c. 2000 Religion News Service
JERUSALEM _ They sent up prayers for peace in Hebrew, Arabic and English in a small white chapel overlooking the border between the last Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem and Palestinian Bethlehem.
But even after Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat had agreed to a cease-fire, the few dozen Christians, Jews and Muslims gathered this week at the Catholic Tantur Ecumenical Center were doubtful the violence would cease.
At the moment, some said wryly, prayer might help more than politics.
“I’m pessimistic. But since God is in charge, that is where I put my hope,” said Yehezkel Landau, a religious Jew who runs a Jewish-Arab community center in the Israeli coastal city of Ramle.
“There has been a mutual demonization of the other side, whether it is Israeli or Palestinian, a mutual buildup of extreme anger and rage,” Landau said. “As for our leaders, both Arafat and Barak are basically warriors, military people. So when the situation deteriorates, it’s very tempting to fall back into the fighting mode. We don’t have the kind of `pastoral’ leadership that has been exemplified at times by Jordan’s King Hussein or even President Bill Clinton, leaders who know how to project a sense of comfort to people in times of trouble.”
The basic problem underlying the conflict is the fact that land is still valued above human life, said Issa Jaber, an Israeli Muslim, who is the vice chairman of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, which sponsored the prayer event.
“A lot of innocent people, children and soldiers, are falling in the name of the Holy Places, in the name of al-Aqsa, or the Temple Mount,” said Jaber, offering a “reflection” to the prayer gathering.
“People like myself believe we should value a human being more than a piece of soil, that the spirits of people should be more important. If we all together held that same principle, then I believe that the killing, death and the bloodshed would stop.”
But rather than honoring the sanctity of life, the visit to the al-Aqsa compound by opposition leader Ariel Sharon three weeks ago highlighted the religious-territorial conflict, and thus the conflicting claims of Arabs and Jews to the site, said Mithkal Natur, a prominent Islamic scholar from Jerusalem.
More than anything else, said Natur, Sharon’s entry into the Islamic shrine helped transform what was primarily a nationalist conflict into a war laden with religious overtones, in which Israel was widely seen as making a symbolic grab for the holy mosque.
“Everyone knows that religiously, it is forbidden for Jews to enter al-Aqsa,” Natur added. “So naturally we had to wonder what he was looking for in this place.”
The ensuing chaos and destruction unleashed latent “end-times” expectations among many Muslims, reminding them of Koranic passages that are popularly understood as forecasting the ultimate destruction of Israel by Islamic warriors.
“I don’t want to rush toward such scenarios,” said Natur. “But there is a feeling that this is where Israel is leading us. That would mean a jihad, in which soldiers would come from Jakarta, from China, from Pakistan and from the United States to fight for al-Aqsa.”
Given such an atmosphere of fear and messianic expectation, few Muslims are willing to venture to a meeting with Israelis, even in a common prayer for peace, Natur said, surveying a chapel filled primarily with foreign nuns, ministers and priests, as well as Israeli and American Jews.
“It’s like bringing the victim to share the victory of the killer. The blood is still wet. Wait at least until it hardens. We have 110 people killed, one-third children, 150 mortally wounded, and 3,000 injured,” said Natur.
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From the hilltop vantage point of Tantur, one can see the contested Rachel’s Tomb site, just inside the Bethlehem border. Both Jews and Muslims believe the biblical matriarch Rachel is buried there; barren women of both religions make pilgrimages there to offer prayers for fertility.
Today, what was once a graceful white domed building set amid olive groves is a barricaded fortress, controlled by Israel. Palestinian crowds have repeatedly assaulted the site over the past several weeks in a bid to gain control, resulting in Monday’s (Oct. 16) death of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy by Israeli fire.
Then on Tuesday, just as the Arafat-Barak meeting was concluding, a stray Palestinian bullet from Bethlehem grazed the glass of one of the windows at Tantur. Even more bullets flew into the nearby adjacent Jewish suburb of Gilo in revenge for the killing, seriously wounding one Israeli police officer and prompting Israeli threats of a retaliatory bombing.
“Look at Bethlehem and Gilo,” said Natur, pointing out of the damaged window. “Until recently, they lived peacefully together, and most of the Palestinians in Bethlehem had even forgotten that Gilo was in fact built upon expropriated Arab land. Now, suddenly they have remembered.”
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The cease-fire conference, he said, won’t succeed in halting such a vicious cycle of attack and counterattack because in Palestinian eyes the summit was promoted by the United States and Egypt to further their own strategic interests rather than signaling the long-awaited end of Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
“If we want to find a way to live together, then it is up to the stronger party, to Israel, to make the difference,” Natur said. “Since we Muslims believe that every death is fated by God, we can forgive the death of a loved one after the proper time has passed. But the killer must come and ask pardon, and prove that he wants to change.
“Israel should say, `I shot your sons and destroyed your houses with my missiles. But now I am sorry. I want to make amends. I want to rebuild the house that I destroyed, and to give you back your land.”’
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