Hundreds of visitors to Jerusalem's old walled city got more than the tour of religious holy sites they had bargained for on Sunday, as violence between Israeli police and Muslims at al-Aqsa Mosque spilled over into some of the otherwise charming cobblestone alleys that frame the compound.

Eighteen Palestinians and three Israeli policemen were injured in the latest of a series of recent confrontations at the mosque, situated on al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), which Muslims regard as their third holiest site. Jews revere the area as the Temple Mount, a site where two ancient temples once stood. The Western Wall remnant to a Roman-era temple, one of Judaim's holiest sites, is right next door.

As the clashes ensued, tourists visiting a Christian holy site on a neighbouring Jerusalem street hurried on past as Israeli police scuffled with Palestinian protesters throwing stones, hurling an occasional firebomb and burning trash on an intersecting alley.

Helmeted riot police kept dozens of Palestinians waiting behind metal barricades even as they ushered through the tourists headed to see the site of Jesus' biblical walk down the Via Dolorosa, where he was marched to his crucifixion. White-robed Palestinian medics could be seen hurrying in the other direction, carrying injured men and women out on stretchers to waiting ambulances outside the old city's walls.

Bill Dykstra, a health consultant from Canada's Vancouver, was one of many who sought to capture some of the drama by snapshot. He photographed a few dozen Muslim worshippers kneeling in prayer outside the closed green gates to the compound that houses al-Aqsa, just a few steps away from where some policemen were arresting two screaming Palestinian protesters.

"I see there's confrontation," Dykstra remarked. "There's obviously a difference of opinion, a site of religious turmoil here."

" A lot of people are very entrenched in the past and they need to move forward, for peace, to change their mindset," Dykstra added. But Dykstra had no plans to change his tourist itinerary, he said, before sauntering down the stony Via.

There were also some unusual attempts at dialogue amid the tension.

Sali Abu Sneineh, a 60-year-old Palestinian resident of Jerusalem,  tried arguing with one of the Israeli policeman on duty not far from the shut gates to the Muslim holy site. Abu Sneineh said he couldn't understand why he couldn't pray at the mosque. "This isn't right," he said. "I'm not happy about this," he told the Israeli border guard, who identified himself as Ben.

"What can I do that you're not happy?" Ben replied. "If you people didn't make a fuss there you could all go and pray."

To a reporter watching the exchange, Abu Sneineh turned and said he thought both Israeli and Palestiniain political leaders were to blame, noting the peace talks stalled since December. 

"If we could achieve the peace with a two-state solution, then we wouldn't have any of this. But the trouble is we have one leader who stonewalls and another who acts like a meathead," he said.

(Photo: Posters for protest in Jerusalem against parking lot open on Sabbath, 8 July 2009/Baz Ratner)

In a move that may literally take the breath away from many of the world’s Orthodox Jews, a group of Israel’s top rabbis recently ruled that riding in what for decades have been designated as “Shabbat (Sabbath) elevators,” is  against Jewish law. This decision — already been opposed by other leading rabbis – could force many Jews who live in apartment buildings to sweat their way up staircases once a week.

The Jewish Sabbath, or Shabbat, is meant to be a day of rest. Observant Jews refrain from working, traveling in vehicles, spending money and from using electricity.

In modern times, it’s tough to imagine going 24 hours without using anything electric. So gadgets have been invented to allow the use of certain appliances without physically turning them on. Like timers for lights, called Shabbat clocks. Or special cookers for stove tops. Or elevators for Shabbat.

The Shabbat elevators, which are ubiquitous in Israel and fairly common in Jewish neighborhoods around the world, are designed to stop automatically at every floor, so passengers are guaranteed to (eventually) make it to their destination without having to activate anything electrical.

But in a surprise decision, a group of top rabbis ruled that riding these elevators was not kosher.

