(Photo: Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip October 23, 2010/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

"We have the right to control our life according to our religion, not according to your religion. You have no religion, You are secular," said Zahar, who is one of the group's most influential and respected voices.

"You do not live like human beings. You do not (even) live like animals. You accept homosexuality. And now you criticise us?" he said, speaking from his apartment building in the densely populated Mediterranean city.

Hamas, which is an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement and means "zeal" in Arabic, won a fair, 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election and then seized control of Gaza in 2007 after routing rival forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas.

Sitting in a cavernous reception room, with an old Mercedes saloon car parked in one corner, Zahar denounced European states, such as France, for recently barring Muslim women from wearing full face veils in public.

(Photo: Mahmoud Al-Zahar, February 11, 2009/Khaled al-Hariri)

"We are the ones who respect women and honour women ... not you," he said. "You use women as an animal. She has one husband and hundreds of thousands of boyfriends. You don't know who is the father of your sons, because of the way you respect women."

Read the full article here.

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AxisMundi will continue to be an occasional posting point for additional material on stories from the Jerusalem, Ramallah, Gaza and Tel Aviv bureaux, but it will no longer be regularly updated. Thank you for interest. Please keep reading our file at this search site and checking our blogs at Global News Journal, FaithWorld and other Reuters sites.

But the limited, and shrinking population of the Armenians has made their Quarter an object of envy and desire for other groups, not least the fast-expanding Jewish Quarter next door, which has been massively rebuilt during 43 years of Israeli control after being ravaged during the period of Jordanian rule from 1948 to 1967.

For a look at the issues, you can read our story and the accompanying factbox.

The Church itself, proud of a tradition that it was an Armenian king in 301 who first adopted Christianity as a state religion (some years before the Roman Empire), is  a solid fixture of Christian Jerusalem. The small ethnic Armenian lay community around it feels less sure of its future.

Having broken with authorities in Constantinople and Rome as early as the 6th century (in a complex dispute over the human and divine nature of Jesus), the Church later secured under the Ottoman-era status quo which still governs such matters a share of the tripartite governance of Jerusalem’s Christian holy sites, notably the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with the very much larger Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic denominations. The latter churches and a small community of their Arab Christian adherents dominate the Christian Quarter, leaving the Armenians in splendid, if potentially precarious, isolation in their own Armenian Quarter, following their distinctive traditions in their unfamiliar Indo-European tongue with its unique script.

Among challenges facing, the Armenians and the also dwindling populations of other Christian denominations is ensuring cooperation while retaining their distinct traditions. Inter-marriage among different Christian groups is seen by many as a welcome and inevitable way to maintain the communities, but also poses problems for those keen to maintain linguistic, religious and other differences.

Tensions, too, are frequent, not just with Jewish and Muslim populations in Jerusalem, but also within the holiest places of Christendom themselves. While the rich diversity of Christian worship in the city is a joy to many, scenes of armed Israeli police and troops having to pull rival priests, notably Greeks and Armenians, off each other within feet of Jesus’s tomb in recent times have done little to burnish the kind of ecumenism many church leaders preach.

But earlier this month, taking my leave at the end of a 3-year assignment,  I reflected while walking the half-mile (700-metre) cage  (picture, right) that separates Gaza from Israel on  how the barriers that surround and divide this region have, if anything, grown higher, deepening the isolation of the rival parties. That may make any kind of reconciliation more difficult as time goes on. I wrote about this earlier today.

Since Israel pulled out troops from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas took control in 2007, the 1.5 million people in the 40-km (25-mile) sliver of Mediterranean coast, have been cut off. But they’re not the only ones. Israel is itself a virtual island in the Arab world. Though it has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, contact with them seems if anything to be retreating. Relations look little more vigorous at times than they are across the frontlines with Lebanon and Syria. Israeli dreams,  backed by some serious cash lately, of re-establishing a regional rail transport hub, seem far-fetched.

The frontier lines weave their way around and among Israeli and Palestinian populations that live lives in parallel but now rarely meet after a decade in which peace hopes faded amid bloodshed. New divisions among Palestinians, between Hamas and Fatah, have left Gaza virtually at war with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Israelis, too, have seen sharper confrontations within their nation, notably between secular and religious Jews. Inside the West Bank and across Jerusalem,  I’ve also watched new physical barriers going up and the battle for territory has heated up.  Today’s revival of Israeli building plans in the annexed Arab east of the city is the latest development to stir angry passions.

