Travel Postcard: 48 hours in Christmas season Bethlehem
The birthplace of Jesus is hardly an easy “weekend getaway” spot, but for a taste of how today’s Holy Land feels, this hospitable Palestinian town draped over the steep hilltops outside Jerusalem is an essential place to visit.
Most foreigners fly into Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, an hour away from Jerusalem, and enter via Israeli checkpoints into the occupied West Bank. Security remains tight but there is currently no tension to deter the hardy traveler.
Visitors love to come at Christmas, when a crowded Bethlehem celebrates its most famous date at the Church of the Nativity in Manger Square. But the town hosts tourists year round. In the summer it’s hot. In winter, there can be a veil of snow on the rooftops so warm clothing is advisable.
Click here for tips from our local correspondent Mustafa Abu Ganeyeh on what to visit and where to eat. Among the places to see are:
Gas in the Holy Land: energy prospecting with the Bible as guide
Using the Bible as its guide, Texas-based energy company Zion Oil and Gas has searched for oil in the Holy Land for a decade. The company uses a map of the 12 ancient tribes of Israel and the biblical assertion – “the foot of Asher to be dipped in oil on the head of Joseph” – as an unlikely guide to help it decide where to drill.
Sitting beneath an 18-storey rig in northern Israel, Zion’s CEO Richard Rinberg translates that reference by pointing to an area on the map where the territory of Asher – long and thin and shaped like a leg – once pushed into the land that belonged to Joseph’s sons.
“It’s exactly where we are,” said Rinberg, a good-humoured Orthodox Jew with a background in accounting and a belief that this biblical prophecy is backed by concrete scientific data. Founded by John Brown, a Christian Zionist who believes the Bible prophesied the discovery of oil in Israel, Zion is just one of a pack of energy companies that has spent years, even decades, surveying and drilling around Israel and its territorial waters. Like many, Zion has yet to find commercial amounts of oil or gas.
But faith runs deep in this part of the world, and Zion and its fellow prospectors were emboldened by the discovery last year by Texas-based Noble Energy of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas in the offshore Tamar field. “There’s little doubt that optimism in oil and gas exploration, both offshore and onshore, has increased,” said Rinberg.
Read the full report here. Also check out a letter the company’s chief explorer wrote to the famous Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson in which he discusses his inspiration and how he thinks the Bible and Jewish commentary describe the fundamental principles of modern petroluem geology.
This is an interesting combination, the Bible and oil in Israel. What are the underlying motivations in an industry that is otherwise obsessed with striking it rich. Is the issue making money? Is it making the modern Jewish state energy independent? Or is it the simple pleasure of fulfilling a prophecy?
This is just another scam by those who prey on the weak minded with too much money and too little sense. The only thing Zion has done is piss away tens of millions of suckers, er, “investor” money.
Instead of relying on a clear misinterpretation of a Fable, why not use some modern technology like the successful offshore drillers have done?
In Holy Land, Christians are a community in decline
In the land where Jesus lived, Christians say their dwindling numbers are turning churches from places of worship into museums. And when Christian pilgrims come from all over the world to visit the places of Christ’s birth, death and resurrection, they find them divided by a concrete wall.
Members of the Abu al-Zulaf family, Palestinian Christians, have left the hills and olive groves of their village near Bethlehem for Sweden and the United States, seeking a better life than that on offer in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Ayman Abu al-Zulaf, 41, moved to France in 1998. But he returned to Beit Sahour, the village where he was born, a year later. “I needed to be here, not in France,” he said. “Without Christians, the Holy Land, the land of Jesus, has no value.”
Today, Christians make up just 1 percent of the mainly Muslim population of the Palestinian territories, said Hanna Eissa, who is in charge of Christian affairs in the Palestinian Authority’s religious affairs ministry. In 1920, they were a tenth of the population of Palestine — land where today Israel exists alongside the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Rising Muslim fundamentalism, a trend across the Middle East, concerns some. But most cite Israeli occupation as the prime cause of emigration and the decline of their community. In Bethlehem alone, the Christian population has slumped to 7,500 from 20,000 in 1995.
Read the full story here. See also our factbox on Christians in the Middle East and analysis Vatican synod to mull Middle East Christian exodus.