The decision, published as a  small notice (shown below) in a religious newspaper last week, decrees that due to changes in the technology of the elevators, based on information provided by elevator technicians and engineers, riding up or down in the elevator indeed breaks the laws of Shabbat. It was signed by Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, a top leader in the ultra-Orthodox community, and others.

It follows discussion over the direct impact on the elevator because the weight of passengers may determine the amount of electricty used.

Other senior rabbis have already come out against the ruling, and Israel’s Haaretz newspaper interviewed some unhappy and disagreeing citizens.

“This is an edict that will not work,” one resident of a Jerusalem retirement home was quoted as saying. “If we all adhere to it, not only will we not leave our rooms on Shabbat, but life in places like Manhattan will come to a standstill.”

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Muslims should avoid prayers that call for the destruction of non-Muslims, an influential Saudi cleric has said.

“Praying for the ruin and the destruction of all infidels is not permitted because it goes against God’s law to call upon them … to take the righteous path,” Sheikh Salman al Awdah told Dubai-based MBC Television channel.

Many mosque imams and preachers in some Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, close their Friday sermons with prayers that call for the destruction of Islam’s enemies, especially Israel and its allies.

Awdah is a director of the Arabic edition of the website Islam Today and he has a number of TV shows and newspapers articles. In 2007, he publicly denounced Osama bin Laden and urged him to abandon violence, a rare move among clerics in his native Saudi Arabia who have avoided direct criticism of the al Qaeda leader.

See the whole story here.

(Photo: Worshippers listen to a sermon in a Baghdad mosque, 23 Oct 2006/Namir Noor-Eldeen)

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With more and more libraries digitising their archives, academics have a growing number of texts they can access without having to get on a plane and journey to distant continents. Perhaps in the near future, researchers will be able to simply log on from their office to view a database of a nearly infinite number of ancient texts, prayers or whatever writings have been handed down by our ancestors.

Of course, problems arise with digitising thousands of years of handwritten documents. Making a digital copy is the easy part. Helping the computer understand what is written, well, that is a tough one.

Gideon Ben-Zvi, who has founded a couple companies in the field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), told me that: “The eyes outperform even the best OCR software by magnitude, although the speed achieved by OCR is far faster than humans.”

That means a researcher can sit for hours in front of a page of text and will always emerge with a better understanding of the words written. However, once a computer program can discern words, phrases and even handwriting in the most highly degraded texts, you can then search through millions of pages almost instantaneously.

Historians will be able to find pages from books that may have been scattered across the globe simply by searching for key words, sentence structures or handwriting styles.

A team of researches at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University has developed an algorithm that could be an important step in achieving such a database. Uri Ehrlich, a liturgist at the university, explained how it took a few years of research to locate a single page stored in a different library that matched a ancient page of text he had been studying. If the research team indeed creates a user-friendly computer program, and libraries agree to centralise these archives in one, giant digital database, imagine the secrets of our past we have yet to discover!

With more and more libraries digitising their archives, academics have a growing number of texts they can access without having to get on a plane and journey to distant continents. Perhaps in the near future, researchers will be able to simply log on from their office to view a database of a nearly infinite number of ancient texts, prayers or whatever writings have been handed down by our ancestors.

Of course, problems arise with digitising thousands of years of handwritten documents. Making a digital copy is the easy part. Helping the computer understand what is written, well, that is a tough one.

Gideon Ben-Zvi, who has founded a couple companies in the field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), told me that: "The eyes outperform even the best OCR software by magnitude, although the speed achieved by OCR is far faster than humans."

That means a researcher can sit for hours in front of a page of text and will always emerge with a better understanding of the words written. However, once a computer program can discern words, phrases and even handwriting in the most highly degraded texts, you can then search through millions of pages almost instantaneously.

Historians will be able to find pages from books that may have been scattered across the globe simply by searching for key words, sentence structures or handwriting styles.

