Posts Tagged ‘Palestine’
Concerns grow over Netanyahu’s rise
Benyamin Netanyahu has been asked to form a government in Israel.
He lists Iran as the biggest threat to Israel. His tough stand on Hamas might also complicate peace negotiations with Palestinians.
Al Jazeera’s Clayton Swisher reports on why the US may find it difficult brokering Middle East peace with Netanyahu as the Israeli PM.
An Ethiopian Easter in Jerusalem
Contrary to romantic perceptions, the streets of Jerusalem’s Old City by night are typically sinister and ghostly due to a combination of bad lighting and poor rubbish collection services, together with the cadres of patrolling Israeli police and soldiers armed with rifles and batons, and the scores of CCTV cameras that punctuate the walls of each winding alley.
But this weekend, the city’s streets took on a festive hue as thousands of orthodox pilgrims converged on the city’s Christian holy sites to celebrate the most important event in the Christian liturgical calendar: Easter.
A willing pilgrim poses for the many photographers present at the Holy Saturday ceremony. Photo: José M. Ruibérriz
One of the most lively and joyful of these celebrations is the Holy Saturday festival held at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Christians believe to be built on the site of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial and resurrection.
The Holy Saturday festival commemorates the time that Jesus is said to have lain in the tomb and descended into hell, defying death and releasing those held captive there, including Adam and Eve.
According to orthodox tradition, at exactly 2pm on this day, a sun beam is said to shine on Jesus’ tomb, lighting 33 candles held by the Patriarch of the Greek Church who waits inside the tomb. The Patriarch then emerges carrying the Holy Fire to light the candles of thousands of worshippers that crowd into the Church for the ceremony.
But because of the strict guidelines defining which part of the Church belongs to which of the six churches based there, Jerusalem’s tiny Ethiopian community conducts its own Holy Fire ceremony later on Saturday evening in the courtyard of the Deir Al-Sultan monastery, which sits on the rooftop of the Church.
Deir Al-Sultan has been home to a community of Ethiopian monks since 1808. The monastery lies above the Chapel of the Finding of the Cross, where Queen Helena is believed to have discovered the three crosses used to crucify Jesus and the two thieves, Dismas and Gestas. It consists of several small chapels, including the Chapel of the Archangel Michael, and a courtyard with a dome in the centre which gives light to the Chapel of Saint Helena below.
During the Holy Saturday festival, the Archbishop of the Ethiopian Church, dressed in an elaborate golden garment, wearing a jewelled crown and sporting a candle carrying the Holy Fire, lights candles carried by monks, nuns and pilgrims wearing simple white cotton robes. Led by the Archbishop, the worshippers proceed to dance around the dome of the Chapel of Saint Helena to the sound of drums and to the smell of incense, chanting and singing as they go. The Archbishop then retreats to a tent erected outside the Chapel of the Archangel Michael especially for the occasion, where prayers continue.
Ethiopian pilgrims dress in white cotton robes for the Holy Saturday ceremony. Photo: José M. Ruibérriz
The Ethiopian Holy Fire ceremony attracts a great deal of attention, and today the courtyard is filled with Israelis, Palestinians, Germans, Italians and a multitude of other nationalities vying for the best view of the festivities.
A spirit of joy prevails over the celebrations, fuelled by the infectious smiles of the Ethiopian pilgrims. While some of the younger worshippers pose with their candles for the many camera-toting media and tourists, some of the older members frown on, decidedly unimpressed by this outside attention.
A nun frowns at the touristic and media attention generated by the ceremony. Photo: José M. Ruibérriz
Yet outside of the Easter festivities, the area is the site of a lengthy and sometimes violent turf war between the Ethiopian and Coptic churches, exacerbating and exacerbated by other disputes between the six churches competing for control over the Church: the Latins (Roman Catholics), Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Copts, and Ethiopians.
Since its dedication around 335, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has undergone many cycles of destruction and rebuilding often strongly linked to political upheavals that have persisted in the region throughout history. And since the accession to power of the Ottoman Turks in 1517, many political machinations among Christians trying to gain control over all or parts of the edifice have followed.
On Palm Sunday in 1767, a squabble broke out between the Greeks and Franciscans over rights to the Church. In order to put what they thought was a decisive end to the bickering, the Ottoman authorities passed a firman (imperial decree) splitting the Church and other holy sites in Palestine between the various Western and Eastern churches. This eventually came to be known as the Status Quo, basically a legal regime restating the different rights and powers enjoyed by the various Christian denominations over holy places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, including the monastery of Deir Al-Sultan in Jerusalem.
