AxisMundi Jerusalem
Inside Israel and the Palestinian Territories
If Moses had turned right instead of left…
There’s an old joke that goes “If Moses had turned right instead of left when he led his people out of the Sinai desert - the Jews would have had the oil and the Arabs would have ended up with the oranges.”
The Land of Milk and Honey it might be – but over the years one major problem for Israel, a tiny strip of land on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, has been energy security.
Scarce natural resources and hostile relations with its oil-producing neighbours have condemned Israel to paying a high premium to keep energy supplies flowing.
But thats changing – somewhat – since the announcement in late January of a major natural gas discovery off the country’s Mediterranean coast.
The announcement didn’t make headlines at the time as Israel’s 22-day Gaza offensive was drawing to an end, overshadowing all other news.
But it is a headline find – and one that has driven big gains in the value of the companies involved in the projects.
According to Noble Energy, the company that led the exploration, the Tamar gas field 90km off the northern Israeli port of Haifa has up to 5 trillion cubic feet (142 billion cubic metres) of gas – dwarfing the capacity of Israel’s other gas field off the southern port at Ashkelon.
Welcome to Jerusalem, centre of the world
Not so long ago, as war raged in Iraq, there was much talk about a suggestion that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians deserved less attention from the United States and other world powers than it had enjoyed over the past 60-odd years, that the intractable dispute was distracting policymakers and that the plight of the stateless Palestinians was much less central to the problems in relations between the Arab world and the West than had long been supposed. It is a debate that continues, though as journalists who have chosen to work in Jerusalem perhaps we may be forgiven for occasionally pointing out that many thinkers continue to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as central to the problems of the region and so to the world at large.
A survey last year by Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution, Does the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Still Matter?, found that 86 percent of non-Palestinian Arabs, from Morocco to the Emirates, placed the fate of Palestinians among their top three concerns. That was an increase from 69 percent in 2005, when a larval sectarian civil war in Iraq seemed to be dragging Sunni and Shiite Muslims into a broader regional conflict. And it was still higher than the 73 percent who thought the Palestinian question mattered in 2002: “Despite the Iraq war and the increasing focus on a Sunni-Shiite divide, the Palestinian question remains a central prism through which Arabs view the world,” Telhami concluded.
At Reuters, we think it matters. We have more than 70 journalists working in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, covering the news and trends across a range of media, in text, in pictures and in video. You can view much of our work at the Reuters News and AlertNet sites linked to in the bar to the right. This blog site complements that work and, we hope, gives readers and chance to debate the topics that matter in the region and the world beyond. You will see an archive of material from recent months, including during the recent war in the Gaza Strip. With Israeli voters going to the polls this coming Tuesday and Egyptian mediators working against the clock to try and solidify the ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, now seemed like a good time to draw your attention to it and let you know that we plan to enrich the site with more material.
Why call it AxisMundi, the “axis of the world” in Latin? Well from our bureau in Jerusalem, we do sometimes feel we are at the centre of world news. It’s not just us of course. Jerusalem has at times and variously been seen as the Axis Mundi, the centre of the world (indeed sometimes “the world’s navel”), by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. All believe Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son to God on a rock at what is now Jerusalem, before God stayed his hand. That rock, seen as a point of contact between earth and heaven, is now covered by the golden dome in the picture above. It is where Jews built the Temple destroyed by Roman troops 2,000 years ago in a conflict that would end with the Jews’ exile from Jerusalem. It is where Muslims believe Mohammad rose to heaven and where the Dome of the Rock, built after Muslims captured the city from Christian rulers, now stands.
Shared religious ideas have not, of course, always brought dialogue and understanding between people of the related faiths. A mere visit by hawkish Israeli politician Ariel Sharon in 2000 to the area around the rock, known as al-Haram al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary by Muslims and the Temple Mount by Jews, sparked violence that compounded a collapse in peace negotiations. Thousands of people have since been killed, including 1,300 during the 22-day Israeli offensive in Gaza that ended on Jan. 18. Both Jews and Arabs, as well as good number of Christians in the powerful states of the West, have a passionate interest in who controls Jerusalem and its holy sites. Thousands of years after the rock was first seen as sacred, Jerusalem remains at the centre of the world’s concerns and the conflict that surges for a couple of hundred kilometres around it, in the narrow confines of Israel and the Palestinian territories, defines the future for billions of people very much farther afield. Do please visit this site frequently to find out more and to share ideas on the news from centre of the world…
(PICTURE: The moon is seen during a total lunar eclipse from the Dome of the Rock on the compound known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, and to Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem’s Old City February 21, 2008. REUTERS/Eliana Aponte)
I could Not agree with you more sidney, the three Abrahmic religions have a lot in common but the media only highlights the differences and too much emphasis is what we dont have in commmon. At least we can all agree on that humanity is above all but the reality is even children in UN building in Gaza are NOT safe from the Isralei war machine.
But it was NOT always like this when Saladin Ayubi great Muslim warrior who took over the city, he did run rivers of blood. Infact he washed the Jerusalem streets with rose petals to wash off what the crusaders did. In my eyes when the Muslims controled it all were allowed to worship in their holly places.
But yes I agree there should be body consisting members from all 3 religion who should look after Jeruslam.
from Global News Journal:
Politics and pop culture mesh in Gaza conflict
Israel's offensive against Hamas in Gaza has made headlines around the world.
But beyond the raw realities of war -- more than 1,100 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead -- the three-week conflict has also created a peculiar intersection with music, literature and cinema, in the surreal way that wars sometimes do.
The latest away-from-the-headlines development is that Israel's entry for the Eurovision song contest, the annual pan-European song-fest that pits some 40 nations against one another, is suddenly under pressure because of the war.
Israel, which has won the competition before and takes it very seriously, is hoping to enter a singing duo -- Mira Awad, a Christian Arab Israeli, and Achinoam Nini, better known as Noa, a Jewish Israeli of Yemenite descent -- for the event to be held in Moscow in May.
But some Arab and Jewish artists and intellectuals are calling on Awad to pull out of the competition, saying her participation would play into the "Israeli propaganda machine" that seeks to convey an image of national coexistence -- Jews and Arabs living happily under one banner.
"What allows the international community to provide support is Israel's image as a 'democratic', 'enlightened', 'peace-seeking' country," a string of signatories wrote in an open letter to Awad, posted on the website of ynetnews.com.
"Your participation in Eurovision is taking part in the activity of the Israel propaganda machine," they said, with one describing Awad's role as that of a "fig leaf" for Israel.