A team of researches at Israel's Ben-Gurion University has developed an algorithm that could be an important step in achieving such a database. Uri Ehrlich, a liturgist at the university, explained how it took a few years of research to locate a single page stored in a different library that matched a ancient page of text he had been studying. If the research team indeed creates a user-friendly computer program, and libraries agree to centralise these archives in one, giant digital database, imagine the secrets of our past we have yet to discover!

An Israeli university student has opened a Twitter site, twitter.com/thekotel, where prayers can be sent for placement in the crevices of Jerusalem’s Western Wall, a Jewish holy site that faithful believe provides a direct line to the Almighty.

You can see our report by my colleague Lianne Gross here.

(Photo: Rolled up messages in the crevices of Jerusalem’s Western Wall, a Jewish holy site that faithful believe provides a direct line to the Almighty.Picture take August 4, 2009. REUTERS/Baz Ratner)

The elections for Fatah's sixth conference, which just ended in Bethlehem, had an unusual first: their first Jewish Israeli member elected to the 120-member Revolutionary Council. Uri Davis, an Israeli citizen living in the West Bank, has been a member of Fatah for 25 years.

Here are some excerpts from Reuters correspondent Ali Sawafta's article on new council member Uri Davis for Reuters Arabic-language service:

Uri Davis, who calls himself a "Palestinian Hebrew", joined the Fatah movement in 1984, and told Reuters he plans to work in the Council's committee for foreign relations.

"I am of Jewish descent, and was born in Jerusalem in 1943 before the establishment of the racist State of Israel. I oppose Zionism."

Davis hopes to work towards restoring Fatah's relations with foreign volunteers who worked with Fatah over the years to fight Israeli occupation.

"I spoke at the sixth conference and said there are hundreds of non-Palestinians who served Fatah and there are thousands who volunteered in all parts of the resistance and the International Solidarity Movement. They worked to defend the rights of the Palestinians, educationally and socially, politically and even militarily. But these reserves have returned to their countries. In the past years Fatah has neglected to connect with them."

Davis, who lives in Ramallah with his Palestinian wife, is currently a lecturer at Al-Quds University, and was a friend of the late Yasser Arafat, and used to frequent the Palestinian leader's headquarters.

Davis is one of the 81 members just elected to the Revolutionary Council (the rest will be appointed by the president.) The election results were considered promising for reformists, as 70 of those elected were new faces, including 11 women.

Many believe that members of Fatah movement, which has the support of the West, will be in a better position to seek reconciliation with the Islamic Hamas movement, which controls the Gaza Strip, and to restore of a degree of unity among Palestinians.

"The movement will come out of this conference more powerful and united," said Davis. "Some believed that the conference would lead to a split in the movement, but Abu Mazen (PA and Fatah president Mahmoud Abbas) succeeded in choosing the right time and place. It was a brave decision."

In an interview with Reuters, Davis said that there may be more Jewish Israelis who would participate in Fatah in the future. It used to be illegal, he says, but since the mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization under the Oslo Accords, it is now permissible. He hopes to be the first of a more substantial presence in future Fatah conferences,, which could be similar to "the small minority of white members in the ANC when South Africa was an apartheid state" .

Check out the clips from our interview with Davis above, where he discusses his personal background and his political stance on recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

You can learn more about Uri Davis and his political and academic work at his website.

In Israel, the death count for the H1N1, or swine flu, outbreak reached 7 yesterday, and for some citizens, fighting the virus has taken on some religious dimensions.

Israel's leading paper, Yedioth Ahronoth, wrote an article about health concerns raised by Israel's Ultra Orthodox media: kissing mezuzahs. A mezuzah is a tiny encasement holding a piece of parchment with a Jewish prayer enscribed on it. Mezuzahs are nailed to most doorways inside a Jewish home, and traditionally, Jews will touch the mezuzah and kiss their fingers when entering a house.  An ultra-orthodox journalist decided to ask seven doctors their opinion on whether this tradition could be dangerous in the Swine flu era.

According to Yedioth Ahronoth, "The doctors unanimously agreed that bacteria leave high levels of residue on such objects, but six of them refused to comment on mezuzot in particular, 'so as not to get in trouble with the rabbis'."