In three years based in Jerusalem, I’ve been impressed by examples of Israelis and Palestinians who do reach over these rising barriers — not least my colleagues in Reuters . But it does seem to be getting harder for most ordinary folk to cross those lines without risking a backlash from their own community.  So although the embargo on goods reaching Gaza looks set to ease, the long divide between the peoples on either side of the wall is unlikely to diminish any time soon.

Tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews protested in Israel Thursday against a court order to desegregate a religious school and force Jewish girls of European and Middle Eastern descent to study together.

Demonstrations were held in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, a Tel Aviv suburb with a large population of religious Jews, before some 80 Ashkenazi parents, Jews of European origin, were to report to jail for defying the Supreme Court ruling.

Israel's ultra-Orthodox minority has long been at odds with the Jewish state's highest judicial authority over edicts which some devout Jews say interfere with their religious lifestyle.

The Ashkenazi parents resisting their daughters' integration with Sephardi, or Middle Eastern, students at a girls' religious school in the Jewish settlement of Immanuel in the occupied West Bank, deny the court's allegations of racism.

They say the two communities have different religious traditions and they do not want their children influenced by Sephardi practices.

Clothed in traditional heavy black garb, ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews held open-air prayers during the protests as police deployed in force, fearing possible violence.

"We have chosen the Torah," one banner read, alluding to the community's belief that the law of God is supreme.

(Photos by Ronen Zvulun)

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“You’re so beautiful!” a middle-aged American woman in a modern Orthodox Jewish headscarf called out across the street to a complete stranger as I was walking through the northern Israeli town of Safed the other day. Anywhere but Safed – also known as Tzfat – and I might have been more startled. But in this mountain-top retreat for Jewish mystics, both of an Orthodox and of less conventional persuasion, the public outburst of peace, love and understanding seemed entirely natural.

Depending on your national cultural references, it’s hard to capture the spirit of Safed precisely – it is part hippie-haven, part devotional centre for hordes of black-clad Hassidic Jews; part Taos, New Mexico, part Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I have tried to sum it up in a story today. While the Orthodox who flock there in the hundreds of thousands every spring to pray at the graves of the founders of Kabbalah mysticism would doubtless take exception to the idea, for an international audience it is probably Madonna who has done most to put Safed on the map lately. The Queen of Pop, whose interest in Kabbalah has drawn many other non-Jewish celebrity emulators, paid a brief visit last year, while on tour in Israel.

The town originally came to prominence when a Roman-era Jewish sage, taking refuge nearby, penned what is viewed as the foundational text of Kabbalah, the Zohar. After a period when it was better known as the biggest Crusader fortress in the Middle East, Safed acquired new fame in the 16th-century when Ottoman rulers let Jews expelled from Spain settle there. They brought back to the Holy Land a Kabbalistic tradition that was substantially reinvigorated by rabbis in Safed. The town, where some believe the Messiah will appear, has since then been one of four holy cities for Jews, alongside Hebron, Tiberias and Jerusalem.

As a town housing both Arabs and Jews, Safed saw violence in the decades leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. In that year, Safed had a  substantial Muslim Arab majority, including the 13-year-old Mahmoud Abbas – now the Palestinian president. Most became refugees as Jewish forces swept through the Galilee. Aside from a mosque, turned into an art gallery, and some Israeli public monuments to the war, there are few reminders of their presence.

The town is now enjoying a new role amid a tourist boom in Israel in general and the green hills of the Galilee in particular. To find out more about Safed and Kabbalah, here are a few sites to explore:  http://www.safed.co.il/; http://www.livnot.org.il/; http://www.tzfat-kabbalah.org/.

PICTURES:

U.S. pop singer Madonna (C), accompanied by Brazilian model Jesus Luz (R), visits the grave of Kabbalist Rabbi Yitzhak Luria at a cemetery in the northern town of Safed September 4, 2009. REUTERS/Gil Cohen Magen

Ultra-Orthodox Jews recite prayers during celebrations for the Jewish holiday of Lag Ba-Omer on Meron mountain in northern Israel May 23, 2008. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

For the majority of Palestinians who are Muslim, as well as for the Islamic world beyond, the Jewish state of Israel’s hold on the city since its capture from Jordan in the 1967 war is a deep grievance. Sporadic violence around the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque has flared again this year.

But with the confluence this year of the Easter calendars of both Western and Eastern churches, as well as the Jewish Passover celebrations, it was the issue of Christian access and the competing claims of different Christian denominations to the holy sites of Jerusalem, that was particularly in focus this past week. And if it was American-accented English that dominated among the visiting Jewish families crowding towards prayers at the Western Wall and which served as a reminder of the powerful alliance Israel enjoys, despite current turbulence, with the United States, it was the Russian spoken by many of the Christian pilgrims which indicated one of the main trends changing the balance of power within that fractured religious community.

