AxisMundi Jerusalem
Inside Israel and the Palestinian Territories
Giving no quarter, Jerusalem’s Armenians keep flame alive
The rare sense of space and calm that marks out the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City is both its blessing and its curse. The acquisition of the land, and construction of the beautiful St. James Cathedral at its heart, speaks volumes for the abilities of this small ethnic diaspora from the Caucasus to secure favour from the Ottoman sultans who partitioned the walled holy city in the hope of a bit of peace from religious rivalries.
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.
Writing on the walls
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip may just feel a little less isolated today. Israel is bowing to international pressure and rejigging its embargo on the enclave in the wake of the bloodshed 3 weeks ago when it enforced a longstanding maritime blockade.
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.
Iran will get the bomb and then there will be peace in the middle east-talk is cheap!
Jerusalem Power
To spend the past few days in the crowded, narrow streets of Jerusalem’s Old City, among the multilingual throngs marking Passover or Easter, was to get an unforgettable sense of the power this place has over the minds of millions. It also gives an insight into some of the ways Jerusalem, and control of access to its holy sites, plays into global power politics.
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.
It amazes me (and my friends) that the PA or even others think that they should be the owners or even have a say in who goes where in the “Old City”. Israel bought that area not only by previous ownership but by blood and treasure in the war of 1967. Which Israel won.
Ever hear the phrase “Winners take all”.
So if you go by history’s thousands of years presidence, “The Old City” now belongs to Israel to do with as they please. Including who goes where and when.
It is as simple as that, but modern Political Correctness and liberal and Islamic pressure to give them something that is no longer theirs (if it ever really was) continues. The whining and begging gets louder and more militant every year.
As long as the PA is a welfare state getting most everything free from without, as long as they want to be in fact and name – Victims. They will never be any better than the Black population of America. They will only be beggars who will always hold their hands out for more instead of using those same hands to work and provide for themselves.
Papa Ray
As Afghan civilians killed, Israel complains of ‘double standards’ over Gaza
A NATO air strike in Afghanistan that mistakenly killed 27 civilians has added a new dimensionto a divide between Israel and Western critics of its conduct in last year’s Gaza war.
Commentators in Israel’s biggest newspapers seized on Sunday’s carnage to argue that the West was quick to judge the Israeli military over Palestinian civilian casualties while ignoring the death of innocents in Afghanistan.
Stung by a U.N. commission’s accusations of war crimes in the Gaza conflict, Israel has been vocal in its attacks on the findings and the panel’s chairman, South African jurist Richard Goldstone, calling the allegations unfair and unbalanced.
“Where is Goldstone?” asked Eitan Haber, a columnist for the popular Yedioth Ahronoth daily, in an opinion piece that focused on the air strike in Afghanistan. Haber said the world “will be silent, or at most pay lip service” after the Afghan civilian deaths, while “crying and screaming over every scratch to a Palestinian child”.
Israel has said its military did its best to keep civilian casualties to a minimum during the Gaza war while battling gunmen operating in urban areas. Goldstone also accused Gaza’s Hamas rulers of war crimes for firing rockets into Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of Israel’s harshest critics of the Goldstone report, has called for the international rules of war to be changed to reflect the difficulties of fighting militants among a civilian population.
In comments that seemed to echo Israel’s defence of its soldiers’ conduct in Gaza, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan realised more than anyone the importance of avoiding civlian casualties. “But it is also a fact that the Taliban mingle with civlians, (and) they use them for cover,” Gates said in Washington on Monday.
Writing in Israel Hayom, another mass circulation Israeli newspaper, columnist Boaz Bismuth said “a licence to kill was issued in Afghanistan” as a result of “an international consensus about the war on terrorism” after the September 11, 2001 attacks. “Could it be there are double standards in our world?” he asked.
“Big Brother” bumbles into West Bank
It’s a reality television show whose contestants are isolated from the outside world, but “Big Brother” in Israel has managed to set off yet another controversy over Palestine policies.
Cameras at the studio-cum-commune outside Jerusalem caught Edna Canetti, a 54-year-old liberal activist, telling fellow residents over the weekend she wanted to see a peaceful popular campaign against Israel’s West Bank occupation.
“It bothers me that you’re silent. What’s needed is a revolt,” she declared after refusing to play along with a challenge in which contestants were divided into two groups — “rich” versus “poor” — with a plexiglass barrier between them.
