East Jerusalem evictions

Jews & Sheikh Jarrah

It was not a pretty picture. The belongings of two Palestinian Arab families dumped in the street after they were evicted from their homes in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. They were expelled on Sunday after Israel's Supreme Court ruled that the land upon which their homes were built belonged to the Sephardi Jewish community.

This area, also known as "Simon the Just," was purchased by Jews at the end of the 19th century during the Ottoman Empire. According to The New York Times, the evacuated houses were built in the 1950s by the United Nations for refugees who had fled west Jerusalem during the 1948 war. When Israel captured east Jerusalem from Jordan and united the city, after the 1967 Six Day War, the families were permitted to stay on as tenants. At some point, they stopped paying rent having become convinced - we know not by whom - that the Jews' deed to the land was a forgery.

It took a large force of police to carry out the evictions in the face of opposition from the residents, left-wing Jewish supporters and foreign demonstrators.

Coming on the heels of the controversy surrounding the nearby Shepherd Hotel complex, which was also purchased to create Jewish residential housing, the evictions drew worldwide condemnation. The international community says Israel has no legal claim to east Jerusalem; nor does it accept Israeli sovereignty over west Jerusalem.

Israel finds itself in the anomalous position in which not a single nation recognizes Jerusalem as our capital. All foreign embassies are located in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, European governments, with Britain often in the lead, have invested vast resources, sometimes surreptitiously, in promoting Arab claims to east Jerusalem (and the West Bank), bankrolling organizations, many staffed with Israelis and sporting Hebrew names, whose mandate is, in effect, to promote EU policy vis-à-vis Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The British Consulate in Jerusalem explicitly denies that Israeli courts have jurisdiction over east Jerusalem. Its diplomats term the Arab connection to Sheikh Jarrah "ancient."

Media coverage of the issue has been overwhelmingly supportive of the Palestinian position.

THERE happens to be another side to this argument.

Put aside, for our purposes here, the ancient Jewish connection to Jerusalem and Zion's centrality to Jewish civilization over the millennia.

Begin instead with the fact that there is no neatly delineated "east" and "west" Jerusalem - one section housing Arabs and the other Jews. Jerusalem beyond the Green Line is home to some 200,000 Jews and 270,000 Arabs, though 66 percent of all residents are Jewish. The city is built on a range of hills and valleys. Arab and Jewish neighborhoods crisscross in the north, east and southern sectors.

Sheikh Jarrah, in the northeast, is strategically situated on the way to the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University. During the 1948 war, Arabs massacred 78 doctors and others who were heading by convoy to Hadassah hospital, also on Mount Scopus. Today, in addition to the hospital (which serves both Israelis and Palestinians) and the university (which has thousands of Arab students), the area is also home to Israel's police headquarters and Justice Ministry.

Staunchly right-wing Orthodox groups have been competing with Gulf Arabs in the quest to purchase properties in the area. (Israel does not forbid Arabs from buying land in Jerusalem.)

In this particular rivalry, we side with the Jewish groups, even if this newspaper is sometimes put-off by the way they see the world, because whatever arrangements may ultimately be negotiated for sharing Jerusalem, mainstream Israelis will insist on unfettered access to Mount Scopus via Sheikh Jarrah.

As far as British claims of an "ancient" Arab connection to the area, Nadav Shragai convincingly documents, in the latest "Jerusalem Issue Brief" published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (www.jcpa.org), that the Jewish connection to what is today Sheikh Jarrah predates the founding of both Christianity and Islam.

That said, we are not enthusiastic about the purchase of property or the construction of Jewish residential housing in heavily Arab neighborhoods when not dictated by strategic imperatives.

Jews and Arabs are destined to share this city. Both peoples would be wise to avoid actions that exacerbate tensions.

Gays murdered in Tel Aviv

Wild weed


We do not know who carried out the ghastly shooting at a gay youth support center in Tel Aviv Saturday night. Some in the media and in the political establishment have jumped to the conclusion that the rampage was motivated by homophobia. Others speculate that the shooter may have been a homosexual with a grudge. We reserve judgment about the identity of the perpetrator; but like most Israelis from across the political and religious spectrum, we condemn this unprecedented assault.

Foremost, our condolences go to the families of Nir Katz, 26, from Givatayim, and Liz Tarbishi, 17, from Holon. Ten of the wounded remain hospitalized, several in intensive care, and we wish them a full and speedy recovery.

For some of the families, Saturday night's bloodbath was a double trauma since there were parents who did not know about the sexual orientation of their children.

