The gunfire was not a clash between Palestinian and Israeli forces, nor a violent dispute between rival Palestinian factions. It was a Palestinian celebration of students passing their high school matriculation exam — a tradition celebrated in some Arab countries.

More than 86,000 high school students in the West Bank and Gaza Strip took the exam, an entry card into college.

In lieu of any formal graduation ceremonies, celebrants fire live ammunition into the air, shoot off fireworks and hand out candy. Music echoes in the street during outdoor parties.

On Tuesday, the local mobile telephone network was jammed as parents and students spread the news on who passed and who failed.

PHOTO:Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (2nd R) visits a classroom during matriculation exams in the West Bank city of Ramallah June 11, 2007, in this picture released by the Palestinian Press Office (PPO).

The true story of a young Gazan woman’s futile battle against breast cancer has been commemorated in the first-ever Palestinian animated commercial film. “Fatenah” debuted last night in the West Bank city of Ramallah, at the Al-Kasabah Theater, and was received by a large and enthusiastic audience.

“I liked the balance of tragedy and comedy,” said one viewer. “It was depressing but also a very accurate picture of how Palestinians have to try and get health care, being treated as less than human beings.”

The film, only 30-minutes long, draws inspiration from a true story of a woman who died in the midst of trying to get treatment for breast cancer. Her story was documented by the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights.

Director and animator Ahmad Habash says the piece, which is being funded by the World Health Organization in the occupied Palestinian territories, tries not to portray either side—Israeli or Palestinian—as sheer good or evil. “That’s the reality,” he said. “There were doctors that tricked the girl and those that helped her on the Palestinian side. And on the Israeli side there were people who helped her, and those who didn’t”.

Much of the tragedy was in watching Fatenah’s humiliating and frustrating attempts to get into Israel for treatment. This was set off by a touch of black comedy, with Palestinian doctors who brushed off the girl’s concerns over the lump in her breast, saying she “should just loosen her bra,” or that “those things tend to go away with marriage.” (Despite significant deviations from the real-life story, Habash says that those encounters with doctors actually took place.)

As if to compliment a story of fighting for basic needs, the film’s animators had their own back story of struggle as well: “We faced a lot of problems. We weren’t able to go to Gaza. People in Gaza had to help us, they sent us pictures, and video.”

“Fatenah’s” creators tried to make their film unique by creating drama around an issue as seemingly basic as healthcare. In a former interview, producer Saed Andony said this approach personalizes an otherwise broad, overwhelming topic: “A big number of people have died because of lack of health. Each one of these has a big story, each one has a family, have a love. We want people to stop looking at the numbers. Our problem is, now, that the world looks at the Palestinians as numbers.”

The film, which has been translated into English and Hebrew as well, is slated to appear at film festivals in Venice, Toronoto, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, before being shown throughout the Palestinian territories.

Checkout:

Fatenah Trailer

Fatenah–website

Animated Shorts by Ahmad Habash:

“Flee”-2006

“Red Feather”-2007

It’s hard to imagine that a quarrel over a municipal parking lot could not only lead to blows, but could possibly drag the Prime Minister into getting involved. At least, that’s what a member of the Labor party called for on Sunday, says the Jerusalem Post. Now, police are investigating threats to the Jerusalem mayor’s life.

This is the aftermath of the latest battle in the ongoing “Shabbat Wars” between ultra-Orthodox Jews and Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat over opening a municipal parking lot on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath (See Reuters coverage of the big protests/rioting that happened Saturday here). Hundreds of ultra-orthodox Jews rioted against the opening, while around a thousand secular Israelis rallied on Saturday in support of the parking lot opening. Now a Jerusalem City Council representative is resigning over the issue, and the former police commander has condemned Barkat for “insisting on making the wrong decisions” (Read more here).

In spite of these ruffled feathers on the political scene, most of the coverage in the mainstream Israeli media has leaned towards supporting Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat’s decision to open a Saturday lot. See this op-ed from Hanuch Daom with Yedioth Ahronoth, which criticizes “the sane elements within the Orthodox community who do not dare to face up [their ultra-religious counterparts] and say: Enough.”