Successive regimes promised to uphold the Status Quo throughout the 20th century, including the British, the Jordanian, and the Israelis. But neither the Jordanians nor the Israelis kept their Status Quo promises when it came to Deir Al-Sultan. In what some say was a jibe at the Egyptian authorities at the time, the Jordanians passed a ministerial decree in 1960 ordering the Coptic Church to hand over the monastery’s keys to the Ethiopians. When the Copts refused, the Jordanian police forcefully broke open the monastery’s locks and handed the new keys over to the Ethiopians. The Jordanian king personally intervened and ordered that the monastery be restored to the Coptic Church.
But the Jordanians lost East Jerusalem and the Old City when they were occupied by the Israelis in June 1967, and the dispute erupted yet again. On Coptic Easter in 1970, while the Copts were busy at midnight prayers in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Israeli police forcefully changed the locks at Deir Al-Sultan and handed over the monastery’s new keys to the Ethiopians. Despite a ruling by Israel’s High Court in 1971 that the monastery be returned to the Copts, no action was taken and the situation remains unresolved to this day.
For their part, the Ethiopians accuse the Copts of having taken over the monastery in 1838 when plague struck Jerusalem and all the Ethiopian monks died. According to the Ethiopians, the Copts burned down the library containing the documents which validated the Ethiopians’ claim to Deir Al-Sultan.
An elderly pilgrim reads his bible by candlelight. Photo: José M. Ruibérriz
Today, a tense coexistence prevails between the Copts and the Ethiopians, one where even the most seemingly insignificant actions can spark off fierce internecine fighting. In 2002, an unholy brawl broke out when an Egyptian Coptic monk stationed on the roof decided to move his chair from its agreed spot into the shade. This was interpreted as a hostile move by the Ethiopians, violating an agreement that defines ownership over every nook and cranny in the Church. Rivals hurled stones, iron bars and chairs at each other in the resulting fracas, and seven Ethiopian Orthodox monks and four Egyptian Coptic monks were hospitalised as a result.
This tragi-comic incident is just a small example of the wider battle raging within and over Jerusalem, one that is not only religious, but deeply political. While this Easter passed without incident at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Palestinian struggle for East Jerusalem as a Palestinian city is being severely undermined day by day.
The building of Israel’s Apartheid Wall is isolating the city from its Palestinian hinterland in Ramallah and Bethlehem, while the construction of thousands of new illegal settlement homes for Jewish Israelis on confiscated Palestinian land are fragmenting Palestinian neighbourhoods and severely impeding their development.
Worshippers carry candles light by the Holy Fire. Photo: José M. Ruibérriz
While pilgrims from all over the world come to Jerusalem to pray at its holy sites, local Palestinian worshippers, Christians and Muslims alike, are denied free access to the city and depend on permits arbitrarily granted by the Israeli authorities. While Israel puts on a show of beneficent religious tolerance for the outside world, it quietly enforces a relentless system of Apartheid against Palestinians.
Third death in West Bank clashes
BBC News – October 16 2008
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7673335.stm
Relatives of the first fatality denied he was involved in petrol-bombing settlers
Palestinian medical workers say Israeli troops have shot dead a Palestinian man in a confrontation near the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The army said he was in a group of three people in Kufr Malik village, one of whom was carrying a firebomb.
Another Palestinian man died overnight after being critically wounded in a clash near a Jewish settlement.
The shooting happened during a protest about another killing on Tuesday of a teenager – also an alleged firebomber.
In the latest incident, Aziz Beerat, 20, was killed when Israeli soldiers in a jeep opened fire in Kufr Malik village, north-east of Ramallah, Palestinian emergency services said.
Another man was in a serious condition in hospital after being shot in the back.
The Israeli military said troops saw the silhouettes of three Palestinians preparing to throw petrol bombs and that the men ignored an order to surrender.
The three deaths were the first from Israeli military action in the West Bank for several weeks, prompting a Palestinian official to protest against what he described as an escalation.
“It looks as if the Israeli army has received instructions to carry out an escalation in the Palestinian territories,” said negotiator Saeb Erekat, in comments reported by AFP news agency.
The army says there has been wave of firebombings around the Ramallah area and it has been stepping up efforts to stop them.
Firebomb denial
On Wednesday, 21-year-old Muhammad Rahami was fatally wounded during a protest near Jalazun refugee camp. Israeli police said Palestinians had thrown rocks at an army post.
