Sheikh Mohammad Hussein was appointed Mufti of Jerusalem by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas in 2006. (Photo: Matthew Bell)

Israelis are used to hearing hateful speech from some of their neighbors. On Friday, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei referred to the Jewish State as a “cancerous tumor.” But a recent speech from another Muslim leader – much closer to the Israeli heartland – has drawn criticism from the highest levels of the Israeli government.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem is the top Muslim official for the Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem and the Palestinian areas. That includes the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third-holiest place. The current mufti was appointed by the president of the Palestinian National Authority, which is dominated by the Fatah party. Last month, Sheikh Mohammad Hussein spoke at a Fatah anniversary ceremony. And he quoted from a well-known hadith, or saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammad.

“The hour will not come until you fight the Jews,” Hussein said into the microphone. “The Jews will hide behind rocks and trees. And the rocks and trees will call out, ‘oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!’”

“The hour” is a reference to the end of days.

So, what was the mufti trying to say exactly, by citing this particular hadith at a political meeting right now? I met with Sheikh Hussein at his home in Jerusalem and asked him to explain.

“The hadith, the statements by prophet Mohammad that I quoted, was a statement that talked about the after-life,” Hussein said. “It was not talking about the practical relationship between Muslims and Jews.”
Hussein said there was nothing wrong with using the quote and he doesn’t apologize for it.

But the Israeli government is taking offense. The mufti is said to be the subject of an investigation and he could be charged with incitement. Government spokesman Mark Regev said the Palestinian Authority should have condemned the speech.

“I would argue that the Palestinian leadership has both a legal and moral obligation to condemn this sort of hate talk,” Regev said in an interview. “If they say they want peace, they shouldn’t tolerate this sort of language.”
“In the signed agreements between Israelis and Palestinians,” Regev said the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas has “a legal obligation to prevent this.”

Palestinian Media Watch, a watchdog group based in Jerusalem, first called attention to the Sheikh Hussein’s speech. Director, Itamar Marcus pointed out that the hadith quoted by the mufti of Jerusalem is the same one found in the charter of Hamas, the Islamic militant group devoted to Israel’s destruction. Marcus says the mufti’s speech is just part of a growing problem of Palestinian incitement against Jews and Israel.

“The mufti’s call for violence is an isolated call from the mufti, but it’s not an isolated call from the Palestinian Authority,” Marcus said during an interview in his office.

Marcus showed me a series of videos on his group’s website. He said they were recorded from the Palestinian Authority’s official TV channel. And they add up, Marcus believes, to a media environment that aims to stoke hatred of Israelis and Jews, and to glorify violence.

Another Israeli who has spent a lot of time studying statements from Palestinians is Matti Steinberg. He worked for more than 30 years with the Shin Bet, Israel’s intelligence agency. He’s also an expert on Islamic fundamentalism.
Steinberg said he probably knows the hadith quoted by the mufti of Jerusalem by heart. It has been used by Islamists going back to the early of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1920s. The fact that the mufti has quoted the hadith again, Steinberg said, is worrisome and dangerous. But it is not surprising.

Steinberg said, the West Bank leadership is opposed to violence. But in the current climate, the Palestinian Authority is utterly stuck. Fatah leaders have been trying to seel the Palestinian public on the idea of a negotiated two-state solution with Israel since the early 1990s. But the peace process is going nowhere.

“It is a sign [of] the total disappointment and frustration of a real political process,” Steinberg said in an interview at his home. “There is a world of difference between, let us say, innate extremism and radicalization, which is caused by the failure of a pragmatic political settlement.”

Steinberg said there is another reason to worry. When pragmatism fails, he said, it becomes much easier for extremists to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in religious terms. And that goes for either side, he added. The problem is, in a religious conflict, there’s no room for political compromise.

Caution: Video contains strong anti-Semitic language.

But there is one settlement very much in the political spotlight right now. It’s called Migron.

About 50 Jewish Israeli families – 300 or so people in all – live at Migron. It’s mostly a cluster of mobile homes on a treeless hilltop outside the Palestinian city of Ramallah.

Migron is the largest of the so-called illegal outposts scattered throughout the West Bank. But in the case of Israeli settlements, illegal doesn’t necessarily mean unsanctioned. Migron spokesman Itai Chemo said there is bitter irony to the situation.

“There’s an electricity poll,” Chemo pointed out to me during a recent visit to Migron. “I cannot bring it on my own, it’s the country that put it over here, the state.”

People have lived at Migron for 10 years, Chemo added. “The houses that you see here were brought in by the ministry of housing. The ministry of defense built the roads and all the infrastructure.” As what about water, I asked? “Same thing,” Chemo said.

But thanks to a Supreme Court decision that came down in August last year, the future of Migron is uncertain. The judges ruled that Migron was built illegally on private Palestinian land. And they ordered the government to evict the residents and demolish their homes by the end of March.