The Israeli state insists on its commitment to free access to the Old City for all religion. Complaints over Easter from the Palestinian Christian minority have been met by Israeli assurances that permission to enter Jerusalem is granted where possible and by pleas for understanding of security concerns in a city blighted by violence. There are also concerns about crowd control. Some Israelis also point out that, under Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967, Jews had virtually no access. Local Christians in the, predominantly Greek Orthodox, Christian Quarter and in the Armenian Quarter now complain however, like their neighbours in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter, of encroachment on territory by Jewish groups seeking property. Israel says its laws are fair to all. Some among the Old City’s Christian minority, notably clergy, complain of intimidation by Jewish radicals, including spitting on them in the street.

The treatment of minority Christians by Jerusalem’s rulers has long been an issue in diplomacy. In the 19th century, it was the Muslim Turks who found themselves on the receiving end of pressure from the Christian powers of Europe. Even today, codes regulating relations among the Christian denominations are the product of Ottoman attempts to appease international pressure or to keep the peace among the different churches competing for a slice of hallowed ground around the traditional tomb of Jesus.

Standing amid the rumbustious and noisy sectarian jostling at the Holy Sepulchre on Easter Saturday, as the Eastern churches took part in the millennium-old ritual of the Holy Fire, it was this competition among the Christians that was most visible, and also the subject of plenty of conversation in the hours of waiting before the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, followed by a senior Armenian cleric, emerged from the tomb at the heart of the church bearing flaming torches symbolic of the resurrection. Essentially, local Armenians and Greek Orthodox worshipers were asking “Will the Russians take over?”

During the centuries of Ottoman control, as subjects of the sultan, the Greeks had favoured access to Jerusalem while Western churches were left out in the cold. Armenians, too, had insiders’ rights within the Ottoman empire. But as the sultans’ grip weakened, Roman Catholics and Protestants, backed by the rising European imperial powers, staked their claims in the city in the second half of the 19th century. Russia, repeatedly at war with the Turks during that time, was a relative latecomer, however.

And by the time Russia then abandoned Christianity after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, virtually simultaneous with the fall of Jerusalem to British forces and the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the “status quo” agreement that allocated rights over the Holy Sepulchre to the Greeks, Armenians and Catholics, with no role for the Russian church, remained in place. It has done so through the succeeding periods of British, Jordanian and, now, Israeli rule. But, today, with the huge upsurge in Russian religious observance since the fall of Communism two decades ago, and an intimate relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the state and economic power structures there, some in Jerusalem are wondering if that status quo can survive. The future balance of power among the Christians of the city, in terms of property rights and access to the Sepulchre and other key religious sites, could, as under the Ottomans, again be determined by the interests of the city’s, non-Christian, masters.

Those churches with international backing that can influence Israel may do better. The weakness of some denominations, like the Egyptian Copts, the Syriac church, Ethiopians and others, was demonstrated again on Saturday by their marginal roles at the Holy Fire ceremony (despite their noisy efforts to parade their clergy). Catholics, who with the Greeks and Armenians are the third power over the Holy Sepulchre but eschew the Holy Fire tradition, can count to some extent, like the Protestant churches, on the European Union and Americans to press their case with the Israeli government. The Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, with perhaps the biggest shares to lose, have less certain international power behind them. The Greek state’s current economic woes were  much cited this Easter as a reason for fewer Greek pilgrims.

And the Russians? Well, they have numbers on their side, both in terms of people and money. One Russian businessman standing near me in a prime spot in the Sepulchre church on Saturday confided to paying $700 for a pass from a member of one of the shrinking local Christian communities allocated some of the few thousand spaces for the Holy Fire ceremony. Thousands of Israeli police around the Old City, including dozens inside the church itself, ensured no one could take part without their permission.