This Jerusalem Post blog entry by McGill History Professor, Gil Troy, takes up a similar vein, calling on religious Jews to take up the parking lot cause along with secular Jerusalemites: “Leaving the fight to so-called “secular” Israelis exacerbates tensions. Alternatively, if religious and non-religious Jews stood together in this struggle, even while agreeing to disagree on other issues, it would reduce Israel’s growing polarization, wherein a Right-Left divide on security increasingly parallels a religious-secular divide regarding lifestyle, philosophy, pluralism and tolerance.” Troy calls on Orthodox Jews in communities outside of Israel (such as New York, London, and Paris) to threaten to withhold financial support for their brethren in Jerusalem if they continue to participate in the parking lot rioting.

What will next Shabbat bring? A Jerusalem city council member quoted says that most citizens of Jeruselm, ultra-orthodox or not, understand the need for the parking lot: “We will not let extremists dictate the future of Jerusalem”. And the deputy mayor says he expects the protests to cool down. We’ll know next week for sure…

PHOTOS: Baz Ratner, Darren Whiteside. Reuters, Jerusalem, June 27, 2009.

For me, the hot, dry evenings of June in Jerusalem and the hills around it have become associated with nocturnal discovery in search of musical gems. It is the time of the Sounding Jerusalem Festival, weeks of nightly concerts featuring some of the best in European classical chamber music. The programme’s highlights for me are eclectic improvisations between the visiting Europeans and Israeli and Palestinian players, creating both tension and novelty in exploring the similarities, common roots and differences between Western and oriental instruments and traditions.

The tensions are not just musical, but, in Jerusalem of course, can turn political, in a way the young Austrian cellist who founded the event four years ago seems to relish.

In the story I filed today, I quoted Erich Oskar Huetter as saying he wanted to “break down walls”, by which he was talking metaphorically about the music and of the divides between the people of the city he has grown to love. It’s far from easy. Israelis are banned by their government from travelling to some areas of the West Bank where concerts have been held. Even if they weren’t, few would dare travel there in a climate of mutual fear and antagonism that last winter’s Gaza war has only heightened. Likewise, Palestinians from the West Bank are mostly prevented from crossing boundaries into Jerusalem and Israel, boundaries marked out in part by the very real wall Israel has built around the city against the threat of suicide bombers and other attacks.  The result, audiences for the concerts are very rarely mixed.

One of the distinguished European soloists who have been drawn to Jerusalem by Huetter describes the 35-year-old, in French, as un fou utopique, a “crazy utopian” perhaps.  Whatever optimistic designs he may harbour about bringing Israelis and Palestinians together in the divided city, however, he strikes me as having a fairly realistic, modest goal. He’s not expecting everyone to hold hands, listen to the music and forget about the troubles around them. But at least the audiences, he says, however different they may be from each other, understand that they are participating in a month-long phenomenon that stretches across the divide.  They form, he says, a single Sounding Jerusalem community in a place where the word community is most usually expressed in the plural.

And when cultures do clash, and voices are raised, Huetter seems just as happy.  He wants, he says, while setting the highest of musical standards, to generate reactions, shared human experiences, that also promote reflection on the environment in which the works are played.

It can just be fun, too. The locations of the festival surprise even long-time residents of the city and its environs. Who knew there was a mediaeval Arab castle in that village near Ramallah? I had also never seen the courtyard pictured above in the village of Ein Kerem, in Israel, which is part of a Christian-run care facility for disabled children. Nor did I know quite what lurked on the rooftops of the Old City until invited up for last year’s spectacular festival finale (left). Featuring dozens of young Middle Eastern and European brass players scattered across Jerusalem, the spectacular will be reprised for the end of this year’s festival on Sunday.

Listen out for more reactions.

PICTURES: Sounding Jerusalem/Christian Langwirth

The latest front in the ongoing conflict in Israel between ultra-Orthodox Judaism and less observant movements -- the subject of a brief blog yesterday on Faithworld -- heated up with a front page article in the Jerusalem Post on Thursday that quoted an ultra-Orthodox parliament member calling Reform Jews, among other things, "trecherous backstabbers to Judaism".

The rather harsh, though not unprecedented, comments were reportedly made by Moshe Gafni from the religious United Torah Judaism party. Gafni is chairman of Israel's finance committee and was quoted in a phone interview following a high court decision that ordered federal funding of non-Orthodox Jewish conversions.

Gafni's office could not be reached to confirm the quote.

It's not clear if Gafni will have any influence in this specific ruling, but his promise to try to block any attempts to allocate funds could certainly take the quarrel up a notch.