Faith: A new Intifada?

Published June 28, 2015
Bethlehem: a poster of Yassar Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas adorns a Palestinian Police station
Bethlehem: a poster of Yassar Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas adorns a Palestinian Police station

Crossing the King Hussein Bridge, I enter the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Strategically placed sharpshooters from the Israeli border police watch with hawk-eyes buses carrying people from Jordan to the Israeli border control. We alight and stand in lines for visa processing. A young visa officer at the window closely examines my passport; obviously the word ‘Pakistan’ under my place of birth, jump out before her eyes. “Where are you going?” Jerusalem, I say. “Why?” she asks. For tourism, I answer. “Do you know anyone in Jerusalem? Are you meeting someone?” No, I shake my head. “Where will you stay?” At a hotel, I say. “Show me your hotel reservation.” I do. She hesitates; looks at my face again; studies the passport anew and then hands me a slip allowing me entry without stamping my passport. Why? I dare not ask.

A 45-minute drive on a smooth highway flanked by white mountain ridges gets me to my hotel. On the way, Ramadan, my designated driver, provides a helicopter view on the longstanding struggle for control of the Old City in East Jerusalem between Israel and Palestine. “This is a hotspot, trouble can flare up in a minute, hence the heavy police presence,” as he points toward the fortress-like Israeli police headquarters bang opposite al-Quds (Old City) that has 40 feet high ancient stone walls all around it. Built by Suleiman the Magnificent, the walls were meant to repel another crusade.

Today, many say Israel is determined to build a temple fulfilling a “biblical prophecy” saying a Third Temple will rise after the first two were destroyed in the Old City that the Jews call the ‘Temple Mount’, where now stand Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. It has been an exclusively Muslim prayer site for the last 1,300 years. According to the locals, heavy machinery “burrows beneath al-Quds” at night. The excavation is being done in the hope to discover evidence of the two ancient Jewish temples, presumably destroyed in 586BC and 70AD.


The Holy Land teeters on the edge of a knife


Why did God converge the holiest sites for Jews, Christians and Muslims in one place? I ask Ramadan “I don’t know!” he says, with a look that seems to ask why I would ask him such a question.

Driving the latest Mercedes model, the Ray Ban wearing Ramadan is unlike his Palestinian brethren. He is Westernised with a cool confidence, a kind of aura that allows him free entry from Israel to the Palestinian territory without any hassle.

According to him, Israelis have work-oriented ethics and hence are more prosperous than the Palestinians who are laid back and disinterested in helping themselves.

Birthplace of Jesus: a poster on the wall welcomes visitors to Bethlehem and asks them to “Pray for the Freedom of Palestine”
Birthplace of Jesus: a poster on the wall welcomes visitors to Bethlehem and asks them to “Pray for the Freedom of Palestine”

“Unfortunately, Palestinian leaders like filling their own pockets instead of working to improve the quality of life for others,” he says with disdain. “Yesterday, I drove a group of Palestinian VIPs for a television interview to another town. We waited for the camera crew to arrive. It never did. No reason was given for their no-show. I then drove these men to an all-paid-for expensive restaurant where they ate a hearty dinner and later went to a mosque to pray. Did these slacks deserve dinner? No! While I got paid $3,000 for the whole trip by the Palestinian Authority government, what was the end result? Zero!” He says there’s no accountability by the Mahmoud Abbas government; money flows from the coffers without any checks and balances.

At a falafel place run by Asaad and Muhammad, a father and son who are Palestinians now living in East Jerusalem, I am greeted warmly when I tell them my origin. “If you’re Muslim, why don’t you wear a headscarf like the Arab women you see here?” asks the older man named Asaad. It’s optional in my country, I say. Turning his attention towards a poster on the wall that says ‘Free Palestine,’ I ask Asaad if they can live and work freely under Israeli occupation. “No”, he replies. “We live under an apartheid rule where we are discriminated against by the Jews.” Raising the spectre of losing Al-Quds, Asaad warns of a new Intifada. The first Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip known as ‘Intifada’ began in 1987. The second Intifada precipitated after the right-wing leader Ariel Sharon toured Al-Aqsa Mosque in 2000 accompanied by 1,000 Israeli police and army officers. With braggadocio, he vowed to reclaim the Muslim site for Jews. Pitched gun battles, suicide bombings and terrorist activities followed for many years. Presently Al-Quds is managed by an Islamic Trust under the custodianship of Jordan.

“Last Ramazan on Laylat al-Qadr, Israeli police clashed with worshippers throughout East Jerusalem,” Muhammad, the son chips in. “On Juma-tul-wida, I was stopped from offering prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque because the police banned men under 50 from entering Al-Quds due to fear of violence.”

