A stroll through Jerusalem's Old City, taking in its atmospheric Muslim, Christian, and Jewish quarters, appears from the outside to show how, in a relatively small area, three of the world's largest monotheistic religions can coexist peacefully. Granted, each ethnic and religious group seems to keep to itself: upon wandering down the narrow alleyways comprising the Old City's Muslim district, one sees only a small gaggle of wimpled nuns barter at a fruit stall, and just one single young Orthodox Jewish boy scurries by.
But in the tiny area housing the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Wailing Wall, two of the most sacred sites in the world for Muslims and Jews respectively, there is an air of calm and sanctity that overpowers the suspicion and hatred characterizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many of the Muslims are Palestinians who have obtained special permits to visit the area; many of the Jews are ultra-orthodox settlers who inhabit land that Palestinians believe is rightly theirs. But watched over by a considerable police presence, these most observant members of both religions come to pray and worship in relative peace.
Below the surface of this model of religious tolerance, however, a seething mass of tensions bubbles away. And, most surprisingly, Jewish-Muslim relations are not always at the forefront of such problems. Earlier this month, at a Christian procession marking the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, such tensions finally boiled over.
On October 10, as leaders of the Armenian Church paraded through the Old City streets toward the Church of the Holy Sepulcher - said to be the place where Jesus was crucified and buried - a 21-year-old Israeli Jew, Natan Zvi Rosenthal, stepped from the crowd and spat at the cross carried by Armenian Archbishop Nourhan Manougian. A scuffle ensued, in which the Archbishop retaliated by slapping Rosenthal, who then managed to tear a seventeenth-century cross medallion from around Manougian's neck. Police intervened; Rosenthal was arrested and remanded in custody, later being barred from the Old City for a period of 75 days.
According to Armenian Church official Aris Shirvanian, such an incident is not as unusual as it may seem. "This is not happening to only Armenian clergy," says Shirvanian, "but also to Catholics, Syrians, Romanians, and Greek Orthodox Christians." Indeed, he and several fellow senior church members assert that spitting incidents of this nature take place regularly. "It happens maybe once a week," he says, "As soon as they notice a Christian clergyman, they spit. Those who are 'respectful' turn their backs on us... but the ones that are daring either spit on the ground or on the person without any provocation on our part."
Moreover, Shirvanian says, such routine abuse does not stop at spitting. Christian clergy throughout Jerusalem regularly complain of garbage being tossed into churchyards or left on church steps, of windows being smashed in Christian religious institutions and homes. Orthodox Jewish women and children, they claim, carry out most of this.
Shmuel Evyatar, former advisor to the Mayor of Jerusalem on Christian affairs, asserts that the rise of this phenomenon is due at least in part to the failure of Jewish religious authorities to do anything to stop it. Like Natan Zvi Rosenthal, who attends the prominent Har Hamor yeshiva (Jewish religious school), many of the culprits are students. There are even suggestions from within the Armenian community that a growing number of offenders are American Jews, visiting scholars at the Old City's plentiful yeshivas. "In practice," said Evyatar recently, "rabbis of yeshivas ignore or even encourage it." Rosenthal himself, on being questioned by the police, confirmed that his prejudices against Christian 'idolatry' had been cemented in his youth and at school.
The vast majority of such incidents, however, currently go unreported, due to what the Armenian Church deems a failure on the police's behalf to deal seriously with such claims. It was only the highly public nature of the recent fracas, they say, that warranted police attention. The Jerusalem police, on the other hand, claim that unless such incidents are indeed reported immediately, there is very little they can do to stop them. "We can only act when we have been informed by a complainant," says Gil Kleiman, police spokesman. "When we do know about it we act immediately to arrest the person who did it and bring them to justice." But the church asserts that even when the police reprimands offenders, a report is simply filed and the suspect set free.
This lenient attitude seems in direct contrast to Israel's reaction to reports of victimization of Jews across the globe. In July this year Prime Minister Ariel Sharon damaged diplomatic relations with France by calling all French Jews to immigrate to Israel, in order to escape what he deemed "the spread of the wildest anti-Semitism." Similarly, in the case of the Paris soup kitchen razed to the ground in August, the media was quick to use the attack as evidence of growing prejudice against Jews in Europe. Paris police later arrested the suspected perpetrator of the blaze: a Jewish local with a personal grudge against the establishment's owners.
Whilst a media furor is sparked within Israel whenever a Jewish graveyard is defaced with swastikas in Belgium, Holland, or France, recently both the Monastery of the Cross and the Holy Trinity Church in Jerusalem were spray-painted with a Star of David. The latter incidents made little impact on the Israeli press.
It seems to go without saying that any religiously observant group, who devote their lives to prayer, study and contemplation, should set a good example for the rest of the community. And, with reports rife of dwindling attendance figures within Christian and Jewish religious institutions, it is more crucial than ever that both faiths create a positive and coherent public image to attract an otherwise increasingly secular Israeli public. If they do not, these rapidly depleting communities risk becoming exactly what they fear: just another museum exhibit in Jerusalem's Old City, a monument to a diverse, but ultimately unsustainable, religious past.
Tensions bubble in Jerusalem's Old City
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