Israel targets top rabbis for anti-Arab incitement backing “King’s Doctrine”
Israeli police briefly detained a leading rabbi Sunday as part of a widening probe into a treatise suspected of inciting the murder of Arabs. The investigation has pitted authorities in the Jewish state against far-right West Bank settlers and has led to scuffles outside government institutions in Jerusalem and a sit-down protest that choked off the main highway to Tel Aviv.
Rabbi Yaacov Yosef was seized by detectives on his way back from morning prayers, witnesses said, in a tactic similar to the arrest last week of a senior West Bank rabbi whose followers responded with street protests. ”They commandeered the car and took it away, together with my dad, to an undisclosed destination,” Yosef’s son Yonatan told Israel Radio. The rabbi was freed after an hour, police said.
The clerics had ignored a police summons to be questioned over endorsements for “The King’s Doctrine,” a book written by a more obscure settler rabbi offering justifications from scripture for killing innocent gentiles during religious war. ”Revenge, including strikes on the blameless and on babies, is necessary and important in fighting and defeating evil,” read a passage excerpted on Israel’s top-rated television news.
Israeli security officials fear such edicts could fuel Jewish attacks designed to scupper the eviction of settlers from occupied land they regard as theirs by biblical birthright but where Palestinians, with international support, seek statehood.
A police spokesman said Yosef had been interrogated in connection with “incitement to racism and violence” before being let go. Dov Lior, chief rabbi for the hardcore settlement of Kiryat Arba, was similarly questioned and released last week.
Jerusalem bishop appeals Israel’s residency denial
Jerusalem’s Anglican bishop, a Palestinian, is engaged in a legal battle with Israel over its refusal to extend his residency permit. An Anglican official, who declined to be named, said Israel’s Interior Ministry had written to Bishop Suheil Dawani and accused him of improper land dealings on behalf of the church and the Palestinian Authority, allegations he denies. A spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry declined to comment, citing an upcoming court hearing.
Dawani was elected Bishop of the Diocese of Jerusalem in 2007, and as a non-Israeli was required by Israeli authorities to obtain temporary residency permits. These were granted to him in 2008 and 2009, but not last year. Born in Nablus in the occupied West Bank, Dawani lives with his family in East Jerusalem. Both areas were captured by Israel in a 1967 war. Israel annexed East Jerusalem after the conflict in a step that is not internationally recognized.
The church official said the church had petitioned an Israeli court to order the Interior Ministry to grant new residency permits and a hearing had been set for May 18. In the meantime, Dawani’s lawyer said, it appeared no moves were imminent to deport him.
The Council of Religious Institutions in the Holy Land (CRIHL), which represents Jews, Muslims and Christians, issued a statement Tuesday voicing concern about Dawani’s case. “The CRIHL calls upon the authorities who have jurisdiction in this matter to find a quick issue without delay,” it said. A statement from the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem said it had appealed to Israeli President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Anglican and political officials in the United States and Britain to intervene.
via Jerusalem bishop appeals Israel’s residency denial | World | Reuters.
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Exorcisms and charlatans flourish in impoverished Gaza
The shabby room in a one-story house in suburban Gaza was shrouded in darkness, and only the mutterings of a bearded exorcist broke the silence. A man lay stretched on a grubby mattress, writhing, as the faith healer recited Koranic verses to chase away an evil spirit. “Get out, you demon,” the exorcist, who calls himself Sheikh Ali, threatened the spirit. “Get out or I will burn you.”
There are a lot of demons to chase in this poverty-riddled Palestinian enclave, say a growing number of Koranic exorcists who have set up shop in Gaza, offering to end the torments of their sometimes highly disturbed patients. The growth of exorcist clinics is seen by some as a sign of rising religious fervour among ordinary Palestinians. Hamas, the Islamic militant group that runs Gaza, however, is increasingly concerned that many exorcists are simply charlatans.
Nobody knows how many exorcists are here, but Hamas investigators say they uncovered 30 cases of fraud last year alone. There have also been complaints that healers are using dark magic to cast spells on their clients, and the police say they have found evidence of sexual abuses committed during these sessions.
“We caught some suspects red-handed, practicing exorcism, using magic to separate married couples and other things, under the pretext of helping people,” said Lieut. Col. Abdel-Baset Al-Masri, head of Hamas’s police investigation unit. “It was all an act of deception and exploitation. Some people handed over fortunes and one woman gave all her jewellery to one of these exorcists.”
The idea of demonic possession exists in many religions, and belief in the existence of demons and spirits, known as jinns, is widespread among Muslims, but many mainstream clerics doubt they can possess the human body, and disapprove of the work of the so-called Koranic clinics. Sheikh Ali begs to differ. He says jinns can wreak havoc on human relations, driving a wedge between married couples or causing women to be infertile, and he says his work shows they can also take up residence in a human body.
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Palestinians ask U.N. recognition for Bethlehem’s Nativity Church
Unlike the Sydney Opera House or the Statue of Liberty, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, one of the holiest places in Christendom, is not on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites. It lies inside the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Palestinians, with no state of their own, do not enjoy the full U.N. membership to secure United Nations recognition.
On Monday, they announced plans to rectify what the U.N. cultural agency agrees is a glaring anomaly that has placed the church — built 1,700 years ago over the grotto where Jesus is believed to have been born — in international limbo.
“This step is part and parcel of our plan to end the (Israeli) occupation and establish a state,” said Palestinian Authority Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Khouloud Daibes, presenting a formal submission to the UNESCO heritage committee, which over the past 40 years has denoted more than 900 sites of “outstanding universal value to humanity.”