Itai Chemo called the demolition order, “the most horrific thing that a country can do to its people.”

But there is another group of people just down the hill from Migron who not happy with the situation either. They are the residents of the Palestinian village of Burka.

Standing next to an old cemetery filled with stones bearing inscriptions in Arabic, a village native who did not want to give his name said, “Do they have a cemetery over there? We belong. This is our proof that this land is ours.”

The Palestinian man said Migron should never have been built. He said the settlers living there now should be evicted according to Israel’s own rule of law.

“What gives them the right to take the land? ‘God gave us this, God said in the Bible that this is our land.’ What about us?”

“It’s apartheid,” he said. That’s all it is. We’re looked upon as nothing, we don’t belong here, we’re a nuisance.”

Palestinians seriously doubt Migron will ever be evacuated. That is despite the fact that Israel’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak has said “it’s out of the question” for settlers to remain on private Palestinian land.

There is also a precedent for demolishing illegal buildings at Migron. It happened last September. Settlers tussled with Israeli police as bulldozers knocked down two houses. It was the kind of scene that pro-settler politicians say cannot be repeated, regardless of the Supreme Court decision.

Vice premier Silvan Shalom recently paid a visit to Migron and weighed in on the issue.

“We need to find a noble compromise,” Shalom said.

What does that mean? It appears the Israeli government is going to build the residents of Migron new homes. The new houses will be put up on another West Bank hilltop, about a mile from where they live right now. It is not clear how long this would take, or what would happen to the existing buildings at Migron itself.

But Peace Now, an Israeli organization that opposes the settlements, says the deal would essentially reward settlers for breaking the law.

“The deals that they are trying to make are absurd,” said Etai Mizrav of Peace Now. “We already passed the debating part and we’re now in the part when, after so many years that this injustice is taking place, the Supreme Court said that Migron should not be where it is right now.”

The prime minister’s spokesman, Mark Regev said he agrees with that. The law is clear and the Supreme Court has spoken, he said. Migron has to be evacuated by the end of March.

But Regev also said that finding a compromise with the settlers there is about avoiding violence.

“We are seeking a negotiated solution involving a voluntary relocation,” Regev said. “But if that’s not possible. I have to be clear: the Supreme Court’s decisions will be implemented.”

That would still leave about 100 illegal West Bank outposts in legal limbo. But the Israeli government is moving to resolve the legal question of the outposts. It has just put together a committee of legal experts to look at ways of legalizing the illegal outposts once and for all.

“I love him, from the first sight,” Lana said with a shy giggle. “We fall in love, that’s what happened.”

Two days later, they were engaged.

Today, life is good for Lana and Taiseer in so many ways. They are married with two kids, a 4-year-old boy named Adnan and 3-year-old girl, Yosra. Taiseer is working on his doctoral thesis in anthropology and he is teaching classes. They live in a nice apartment in a nice neighborhood in Akko.

But that could all change, because of a recent Israeli Supreme Court decision. It ruled that most Palestinians – and this would include Lana Khatib – who are married to Israelis would not be eligible for Israeli citizenship.

Taiseer said the ruling puts Lana in danger of being deported, and that is no way for a democracy to treat its citizens.

“It’s not political, it’s human,” Khatib said, clearly frustrated with the new reality his family is facing. “The first victims of this will be my children, not me and not Lana. We are adults. We can survive it. Where’s the security of these two children?”

Every year for the last six years, Lana said she has applied for – and received – temporary permission to live in her husband’s hometown of Akko. But she would like to become a full-fledged Israeli citizen.

The Khatib family has lived together in Akko, Israel since 2005. The mother, Lana is facing the possibility of losing her residency. (Photo: Fouad Abu Ghosh)

As a Palestinian from the West Bank living in Israel on a temporary residency permit, Lana is ineligible for national health insurance. She cannot get a driver’s license. She cannot work legally.

The Supreme Court decision appears to have closed the door on that possibility for Lana Khatib and for thousands of other Palestinians like her, who are married to Arab Israeli citizens. The rule applies to Palestinian women under the age of 26 and men under 36. The reason most often cited for the decision is national security. But Taiseer Khatib said he doesn’t buy it anymore.

“You want security? I want security too. So, please go and check every case for its own,” Khatib said.

“At the beginning, they said security. But it’s mainly, the reason is just simple, it’s about the Jewish state and having a pure Jewish state. This is what they want.”

Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem told me, “this was one of those moments when I was really grateful not to have to be among those making the decision, because it’s simply unbearable.”

But Halevi added that the citizenship law puts two legitimate goals on a collision course. On the one hand, there is the desire for Israel to protect equal treatment for all its citizens, including Arabs – who make up 20 percent of the population. On the other hand, there is the fundamental Zionist mission to provide a safe haven for any Jew in the world.

“There is a moral responsibility [for Israeli] political and legal decision makers to make sure that there is a viable Jewish majority in this country,” Halevi said.

