The first day after, Tuesday, September 13, 2005

There are two other ways into the city from the west. One is a two lane road winding through the Jerusalem Forest. In places it is one of the most dangerous roads in the country. The other is Highway 443 that goes into the West Bank east of Modiin, via the northern suburbs the Likud governments of the late 1970s and early 1980s imposed on the Jerusalem municipality, driving many from the city’s Jewish middle class out of the city. Like most Israeli highways through the West Bank, Highway 443 is very modern, and never has traffic jams. If cars are stopped on the road it is a sign of violence, either a car accident or a terrorist incident.

Presumably, more people from the coastal plan will now start using the West Bank route, largely because the much older road, that winds and twists through the Judean forests west of the city, coming out in Ein Kerem, is often blocked by traffic and is extremely dangerous since it is impossible to see oncoming cars until they are almost on top of you. And all it takes is someone with a flat or a slow-moving truck for the pretty long shortcut around the almost constantly clogged main entrance to Jerusalem to slow down to a crawl.

The need for a rail system for sprawling Jerusalem -- is obvious, the desire for something ostentatious as the bridge is typical of a town trying to be a city. What’s not so obvious is how the desire for normalcy in Israel represented by the construction starting on the bridge was so exhilarating after the long months of the anticlimactic disengagement when what seemed to be impossible turned out to be so bathetic as to be farcical.

The symbol of that farce was of course Shaul Mofaz’s sudden last minute kowtow to the atavistic politics of religious Zionism and the Likud central committee, announcing he would reverse defense establishment policy from the first days of the disengagement plan, and vote against the IDF demolishing the Gaza synagogue buildings, setting the stage for ‘dancing on the rooftops’ and ‘vandalism and looting’ by ‘barbarian Palestinians,” as so much of the sensationalist press and jingoistic politicians have been predicting for months. The Palestinians and the Arabs in general saw it as a last minute trick, a Jewish conspiracy to make the Palestinians fulfill the ugly prophecy. And some indeed did the first night. But the masses of Palestinians, the tens of thousands predicted turned out to be a few hundred youths from the Islamic Jihad and some Palestinian policemen who had until then had followed orders to keep the youths away from the settlements during the disengagement.

Or maybe there was something to the last minute call to respect the ‘Jewish holy sites,’ something that did not exist, except, perhaps, for the Western Wall, until 1967, when Zionism was hijacked by newborn messianic movements in Judaism. After all, perhaps not understanding that the Israelis had already stripped the synagogues of all the religious artifacts, from Torah scrolls and prayer books to donors plaques and gleaming wooden benches, even Kofi Annan was said to have called on the Palestinians to treat the synagogues with respect.

So, while the PA announced it would demolish everything the Israelis left behind, Hamas leaders were photographed praying inside the Neve Dekalim building that had once been a synagogue. It was a bit too much to hope the praying men would say they indeed did plan to respect the history of the building as a house of worship. According to Mahmoud al-Zaher, the Hamas official who led the prayers, they were protesting the Israeli decision to leave the synagogues standing. He presumably doesn’t know that the Rambam had long since ruled that synagogues can be turned into mosques, but not churches. Nonetheless, by this afternoon, the PA police was restoring law and order in the areas left behind by the settlers. As for the ‘looting,’ the poverty of Gaza had reduced piles of scrap tin and plastic sheets from greenhouses, and pieces of window frames and doors into valuables worth carrying home on foot for kilometers by Gazans who live under the official UN poverty line, on $2 a day.

More news from today || Yesterday's situation (Archive)

© Today's Situation From Ariga, http://www.ariga.com by Robert Rosenberg; Feel free to pass this page on, including this line: Subscribe to get it daily by email -- or unsubscribe -- at http://www.ariga.com/signup.shtml >>>>>>>>>>RSS Feed

Feed Shark

Today's Situation || Yesterday's Situation