Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "bible"
Making deserts bloom
Jerusalem endures both suffocating dust and torrential downpours as Middle East confronts water shortage.
GlobalPost
Published: February 23, 2009 12:02 ET
JERUSALEM — When you experience the weather here, you start to understand how the biblical prophets found such great material for their doomy prognostications. Last week high temperatures had locals wearing T-shirts in midwinter, then a blanket of dust settled over Israel, only to be washed away by two freezing days of thunder and lightning.
It’s the latest dramatic chapter in what might be called the real crisis of the Middle East — the chronic water shortage affecting much of the Levant.
"This has been an extremely dry winter, with the lowest recorded rainfall since Israel started keeping track,” the country’s National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said at a recent cabinet meeting.
Israel has seen less than half its usual rainfall. Some towns have cut off supplies to certain neighborhoods for limited periods. In Jerusalem, nature’s fecund bounty has been in particularly short supply — only a third of the average. Last month the Israeli Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon advocated changing all the national Water Authority’s mezuzot — scrolls of parchment attached to the doors and containing a Jewish prayer — in the hope of encouraging divine intervention in the water shortage.
The weather — or, one might say, the lack of it — isn’t only Israel’s problem. In Syria, faucets ran dry last summer, after four consecutive winters without adequate rainfall. Worse is to come, however, as precipitation this winter has been about 45 percent of the average.
The water shortage might seem like the least of the region’s worries, given all its apparently more explosive issues. But it’s more than just a problem for Zionists, whose claim to have “made the deserts bloom” with new agriculture is one of their proudest boasts. Academics have been warning for years that a Middle East war could one day be fought over water, rather than land.
Syrians have been forced to buy water for their homes on the black market, because of rising industrial demand combined with falling supplies. The government of President Bashar Assad is trying to persuade Japan to fund a $2 billion project to bring water from the Euphrates River in the east of the country to the populous regions in western Syria.
The Japanese already gave $50 million five years ago to rebuild Damascus’ aging water system. But those were different economic times and the Syrians are concerned that the money might not be forthcoming.
Israel has considered various ideas for solving its own shortage from filling oil tankers with water from Turkey to floating a massive balloon of water across the eastern Mediterranean. Those plans were probably going nowhere even before the recent diplomatic spat with Ankara, sparked by Turkish anger at the Israeli attack on Hamas in Gaza.
That leaves Israelis facing their freakish weather alone. On a drive from the coastal city of Herzliya to Jerusalem on Thursday, I found myself encased in a khaki-orange cloud of dust, blown up from the Sinai Desert. Visibility was a little more than 100 yards.
Arriving in Jerusalem, my blinking eyes were instantly filled with painful grit. An asthmatic friend wheezed with more than a touch of desperation.
Yet 24 hours later, the dust was gone on a tide of rainwater. “The dust dirties, the rain cleans,” read the breezy headline on the back page of Yediot Aharonoth, Israel’s biggest newspaper. But this was no ordinary rain.
During the Jewish Sabbath on Friday night and Saturday, the only people on the streets of Jerusalem were worshippers rushing home from synagogue in the torrential hail downpour, illuminated by lightning and monumental bursts of thunder from the cloud that scudded low over the city in the 50 miles-per-hour winds.
Heavy rain in Jerusalem meant floods on the road alongside the Dead Sea as the water washed down through the deep desert wadis to the lowest point on earth.
On the coast, thousands of Palestinians remained in tents in Gaza, because their homes were destroyed in the fighting there at the turn of the year. Gaza was never exactly a pretty picture in the rain, with its inadequate sewerage system. After the damage inflicted during the Israeli operation against Hamas last month, conditions are even worse.
Critics say the problem is less to do with lack of rainfall and more a matter of ill-used resources. Israeli academic studies show the country wastes 35 percent of its water through leaky pipes. The priorities of Israeli agriculture are questioned, too. Haifa University Professor Dan Schueftan criticizes the massive Israeli watermelon industry for “putting all our scarce water into their product, then exporting it. It’s crazy.”
Maybe deserts just weren’t meant to bloom.
GlobalPost
Published: February 23, 2009 12:02 ET
JERUSALEM — When you experience the weather here, you start to understand how the biblical prophets found such great material for their doomy prognostications. Last week high temperatures had locals wearing T-shirts in midwinter, then a blanket of dust settled over Israel, only to be washed away by two freezing days of thunder and lightning.
It’s the latest dramatic chapter in what might be called the real crisis of the Middle East — the chronic water shortage affecting much of the Levant.
"This has been an extremely dry winter, with the lowest recorded rainfall since Israel started keeping track,” the country’s National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said at a recent cabinet meeting.
Israel has seen less than half its usual rainfall. Some towns have cut off supplies to certain neighborhoods for limited periods. In Jerusalem, nature’s fecund bounty has been in particularly short supply — only a third of the average. Last month the Israeli Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon advocated changing all the national Water Authority’s mezuzot — scrolls of parchment attached to the doors and containing a Jewish prayer — in the hope of encouraging divine intervention in the water shortage.
The weather — or, one might say, the lack of it — isn’t only Israel’s problem. In Syria, faucets ran dry last summer, after four consecutive winters without adequate rainfall. Worse is to come, however, as precipitation this winter has been about 45 percent of the average.
The water shortage might seem like the least of the region’s worries, given all its apparently more explosive issues. But it’s more than just a problem for Zionists, whose claim to have “made the deserts bloom” with new agriculture is one of their proudest boasts. Academics have been warning for years that a Middle East war could one day be fought over water, rather than land.
Syrians have been forced to buy water for their homes on the black market, because of rising industrial demand combined with falling supplies. The government of President Bashar Assad is trying to persuade Japan to fund a $2 billion project to bring water from the Euphrates River in the east of the country to the populous regions in western Syria.
The Japanese already gave $50 million five years ago to rebuild Damascus’ aging water system. But those were different economic times and the Syrians are concerned that the money might not be forthcoming.
Israel has considered various ideas for solving its own shortage from filling oil tankers with water from Turkey to floating a massive balloon of water across the eastern Mediterranean. Those plans were probably going nowhere even before the recent diplomatic spat with Ankara, sparked by Turkish anger at the Israeli attack on Hamas in Gaza.