Only one doctor in the article affirmed that their could be a direct link between kissing a mezuzah and contracting the virus.

The results lead some rabbis to make suggestions for how to preserve the practice in light of potential health hazards. Israel's Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar said, "If a specific order is given in the matter, the mezuzah must be kissed from the air, to ensure that the custom is not forgotten."

It's not the first problem there's been concerning the disease and local beliefs. When it arrived in Israel earlier this year, the Ultra-Orthodox deputy health minister insisted on respect for the kosher dietary traditions that ban the eating of pork: he banned references to the illness as "swine" flu...

Earlier this week, we wrote about the "flying rabbis" trying to combat the flu: "Dozens of rabbis and Kabbalah mystics armed with ceremonial trumpets have taken to the skies over Israel to battle the H1N1 flu virus."

After the flight, Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri said "we are certain that, thanks to prayer, the danger is already behind us."

According to an article in Ha'aretz, there have been  2,148 cases of verified swine flu in Israel and half of them have been under the age of 30.

PHOTO:Israeli doctor at the health clinic in Ben Gurion Airport, Israel. The clinic was opened as part of an effort to combat the virus' spread from high-risk countries. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

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.

Much ink has been spilled about the riots of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews in Jerusalem over the past several weeks (See our article on that here). Among some sources, there's a note of disdain for this sector of Jewish population, seen as being contemptuous of the state of Israel while making up the largest portion of the country's welfare recipients.

So I was a bit surprised to see one group rise to defend the Haredim this week --left-leaning bloggers. A few critiques were posted about Israel's Jerusalem municipality's reaction to Haredi riots. Philip Weiss, in his blog Mondoweiss, calls the police treatment of Haredim "bigotry." And Jerry Haber, of the Magnes Zionist blog, began his latest entry saying, "I tend to distrust news reports about Haredim the same way I distrust news reports about Palestinians; both are hated sectors in Israeli society (though the haredim that participate in the state are much more privileged.)"

Not only bloggers took issue with police treatment of Haredi communities. Haaretz, Israel's left-leaning daily, had an editorial condemning Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat's "collective punishment against Haredim".  They criticised his decision to halt municipal services to two ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, Mea She'arim and Geula in response to the street violence.  Barkat said this was done for safety reasons, to prevent attacks on municipal workers.

Arguing that only a slim minority out of "tens of thousands" of residents participated in rioting, the Haaretz editorial says that "for the municipality to declare war on an entire community will only further inflame passions and push Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox community into a "them or us" stance toward the authorities ... [Barkat] must strive to be a unifier and conciliator ... Law enforcement is important, and he must insist on it. But he must not engage in populist hooliganism of his own."

In the meantime, many of us may be wondering why all this rioting started in the first place. Recently, journalist Matt Baynon Rees wrote on just this subject, suggesting that the situation is actually a "sign of good times in Israel. Here's why: It shows that Israelis think there's nothing worse to worry about." Despite difficulties on the horizon, such as the Israeli-U.S. standoff over a settlement freeze,  Rees argues that in comparison to the days of the Intifada, "these are easy times for Israel".

Jerry Haber offers other reasons, ranging from a long-time psyche of victimisation among Haredim in Israel, to frustrations over the mayor's decision to keep open a municipal parking lot on the Sabbath and the failure to stop Jerusalem's gay pride parade. He also says that many Haredim don't believe allegations by Israeli legal authorities that an ultra-Orthodox woman starved her child -- accusations that touched off the urban violence (read more here).

Haber's theory? "It's vacation time for yeshiva bachurim [boys in religious school], and it's hot outside. Those of us who have lived in Jerusalem for a long time ... will recall that protests of this sort are a summer activity."

PHOTO:Ultra-Orthodox Jewish children walk past burning garbage in Jerusalem. July 16, 2009. REUTERS/Ammar Awad