Christians in Middle East much more than a numbers game
Franciscan Father David Jaeger is one of the Roman Catholic Church’s most authoritative experts on the Middle East. Until a few weeks ago, he was the delegate of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land in Rome. A convert from Judaism who became a Roman Catholic priest in 1986, he is a noted canon lawyer. He was part of the Vatican team that negotiated diplomatic relations with Israel in 1994 and is part of the Vatican team that is still ironing out the final subsidiary details of that accord. He spoke to Reuters and Reuters Television about the upcoming Mideast synod in the atrium of Antonianum University in Rome. Here is a transcript of parts of the conversation.
What do you expect from the synod?
I think it is intended to be a very significant step forward in the development of the witness of the Church in the Middle East. Synods are convened not simply, or not necessarily, in response to a current affairs concerns but as a moment for the Church to grow, in faithfulness and in effectiveness of witness.
The moment in the Middle East is particularly appropriate for this further development. There is hope for new ecumenical relations. There is a growth of the Church itself in the Middle East, in awareness of fundamental values of Vatican II, such as religious freedom and the civic responsibility of Christians. I don’t think people in the West appreciate to what extent the thematics of the synod are totally new to so much of the Church in the Middle East. Religious freedom some decades ago was not even a known concept. It had never been experienced in 13 centuries. It had always been presupposed that it could not be attained, yet now it is being spoken of in the preparatory documents of the synod as a serious subject, not as something already existing of course, but as something realistically to be looked forward to.
The whole discussion of the civic duty of the Christian, the Christian as citizen, the Christian communities as actors in the national lives of the countries where they live, this is totally new for the region as a whole. For 13 centuries, Christians in the Middle East had been made to live strictly in kinds of socio-political ghettos, not a physical ones necessarily, but socio-political and legal ones, and it was a given that general society was something else, in which as Christians they had no part. Maybe individuals did manage to insert themselves into politics in different countries, of course, but that the idea that as a Christian, as a Christian community, you had to participate in the formation of a national culture, in the development of the national political culture too, these are all new insights in that region. These are all (examples) of Vatican II coming finally to fruition in that region too, so it is a very exiting moment for the Church.
There is great concern about a continuing exodus of Christians from the region. What can be done about that?
Let us say two things to that. One thing is that Christians are not an endangered animal species, nor a vegetable one either. Christians are not some ethnic minority like the Yamomani in the Amazon forests of Brazil or something like that. To speak of Christians is not to speak of a given quantity. The Church is a community of faith in a state of mission.
To Genesis or Stan – What is a “working knowledge of the Bible”? Do you mean that in the same sense of the word as an actor or comedian can “work” his audience. Or do you mean it in the sense of a grifter working his con? Are you perhaps thinking of the book as an operating manual? A do it yourself – or your faith club’s – Popular Mechanic’s guide to spiritual what? Perfection?, holiness?, staying on the good side of the great unknown and unknowable?
The only thing I can see in your comment is a very old attitude that a particular mixture (probably an admixture) of genes are necessary for a promise from God. That attitude is why Judaism has remained a very small minority religion. It didn’t “sell” well to the Romans even though many Roman’s admired their way of life: the regularity and ethic of it. Augustus himself wrote of them and wanted the Roman’s to have the same integrity.
You profess a belief in a God who hands out real estate like it was a grace shed from above and all those who occupied the territory prior to God’s grand scheme are expected to disappear or “submit to the will of God”. If the will of God as defined by those “working the word” isn’t enough, ten of thousands of troops, billions in cash and arms, friends in very high places of the very worldly sort, help too.
In case you haven’t noticed, “submission to the will of God” is a basic principle of Islam. It is the professed operating motive of the Taliban. They profess a total submission to their version of the will of God and expect everyone they encounter to do the same. It is a very old attitude and every world power from the times of the Egyptians (they probably invented it, but it was common enough beyond their borders) had used the idea that they were God (or the Gods’) favorites.
What do you suppose the criteria for the winner in a contest of competing interpretations of the will of God might be? Does your working knowledge shed any light on the subject? If you know you might do well to share it but you better work fast because a lot of people I meet think 2012 is the end of the world because somehow “God” loved the Mayans too?
God sounds very like my grandmother, who had a different story for every one of her children about each one of them, didn’t always get her facts straight, knew how to motivate them with rivalry and tended to take the Enquirer as good reading. But she was lovable, strong and ambitious and wanted her children to do better in the new world. She was a daughter of a large immigrant Italian family, but she did not want them to be raised as Italians. With my Grandmother, ethnicity was something she wanted to overcome. She couldn’t do anything about her genes but she did not make a great fuss about her children marrying into other gene pools. Neither did her husband.