That leaves Israelis facing their freakish weather alone. On a drive from the coastal city of Herzliya to Jerusalem on Thursday, I found myself encased in a khaki-orange cloud of dust, blown up from the Sinai Desert. Visibility was a little more than 100 yards.
Arriving in Jerusalem, my blinking eyes were instantly filled with painful grit. An asthmatic friend wheezed with more than a touch of desperation.
Yet 24 hours later, the dust was gone on a tide of rainwater. “The dust dirties, the rain cleans,” read the breezy headline on the back page of Yediot Aharonoth, Israel’s biggest newspaper. But this was no ordinary rain.
During the Jewish Sabbath on Friday night and Saturday, the only people on the streets of Jerusalem were worshippers rushing home from synagogue in the torrential hail downpour, illuminated by lightning and monumental bursts of thunder from the cloud that scudded low over the city in the 50 miles-per-hour winds.
Heavy rain in Jerusalem meant floods on the road alongside the Dead Sea as the water washed down through the deep desert wadis to the lowest point on earth.
On the coast, thousands of Palestinians remained in tents in Gaza, because their homes were destroyed in the fighting there at the turn of the year. Gaza was never exactly a pretty picture in the rain, with its inadequate sewerage system. After the damage inflicted during the Israeli operation against Hamas last month, conditions are even worse.
Critics say the problem is less to do with lack of rainfall and more a matter of ill-used resources. Israeli academic studies show the country wastes 35 percent of its water through leaky pipes. The priorities of Israeli agriculture are questioned, too. Haifa University Professor Dan Schueftan criticizes the massive Israeli watermelon industry for “putting all our scarce water into their product, then exporting it. It’s crazy.”
Maybe deserts just weren’t meant to bloom.
Hebron settlers sit tight and worry
As the U.S. increases pressure on Israel to dismantle settlements, Hebron residents wonder who they can turn to. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
HEBRON, West Bank — He’s stayed in the largest town in the West Bank for 36 years, even though most of its 167,000 residents want him to leave. He’s just won a $50,000 prize for his “Zionist activities” there. His country’s new government is vilified around the world because it’s seen as supportive of people just like him.
You’d think Noam Arnon would be feeling a lot more secure than he is.
But the 54-year-old leader of Hebron’s 700 Israeli settlers is worried that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won’t stand up to a new U.S. administration that promises to be tougher on Israel’s continued construction on occupied land.
“I know that we can’t trust him,” Arnon says, as he enters the ancient Cave of the Patriarchs, burial place of the biblical couples Abraham and Sara, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. “[Netanyahu:] is not a strong man. He’s very weak. Under pressure he collapses very fast.”
It’s commonplace among diplomats and foreign correspondents to refer to Arnon as “crazy.” After all, he’s bringing up his eight children in a hostile city whose municipality is run by Hamas. But the tag comes mainly from his opposition to the idea that Israelis ought to leave their settlements in return for peace. If the 282,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank are generally seen as an obstruction in peace talks, the residents of the Jewish Quarter of Hebron are viewed as violent extremists reveling in the hatred that surrounds them.
Arnon, of course, doesn’t see it that way, and he’s not the only one. In a few weeks he’ll receive the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism awarded by Irving Moskowitz, a Florida resident mainly known for his support for controversial attempts by Israeli nationalists to plant colonies in Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem. One reason Moskowitz decided to give the award to a Hebron settler was in recognition of the anniversary of a massacre of Jews in the city by Palestinians 80 years ago. It was followed by the expulsion of the Jewish residents, who only returned in the 1970s.
Until the massacre of 1929, as Arnon likes to point out, Jews had lived in Hebron since Abraham arrived 4,000 years ago. The patriarch bought the cave over which King Herod built the existing massive edifice at the time of Christ in the same style as his Great Temple in Jerusalem. (“Herod,” says Arnon, “was a complicated personality, but he knew how to build.” Which is what many people say about Moskowitz.)
The memory of the massacre, like the hostility of Hebron’s Arabs, only serves to strengthen Arnon’s determination to stay in the dusty, deserted quarter of the town where Israelis are permitted to reside. I walked with Arnon through the once-bustling market area between the Cave of the Patriarchs and the 120-year-old Hadassah building in which he lives. The Arab shops have been shuttered for five years for the security of Arnon and the other settlers.
“Don’t blame me for these shops being closed,” he says. “Blame the terrorists.”
Six paratroopers swap their red berets for helmets as we pass. They go single file into a narrow alley in the casbah, built in the time of Turkish rule. As they step out of sight, each one locks and loads his M-16 and takes a deep breath as though diving into water.
The edgy soldiers are patrolling the dividing line between Israeli-controlled Hebron and the part of the town handed over to the Palestinian Authority in 1997. Arnon needs no reminding who was prime minister when the bulk of his town was given to people he considers terrorists: Netanyahu.
The new Israeli prime minister visits Washington next week. The Obama administration has been trying to weaken his opposition to an independent Palestinian state and restrictions on Israeli construction in the settlements.
Last week, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told a pro-Israel lobbying group that Israel ought to “not build more settlements, dismantle existing outposts and allow the Palestinians freedom of movement."
Combine that pressure with Netanyahu’s pullout from much of Hebron a decade ago and you see why Arnon has some doubts about his community’s future. To those who say Netanyahu is deeply right-wing and couldn’t possibly evacuate settlements, Arnon points out that it was the fiercely nationalistic Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who forced almost 10,000 settlers from their homes in the Gaza Strip settlements in 2005.
When Arnon and I sit with the mayor of Kiryat Arba, the 7,000-person settlement that abuts Hebron, he’s deeply skeptical of Malachi Levinger’s hope to build 2,000 new homes there over the next decade.
“This is very optimistic,” Arnon says.
“If the government won’t help us, God will help us,” says Levinger, whose rabbi father was the founder of the settlement in Hebron.
Levinger says that during the February election campaign, Netanyahu promised him that construction would go ahead full steam in the settlements. “Also after the election, [Netanyahu:] said we’d move ahead with building,” he says.
