Home > Olives & Thorns > Archives > 2008 > July
July 2008
The case of the missing key
The other day, I found a large iron key hidden in an old armoire in my house. I saved it for my landlord.
“Where did you find it?” he asked. “It’s been missing for many years.” He thanked me and slipped it in his pocket
Turns out the key was one of three known to exist to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, site of the death and resurrection of Jesus, according to the beliefs of most Christian denominations.
My landlord, Wajeeh Nuseibeh, is the doorkeeper to the church. His job is to unlock and lock the front door of the church everyday.
According to family tradition, the Caliph Omar appointed the Nuseibeh family, who are Muslims, doorkeepers to the church in 637. Father has passed the keys down to son ever since.
Wajeeh’s father died 26 years ago. Since then, Wajeeh has held the job.
But nothing in this city is so simple. The local Joudeh family has had custody of the keys since 1192, when Saladin conquered the city from the Crusaders. Since then, every morning, in theory, a Joudeh has delivered the key to a Nuseibeh, who unlocks the door. (In practice, both families have outsourced the job, as the 4:30 a.m. opening time has proven inconvenient.)
So, why was a key to the church hidden in the Nuseibeh’s armoire all these years? Who put it there and how did it come to be “missing”? Perhaps the case of the missing key dates back to a dispute between the families in 1990 over their respective key-holding and key-turning roles at the church.
Wajeeh likes to refer questions about his job to the family Web site. He has commended me on my patience, however (the old, broken refrigerator still sits against the side of the house outside the kitchen door), and I expect the answers will come soon enough.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Attack in Jerusalem near Obama’s hotel
Kenny Lerner, 67, had never witnessed a terror attack before and neither had his wife, Sandy, 65. They’re originally from the Bronx, N.Y. and they’ve lived in Israel for the past 11 years.
“I can still see that man lying on the ground, his leg bleeding,” said Sandy, recalling today’s tractor attack, the second such incident this month in Jerusalem.
They were having lunch at Rosemary’s. It’s a fish and dairy restaurant and they were having fish. They parked farther away than they would have liked, as it turns out a good thing.
Their meal was interrupted as their waiter shouted for them to follow him outside. A yellow front-end loader had left a construction site and was careening down King David Street (coincidentally, very close to where Senator Barack Obama is scheduled to stay tonight on his Middle East tour). It smashed a bus and three cars, leaving four people injured, one seriously.
“We started running after it. That was my first reaction. To stop it. I didn’t know how,” Kenny said.
A civilian shot dead the driver, identified as a Palestinian from East Jerusalem.
It was eerily similar to an attack on July 2, when a Palestinian rammed the front-end loader he was driving into several cars on a busy Jerusalem street, killing three Israelis, before an off-duty soldier shot and killed him. The driver was also a Palestinian from East Jerusalem.
The 250,000 Palestinians who live in Jerusalem carry IDs allowing them to work and travel freely in Israel, unlike Palestinians who live in the West Bank.
“My question is what did we learn from the first bulldozer attack? How did he get access to the bulldozer? Was he brainwashed? Was he acting alone? You can’t just say one crazy guy did this. This is the second time,” Kenny said.
Jewish West Jerusalem is undergoing a building boom and Palestinians fill most construction jobs.
“This is a tragedy for all communities,” Kenny said. “I know there are people in the Arab community who are against it. It hurts them, too.”
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Wine and politics in the Golan
“This is the best place in all the country for good wines,” Shalom Blayer, chief executive of Golan Heights Winery, told me today, referring to the 690-square mile sparsely-populated volcanic plateau that rises to the northeast of the Sea of Galilee.
It is home to eight boutique Israeli wineries, as well as the Golan Heights Winery, Israel’s No. 1 wine exporter and “a driving force in its modern wine industry,” according to a recent issue of Wine Spectator. The magazine called the kosher winery’s Yarden label “top of the line.”
Israel’s leaders often talk of the need to make painful concessions for peace with their neighbors. Israel and Syria will soon enter into a fourth round of indirect negotiations over the Golan, seized by Israel in 1967 and considered occupied Syrian land by the United Nations. The renewed talks began in May and the underlying premise, exchanging the Golan for peace, is unpopular in Israel.