Emblem of Palestinian Police with the Dome of the Rock in the centre
Emblem of Palestinian Police with the Dome of the Rock in the centre

As we drive out to the city of Hebron, which means ‘friend’ in Hebrew as well as in Arabic (Al-Khalil), located 32 kilometres south of Jerusalem in the West Bank, we pass several Jewish settlements built on hills. The sun-spattered cookie-cutter red-tiled sloping roofs are seen for miles perched on white hills dotted with olive groves. “After Israel annexed West Bank, it built homes for the settlers, most of them Jewish extremists,” Ramadan tells me. Despite international censure, Israel continues to encourage these settlements. The settlers are heavily armed and a threat to the safety of Palestinian villagers, he says. “It’s the Israeli government and its police that are the problem; not the people under Israeli occupation,” declares Ramadan.

He sums up the conflict between Palestine and Israel in one word: land. “You’ll notice there is very little flat land around this hilly terrain,” he says. So to build residential colonies, Israeli bulldozers work overtime to flatten out the area, which it illegally occupied in 1967. The UN, International Court of Justice, the European Union, America, Russia, France and the UK, have repeatedly upheld the view that Israel’s expansion of Jewish settlements is illegal.

But who is listening?

Hebron is the second largest city of the Palestinian territories after Gaza. It is divided into two sectors: 80 per cent is controlled by the Palestinian Authority and 20pc by Israel. However, since last year, Hebron is under Israeli military control on the pretext of protecting some 600 Jewish residents living in the old Jewish quarter. At Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, I meet Al-Karm who tells me that his brother was among 30 martyred here during Ramazan in 1994. “He was offering his Fajr prayers when a frenzied American-Israeli named Baruch Goldstein opened fire on worshippers.” The carnage is known as the ‘Cave of the Patriarchs massacre.’ It is here that Prophet Ibrahim, wife Sarah, son Prophet Ishaaq and daughter-in-law Rafiqa are buried.

Inside the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron with tombs of Prophet Ishaq and his wife Rafiqa in the background
Inside the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron with tombs of Prophet Ishaq and his wife Rafiqa in the background

Israel provides the best roads, electrification and beautification for its Jewish settlers. Driving through one of the settlements on the way from Bethlehem, I see orderly homes, flowers, blooming creepers, paved pathways and elegant street lights as opposed to broken-down roads, multi-coloured buildings, haphazard houses, abandoned tyres and a line of junked cars just left on the median strip that divides the dual carriageway in Bethlehem which is in Palestine. The difference is so stark. On the roadside are just sitting-around-guys doing nothing. But the Bank of Palestine where I go to use the ATM machine to withdraw dollars, has a professional air about it. Young male and female bank executives attend to customers with courtesy. I am running out of dollars. In Jerusalem, all ATM machines provide only Shekels, the Israeli currency.

Recently Israel suffered a setback after the Supreme Court of United States ruled that Jerusalem did not belong to Israel and therefore the State Department could not “record the place of birth as Israel” in the passports of American children born in Jerusalem! The Obama administration further reiterated by saying that “No state (read Israel)” has “sovereignty over Jerusalem, leaving the issue to be decided by negotiation between the parties to the Arab-Israeli dispute.” Rebuffing President Obama, Jerusalem’s Mayor Nir Barkat who also happens to be Israel’s richest politician vaingloriously declared “Just as Washington is the capital of the United States, London the capital of England and Paris the capital of France, so Jerusalem was and always will be the capital of Israel, and the heart and soul of the Jewish people.”

Millions of others, with their own hearts and souls, would disagree.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, June 28th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play

Opinion

Editorial

Afghan turbulence
Updated 19 Mar, 2024

Afghan turbulence

RELATIONS between the newly formed government and Afghanistan’s de facto Taliban rulers have begun on an...
In disarray
19 Mar, 2024

In disarray

IT is clear that there is some bad blood within the PTI’s ranks. Ever since the PTI lost a key battle over ...
Festering wound
19 Mar, 2024

Festering wound

PROTESTS unfolded once more in Gwadar, this time against the alleged enforced disappearances of two young men, who...
Defining extremism
Updated 18 Mar, 2024

Defining extremism

Redefining extremism may well be the first step to clamping down on advocacy for Palestine.
Climate in focus
18 Mar, 2024

Climate in focus

IN a welcome order by the Supreme Court, the new government has been tasked with providing a report on actions taken...
Growing rabies concern
18 Mar, 2024

Growing rabies concern

DOG-BITE is an old problem in Pakistan. Amid a surfeit of public health challenges, rabies now seems poised to ...