Israel has a complex but essential diplomatic relationship with Moscow, which in Soviet days favoured its Arab enemies. And so it has plenty of reason to use what one Christian observer called a “free pass” — its control of access to Jerusalem and its holy sites — to secure diplomatic benefits, including from Russia. (Though control of occupied East Jerusalem, and especially the Old City and the holy sites, forms a core element of peace negotiations with the Palestinians, few see an early end to Israel’s gatekeeper role.) Israel is seeking Russian cooperation in a multitude of foreign policy spheres, not least in curbing a hostile Iran, to which Russia has hitherto been planning to provide armaments and nuclear technology. Among goodwill gestures to Moscow, the previous Israeli government moved to return a piece of prime real estate in west Jerusalem that once formed part of a major Russian Orthodox pilgrimage centre. And the most visible development of late, not least over Easter, has been the Russian influx on the streets. With a million citizens who are recent immigrants from the Soviet Union, including the foreign minister and tourism minister, Israel has seen the economic potential of  those ties, notably in the form of mass Christian pilgrimage. It has scrapped visa requirements for Russians, who now form the the second-biggest contingent of visitors (after Americans) to Israel, a country for which tourism accounts for 6 percent of national income.

As one Armenian worshiper at the Holy Sepulchre put it on Saturday as he surveyed the massed ranks of pious Russians (and the not so pious, with their video cameras running): “The political stakes are rising because of this Russian involvement. In 20 years, we may see a change in the old ‘status quo’ among the Christians.”

PICTURES:

Worshippers hold candles as they take part in the Christian Orthodox Holy Fire ceremony at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City April 3, 2010.
Credit: REUTERS/Baz Ratner

Jerusalem, December 8, 2009/Ammar Awad

Next week is the time of year when millions of people around the world look to Jerusalem as the source of inspiration for the Christian festival of Easter and Jewish Passover celebrations. But this week the city is also the recurrent focus of bitter dispute. The United States has directed rare strong criticism at Israel over its plans to expand Jewish settlements there, saying the building undermines U.S. efforts to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Want to know more? Following are links to a sampling of recent Reuters stories about Jerusalem and a Reuters graphic on new Israeli construction in East Jerusalems:

LATEST NEWS

Israel awaits word, signs are no deal with US

Israel, undeterred, to build in East Jerusalem

FEATURE STORIES

Jerusalem struggle goes on, years after war

Researchers dig up controversy in Jerusalem

ANALYSIS/BACKGROUND

Leaders' Jerusalem rhetoric mirrors conflict

Q+A-Jerusalem: What's at stake? Why does it matter?

Jerusalem clashes could signal more trouble

Jerusalem, focus of faith, conflict

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The new crisis was over an issue regarding which there is even less consensus in Israel than on how to resolve the conflict with Palestinians — an ever-widening social divide between Israel’s ultra-Orthodox and its secular Jewish citizens.

Opposition parties and newspaper headlines screamed outrage at a decision taken by Netanyahu’s cabinet on Sunday to postpone construction of a new wing for trauma medicine at Barzilai Hospital in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, an area often targetted by Palestinian militants firing rockets from the Gaza Strip.

The reason for the delay?

Ultra-orthodox leaders, whose political parties are important political allies of Netanyahu’s, had lobbied to halt construction citing evidence of ancient graves at the site. A recommended compromise called for placing the new emergency room a bit farther from the hospital, in what is now a parking lot, where presumably no other ancient remains have been found.

Critics exclaimed that the consequential delay of up to three years in building the new facility, which the cabinet had approved and the reported extra price tag of tens of thousands of Israeli shekels (dollars) — the cost of moving the site– would amount to an intolerable waste of public funds.

Opposition lawmakers mustered enough signatures to call an emergency session of Israel’s Parliament to try and vote down the government. Doctors drew up angry petitions demanding the government give more priority to the needs of medicine.

Netanyahu, already in Washington for meetings with President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in addition to a speech to the pro-Israel AIPAC lobby, nonetheless responded to the furor, by delaying on Monday any implementation of the cabinet’s resolution of the previous day, pending a further investigation by experts.

Some Israeli commentators criticised his about-face on a decision they thought he shouldn’t have made to begin with.

“He has folded,” screamed a headline in the Maariv tabloid daily. The newspaper’s competitor, Yedioth Ahronoth, took a predictable opposite tack, its leading columnist Nahum Barnea opining, “he didn’t fold, he came to his senses.”

Eitan Haber, once spokesman for the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, wrote that he hoped the controversy had sparked enough outrage to persuade politicians to roll back the influence of ultra-Orthodox religious parties in government.

Two ultra-Orthodox religious parties hold swing votes in Netanyahu’s coalition, one of them represented in the cabinet by a deputy health minister, said to have been the one responsible for pressuring to move the planned emergency room.

Political parties representing ultra-Orthodox constituents have held cabinet seats in most Israeli governments since the 1970′s. This reality has given some very conservative rabbis much more influence than their numbers in Israel’s population, where the fervently devout are a minority.