According to opinion polls, three-quarters of Israelis do not support giving up the Golan in a peace deal with Syria. In a small, crowded country, the Golan is an escape. In the winter there is skiing, in the summer hiking, and all year around wine tasting.
Israel and Syria first flirted with a peace deal in 1991 and a few times since.
“You can pack all your baggage and sit on your baggage and wait, but you cannot live this way,” Blayer said. “Until it happens, we are planting, we are investing.”
The winery reinvests between $2.4 million and $3.6 million annually, according to Blayer. It produces 5.5 million bottles a year and in 2007 reported revenues of $45 million.
But, Blayer, like most of the 20,000 Jewish Israelis living in the Golan, is secular and not living there according to religious ideology. While he said he would disagree with his government if it handed back the Golan, he would leave his home of 33 years without a fight.
As for wine, he said there are other regions — the Galilee and Judean Hills near Jerusalem — that produce good wine grapes.
“Israelis,” Blayer told me, “would not go thirsty.”
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
In the West Bank, rockets reverse direction.
Homemade rockets were launched toward an unsuspecting civilian population. Residents worried about their safety and a dangerous escalation to the conflict.
This would be a familiar storyline if not for the alleged perpetrators, Israelis, and the victims, Palestinians.
Israeli police this week arrested Gilad Herman, a religious student at the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar, in connection with the rocket attacks. Residents of the Palestinian village of Burin, which lies in a wide valley ringed by Jewish settlements, said two rockets were fired from Yitzhar, and another from the settlement of Bracha. No one was injured in the attacks.
According to Israeli media reports, the rockets resembled the so-called Qassam rockets that Palestinians once fired with frequency from Gaza, before a cease-fire began a month ago.
“Soon, when we go collecting our olives, we will be scared they will shoot rockets on us,” village resident Munir Qadous told me Thursday.
Residents of Yitzhar told Israeli media this week that the rocket attack did not reflect their community.
Palestinians told a different story. Qadous said settlers recently shot at him as he herded his brother’s sheep on village land. He reported the incident on Thursday to the nearby Israeli army district headquarters.
A woman from the village also complained to the army on Thursday of poisoned sheep. Dozens of sheep in the village have died in recent months. A village veterinarian has determined poison to be the cause of death.
Last month, on a Thursday afternoon, settlers burned 75 to 100 acres of mostly olive trees on the outskirts of the village, residents said. Qadous lost 4.5 acres, more than half his land. Resident threw stones at the fire-setters, to no avail.
Burin villagers also visited the army to complain. “This is doing nothing for us. Even after these complaints, they have attacked us again,” Qadous said.
In a report issued last week, the Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, found that 91 percent of reported crimes perpetrated by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank went unsolved.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Spiritual danger in the skies.
US Airways caused a stir last week when it announced it would no longer show movies on domestic flights in effort to save fuel and other costs.
The airline unwittingly may have added a customer base.
The Rabbinic Commission of Transportation Matters recently ranked airlines based on, among other criteria, movies shown on board. They were the first such rankings of their kind, offered as guidance to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish traveler.
Those airlines that did not show movies at all received the highest rankings.
The commission states, alongside the rankings, published in two ultra-Orthodox newspapers: “The problem of in-flight movies constitutes a terrible spiritual danger.”
Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who constitute 8 percent of the Israeli Jewish population but are the fastest growing segment, generally view television programming and movies to be a corrupting influence and an infiltration of secularism into the community.
But what to do during an in-flight movie?
Individual screens that can be turned off still pose a danger, the commission said, because “it is still possible to see the screens of other passengers, and therefore travelers are advised to equip themselves with a ‘folding curtain,’” according to a partial translation of the report in the secular Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.
The national Israeli carrier, El Al, ranked poorly because it offers individual screens only on flights from Tel Aviv to London and to the United States.
Ranked highest were Swiss International Airlines and British Airways flights from Tel Aviv because they do not show movies at all.
Perhaps U.S. Airways should add a route to Israel.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Troubling beauty.