Asked if the prime minister had actually told him since the election that new building permits would be issued, Levinger backs off. “No, but I’ve been told this in conversations with ministers,” he says. “They’ve told me.”
Arnon shakes his head.
HEBRON, West Bank — He’s stayed in the largest town in the West Bank for 36 years, even though most of its 167,000 residents want him to leave. He’s just won a $50,000 prize for his “Zionist activities” there. His country’s new government is vilified around the world because it’s seen as supportive of people just like him.
You’d think Noam Arnon would be feeling a lot more secure than he is.
But the 54-year-old leader of Hebron’s 700 Israeli settlers is worried that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won’t stand up to a new U.S. administration that promises to be tougher on Israel’s continued construction on occupied land.
“I know that we can’t trust him,” Arnon says, as he enters the ancient Cave of the Patriarchs, burial place of the biblical couples Abraham and Sara, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. “[Netanyahu:] is not a strong man. He’s very weak. Under pressure he collapses very fast.”
It’s commonplace among diplomats and foreign correspondents to refer to Arnon as “crazy.” After all, he’s bringing up his eight children in a hostile city whose municipality is run by Hamas. But the tag comes mainly from his opposition to the idea that Israelis ought to leave their settlements in return for peace. If the 282,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank are generally seen as an obstruction in peace talks, the residents of the Jewish Quarter of Hebron are viewed as violent extremists reveling in the hatred that surrounds them.
Arnon, of course, doesn’t see it that way, and he’s not the only one. In a few weeks he’ll receive the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism awarded by Irving Moskowitz, a Florida resident mainly known for his support for controversial attempts by Israeli nationalists to plant colonies in Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem. One reason Moskowitz decided to give the award to a Hebron settler was in recognition of the anniversary of a massacre of Jews in the city by Palestinians 80 years ago. It was followed by the expulsion of the Jewish residents, who only returned in the 1970s.
Until the massacre of 1929, as Arnon likes to point out, Jews had lived in Hebron since Abraham arrived 4,000 years ago. The patriarch bought the cave over which King Herod built the existing massive edifice at the time of Christ in the same style as his Great Temple in Jerusalem. (“Herod,” says Arnon, “was a complicated personality, but he knew how to build.” Which is what many people say about Moskowitz.)
The memory of the massacre, like the hostility of Hebron’s Arabs, only serves to strengthen Arnon’s determination to stay in the dusty, deserted quarter of the town where Israelis are permitted to reside. I walked with Arnon through the once-bustling market area between the Cave of the Patriarchs and the 120-year-old Hadassah building in which he lives. The Arab shops have been shuttered for five years for the security of Arnon and the other settlers.
“Don’t blame me for these shops being closed,” he says. “Blame the terrorists.”
Six paratroopers swap their red berets for helmets as we pass. They go single file into a narrow alley in the casbah, built in the time of Turkish rule. As they step out of sight, each one locks and loads his M-16 and takes a deep breath as though diving into water.
The edgy soldiers are patrolling the dividing line between Israeli-controlled Hebron and the part of the town handed over to the Palestinian Authority in 1997. Arnon needs no reminding who was prime minister when the bulk of his town was given to people he considers terrorists: Netanyahu.
The new Israeli prime minister visits Washington next week. The Obama administration has been trying to weaken his opposition to an independent Palestinian state and restrictions on Israeli construction in the settlements.
Last week, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told a pro-Israel lobbying group that Israel ought to “not build more settlements, dismantle existing outposts and allow the Palestinians freedom of movement."
Combine that pressure with Netanyahu’s pullout from much of Hebron a decade ago and you see why Arnon has some doubts about his community’s future. To those who say Netanyahu is deeply right-wing and couldn’t possibly evacuate settlements, Arnon points out that it was the fiercely nationalistic Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who forced almost 10,000 settlers from their homes in the Gaza Strip settlements in 2005.
When Arnon and I sit with the mayor of Kiryat Arba, the 7,000-person settlement that abuts Hebron, he’s deeply skeptical of Malachi Levinger’s hope to build 2,000 new homes there over the next decade.
“This is very optimistic,” Arnon says.
“If the government won’t help us, God will help us,” says Levinger, whose rabbi father was the founder of the settlement in Hebron.
Levinger says that during the February election campaign, Netanyahu promised him that construction would go ahead full steam in the settlements. “Also after the election, [Netanyahu:] said we’d move ahead with building,” he says.
Asked if the prime minister had actually told him since the election that new building permits would be issued, Levinger backs off. “No, but I’ve been told this in conversations with ministers,” he says. “They’ve told me.”
Arnon shakes his head.
Global Post: Bibi in a corner
Obama presses Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop building in West Bank settlements. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost May 26, 2009
JERUSALEM — One morning late last week, Israeli Border Police showed up at Maoz Esther, an outpost of Israeli settlers in the West Bank near Ramallah. They waited for a Bible study class to finish, tore down the settlers’ five little shacks and ran the residents off.
A few hours later, the settlers returned, nailing together the battered pieces of drywall shunted aside by the government. Maoz Esther rose again.
This kind of half-hearted approach to clearing out illegal outposts is the way Israel has always handled the settlers. Read more...
JERUSALEM — One morning late last week, Israeli Border Police showed up at Maoz Esther, an outpost of Israeli settlers in the West Bank near Ramallah. They waited for a Bible study class to finish, tore down the settlers’ five little shacks and ran the residents off.
A few hours later, the settlers returned, nailing together the battered pieces of drywall shunted aside by the government. Maoz Esther rose again.
This kind of half-hearted approach to clearing out illegal outposts is the way Israel has always handled the settlers. Read more...
Oldest Bible? Tell it to the Samaritans
UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph reports the discovery of a portion of a Bible from 350 AD in the library of the monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai. The Codex Sinaiticus is written in Greek on animal skin and the newspaper calls it "a fragment of the world's oldest bible." Well, I hate to disappoint the good Fathers in the Sinai, not to mention the hacks at the Torygraph, but there's a much, much older Bible on a hilltop just outside the Palestinian town of Nablus. The Abisha Scroll is used in the rites of the ancient sect of Samaritans. I featured it in my Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET. How old is it? Read these few paragraphs from my novel to find out just astonishingly aged it is:
“Our greatest treasure was stolen, Abu Ramiz,” Ben-Tabia said. He lifted the tips of his fingers to his beard, as though he might pull it out in despair at the thought of such a calamity. “I felt terrible shame that it should be during my tenure as a priest here in our synagogue that the Abisha Scroll might be lost.”