Shifting to Middle East politics, Canetti said Palestinians should similarly tell Israel: “Shove your laws … We’re not going through that checkpoint and we’re not showing you IDs … This is our land.”
The remarks were in themselves unremarkable for Big Brother, an international franchise whose dramatic formula is based on the premise that very different people, cooped up together for weeks, will grow fractious. Yet while Canetti’s assertions met with bored or exasperated shrugs inside the Big Brother house, they found a far angrier audience on the Israeli far-right.
Michael Ben-Ari, a lawmaker from the National Union party who has himself been the subject of public censure after urging Israeli military conscripts to refuse orders to evacuate Jewish settlers from the West Bank, accused Canetti of sedition.
“Mrs. Canetti is, in effect, encouraging Arabs to rise up against the State of Israel, the violation of Israel Defence Force (IDF) troops’ orders, and even open insurrection,” Ben-Ari wrote in a complaint that his spokesman said had been mailed to the Justice Ministry along with a demand for a criminal investigation.
lolol, gotta love that “only symbol of freedom and liberty in the middle east” israel. what a “great” shinning light of democracy. all paid for by the american tax payer.
Recycling garbage into art, Gaza style
A group of Gazan women are beating high unemployment, achieving self-empowerment, and raising environmental awareness, all with a rather unconventional resource: garbage.
With funding from USAID, the Organisation for Supporters of Palestinian Environment launched a project that trains and assists 24 women in creating craft items for sale out of household garbage.
The artists display their flower vases made of plastic soda bottles, or wall-hangings made of tree bark, and scrap metal at two or three-day exhibitions, where potential buyers can make their purchase.
Each piece sells for about 20 to 50 NIS ($5-10 U.S. dollars). Twenty-five percent of the total sales are distributed to the craft workers.
The Gaza Strip is sealed off by an Israeli blockade against the ruling Hamas, which seized control of the strip in 2008 and refuses to recognise Israel.
The isolation has made the Gaza economy almost entirely dependent on foreign aid with unemployment reaching up to 40 percent and poverty levels rising.
This is a really cool idea. Who would have thought to take trash and create sculptures, design, or anything for that matter. It will help with all the crazy things happening as well.
O Hamas where art thou?
Hamas has kept a pretty low profile in the West Bank recently–when will that change?
According to recent polls in both Israel and the West Bank, both Israeli and Palestinian populations are looking to see Hamas step up to the plate in negotiations. But that might not be enough to make Hamas willing to resurface in the West Bank just yet.
Two days ago, the Israel Dialogue Institute released a poll saying that over half of the Israeli public wants to see Hamas brought into negotiations if it recognized Israel (See Reuters’ story here).
A Ha’aretz article said, “it turns out that the majority of the public – 57% – supports the view of (Knesset member) Shaul Mofaz of (Israeli centrist party) Kadima, who published a plan earlier this week, in which he called for dialogue with Hamas under certain conditions. Inside Kadima the idea has tremendous support by some 72 percent of the party’s voters.”
Even more surprising is that among supporters of Likud, Israel’s right-wing political party, 53% of the public approved of negotiating with Hamas.
But according to a recent report in the Carnegie Endowment’s Arab Reform Bulletin, Hamas plans to keep lying low in the midst of the West Bank political storm between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American negotiators (original Arabic here).
“Hamas has also gone to ground on the West Bank because it is convinced that the current situation will eventually redound to its benefit,” says Palestinian writer Omran al-Risheq–especially given Abbas’ refusal to restart peace talks with Israel, the US reluctance to demand a total settlement freeze, and Abbas’ recent announcements that he won’t run for re-election. (Read Reuters’ latest story here.)
israel is has become a terrorist sponsoring nation. just like how hamas is sponsored by iran, the israeli government is sponosring the IDF who has killed thousands of people in palestine and lebanon. The U.S. needs to sending our tax dollars to them. we need to stop sending them a welfare check. if we can distance ourself from israel and its extremist government, we can reduce the threat of islamci extremesim against us.
It’s always sunny on West Bank’s Sesame Street
Shara’a Simsim, the Palestinian version of the popular television program Sesame Street, will air its fourth season on Palestine TV in January 2010. Funded through a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the new edition aims to teach Palestinian children that they can achieve their dream of an independent Palestinian state through tolerance, education and national pride, as opposed to anti-Israel violence.