If art is a reflection of society, Israelis for the past 10 years have been filled with anxiety and dread.
In a major 60-year retrospective, six Israeli museums are showcasing six decades of Israeli art.
The Israel Museum in Jerusalem is displaying the decade 1998-2008. “Troubling beauty,” is how curator Amitai Mendelsohn characterized much of the work.
One of the most talked-about pieces is a staged photograph of Israeli soldiers at a mess table arranged as the Twelve Apostles in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.
“Is this their last supper? Who has betrayed them?” Mendelsohn told a group of foreign correspondents the other day. He called the large photograph a “powerful political statement on sacrifice and betrayal.”
The exhibit, which will be up until mid-August, features young Israeli artists, some of whom have received acclaim abroad. In one piece that appears as a child’s giant diorama underneath a glass case, red tile rooftops rise above a wasteland of ash.
Mendelsohn said the rooftops may represent the bourgeois dream. Pitched terracotta roofs are also the architectural trademark of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
In perhaps the most disturbing work, a 2006 installation titled Tardemon, by Adam Rabinowitz, a papier-mache creature that could be a monkey or a mutated human, is hunched on a windowsill in a dark room, staring at a deep blue sky and a full moon. His head randomly ticks and pivots.
“You wonder,” Mendelsohn said, “if he is the first human or the last human.”
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Jerusalem, divided.
The Jerusalem Post could not have put it better in an editorial last week:
“There is a gnawing sense that the tranquility residents have enjoyed for some years now, since the unofficial end of the second intifada, may be over — and that the biggest danger emanates from within the boundaries of the city itself.”
This, after a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem killed three Israelis by crushing them with the front-end loader he was driving on a busy downtown street.
So, perhaps I should not be surprised that The Jerusalem Post will not deliver to my new house.
I live 50 yards or so from the 1949 Armistice Line. My neighborhood, Musrara, was split into two countries — Israel and Jordan — until the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Jerusalem was “reunified.” There is no longer a physical border, but the boundary remains. Arabs live to the east, Jews to the West.
The fact the Jerusalem Post, a leading Israeli English-language newspaper that dates to the British Mandate of Palestine, will not deliver to my address, 14 Hanevi’im — The Prophets Street, a thoroughfare through downtown Jerusalem — is one more example of a divided city.
“We do not deliver to your area,” the newspaper representative told me over the phone. I told her that I live a block from the American Consulate, and surely it must receive The Jerusalem Post. Perhaps the newspaper deliveryman can add me to his route?
A few days later, the answer came: If you can provide us with an address on the other side of the street, we can deliver your paper there, and then you can cross the street and pick it up.
For The Jerusalem Post, crossing the street was out of the question.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment |
Bomb-bomb-bomb, Bomb-bomb Iran?
Will they or won’t they?
If they do, I’m probably safe. Or, safer than I was last week.
Talk in Jerusalem in recent days has been dominated by the question: Will Israel — or the United States — attack Iran? Israel recently conducted a major military drill over the Mediterranean. Iran said if attacked it would strike back.
I have moved to within a kilometer of the Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, and the Dome of the Rock, where Muslims believe Mohammad ascended to heaven.
In times of tension with Israel’s Muslim neighbors, this is widely believed to be the safest place in the country. Conventional wisdom says no Muslim nation would dare target Jerusalem’s Old City or vicinity.
During Iraq’s Scud missile attacks in the 1991 Gulf War, Israelis drove from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, where they were indeed safe. Thirty-nine Iraqi missiles landed in Israel. The Knesset building in West Jerusalem was targeted; otherwise, the missiles landed in the Tel Aviv area or elsewhere.
My new neighbor, George, a shopkeeper on Nablus Street, told me the other day that he decided Israel wouldn’t strike Iran, and neither would the United States. Too risky, he said. Oil could hit $300 a barrel. Nobody knows the location of all the Iranian nuclear sites. Plus, they’re buried deep underground. Besides, Bush doesn’t have to listen to his neo-conservative, evangelical base anymore: he’s not running for reelection.
George may be right. But, in case he’s not, I think we’re safe, both George and me.