The protest followed the funeral of Abdul Qadir Zeit, 17, killed by troops late on Tuesday near the Beit-El settlement, which is adjacent to Jalazun, deep in the West Bank beyond the barrier Israel is building in and around the territory. The army said he had been carrying a petrol bomb.
A BBC correspondent who visited Jalazun reported that local residents said the teenager was killed while walking alone on a road that passes the settlement on the way to the camp.
They said youths do sometimes throw rocks at passing cars belonging to Israeli settlers, but Abdul Qadir Zeit had never participated. They also denied that any firebombs had been thrown in recent days.
Correspondents say tension between Israeli settlers and local Palestinians have peaked in recent days, with each side complaining of violent attacks by the other.
Israel has settled about 450,000 of its citizens in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since it occupied the areas in 1967.
Settlements, which are heavily guarded by the Israeli army, are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
Israel’s own religious fanatics
Seth Freedman – October 10 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/10/israelandthepalestinians-judaism
The problem with any country fashioned along religious lines is that moderates get buried under rocks and a stream of abuse.
During Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the port city of Akko erupted into race riots, after a clash between Jewish and Arab residents escalated into a battle involving hundreds of willing participants. The initial incident was sparked by a handful of Jews hurling rocks at an Arab man, after they took umbrage at his decision to drive through the Jewish side of town on Yom Kippur, an act that apparently offended their religious sensitivities.
When word of their attack spread around the Arab community, the response was swift, and as utterly unacceptable as the initial violence meted out by the Jewish attackers. Mobs of Arab locals went on a rampage, smashing cars and vandalising shops belonging to Jews, until police took control of the streets and forced them to a halt. As soon as the Israeli press got back to work after the Yom Kippur hiatus, the reaction was fast and furious, with both sides rushing to condemn the other via the media.
When I likened the wanton destruction I witnessed in Nil’in to a pogrom, I was hauled over the coals by my detractors for the language I employed. A few months on, and it appears that the word is enjoying something of a renaissance: Ehud Olmert using it to describe a wave of settler attacks on Arab villages, and – last night – at least three MKs calling the Yom Kippur war in Akko a pogrom, albeit from polar opposite sides of the spectrum.
Yuval Steinitz, a firebrand Likud politician took the view that “Israel has become the only country in the world where pogroms against Jews are taking place”; hot on his heels came Estherina Tartman’s racist outburst, in which she claimed “The pogrom in Akko is another proof that the Arabs of Israel are the real threat to the state”. Countering these claims was Ahmed Tibi, one of Israel’s few Arab parliamentarians, who called the events a “Jewish pogrom”, accusing the police of discriminating against Arab residents of the city during the disturbances.
Last night, a second round of clashes brought heavy police intervention, with the mixed city seemingly unwilling or unable to return to its pre-Yom Kippur state of calm and tolerance. While there is little doubt that what took place during the disturbances definitely walked and quacked like a pogrom, focusing on the symptoms rather than the disease is an unhelpful way of addressing the situation.
That anyone should feel so affronted by a non-Jewish citizen driving his car on Yom Kippur that they hurl rocks in response is as absurd a reaction as the recently-exposed ultra-orthodox vigilantes in Jerusalem, who take the law into their own hands to uphold religious law. For a country so determined to criticise – rightly – the Taliban-style behaviour of many Arab states, it is incredible that such practices are not clamped down upon when they occur closer to home.
Religious fervour has an alarming way of dragging its followers, and their unfortunate victims, back to Bible times. Stoning women in Iran is matched by stoning Arabs – or anyone else – daring to contravene Jewish law in Israel; the violators apparently deserving to be injured or killed for simply exercising the free will that the modern world extends to them.
I spent the entirety of Yom Kippur in synagogue, paying no attention whatsoever to what others might or might not be doing while I was fasting and praying. The only way I could have been offended by others’ actions would have been if it directly impeded on my ability to carry out my religious obligations: if anyone had played music beneath the synagogue’s windows, for example. However, catching sight of the hundreds of cyclists who come out of the woodwork every Yom Kippur wasn’t offensive in the slightest; their violations of the day being their look-out, and no one else’s.
The inherent problem with any country fashioned along religious lines is that the moderates get buried under a pile of rocks and a stream of abuse; a state of affairs to which both Israel and Gaza can attest. Jews attack other Jews for daring to contravene the seating arrangements on “modesty buses”; Palestinians do likewise to their non-believing brethren in similar acts of fundamentalist rage.