“Our problem is that for so long we’ve been focusing on resistance and we gave up on other things like culture, education and tolerance,” said executive producer Daoud Kuttab.
The show will target mainly boys by teaching them non-violent ways of expression. Empowered characters such as six-year-old Basel, who in one episode is seen brushing his teeth, wearing his clothes and tying his shoelaces alone and then waving a Palestinian flag and declaring: “It’s Basel’s independence day!”, will serve as role models.
The show’s Palestinian producers chose to make no reference to symbols of the Israeli occupation such as the West Bank barrier and the network of Israeli army checkpoints, which Palestinians say are sources of hardship.
“Little Palestine”
Palestinian reconciliation efforts suffered another setback when President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree for presidential and parliamentary elections on Jan. 24, a move that was rejected by the Islamist group Hamas. Egypt has been mediating for over a year to heal the split between Abbas’ Fatah party and Hamas but the two rivals have continuously failed to reach a unity agreement. (Read our Q&A to understand why the two Palestinian factions fail to reach an agreement on Cairo’s latest proposal.) Most Palestinians believe a unity deal is crucial to achieving Palestinian statehood but don’t think an agreement is likely. However, the rare case of successful Fatah-Hamas partnership in the West Bank village of Beita might convince them otherwise.
Elected leaders of this town come from different backgrounds and political affiliations but all serve on the same council, working in synergy to build a robust independently-funded infrastructure – a rarity in the Palestinian territories.
In the 2004 municipal elections, Beita village produced an 11-member council comprised of 6 Hamas and 5 Fatah members, with Sheikh Arab from Hamas as mayor. Shortly after the elections, Sheikh Arab joined forces with Abu Haitham, a former mayor of 8 years who had headed the Fatah ballot list, and together they worked to start building what they call ‘Little Palestine’.
“We asked ourselves this question, ‘Why did we come to this council?’ and all 11 members answered: ‘We came here for the good of the town,’” Sheikh Arab told Reuters. “We cooperate on what we agree and we pardon one another on issues we do not agree. We try to pretend as if Beita is Little Palestine with all of its problems – political, social, economic, and security issues.”
Like most Hamas leaders in the West Bank, Sheikh Arab was arrested by Palestinian forces loyal to Abbas in 2007, the year Hamas wrested control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah. He was released in 2009 and now serves as deputy to the current mayor, Abu Muhanad, a Fatah member who last held the post while Sheikh Arab was in detention.
“Outside the walls of this municipality, I am still Fatah and defend Fatah, and he is Hamas and defends Hamas. But we defend the right things and what is wrong on what we all agree is wrong,” Abu Muhanad said about his relationship with his deputy mayor.
Unity and cooperation within the leadership isn’t the town’s only achievement, said Abu Haitham, the former mayor who oversees various investments and development projects. “On top of the slogan to have unity and cooperation, we have adopted another principle and that is how to move from relief to development. In this respect, we concentrated on investments and how to rely on our income,” he said.
the americans are the top terrorist in the world, they are a threat for the peace in the world
Gridlock in the Mideast
Want to know how it feels to be George Mitchell, President Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East? Try getting from Jerusalem to Ramallah on a typical weekday at the rush hour. And experience stalemate, frustration, competitive selfishness, blind fury and an absence of movement that even the most stubborn and blinkered of West Bank bus drivers might see as a metaphor for the peace process that is going nowhere fast right now.
It took me 2 full hours to drive the 100 metres (yards) or so from the Israeli military checkpoint in the West Bank barrier around Jerusalem to reach the relatively open main street through Qalandiya refugee camp, the gateway to Ramallah. The reason? Well, at its simplest it’s traffic chaos caused by anarchy, a vacuum of law and order. Look further, as with much else in the Middle East, and you get a conflicting and contrasting range of explanations.
Traffic coming through the Israeli checkpoint must merge with that arriving on a main road that follows the West Bank barrier on the Palestinian side. Just beyond the checkpoint, where these two flows merge, they must also cross with traffic going in the opposite direction, from Ramallah, either into the checkpoint or along the barrier. The snag? No traffic lights, no traffic police, no nothing (barely smooth tarmac and certainly no painted junction lines) at the crossroads. The result? Check out the picture above.