The emotional nature of the reaction to this vile attack is understandable. MK Nitzan Horowitz of Meretz, who is gay, participated in an impromptu rally to protest "incitement" against the gay and lesbian community. Granted, there is prejudice against gays in Israel. Yet gay activists readily grant that Israel is one of the world's most progressive countries in terms of equality for sexual minorities, and in some respects - military service, for instance - far more advanced than many other Western societies.

Not only did major political figures rush to condemn Saturday night's attack, but even the ultra-Orthodox Sephardi, Shas Knesset faction - some of whose members have been vitriolic against gays - issued a statement condemning the violence and calling for the capture and prosecution of the attacker.

THROUGH the haze and shock of Saturday night's attack, it is important to maintain perspective. Whoever did it - gay or straight, observant or secular - was a wild weed and not indicative of their community.

Gays in Israel are not oppressed. There is no culture of marginalization. While community standards vary from place to place, gays in metropolitan Tel Aviv are valued citizens. The TA municipality helps fund the annual gay parade. Even in comparatively conservative Jerusalem, an openly gay man, Sa'ar Nethaniel, served on the municipal council in the previous government. It is true that the gay parade invariably generates local ultra-Orthodox opposition. In 2005 a haredi man from Kiryat Sefer stabbed three participants at Jerusalem's gay parade. Not only was he convicted of attempted murder, but ultra-Orthodox leaders have incrementally toned down the vociferousness of their anti-parade agitation. While in deference to local norms, gay pride events in Jerusalem have become relatively (and appropriately) understated. Mutual - albeit tacit - accommodation, backed by the Jerusalem Open House and the mainstream haredi leadership, is a fact of life.

Tolerance toward gays is nothing new. As early as 1953 the attorney-general of Israel issued instructions not to prosecute gay activities. In 1992, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1988 was expanded to prohibit anti-gay discrimination in employment. In 1994, the Supreme Court recognized same-sex partner benefits in the private sector; in 1997 these were extended to the public sector. In 2000, the age of legal consensual homosexual relations was lowered to 16.

Same-sex couples can today legally adopt children. Gay marriages abroad can be registered as legal in Israel. Knesset legislation provides gays with enhanced civil liberties protections. Many municipalities do likewise. Moreover, gay life - far from being delegitimized - is a not infrequent theme in our cinema (The Bubble, Yossi & Jagger), music (Dana International), theater (Passing the Love of Women) and literature.

Contrast the situation in Israel to gay life in neighboring Arab and Muslim countries.

In Iran, homosexuality is outlawed; sodomy is a capital crime. The mullahs endeavor to make the lives of gays miserable. Scores have been flogged and others executed. Gays are not as relentlessly persecuted in Saudi Arabia, but sodomy is punishable by death. In relatively tolerant Turkey, gay life is not criminalized, but neither is there much forbearance for outward displays of homosexuality.

Saturday night's carnage in Tel Aviv is heartbreaking. It is not - at least based on what we know now - cause for national consternation over the place of gays in Israeli society.

Refugees in Israel

Meant to post this before Shabbat but ran out of time....


Let the children stay

The prospect of the Jewish state expelling 2,800 children whose parents are foreign workers or illegal immigrants tugs at the heartstrings.

An authorized foreign worker who gives birth in this country loses her right to work here; illegal immigrants shouldn't be here in the first place. But the fact is that hundreds of their Hebrew-speaking children call Israel home. Interior Minister Eli Yishai would be doing the right thing to let them stay. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu took a step in the right direction yesterday by delaying their expulsion for at least three months.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the system that brings over workers from abroad to do the jobs most of us do not want - home care for the elderly and infirm, back-breaking farm labor, or construction.

Until Yasser Arafat launched the second intifada in 2000, the farm and construction jobs had gone mostly to Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza. But that conflict forced Israel to turn to Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe to meet its labor needs.

Yet, from the get-go, potential foreign workers could not simply apply for, say, a four-year work visa at the Embassy of Israel closest to them. Instead, they were "imported" by licensed brokers - not a few of them rapacious and unscrupulous. There is money to be made in bringing foreigners to Israel, and the sooner one batch goes and another can be brought over, the more money the brokers make.

Most workers pay these middlemen a hefty fee for the opportunity to work here. That means many are in debt the moment they arrive. While in Israel, the foreigners are indentured to their employers by arcane rules, which provide them with little protection. Legal workers can't simply move to a different job, or to one with better conditions. If a caregiver's patient dies, the worker has few options, other than leaving the country, even if she or he only recently arrived. As the Post reported on Wednesday, the Interior Ministry inexplicably shut down a database through which workers with time remaining on their visas could learn about other openings. Thus, through no fault of their own, legal workers can suddenly find themselves illegal.