“The Abisha?” Omar Yussef’s voice was low and reverent.
“What’s that?” Sami said.
“A famous Torah scroll,” Omar Yussef said. “The oldest book in the world, they say.”
The priest raised his eyes to the ceiling. “The five books of Moses, written on sheepskin three thousand, six hundred and forty-five years ago. It was written by Abisha, son of Pinchas, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron who was the brother of Moses, in the thirteenth year after the Israelites entered the land of Canaan. Every year, we bring it out of the safe only once, for our Passover ceremony on Mount Jerizim.”
“It must be very valuable,” Sami said.
“It’s beyond all value. Without this scroll, our Messiah can never return to us. Without this scroll, we cannot carry out the annual Passover sacrifice, and if we fail to sacrifice on Passover we cease to be Samaritans and the entire tradition of our religion comes to a terrible close.” The priest’s eyes were moist.
“Our greatest treasure was stolen, Abu Ramiz,” Ben-Tabia said. He lifted the tips of his fingers to his beard, as though he might pull it out in despair at the thought of such a calamity. “I felt terrible shame that it should be during my tenure as a priest here in our synagogue that the Abisha Scroll might be lost.”
“The Abisha?” Omar Yussef’s voice was low and reverent.
“What’s that?” Sami said.
“A famous Torah scroll,” Omar Yussef said. “The oldest book in the world, they say.”
The priest raised his eyes to the ceiling. “The five books of Moses, written on sheepskin three thousand, six hundred and forty-five years ago. It was written by Abisha, son of Pinchas, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron who was the brother of Moses, in the thirteenth year after the Israelites entered the land of Canaan. Every year, we bring it out of the safe only once, for our Passover ceremony on Mount Jerizim.”
“It must be very valuable,” Sami said.
“It’s beyond all value. Without this scroll, our Messiah can never return to us. Without this scroll, we cannot carry out the annual Passover sacrifice, and if we fail to sacrifice on Passover we cease to be Samaritans and the entire tradition of our religion comes to a terrible close.” The priest’s eyes were moist.
Suffering 101
Palestinians and Israelis take an eternal debate into the classroom, leaving the UN stuck in the middle. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — In the Book of Lamentations, the people of Jerusalem cry out against the destruction of the city: “Is any suffering like my suffering?”
The answer, of course, is: No. Ever since, Jeremiah’s phrase has pretty much been the catchphrase of the entire Middle East.
On a recent Sunday, the Israeli Education Minister Gideon Saar told the cabinet that the word Arabs use to describe the foundation of Israel — “Nakba,” or catastrophe — would be removed from Arabic-language textbooks in the schools of Israel’s Arab minority. His contention: it wasn’t a catastrophe for him or the government that pays the schools’ bills, so out with “Nakba.”
The same day, Hamas lashed out at the U.N. agency that educates Palestinian refugees. The agency, Hamas alleged, was planning to change its textbooks to teach Palestinian children about the Holocaust. Hamas’s contention: the Holocaust didn’t happen, and teaching about it would legitimize the State of Israel which, in the opinion of most Palestinians, was foisted on them as payback for the Holocaust by guilt-ridden Europeans.
Recognizing the sufferings of the other side is generally the first step in conflict resolution. It makes the enemy seem human. It’s something Israelis and Palestinians find particularly hard to do.
In a letter to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the Hamas-affiliated Popular Committees for Palestinian Refugees called the Holocaust “a big lie that was fabricated by the Jews and a big campaign of propaganda.” The U.N., the letter says, should “erase the subject of the Jewish Holocaust from the curriculum, and stop future attempts to insert strange concepts which contradict Palestinian values and principles.”
Hamas claimed to have uncovered plans to teach about the Holocaust in a human-rights course. There are 200,000 Gazan children in U.N. schools.
U.N. officials tried to set the record straight. Karen Abu Zayd, the UNRWA commissioner-general, said Tuesday that she could "refute allegations that the U.N. school curriculum includes anything about the Holocaust."
A relief, perhaps, to anyone worried about offending Palestinians. Maybe not such a relief to those hoping the U.N. provides refugee children with a fully rounded awareness of history — the history of the people who live right next door.
Holocaust denial is common among Palestinians. That’s because they believe the enormity of the Holocaust diminishes — in the eyes of the world — the significance of their own suffering. The figure of 6 million murdered was made up, they contend, so that it would dwarf the 750,000 Palestinians who lost their homes and became refugees in 1948 when Israel was founded.
Hamas has backers in this regard. Since its international isolation in 2006, the Islamic group has increased its political and financial ties to the Holocaust-denying regime in Tehran.
In contrast, Saar, the education minister, didn’t entirely deny the grievance of Israel’s Arab population at the cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “It can be said with certainty that Arab Israelis experienced a tragedy in the war [of 1948:],” he said. “But there will be no use of the word ‘Nakba,’ whose meaning is similar to Holocaust in this context.”
For Saar it seems to be more a matter of capitalization. That is, 1948 was a catastrophe for the Palestinians, but not a Catastrophe.
“Nakba” didn’t have a very long run in Israel’s schools. The left-wing education minister, Yuli Tamir, introduced it two years ago to third-grade Arabic-language textbooks. Saar took office this spring as part of a more rightist government.
“The creation of the State of Israel cannot be referred to as a tragedy,” he said, “and the education system in the Arab sector will revise its studies in elementary schools.”
All this is just in time for the return of students to school for the start of a new academic year.
Now that’s a kind of suffering everyone can relate to.
JERUSALEM — In the Book of Lamentations, the people of Jerusalem cry out against the destruction of the city: “Is any suffering like my suffering?”
The answer, of course, is: No. Ever since, Jeremiah’s phrase has pretty much been the catchphrase of the entire Middle East.