Sceptics will say that Akko was a tinderbox waiting to explode, and that religious sensibilities played little part in the initial outburst of violence, in the same way that Sharon’s infamous tour of al-Aqsa was dismissed by rightwingers as incidental to the outbreak of the second intifada. However, the fact remains that politicians and commentators alike have been only too quick to jump on the religious bandwagon, claiming to be mortally hurt by the Arab driver’s actions, as though Israel’s otherwise untainted religious purity was irredeemably stained by his decision to – quite legally – drive on Yom Kippur.
The local police chief described the incident as a “deliberate provocation” by the driver, while saying precious little about the decision by his assailants to resort to hurling rocks and bottles to express their displeasure. But in that case, why don’t the police end the nationwide tradition of bike-riding on Yom Kippur, if such acts are deemed to be a provocation to those adhering to religious law? The answer’s pretty clear, and gives the lie to any claim that Israel is any more tolerant than its peers in the Arab world.
There is much to be said for respecting others’ religions and customs, but at the same time “your freedom ends where my nose begins” cannot – and must not – be allowed to extend to a national scale. When that happens, and when the state apparatus fails to condemn such behaviour, then the game is well and truly up. And all the screams of “pogrom” in the world won’t cover up who the true Cossacks are in such a case.
Jews protect Palestinians in harvest of hate
By Donald Macintyre in Awarta, West Bank
Friday, 10 October 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/jews-protect-palestinians-in-harvest-of-hate-956706.html
Hellela Siew helps Jamal Otman Koarik pick olives near the intensely hostile Itamar Jewish settlement
In the shade of the trees where they have been picking olives all morning, in this wadi, south-east of Nablus, a Palestinian farmer, Jamal Otman Koarik, and two of his daughters share a lunch of home-baked bread, zatar, oil, courgettes and salad with three visitors. It’s a bucolic scene that could have happened any time in the past century. But what makes it notable in 2008 is that the guests who have been helping Mr Koarik pick the olives are Israeli Jews: a rabbi, an anthropologist and a youth worker, Hellela Siew.
Born in Tel Aviv, Ms Siew served in the army, took a university degree, then a teacher’s diploma. Thirty-six years ago, she took the tough decision to emigrate to London, telling her parents: “I won’t come back until there’s peace.” Ms Siew, who is now 64, remains an Israeli citizen but now lives with her British husband in Hebden Bridge. She has kept to her word, except that each autumn she comes back to stay in her hometown with her relatives and spends each day of the two-month harvest season picking olives on Palestinian farmland in the West Bank.
And Ms Siew does that for a purpose. Up on the ridge above us, you can see the red roofs of Itamar, a notably hard-line Jewish settlement, and she is here to help protect the Palestinian farmers from the threat of settler violence which has so often scarred the olive harvests.
Last year, she was in a group in the South Hebron Hills confronted by settlers who fired shots from a pistol and an M16 assault rifle, despite the presence of the army and police. “Then one of the soldiers said, ‘Look, one of them is coming down with a jug of water for you’. The settler emptied the jug over me. It was full of human shit.”
Mr Koarik, the olive farmer, says he has no difficulty distinguishing between the settlers who fired on and burnt out his tractor during the harvest six years ago and the Jews who come to help him. “I welcome them here like they are my family,” the 40-year-old says. Looking up at the settlement, Ms Siew tries to explain, as a lifelong opponent of the occupation, why she comes each year. “When there was the big demonstration against the Iraq war in England people carried banners saying ‘Not in my name’. I’m trying to do something against what is being done in my name.”
Ms Siew was brought here by the Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights, led by Rabbi Arik Ascherman who has led a never-ending campaign to persuade the army and police to enforce the Palestinian olive growers’ right to farm their land despite the settlers’ attempts to stop them. RHR has made a special effort this year to maximise its volunteer numbers because of the growing incidence of settler violence against Palestinians in the past few months.
Rabbi Ascherman says that apart from one notably ugly and violent confrontation with aggressive settlers in Hebron last week, the harvest has been relatively quiet. But it has only just begun. And while the army insists that it will “strive” to ensure as normal a harvest as possible, Rabbi Ascherman is considering returning to the Supreme Court because of restrictions he says the military is still imposing on the farmers even in areas opened up under a 2006 order made by the Court.
Asked why he and his volunteers make this often risky mission each year, the US-born rabbi says “if we really believe” the Biblical text that all human beings are made in God’s image, “we have got to put our money where our mouth is and be here in an active way to defend human rights”. And he also cites the “dialogue of the olive groves” in which Israelis and Palestinians who “have to live and die here together” have “no choice but to communicate” if they also work together. “I think this is not only the just and right and Jewish thing to do, but it’s the self-interested thing to do. We are going to survive.”