On Tuesday, two presumably legal Chinese workers held a protest atop a construction crane to object to their treatment. Next day, authorities arrested four brokers who had obtained work permits under false pretenses - ostensibly to provide caregivers for the blind, but in fact to meet needs for janitors and in construction (where new permits have been frozen).

We don't even know for sure how many illegals are in the country - estimates vary between 80,000 and 300,000. Authorities tried to keep most of them out of the main population centers, but under legal challenge reversed their "Hadera-Gedera" policy.

ADVOCATING against the children's deportation is easy. But we also support allowing foreigners who came here legally, and developed a strong attachment to this country, the opportunity to apply for resident alien status; thus providing them with the rights and obligations of citizenship, save for voting and military service. And we want to see their Israeli-born children become naturalized citizens in every sense.

We have less sympathy for those who came here illegally, or under false pretenses. After due process, and allowing for extenuating circumstances, we favor repatriating most illegal immigrants to their home countries.

As for those illegals, mostly from Sudan and Eritrea, who are genuine (pending UN certification) asylum-seekers and cannot be deported under international law, we urge the UN to move speedily to help resettle these people in countries where their lives will not be in danger. Where appropriate, perhaps some of these refugees could be offered resident alien status.

We urge authorities: Rather than proceeding with a draconian Knesset bill that proposes treating illegal immigrants as if they were security infiltrators, invest your energies in building a security barrier along the Negev-Sinai border to keep both infiltrators and illegal aliens out.

Long-term, Israel needs to secure its borders, liberalize its naturalization procedures and, separately, revamp the way foreign workers reach our shores.

Tiny Israel cannot serve as a life-boat for millions of desperate refugees fleeing their poverty-stricken and war-torn countries. Yet it has a moral obligation to deal humanely - and with Jewish compassion - with those who are here, regardless of how they arrived.

The opium of the Arabs

Stunted development


As American officials from Middle East envoy George Mitchell to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and from National Security Adviser James Jones to Dennis Ross, who's responsible for Mideast policy at the National Security Council, visit our region this week, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has just published its fifth report on conditions in the Arab world.

The UNDP tells us that many Arabs are shockingly poor; millions survive on less than $2 a day. Though 60 percent of the world's proven oil reserves are in the Middle East, the report's authors reveal that "Arab countries are actually less industrialized today than was the case four decades ago..."

We know from other sources that national identity is weak. It's been decades since the last colonial power quit the region, yet most Arabs still primarily identify themselves not as citizens of the country in which they live but as Arabs or Muslims. The Palestinian Arabs may be in a different category since their identity has been shaped by their confrontation with the Zionist enterprise.

Although the Arab fertility rate is declining (as more women obtain an education), young people with little hope of upward mobility today comprise a huge chunk of the Middle East population. Half of all Egyptians, for instance, are under 24. This helps explain why many turn to religious fundamentalism for solace.

In its coverage of the report, London's The Economist notes that most Arabs live under basically authoritarian regimes. The magazine, which is not known for its Zionist sympathies, points out that about the only genuinely free elections in the Arab world have been held under "occupation" - in the Palestinian Authority and Iraq. Still, insists The Economist, just as other parts of the Muslim world have transitioned to democracy so too can the Arabs. Perhaps. The magazine is right to say that democracy is more than just holding free elections; it also requires the inculcation of values such as tolerance and a respect for minority rights.

THE UNDP report was largely ignored by the state-controlled Arab media despite containing de rigueur criticism of Israel. The Arabs, and many Arabists in the West, have long embraced the neo-Marxist line that Middle East development has been stymied by outsiders - the oil companies, Western imperialists, Cold War warriors and, unsurprisingly, by the existence of a Jewish state in the region.

The Economist buys into some of this: "The job of the Arab moderates was made all the harder by Israel's recent wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Shocking television footage transformed both of these local fights into moments of pan-Arab and even pan-Muslim rage." The implication being that if only Israel had swallowed two separate cross border attacks in which Israeli soldiers were killed or taken hostage, the world would be a more peaceful place.

Still, with refreshing diversity, The Economist cites Mona Eltahawy, a New York-based Egyptian pundit, who explains that Israel is "the opium of the Arabs." "Resistance" to Israel's existence, she implies, provides Arabs with a convenient excuse for putting off political and economic development.

