law," he said. "It would, consequently, have been impossible to condemn the former and remain silent on the latter."
Navarro's statement came in direct response to assertions made by Israeli Foreign Ministry official Nimrod Barkan to the Jerusalem Post that Israel had quietly protested that Benedict's predecessor, Pope John Paul II, had also refrained from condemning terror attacks in Israel.
Israel was now going public with such concerns, he said, in the hope that Benedict would change this policy.
Israeli and Vatican officials cooled their rhetoric over the weekend, but observers said the bitter dispute represented Benedict's first major diplomatic crisis since he was elected pope in April following the death of his predecessor.
Benedict is due to meet with German Jewish leaders and visit the synagogue in Cologne on Aug. 19. It will be the first visit ever by a pope to a synagogue in Germany and the first to a synagogue since John Paul's landmark visit to Tempio Maggiore, or the Great Synagogue of Rome, in 1986.