An estimated two million pilgrims and tourists are expected to visit the Church of the Nativity this year, bending low to enter by the Door of Humility to the basilica, whose rafters were donated by the 15th century English king, Edward IV. For Christian pilgrims it is as holy as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, a few kilometres to the north, which has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site for 30 years.
“The Church of the Nativity is the oldest church we know,” said Lousa Haxthausen, UNESCO’s representative in the West Bank.
Amid row with Israel, Turkish officials attend Istanbul Holocaust Day
In a rare show of unity with Istanbul’s dwindling Jewish community, government officials attended the country’s first official commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of Nazi concentration camps.
“For generations in Istanbul, we have lived together with love, tolerance, fraternity and without discrimination, and we are extremely determined to continue living this way,” Istanbul Governor Avni Mutlu said before lighting a candle with Chief Rabbi Isak Haleva at Neve Shalom Synagogue on January 27. Neve Shalom was one of two temples targeted in a 2003 bomb attack in Istanbul that was blamed on al Qaeda. Twenty-one Muslims and six Jews were killed, and hundreds more were wounded.
Turkish Jews, whose numbers have dwindled to about 18,000 in a country of almost 74 million Muslims, have in recent years again felt under threat as relations between Israel and Turkey, each other’s closest allies in the Middle East until recently, have deteriorated.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, a devout Muslim, castigated the Israeli government in early 2009 for its incursion into the Gaza Strip. Relations hit a nadir on May 31, when nine pro-Palestinian Turkish activists bringing aid to Gaza were killed by Israeli commandoes during a raid of their ship, the Mavi Marmara, in international waters.
Erdogan has condemned anti-Semitism and said he differentiates between Turkey’s Jews and Israeli policies. Still, both episodes kicked off popular anti-Israeli protests in Turkey that frightened Turkish Jews already fretful about their survival in a city that had served as a safe haven for centuries.
“At times of tension, as we saw with the Mavi Marmara incident, some Jews have concerns about their personal security, and in general many wonder what will happen in 20 years with the strain they feel just from their dwindling numbers,” said Louis Fishman, an expert on Turkish religious minorities at Brooklyn College in New York. Hundreds have quietly left for Israel in the last decade in an unofficial migration, he added.
Most Istanbul Jews are descendants of Sephardim who fled the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. During World War Two, when 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, Turkish diplomats helped rescue a few thousand expatriate Turkish Jews, and neutral Turkey offered safe passage to several thousand others.
European far right courts Israel in stepped-up anti-Islam drive
Far-right political parties in Europe are stepping up their anti-Muslim rhetoric and forging ties across borders, even going so far as to visit Israel to hail the Jewish state as a bulwark against militant Islam.
Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front has shocked the French political elite in recent days by comparing Muslims who pray outside crowded mosques — a common sight especially during the holy month of Ramadan — to the World War Two Nazi occupation. Oskar Freysinger, a champion of the Swiss ban on minarets, warned a far-right meeting in Paris on Saturday against “the demographic, sociological and psychological Islamisation of Europe”. German and Belgian activists also addressed the crowd.
Geert Wilders, whose populist far-right party supports the Dutch minority government, told Reuters last week he was organising an “international freedom alliance” to link grass-roots groups active in “the fight against Islam”. Earlier this month, Wilders visited Israel and backed its West Bank settlements, saying Palestinians there should move to Jordan. Like-minded German, Austrian, Belgian, Swedish and other far-rightists were on their own Israel tour at the same time. “Our culture is based on Christianity, Judaism and humanism and (the Israelis) are fighting our fight,” Wilders said. “If Jerusalem falls, Amsterdam and New York will be next.”
Campaigns aimed at Muslims have been gaining ground in Europe, most notably with the Swiss minaret ban last year and France’s law this year against full facial veils in public, which Wilders said the Netherlands should copy next year. Support for these steps has spread beyond anti-immigrant parties and towards the political centre as globalisation and the ageing of Europe’s population fuel voters’ concerns about national sovereignty, according to leading French analyst Dominique Reynié.
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:
Pope seeks Mideast religious liberty, bishops criticise Israel
Pope Benedict called on Islamic countries in the Middle East on Sunday to guarantee freedom of worship to non-Muslims and said peace in the region was the best remedy for a worrying exodus of Christians.
He made his a appeal at a solemn mass in St Peter’s Basilica ending a two week Vatican summit of bishops from the Middle East, whose final document criticized Israel and urged the Jewish state to end its occupation of Palestinian territories.
In his sermon at the gathering’s ceremonial end, the pope said freedom of religion was “one of the fundamental human rights that each state should always respect.” While some states in the Middle East allowed freedom of belief, he added, “the space given to the freedom to practice religion is often quite limited.”
At least 3.5 million Christians of all denominations live in the Gulf Arab region, the birthplace of Islam and home to some of the most conservative Arab Muslim societies in the world.
In their concluding message after two weeks of meetings at the Vatican, bishops from the Middle East said on Saturday they hoped a two-state solution for peace between Israel and the Palestinians could be made a reality and called for peaceful conditions that would stop a Christian exodus from the region.
what are the states where religion is practiced freely(and, of course, belief)?
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.
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
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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The National Socialists also thought it was right and necessary to kill the blameless and babies. Remember? How do people reach the point where killing the innocent is part of their doctrine, part of their phylosophy for living a life of service?