To the opiate analogy one might add that "settlements" have become like crack cocaine - a habitual pretext used by Mahmoud Abbas and others for not negotiating an end to the conflict. In truth, the settlement issue would become moot once negotiators agreed on final borders.

IT IS to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of The Netherlands that we owe a debt of gratitude for bankrolling the website, Menassat. It's ostensibly intended to promote press freedom and development among the Arabs and recently offered insight into Arab elite thinking on the UNDP report.

Writing from Beirut, Saseen Kawzally quoted approvingly Columbia University's Joseph Massad in damming the report for adopting "the rhetoric and terminology used by the US and Israel." Massad further criticized the English-language version of the report for, supposedly, casting a modicum of blame for the Gaza fighting on Hamas.

But it is Kawzally's indignation at the UNDP report for relegating the "occupation" to eighth place in a list of factors inhibiting Arab development that we find especially instructive. Thank you, taxpayers of The Netherlands. Your money is being used to perpetuate Israel as the opium of the Arabs.

Does ultra-Orthodox garb protect a Jew from sinning?

When righteous stumble

'For these defendants, corruption was a way of life," said New Jersey District Attorney Ralph Marra, speaking of rabbis and politicians ensnared in a $3 million money-laundering scandal.

For the rest of us, it was painful and embarrassing to watch Rabbi Saul Kassin, 87, the venerable leader of the Syrian Jewish community of metropolitan New York, being led away by federal agents.

Images of the arrested ultra-Orthodox Jews being escorted to a waiting bus generated headlines in the American press that said it all: "Is nothing sacred!" (The New York Daily News); "Walk of shame" (Newark Star Ledger); and "Kosher nostra & dirty Jersey" (The New York Post). The paper led its story with: "Everything was on sale - from politicians to kidneys."

ONE OF the reasons ultra-Orthodox Jews wear dark suits, wide-brimmed hats and ritual fringes hanging outside their trousers is as a self-reminder that the Holy One above is a constant presence. Dark colors remind the pious that life should not be taken frivolously - that its purpose is not to revel in the pleasures of the here and now, but to prepare a place for the soul in the eternal world to come. Haredi garb is intended to instill "fear of heaven."

Among the ultra-Orthodox - Hassidic, Lithuanian and Sephardi - distinctive dress is intended to make it difficult to sin publicly or privately. You can never blend in or forget who you are.

It would be unimaginable for a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews to be captured on camera robbing a bank or mugging an elderly pensioner who had just cashed a social security check; or beating a drug dealer senseless for selling heroin on a street corner they had staked claim to.

Plainly, however, haredi garb is not a foolproof protection against immorality.

Lately, the Jewish world has been roiled by the bad behavior of people who are identifiably Jewish. Sometimes it is not a matter of clothing.

Bernard Madoff, for instance, was described as an Orthodox Jew, not because of how he dressed but presumably because of his synagogue affiliation and the fact that he served on the boards of major Orthodox educational institutions. But the magnitude of Madoff's crimes was such that his garb was beside the point; his Jewishness was anyway in the public domain.

From the streets of Jerusalem to the streets of New Jersey, the media have lately been spotlighting what seems like an epidemic of ultra-Orthodox Jews behaving badly. In fact, the number of haredim who riotously attack police officers in Jerusalem or engage in money laundering in New Jersey is minuscule. And it would be stating the obvious to point out that the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews are law-abiding; many live simple, unadorned lives, genuinely focusing their energies on the study of Torah and the fulfillment of the mitzvot, down to their minutiae.

Yet were ultra-Orthodoxy a brand, one might argue that the "franchise" has taken a public-relations hit over the years. Fair or not, the stock of the entire ultra-Orthodox world declines when outwardly pious Jews turn out to be slumlords, child-molesters or wife-abusers, proprietors of nursing homes that neglect their residents, dealers in human organs, money-launderers, or those who have no compunction about hurling bricks through the windshields of cars on Shabbat.

REPENTANCE is an essential tenet of the Jewish way of life. So there needs to be some genuine soul-searching in the haredi world on two levels. Since it is now pretty much demonstrated that distinctive garb doesn't inoculate against unlawful behavior, what would?

And since these crimes also intimate a weakening of faith and an obsession with materialism, what steps can the faithful take to strengthen the tenets of their belief?

And what does this mean for the rest of us? It does not mean that those affiliated with other streams of Judaism, or the unaffiliated secular, can afford to be smug. Human beings are fallible.

Instead, it reinforces the idea that Judaism strives for a golden mean which combines fidelity to tradition with morality; ritual with responsibilities to our fellow human beings - and, it should go without saying, an obligation to adhere to the laws of the land.