Why does it happen? For many Palestinians, the cause as in so many other respects is Israel. Take away the checkpoint and the Jewish settlements protected by further military posts and traffic would circulate much more easily. For Israelis, the checkpoints, barrier and so on are the result of Palestinian violence during the Intifada of the first part of this decade. Bad traffic is the price ordinary Palestinians are paying. Dig further, and each side will come up with a long line of causes and counter-causes going back many decades, if not millennia. Stuck in a jam at Qalandiya checkpoint, you have time to muse on all of them, believe me.
There are a few nuances. Palestinians point out that the violence of the Intifada has died away. But Israelis note that a security guard was wounded in a stabbing at Qalandiya only on Sunday. As I sat imprisoned in a car on Monday, boys aged 14 or less took advantage of the inability of Israeli jeeps to drive out and grab them to lob stones into the checkpoint. Palestinians complain that Israeli troops have authority over the roads around the checkpoint under the Olso accords of the 1990s, but in fact show little or no interest in managing traffic beyond the confines of the checkpoints search bays. Palestinians argue that they manage traffic pretty well in Ramallah itself. A minor economic upswing in the past few months in the West Bank, grudgingly attributed at least in part to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of easing security roadblocks, seems to have contributed to bringing more cars onto the roads. Traffic lights and traffic cops keep reasonable order in the Palestinian cities. But out in the no man’s land close to the Israeli barrier, they are not allowed to operate.
What else can you learn sitting tight for a couple of hours breathing other people’s exhaust fumes? 1. Yasser Arafat is still popular, as attested to by some nifty graffiti art on the wall itself. 2. It’s an ill wind that blows no good in the Middle East – enterprising young men were hawking gum, cigarettes and sunglasses with rather more success than usual to the stranded motorists. 3. Brutally selfish pig-headedness seems to pay, after a fashion, in these parts. The guys with the baddest attitude and least regard for their fellow man or woman, seem to get to the front of the queue, and no one seems able to stop them.
That’s a pretty sad lesson to take away, but one that Mr Mitchell may be becoming familiar with as he struggles to coax anything looking like compromise from any of his interlocutors. However, if one can find any positives, perhaps it is this. I did eventually get across the crossroads, even if it did take a big chunk of my afternoon. And I did so quicker than I might have done if total anarchy had prevailed. For, in time, at least, in this small, ugly, scarred spot of the Middle East, ordinary people did come to the rescue. Groups of men from the refugee camp, with no obvious authority but the odd chequered headscarf, leather jacket or a don’t-mess-with-me moustache, started directing the traffic, blocking everything from cheeky Suzukis to belching 16-wheelers with their bodies and forcing apart the gridlocked mess to start the process of clearing the backlog. A few thousand years after Moses and the Red Sea, another miracle in the Middle East. Mr Mitchell may have to hope for one. But at least the good folk of Qalandiya camp showed that, just maybe, such things really can happen around here.
Actually, when Mitchell goes from Tel Aviv or Jerusalem to Ramallah, he goes through the Beit El settlement where Israel operates a DCO and a checkpoint for VIPs only.
Thus Mitchell, and other international diplomats, do not see the chaos and abuses of Qalandiya or other checkpoints. It is set up to hide that reality from them.
That is why George Bush (upon his first, last and only visit to Ramallah) could make the disgusting joke, based on his actual observation of the Beit El DCO, that the checkpoint “wasn’t that bad”. For the international VIPs (and some Palestinians VIPs) it really isn’t “that bad”. But for the majority it is. In fact, most Palestinian residents of the West Bank cannot access Qalandiya checkpoint at all unless they have special permits issued by the Israeli military.
The observation of chaos (let’s not conflate that with anarchy, please!) at Qalandiya is on the money, as is the observation that the Israeli Border Police (a branch of the Israeli military) that are stationed there, could really care less about the gridlock. But peel back more layers of the onion and find the reality is much more stark.
It’s a basic problem of apartheid. There is one system for Israelis and their international visitors (complete with new roads and the rule of law) and another for the Palestinians (where gridlock festers and military rule is imposed). It is always harder to see the reality when you benefit from it, isn’t it?
Dear Sirs,
You got your history wrong. The core of the Armenian Quarter was established shortly before the Crusades, in 1165 (with the construction of the Cathedral of St. James), and officially institutionalized during the First Crusade.