On a recent Sunday, the Israeli Education Minister Gideon Saar told the cabinet that the word Arabs use to describe the foundation of Israel — “Nakba,” or catastrophe — would be removed from Arabic-language textbooks in the schools of Israel’s Arab minority. His contention: it wasn’t a catastrophe for him or the government that pays the schools’ bills, so out with “Nakba.”
The same day, Hamas lashed out at the U.N. agency that educates Palestinian refugees. The agency, Hamas alleged, was planning to change its textbooks to teach Palestinian children about the Holocaust. Hamas’s contention: the Holocaust didn’t happen, and teaching about it would legitimize the State of Israel which, in the opinion of most Palestinians, was foisted on them as payback for the Holocaust by guilt-ridden Europeans.
Recognizing the sufferings of the other side is generally the first step in conflict resolution. It makes the enemy seem human. It’s something Israelis and Palestinians find particularly hard to do.
In a letter to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the Hamas-affiliated Popular Committees for Palestinian Refugees called the Holocaust “a big lie that was fabricated by the Jews and a big campaign of propaganda.” The U.N., the letter says, should “erase the subject of the Jewish Holocaust from the curriculum, and stop future attempts to insert strange concepts which contradict Palestinian values and principles.”
Hamas claimed to have uncovered plans to teach about the Holocaust in a human-rights course. There are 200,000 Gazan children in U.N. schools.
U.N. officials tried to set the record straight. Karen Abu Zayd, the UNRWA commissioner-general, said Tuesday that she could "refute allegations that the U.N. school curriculum includes anything about the Holocaust."
A relief, perhaps, to anyone worried about offending Palestinians. Maybe not such a relief to those hoping the U.N. provides refugee children with a fully rounded awareness of history — the history of the people who live right next door.
Holocaust denial is common among Palestinians. That’s because they believe the enormity of the Holocaust diminishes — in the eyes of the world — the significance of their own suffering. The figure of 6 million murdered was made up, they contend, so that it would dwarf the 750,000 Palestinians who lost their homes and became refugees in 1948 when Israel was founded.
Hamas has backers in this regard. Since its international isolation in 2006, the Islamic group has increased its political and financial ties to the Holocaust-denying regime in Tehran.
In contrast, Saar, the education minister, didn’t entirely deny the grievance of Israel’s Arab population at the cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “It can be said with certainty that Arab Israelis experienced a tragedy in the war [of 1948:],” he said. “But there will be no use of the word ‘Nakba,’ whose meaning is similar to Holocaust in this context.”
For Saar it seems to be more a matter of capitalization. That is, 1948 was a catastrophe for the Palestinians, but not a Catastrophe.
“Nakba” didn’t have a very long run in Israel’s schools. The left-wing education minister, Yuli Tamir, introduced it two years ago to third-grade Arabic-language textbooks. Saar took office this spring as part of a more rightist government.
“The creation of the State of Israel cannot be referred to as a tragedy,” he said, “and the education system in the Arab sector will revise its studies in elementary schools.”
All this is just in time for the return of students to school for the start of a new academic year.
Now that’s a kind of suffering everyone can relate to.
In Bethlehem, the Third Intifada approaches
Rain on the streets of Bethlehem can't cool simmering tension. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
BETHLEHEM, West Bank — A writer seeks the surprise of a “man bites dog” story. The most violent times of the Second Intifada, which took place under the leaden winter skies of early 2002, gave me mine. I wrote about Arabs in the rain.
It was raining in the city of Jesus’ birth throughout “The Collaborator of Bethlehem,” the first of my Palestinian crime novels. I set the story during the brief Middle Eastern winter because it makes the place look different, not as one might expect.
That’s what I wanted to do for the Palestinians — to make readers look at them as real people, not as the stereotypes we’re accustomed to seeing in the news. Not as violent types rioting in the baking sunshine. But slouching through the drizzle, sitting in their overcoats on their living room couches with no heat.
As I crossed the checkpoint and went through the gate in the Israeli wall around the town, the skies darkened, flat and gray this week, too. By the time I greeted my friend Walid, a former bodyguard to Yasser Arafat, the sky was pouring already.
“The city seems a bit livelier than it was the run-up to last Christmas,” I said.
"Yes,” said Walid, who also happens to be a Palestinian weight-lifting champion (he dead-lifts 680 pounds). “But underneath, it’s very dangerous and everyone fears a Third Intifada.”
Again, not what you'd expect. Palestinians are supposed to be on the way to a better life, with the security and economic improvements pushed by U.S. diplomats and advisers. Stutteringly, without much help from their Israeli counterparts or their own civil strife, but getting there. Still like the rain in this desert town, that view warrants another look.
Palestinian newspapers have reported in the last week that the Fatah Party is preparing for new demonstrations against Israel, which it will dub the “Third Intifada.” (The First Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, was considered a success among Palestinians, because the abiding image was of young boys throwing stones at Israeli tanks. The Second Intifada, 2000 to 2005, failed, because it turned quickly to armed violence and brought the wrath of the Israeli army fully onto Palestinian civilians.)
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is reported to have given his support to a new intifada, provided it eschews firearms. Disappointed with the U.S. failure to force an absolute freeze on Israeli settlement construction, Fatah wants to unleash protests of the kind that take place every Friday at the Israeli “separation barrier” near the villages of Bilin and Na’alin. Stone-throwing and tear gas are the order of the day there.
But Hamas would be unlikely to stick to stones. In Bethlehem, Palestinian officials say Hamas has been working underground to rebuild its power — the West Bank is under Fatah’s control and many Hamas men have been jailed. A Third Intifada would be an opportunity for the Islamist group to come into the open, to confront Israeli soldiers and, more worrisome for many Bethlehem residents, to take on the Palestinian Authority and perhaps win control of the city.
Walid and I headed to Dehaisha Refugee Camp. It’s home to 16,000 people, including the fictional character in my books, schoolteacher-detective Omar Yussef (and the real-life figure on whom I based him). I always love being in Dehaisha. It isn’t what you’d expect from the city of childhood Christmas carols.