A “nice Jewish girl” married one of my Grandmother’s cousins and she was disowned by her family and even given a ritual burial. My Grandmother was able after a decade or so, to bring the families together again.
My Grandmother died confessing that she “always wanted to be a big shot” and she never realized how big a presence she actually was. Go figure?
NYPD interfaith Holy Land tour, a different kind of New York religion story
There used to be a television series about the New York Police Department that ended with the voiced-over sign-off: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.” We’ve been hearing mostly about only one of the religion stories in New York these days, the controversy surrounding the planned Islamic center and mosque near the World Trade Center site. On a recent visit to New York, I had the pleasure of hearing a very different type of New York story when I interviewed the NYPD officers who led the unusual interfaith tour of the Holy Land described in my feature here.
I met Sgt. Brian Reilly, Detective Ahmed Nasser and Detective Sam Miller at Reilly’s Lower East Side office and spoke to Detective Larry Wein by phone because he was out investigating a case. The Lower East Side has traditionally been so diverse that it’s almost tailor-made for the kind of interfaith cooperation they highlighted with this trip. “I’ve worked here in the Lower East Side and East Village for 29 years and been exposed to people from all over the world,” said Miller, who is Jewish. “It’s just a melting pot of every race, religion and ethnicity.” The NYPD reflects the city’s diversity, he said: “This is the most diversified police department in the world. I’m an investigator. When we need a translator, I don’t have to go outside. We have members of the service who can speak any language in the world.”
Reilly is commanding officer of the NYPD chaplains’ unit (4 Catholics, 2 Protestants, 1 Jewish and 1 Muslim) but these men are not chaplains themselves. Instead, they are leaders in faith-based fraternal organizations for NYPD officers. The Holy Land tour was a completely private initiative. “We weren’t working on somebody’s suggestion,” explained Reilly, a Roman Catholic. “We paid it all ourselves. There was a price for the tour and people decided to go or not. We’re fraternal organizations and we decide how to run our yearly trip.”
After Christians joined the annual Jewish trip to Israel that Miller organized in recent years, the expansion of the group to include Muslim officers was the new element this year. Nasser, the head of the Muslim Officers Society, was enthusiastic despite the fact he and two Palestinian-born officers were held up by Israeli security for two hours on arrival. “It was a very wonderful experience to go there and experience for yourself, to see the Holy Land and be able to share such time with friends,” he said. “It gave me a different way of looking at that region. We focused on what’s common among our members. We’re all brothers in uniform. We wanted to go there and see what’s common in our faiths.”
Nasser said the trip gave rise to conversations about Islam with his non-Muslim colleagues. “When I mentioned some things, like we in Islam say all prophets are the same from Adam to Mohammad, some people looked and said — really? When I said Mary has a chapter for herself in the Koran and Jesus has a chapter for himself, people started to think — oh wow. So they see we have a lot of things in common.”
Nasser also explained to them his take on religion and politics in the Middle East: “People often blame religion but I think it’s more politics than religion. I’m a Muslim and speak Arabic. But I can’t go to Saudi Arabia without a visa because I’m not a Saudi. Politics plays a big role but people like to play with religion and say it’s the cause of everything.”
Great story Tom ! Coming from a family of cops, I am especially proud of these guys. I would like to join their next trip…
Israel Museum takes a new look at the history of the Holy Land
A new Jerusalem exhibit displaying a million years of history in the Holy Land offers Bible buffs and skeptics alike a chance to say: “I told you so!” The Israel Museum, fresh-faced after a three-year, $100 million upgrade, offers an unparalleled look into the development of monotheistic religions, while leaving plenty of room for both science and faith.
The museum’s more devout visitors may feel vindicated by a collection of three-thousand-year-old weapons used by ancient warriors in the Battle of Lachish, verifying the fighting as depicted in the Bible. The scientifically minded can point to a set of 1.5 million year old bull horns on display around the corner, by far predating Earth’s creation as described by the book of Genesis.
A new exhibit features the reconstruction of a church originally built about 400 years after the time of Jesus. It has daunting similarities to a synagogue of the same period reconstructed alongside. The influence can also be seen in later Islamic relics on display nearby.