“First Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak cancelled talks in Cairo and flew to hospital for gallbladder surgery. Then came an Israeli gift of broken glass and an eerie power outage in the “Hall of Remembrance” for the Holocaust. By the time the lights flickered back on, Biden’s Middle East fortunes were sealed with an Israeli announcement that it would build 1,600 new homes for Jewish settlers, ignoring U.S. and Palestinian objections. It was an embarrassing setback that put a spotlight on the challenge the U.S. administration faces getting Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.”

Adam was not the only one who noticed that Israeli Prime Minsiter Benjamin Netanyahu handed Biden a gift that, it turned out, comprised partly of broken glass.

As Israeli forces braced for the possibility that Palestinian anger about Jewish settlements might brim over during weekly prayers in Jerusalem on Friday, some of Israel’s main newspaper commentators were sounding off about the Israeli government’s handling of a visit  by a US leader widely seen as among the best friends Israel has in Washington.

Maariv’s Ben Caspit wrote: “It was supposed to be a visit that would restore our trust. It was the visit that destroyed trust … Biden burned with anger …  Biden is our best friend in the American administration. And we do not have too many friends there. He was supposed to restart the process. To create, finally, a relationship of trust with Netanyahu. Instead, the moment he landed, he discovered a plan to construct sixteen hundred dwelling units in Ramat Shlomo … High-ranking American officials said this week that Israel was not behaving like an ally of the United States. There is no worse thing to say at such a critical time, when Iran is charging toward the last stretch on its way to the nuclear bomb. At this stage, At this stage, there should have been blind coordination between ourselves and them. Netanyahu should have been Obama’s best friend. A word is a word and a promise is a promise, and all the details of the operation to stop Iran’s progress toward the nuclear bomb, including the negotiations with the Palestinians and the Syrians (even in neutral) were supposed to be kept secret for the sake of calming things down on the ground and neutralizing ticking bombs. In reality? There is nothing. Only the broken glass of the souvenir that Bibi prepared for Biden and shattered with his own hands.”

Haaretz, voice of Israel’s centre-left, welcomed Biden’s stress on a need for progress: “In his speech at Tel Aviv University yesterday, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden outlined the American approach to the Middle East in its broadest sense, from the Israeli-Arab conflict to the Persian Gulf.  This is President Barack Obama’s line … The American administration’s position is territories in exchange for peace, peace to ensure security and security to ensure the region’s stability and foil the Iranian nuclearization, which constitutes a ‘strategic threat to Israel’s survival.’  The position also supports a Jewish, democratic Israel alongside a Palestinian state, with the Green Line as its border, minus agreed territory exchanges. This means that if Israel wants to keep neighborhoods and settlements in exchange for other territory, Washington will understand, but on condition that the Palestinians agree to the deal. Biden pointed out the self-evident: To reach a deal, the sides must negotiate directly with each other. And if the corridor to the direct talks is indirect talks, as the Palestinian leaders demand, then this is the way it must be done. For Israel will not find better Palestinian leaders than Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad. Thus the key is to eliminate reasons and excuses for avoiding indirect talks that lead to direct talks. One of these is the Israeli construction beyond the Green Line, whether in West Bank settlements or East Jerusalem neighborhoods. Pushing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to express regret over the announcement of the building plans in Ramat Shlomo enabled Obama and Biden to tie Netanyahu’s hands. They leave him no option of implementing the declarative decisions. This week the Obama administration showed Netanyahu a yellow card. Next time, if Netanyahu takes that risk, whether with ill-intent or because one of his 30 ministers, a mayor or some clerk forgets to coordinate with him – the White House will brandish a red card … This was a support speech by an old friend, with whom the Israeli public can identify. Israel’s leaders should respond to his call.”

In some contrast, Shlomo Cezana and Matti Tuchfeld, writing in Israel Hayom, which generally supports Netanyahu and his right-leaning coalition, wrote: “Diplomatic officials in Jerusalem believe that the has crisis passed after US Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel ended last night. Last night, the officials expressed fear that in the wake of the latest crisis over the construction permits in the neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo, the US expected that Israel would not allow additional construction in East Jerusalem as long as talks with the Palestinians were taking place. The intention appears to be that no construction permits will be granted for the next four months, which fall within the time allotted for the conclusion of the indirect proximity talks … Officials close to Netanyahu expressed satisfaction with the positive note on which Biden’s visit ended. One high-ranking official said last night, ‘There is no change in policy. We’ll continue to build in Jerusalem.’”