It’s densely packed, clinging to a hillside. Buildings in poured concrete and cinder block rising to four stories. Colorful graffiti about the dead of the intifadas and about hope for a kind of freedom that seems far off. In the rain, water floods down the steep streets, because there’s inadequate drainage.
In the long, narrow alley where the Akhras clan lives, there was the taint of urine in the damp air, as the drains backed up. On the shuttered front of a small workshop, posters marked the death in March 2002 of Ayat al-Akhras. She was 18. She witnessed her cousin’s death, killed by Israeli soldiers. She decided to take revenge. She became the third female suicide bomber of the Second Intifada. She killed a supermarket guard and an Israeli girl almost her own age. Now she’s a faded poster and, outside the school where my fictional Omar teaches, she’s a large stencil painted black onto a pedestrian bridge, brandishing a pistol.
Her uncle Lutfi al-Akhras hobbled along the street. He greeted me with a left-handed shake. His right hand is a paralyzed fist, since he took a bullet in 1990. You could say he should’ve got the message before that blow. Earlier in the First Intifada, in 1988, an Israeli bullet shattered his left knee and another took away part of his head. Beneath his thinning black hair, a quarter of his skull is plastic. He lets me touch it, from time to time.
Lutfi led me up the cold stairs to his apartment. A bare room, a couple of couches, a television tuned to a Japanese cartoon with Arabic voice-over on a Jordanian channel, a spartan kitchen and a simple bathroom. His wife was back in the bedroom and, though Lutfi is not particularly religious, she stayed there until I left, out of modesty.
His daughter came out to say hello. She’s 10 years old, but she looks 7 at most. I assume it’s the lack of nutrition. After all, Lutfi can’t work with his disabilities. He gets an allowance of 1,350 shekels a month from the Palestinian Authority. That’s about $375. “It isn’t much,” he said. “Well, it isn’t really anything.”
With his good hand, Lutfi shakily cooked some coffee on the stove. Flavored with cardamom, it was thick and good. He was hopeful German mediators could do a deal between Hamas and Israel to free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for an Israeli soldier held in Gaza. Perhaps, he said, the deal would be done by the end of the week, when Muslims celebrate the festival of Eid al-Adha, marking the new moon that ends the Hajj pilgrimage.
I asked him what he thought of the talk among Palestinian leaders of a Third Intifada. “God willing, it won’t happen.” With his good hand, he lifted his useless arm and was quiet. It was as though he were thinking about his crippling in a time of intifada, his niece’s dreadful sacrifice, and wondering how many more lives would be ended or ruined by a new round of violence.
His train of thought seemed to flash from his own disaster and its consequences to those of the Palestinian future. “Thirteen hundred shekels, it’s really nothing,” he murmurs. “God willing, this thing won’t happen. God willing.”
BETHLEHEM, West Bank — A writer seeks the surprise of a “man bites dog” story. The most violent times of the Second Intifada, which took place under the leaden winter skies of early 2002, gave me mine. I wrote about Arabs in the rain.
It was raining in the city of Jesus’ birth throughout “The Collaborator of Bethlehem,” the first of my Palestinian crime novels. I set the story during the brief Middle Eastern winter because it makes the place look different, not as one might expect.
That’s what I wanted to do for the Palestinians — to make readers look at them as real people, not as the stereotypes we’re accustomed to seeing in the news. Not as violent types rioting in the baking sunshine. But slouching through the drizzle, sitting in their overcoats on their living room couches with no heat.
As I crossed the checkpoint and went through the gate in the Israeli wall around the town, the skies darkened, flat and gray this week, too. By the time I greeted my friend Walid, a former bodyguard to Yasser Arafat, the sky was pouring already.
“The city seems a bit livelier than it was the run-up to last Christmas,” I said.
"Yes,” said Walid, who also happens to be a Palestinian weight-lifting champion (he dead-lifts 680 pounds). “But underneath, it’s very dangerous and everyone fears a Third Intifada.”
Again, not what you'd expect. Palestinians are supposed to be on the way to a better life, with the security and economic improvements pushed by U.S. diplomats and advisers. Stutteringly, without much help from their Israeli counterparts or their own civil strife, but getting there. Still like the rain in this desert town, that view warrants another look.
Palestinian newspapers have reported in the last week that the Fatah Party is preparing for new demonstrations against Israel, which it will dub the “Third Intifada.” (The First Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, was considered a success among Palestinians, because the abiding image was of young boys throwing stones at Israeli tanks. The Second Intifada, 2000 to 2005, failed, because it turned quickly to armed violence and brought the wrath of the Israeli army fully onto Palestinian civilians.)
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is reported to have given his support to a new intifada, provided it eschews firearms. Disappointed with the U.S. failure to force an absolute freeze on Israeli settlement construction, Fatah wants to unleash protests of the kind that take place every Friday at the Israeli “separation barrier” near the villages of Bilin and Na’alin. Stone-throwing and tear gas are the order of the day there.
But Hamas would be unlikely to stick to stones. In Bethlehem, Palestinian officials say Hamas has been working underground to rebuild its power — the West Bank is under Fatah’s control and many Hamas men have been jailed. A Third Intifada would be an opportunity for the Islamist group to come into the open, to confront Israeli soldiers and, more worrisome for many Bethlehem residents, to take on the Palestinian Authority and perhaps win control of the city.
Walid and I headed to Dehaisha Refugee Camp. It’s home to 16,000 people, including the fictional character in my books, schoolteacher-detective Omar Yussef (and the real-life figure on whom I based him). I always love being in Dehaisha. It isn’t what you’d expect from the city of childhood Christmas carols.
It’s densely packed, clinging to a hillside. Buildings in poured concrete and cinder block rising to four stories. Colorful graffiti about the dead of the intifadas and about hope for a kind of freedom that seems far off. In the rain, water floods down the steep streets, because there’s inadequate drainage.
In the long, narrow alley where the Akhras clan lives, there was the taint of urine in the damp air, as the drains backed up. On the shuttered front of a small workshop, posters marked the death in March 2002 of Ayat al-Akhras. She was 18. She witnessed her cousin’s death, killed by Israeli soldiers. She decided to take revenge. She became the third female suicide bomber of the Second Intifada. She killed a supermarket guard and an Israeli girl almost her own age. Now she’s a faded poster and, outside the school where my fictional Omar teaches, she’s a large stencil painted black onto a pedestrian bridge, brandishing a pistol.