Witness – Writing on the walls in the Holy Land
Alastair Macdonald has been Reuters Bureau Chief in Israel and the Palestinian territories for the past three years. As a foreign correspondent over the past 20, he has previously been based in London, Paris, Moscow, Berlin and Baghdad. As he ends his assignment in Jerusalem, he reflects in the following story on how he has watched people in the region build an array of barriers, both physical and emotional, to cut themselves off from each other.
With one last exit stamp in my passport, I end a three-year reporting assignment in the Holy Land that has been marked by images of frontiers, by a sense of walls going up and fewer and fewer people finding a way through.
From the minefields of Israel’s frontlines with Syria and Lebanon to the fortified fences around the West Bank and Gaza Strip — much in this month’s headlines — to the walls, old and new, of Jerusalem, physical barriers shape the lives of the 12 million people cut off here in what was once called Palestine.
But those lives, and millions more touched by events that reach far beyond these borders, are marked, too, by less visible internal frontiers — religious, cultural, ethnic, political.
I’ve seen Israelis grapple with divisions among between descendants of early European immigrants and later arrivals from the Middle East, Ethiopia and the Soviet Union. Ultra-Orthodox boys hauling barriers around their expanding neighbourhoods in Jerusalem to protect their Sabbath observances from intrusion by secular Jews has also been a potent image.
Inside the Old City’s gates, Ottoman-era Quarters — Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Armenian — map communal rivalries still alive today. Small battlefields marked by razor wire, flags and hurled garbage show where Israelis are settling in Arab areas.
“Jalaluddin, this sounds to me like one of those book reviews where the critic basically writes, “This isn’t the book I wanted to read!”” “one article whose purpose has been misunderstood.”
I agree that much hinges on perceived intentions and purposes. I also agree that impressionistic reporting is a valid and important component of journalism, complementing both detailed day-to-day headlines and wider analysis. I’d like to see reporters do this more often.
“they may have some difficulty following all the details”
“Most of our readers have specific knowledge about a few issues in the news and general or little knowledge of the rest. They deserve our attention too”
Again, I fully agree! I’m not complaining about the lack of detail in this article, but rather its strange detachment from any wider context. What makes Hass, Levy, and Mondoweiss worth reading is not their detail, but (a) an ever-present awareness of the key issues that loom behind the conflict and (b) objectivity rooted in some sort of principled, rather than semantic, framework. As discussed earlier, it’s Reuters which focuses (perhaps aptly) on the trees rather than the forest; the “Witness” concept would seem to be a way to go a little beyond the trees, as you suggest.
“gives those readers some insight into what’s behind them, it has achieved its purpose.” … “and they will come away from a piece like this with some new understanding.”
Here’s where I disagree. I don’t think that such readers will come away with some new understanding from this piece. They are just as likely (or more likely) to come away with the old and false understanding that the Holy Land is just a hopeless place where people have always hated one another along sectarian lines and continue to do so.
There simply isn’t enough phenomenological depth here for the piece to stand alone on impressionistic grounds, though I’ll bet that’s more to space contraints than to journalistic ability. (Looking back briefly into MacDonald’s archive of postings, I don’t see reason to doubt MacDonald’s ability or sincerity. Better than average, in my quick and humble opinion.) Some reflections on the hierarchy or causal elements of these divides could have easily compensated, and are necessary for a readership which is surprisingly unclear (judging by recent studies) on the most basic facts of the occupation upon which everything here hinges. Someone who “has been Reuters Bureau Chief in Israel and the Palestinian territories for the past three years” surely must have some reflections on this, and those thoughts would give the article depth and purpose and value, but from the article as is, you couldn’t tell whether he arrived there three weeks ago or three years ago.
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Incidentally, I’m not someone deeply invested in the Middle East conflict; I’m probably not far off demographically from your typical readership. I turn to Mondoweiss et. al instead of the BBC or the NYT only because I feel that’s where I can get a quick and meaningful sense of what’s happening in that part of the world free of the semantic chicanery which plagues those two otherwise venerable institutions. (I do have more respect for Reuters, though of course its footprint is more diffuse.) Fisk alludes to this phenomenon near the end of a recent (and powerfully written) column: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/com mentators/fisk/fighting-talk-the-new-pro paganda-2006001.html
African Jews may have the lost Ark of the Covenant – video
Reuters Video Report — DNA confirms that a secretive African tribe are direct descendants of Jews who fled the Holy Land 2,500 years ago, and one their religious artifacts might be linked to the lost Ark of the Covenant.
Out of the spotlight, Israel and Vatican negotiate holy sites
There have been a series of significant and highly publicised events recently in Vatican-Jewish relations.
Pope Benedict put his predecessor Pius XII along the road to Roman Catholic sainthood last month, angering many Jews who accused the wartime pope of turning a blind eye to the Nazi Holocaust. Benedict defended the move this week during his first visit to Rome’s synagogue, which prompted Israel to ask the pope to open up the Vatican archives covering Pius’ reign between 1939-1958.
But behind the scenes, out of the spotlight, the Catholic church and Jewish state have restarted efforts to put to rest a property dispute in the Holy Land that goes back much further than World War Two or Israel’s founding in 1948. Churches acquired large amounts of land around Jerusalem as the Ottoman empire went into decline from the early 19th century. Today, many official Israeli buildings sit on leased church land. But agreement on the legal status of these properties has evaded governments and popes for decades.
After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took office early last year, his Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon was made pointman in a push to settle the decades-old debate. Ayalon was at the Vatican last month to try to narrow divides over six religious sites, including what is believed by Christians to be the Cenacle of the Last Supper, whose future status remains uncertain. Negotiating teams held a meeting again this month, which ended with the vague statement that they “did useful work in atmosphere of cordaility” and that they would meet again. Ayalon heads to the Vatican again in May.
The Vatican got some unexpected support last week from a prominent rabbi who is active in Christian-Jewish dialogue and attended the pope’s visit to the Rome synagogue. Rabbi David Rosen, the British-born international director of interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Israel’s behaviour toward the Vatican since they agreed to diplomatic relations in 1993 has been “outrageous.”
“Any (other) country would have threatened to withdraw its ambassador long ago over Israel’s failure to honour agreements,” he said. Rosen said the Vatican agreed to diplomatic relations after Israel said it would recognise the legal status of Catholic institutions and exempt their property in Israel from taxes.
This was supposed to take about two years, he said, but this has not still not happened. Rosen told Haaretz the Vatican wanted its local hierarchy to be recognised under Israeli law and treated as a whole organisation, rather than treating each Catholic church as a separate nonprofit organisation as is now the case. Israeli bureaucrats wore down the Vatican by negotiating every tax clause separately instead of granting a general concession, as the Vatican expected them to do, Rosen said.
from AxisMundi Jerusalem:
Israel’s burial crisis and the afterlife
Far from the spotlight of peace talks and military conflicts, Israel is facing a different kind of land crisis: it is running out of space to bury its dead. Most Jewish cemeteries in major cities like Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, are filled beyond maximum capacity. Gravestones are packed together leaving little room for mourners to gather.
You can read about a new system of multi-tiered burial chambers being used in the Jewish state to solve the issue of land. It's actually an ancient system, used thousands of years ago by Jewish sages, that was modernised by two Israeli architects and given approval by the country's chief rabbis.
Ancient Sanhedrin tombs and their modern-day revival
Adding to the problem of dwindling burial space for Israelis, each year about 1,500 Jews from around the world choose the Holy Land for their final resting place. For some, the choice could come from the allure of being buried in the Jewish state. For others, it stems from the Bible. And you can always find some group that offers to help make it happen.
Israel's Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger said in an interview with Reuters that it is written in the Talmud -- a collection of ancient Rabbinic texts -- that "the earth of the Holy Land cancels all the sins of the person who passed away so he can go directly to heaven and paradise without sin".
One of the most sought after -- and expensive -- cemeteries is Jerusalem's Mount of Olives, just outside the Old City walls. Many Jews pay thousands of dollars to be buried at the Mount of Olives because the Bibilical Prophet Zecharia said that the Messiah, upon arriving in Jerusalem, will first ressurect those buried there.
Vedic tradition is the only practical solution- cremation with religious rites.
A relevant topic of global importance, indeed. Predictions are that by 2050 the worlds population will grow to a mammoth 9 billions. Even if 60 % of them were to buried, it’s a lot of precious real estate that needs to be downgraded into a burial ground. Last time I heard the land is shrinking and not expanding. The Hindu think tank, thousands of yrs ago, had foreseen the after death ground reality and made it a religious obligation to take the cremation route. Wake up people , a serious land problem that’s going to overwhelm us all in not so distant future.
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