Her uncle Lutfi al-Akhras hobbled along the street. He greeted me with a left-handed shake. His right hand is a paralyzed fist, since he took a bullet in 1990. You could say he should’ve got the message before that blow. Earlier in the First Intifada, in 1988, an Israeli bullet shattered his left knee and another took away part of his head. Beneath his thinning black hair, a quarter of his skull is plastic. He lets me touch it, from time to time.
Lutfi led me up the cold stairs to his apartment. A bare room, a couple of couches, a television tuned to a Japanese cartoon with Arabic voice-over on a Jordanian channel, a spartan kitchen and a simple bathroom. His wife was back in the bedroom and, though Lutfi is not particularly religious, she stayed there until I left, out of modesty.
His daughter came out to say hello. She’s 10 years old, but she looks 7 at most. I assume it’s the lack of nutrition. After all, Lutfi can’t work with his disabilities. He gets an allowance of 1,350 shekels a month from the Palestinian Authority. That’s about $375. “It isn’t much,” he said. “Well, it isn’t really anything.”
With his good hand, Lutfi shakily cooked some coffee on the stove. Flavored with cardamom, it was thick and good. He was hopeful German mediators could do a deal between Hamas and Israel to free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for an Israeli soldier held in Gaza. Perhaps, he said, the deal would be done by the end of the week, when Muslims celebrate the festival of Eid al-Adha, marking the new moon that ends the Hajj pilgrimage.
I asked him what he thought of the talk among Palestinian leaders of a Third Intifada. “God willing, it won’t happen.” With his good hand, he lifted his useless arm and was quiet. It was as though he were thinking about his crippling in a time of intifada, his niece’s dreadful sacrifice, and wondering how many more lives would be ended or ruined by a new round of violence.
His train of thought seemed to flash from his own disaster and its consequences to those of the Palestinian future. “Thirteen hundred shekels, it’s really nothing,” he murmurs. “God willing, this thing won’t happen. God willing.”
Everyone comes back to Jerusalem
Everyone comes back to Jerusalem. I don’t know why, for the life of me I really don’t.It’s much too hot. The people can be offhandedly mean, and they drive as though they want to kill you. It isn’t a very pretty place once you look close. Oh and, yes, sometimes it gets violent. With jaw-dropping self-obsession, it thinks the eyes of the world are turned admiringly upon it all the time.
Jerusalem sometimes seems like that inexplicably popular idiot everyone liked in high school. Exerting a stupefying magnetism over people with otherwise solid judgment.
I’ve been in Jerusalem 14 years. I’m under no illusions as to what keeps me here. I’ve made a good life for myself with good friends, and the place provides me with the material for my writing.
But I’m rather immune to its other supposed charms. It’s no Tuscany.
Yet all my journalist pals have come and gone – and come back again. I’ve been here so long, everyone to whom I’ve said goodbye ends up dropping in for dinner once more. It wouldn’t happen if I went back to live in Wales. No one is drawn there with idealistic visions of its sublimity…
I spoke to a writing group in the center of Jerusalem last week. Lovely people the lot of them. Mostly young Americans or Canadians, Brits and South Africans who’ve immigrated recently to Israel and want to get together with writers of a similar background. All of them so devoted to Jerusalem.
To some degree, each of them has to live here a while to see beyond the newness. They’re experiencing the same happiness I recall when I arrived at university and discovered a kind of freedom and belonging I’d only before imagined. Until then, they’ll write about Jerusalem in the tones of the biblical psalmist, making of the city a personified lover, the object of desire and devotion.
That isn’t how I see the place. I’ve lived through an intifada, seen Jerusalem mangle the bodies of its peoples and accept the spray of hateful slogans on its walls. I’ve been called all kinds of names by all kinds of people and sued by some particularly unreasonable ones. I’ve come close to being run down on crosswalks by angry Israeli drivers and shoved aside in the Old City by angry hashish-raddled Palestinians.
For a while all that made me angry too. Not so angry that it overcame the feelings of creativity it gave me. There’s a certain anger – spun forward and made pro-active, positive – at the heart of Omar Yussef, the hero of my Palestinian crime novels.
Why didn't I keep on getting angry? Because I discovered I liked the hash-tokers of the Muslim Quarter rather better than I enjoyed the company of the politicians or professional classes I met as a journalist.
That’s one of the main reasons I write crime novels about this place. Crime novels are the opposite of idealization. They see “the skull beneath the skin,” as Eliot wrote of John Webster (a playwright I recommend to anyone who likes a bit of morbid, cynical straight-talk).
It isn’t that I take a negative view of Jerusalem and its environs. I long ago realized that I continue to live here because there’s something I like about it, and its people. Just not in a romanticized way. It’s simply because I’ve come to understand the ways in which the people and their city push each other to the edge of existence. It’s when they’re on the edge that I find out what really counts for them.
And for me.
(I posted this today on International Crime Authors, a joint blog I do with some other...well, crime authors, obviously.)
Israeli settler sect: Messiah is coming
GIVAT ONAN, West Bank—On this windblown outpost in the hills north of Jerusalem, a small group of Israeli settlers strives to bring the day of redemption promised, as they believe, in the Bible.A controversial sect shunned by nearby Israeli settlements, the Brothers of Onan believe that by “spilling their seed” on the land of the ancient biblical Jewish homeland, they will hasten the coming of the Messiah. With the Israeli communities of the West Bank considered illegal under international law, the Onanists are the outcasts among outcasts. But they’re unperturbed.
“We can never give up this land,” says the group’s leader, Rabbi Meir Gedalia Kaplowitz. “You can ejaculate all you want in Tel Aviv or New York, but the Holy One, blessed be He, wants us to perform the miracle here.”
Kaplowitz sits in a messy caravan on a windy hilltop, taking a brief break from his endless routine of Talmud study and self-abuse. Wild-eyed and gaunt, he is the picture of the stereotypical Israeli settler extremist. Only, if anything, even more wild-eyed and gaunt.
The sect takes its name from the biblical Onan, who was ordered by his father Judah to impregnate Tamar, his brother’s widow, and to pass off the resulting children as belonging to his deceased brother. Not wanting to have children he couldn’t regard as his own, Onan fornicated with Tamar but at the moment of ejaculation he “spilled his seed.” God punished this disobedience by killing Onan.
Onanism has become a term used to describe such coitus interruptus, though it is also used for masturbation. In the Hebrew spoken on Givat Onan, masturbation is “onanut.”
“We’re proud to use that word for what we do,” says Haim Hercz, who occupies the caravan next to Kaplowicz. “But it's not all about Onan. Sometimes we call it flogging the Pharisee or chafing the camel. We have a sense of humor, just like people who have sex with women. But anyone can do that five or six times a day. We know that what we’re doing has a deeper purpose, and that’s what keeps us going.”
The Brothers of Onan celebrated Passover with a traditional Orthodox seder meal this week. (“Frankly it was nice to have something else to keep us occupied for six hours,” says Hercz.) But next week they plan to take their struggle to Tel Aviv, where they will pray and “shoot their short Uzis” outside the Israeli Defense Ministry to protest any restrictions on building in the settlements.
Successive Israeli governments have justified new construction in the West Bank by arguing that they are only satisfying “natural growth,” whereby the growing families of settlers must be accommodated with new homes. “Obviously that’s not fair on us,” says Kaplowitz.
Israelis who oppose the settlements say the Brothers of Onan are more than a dangerous fringe group. Orla Mohel, a Tel Aviv masseuse, founded Wank Watch to combat the influence of the group. “I’m concerned that a lot of people in Tel Aviv will see them as harmless ‘frotteurs,’” she says. “But they celebrate a story from Genesis in which a father forces a brother to have sex with his sister-in-law, tries to get a third son to marry her, then has sex with her himself.”
Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz writes in his book “The Genesis of Justice” that Onan probably had non-penetrative sex with Tamar, or maybe anal sex.
“I didn’t go to Harvard and I’m not a lawyer, so I'm no expert on the Bible or anal sex,” responds Mohel. “But these Onanists also don’t want to give up the West Bank, which prevents a peace deal.”
Rabbi Kaplowitz contends that he’s no extremist. Rather he claims to represent the mainstream in Israel. “There are only a couple of dozen of us here, but there are thousands of others who’d like to join us. We’re out here in the lonely desert hills, doing something important for the redemption of the world. It’s not easy. We have very slow internet and sometimes youporn.com goes down for minutes at a time. Our thing is exhausting without visual aids.”
US Mideast envoy George Mitchell has condemned the Givat Onan outpost as “illegal under international law and pretty skeezy.” Mitchell also cited the 4th Century sage St. Athanasius of Paros as saying that “to have coitus other than to procreate is to do injury to nature.”
Kaplowitz rejected the criticism. “I don’t take sex advice from Greeks,” he said.
Big acts cancel, Israel's opera goes on
MASADA, Israel — A parade of bejeweled camels, elaborately costumed warriors and prancing horses crossed the stage. Jerusalem had fallen to a conqueror from the east. The high priest predicted disaster and the wrath of a vengeful deity. Three hours later, with searchlights flitting across the rugged face of this ancient fortress, the Jews were freed, the conqueror stood in awe of the God of the Jews, and, oh yes, a fat lady sang.The Israeli Opera last weekend put on the first performances of its “Nabucco,” Giuseppe Verdi’s greatest early success from 1842, around about where the Romans camped in A.D. 73 when they besieged the 1,300-foot heights of Masada. The company, which is based in Tel Aviv, intends this extravaganza to inaugurate a new annual outdoor opera festival. (There’s also a performance by the great American soprano Jessye Norman, whose services, it should be noted, do not come cheap.)
It might seem a risky proposition to start an annual outdoor opera festival at a time when Israel is isolated not only politically but, increasingly, in the cultural sphere. Pressure from boycott campaigners persuaded Elvis Costello last month to cancel open-air concerts at another historic venue — the Roman amphitheater in Caesarea. This week, alternative rockers The Pixies joined Carlos Santana and Gil Scott-Heron in pulling out of shows in Israel. Pro-boycott protesters have turned their attention to other performers with dates scheduled for Israel this summer, including Elton John.
Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.
Extreme weather boosts creativity
Samuel Johnson wrote that “When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.” The good doctor wrote that in 1758, long before the conversation of Englishmen was informed by the hyperbolic outrage of London’s present tabloids. Just lately it seems he might amend his phrasing to “their only talk.”The British are in a weather frenzy. Snow has shut down Heathrow Airport essentially for five days. Other airports are stuttering, trains are barely operating, roads impassible. The newspapers – and not just the tabloids – accuse the airports authority of dreadful failings, while others curse an unprepared government and the swinging temperatures caused by global warming.
What we writers ought to focus on is the opportunity for unleashing our creativity presented by such extreme conditions.
A writer should seek out extremes. Within himself, of course. But how to uncover those extremes of emotion? External extremes impinge on what goes on in your mind and heart, so that in the end they promote an understanding of the deepest feelings. And it’s deep feeling that makes a novel memorable, more than swish style and zippy plot.
I realized this during the Palestinian intifada. Not because of the extreme weather – though the battles I saw fought out in a rainy January in the West Bank or a sweltering July in Gaza were unrestrained – but rather because I was able to witness people in extreme situations. Surrounded by immoderate violence I saw the worst and best of people. In turn, that evoked my understanding of the best and worst in me.
I came to think of this experience in terms of color. If your everyday life is pretty good, let’s call it green. You get used to seeing green and, even when you change location, you prefer something in a similar shade of green. Then one day there’s a burst of scarlet, and then comes orange, and just as you wonder what that’s all about, your vision is splashed with turquoise. Suddenly the green seems different.
John Lennon wrote that “When the rain falls, they run and hide their heads. They might as well be dead.” He was right: Rain or shine, “The weather’s fine.” If you’re in tune with your surroundings, accepting of them, you can feel your own responses on a deeper level.
Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.