“Israel is the only place in the world where Jews actually get preferential treatment and I think that based on history and based on possible future need, there is a moral imperative to preserving Israel as a place that can grant preferential treatment to Jewish refugees.”

A panel of Supreme Court judges was split on this decision six-to-five. Typically, the human rights community in Israel has viewed the high court as a bastion of democratic values. But Hagai El-Ad – who directs the Association for Civil Rights in Israel – says the ruling amounts to a disaster for Israeli democracy.

“This is probably the most extreme piece of racist legislation that the Knesset has passed and now, it has the seal of approval from the highest court in the land,” El-Ad said in an interview with The World.

It is not clear how the new ruling will play out. Nor is it clear how many thousands of people would be affected. One expert on immigration issues in Israel, who asked not to be named, told me that government agencies have wildly different estimates of how many Palestinians are married to Arab Israelis. A statistic that is often cited, however, puts the number of Palestinians who have gained citizenship in Israel since the 1990s at more than 100,000.

As for the Khatib family in Akko, Lana said she has applied for another one-year residency permit. And she expects to get an answer from the government in the next couple of weeks.

Taiseer said they have been getting a lot of support from friends and colleagues. One Jewish Israeli family, he said, has even offered to help hide Khatib’s family from the authorities by letting them move into their home.

Here is a photo I took of several wall posters in an Ultra-Orthodox neighborhood accusing the Israeli government of trying to wipe out Judaism.

The Haredim – as Israelis refer to the Ultra-Orthodox – only make up about 10 percent of the population. But it is one of the fastest-growing segments of society, due in large part to high birth rates.

There are a whole host of issues at stake, from military service to work force participation to gender segregation in public places.

The Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim is an Ultra-Orthodox stronghold. It’s a place where the Israeli police tend to keep a low profile. An example of why came on Sunday.

As uniformed police officers moved into the neighborhood to arrest several suspects on tax evasion charges, dozens of men dressed in the traditional Ultra-Orthodox style – long black coats, big beards and black hats – confronted the officers in the street. Scuffles broke out when Haredi tried to block traffic to protest the arrests.

Down the street, Shmuel Yisrael runs a sewing machine repair shop. Yisrael is an observant Jew himself. But he resents the way the Haredim live in isolation from the mainstream.

“It’s not good,” Yisrael said. “They don’t pay taxes, they don’t serve in the army and they don’t contribute.”

It all goes back to a deal made by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. The Ultra-Orthodox were given exemptions from military service and generous government subsidies so they could spend long hours in prayer and religious study.

This arrangement has endured. And it’s a win-win, said a 28-year-old Haredi man waiting at a bus stop. He gave his name as Yehuda and said he studied in a yeshiva nearby.

“The way we feel is that, when we learn and we study Torah all day, that’s a big merit for the survival of the Jews,” he said. “We feel that as long as there are people fighting in the army and there are people learning, they complement each other.”

As Yehuda sees it, the Haredim are being pressured by the media, by the government and by secular Israelis to make an unacceptable compromise.

“We will not give up on our standards of living a life of Torah,” he said.

“We’re religious and we’re completely committed to that. We’re not going to give up on those standards just because other people think we shouldn’t be religious.”

Around the corner from the bus stop, there was a much more extreme view from one segment of the Haredi community on display. It was a wall poster with names of several rabbis on it that accused the “evil government” of anti-Semitism. It said the authorities are trying to “destroy Haredi Judaism” by conducting a “brutal campaign of arrests” that harken back to the “darkest days of the Soviet Union.”

The poster is an example of what is wrong in the Ultra-Orthodox community, according to 52-year-old Yehuda Meshi-Zahav. He is a former Haredi extremist himself.

In the 1970s and 80s, Meshi-Zahav organized demonstrations against the Israeli authorities. He was an ardent anti-Zionist who rejected the idea of compromising with the Israeli government or making connections to the non-Haredi world.

But since the early 1990s, Meshi-Zahav has been very much engaged with the mainstream. He runs a highly-regarded volunteer organization of emergency medical responders called ZAKA. Many of the volunteers come from the Haredi community.

“Most of the Ultra-Orthodox community is completely sane,” Meshi-Zahav said in an interview at his Jerusalem office. “These people recognize that Israel is made up of different sectors that all belong here. But there are still extremists. They have too much influence on the community.”

Meshi-Zahav said the leaders of the Haredi community need to speak out against Ultra-Orthodox extremism. There have been incidents such as throwing rocks at police, spitting on school girls for not dressing modestly, or attacking businesses for not being religiously observant enough. Meshi-Zahav said these are the kinds of actions that more Haredi leaders need to denounce publicly.

In general, Meshi-Zahav and others like him want to lower the walls that divide the Haredim from the outside world. They want more people from the Ultra-Orthodox community to enter the work force, to serve in the army, and, more broadly, serve the nation of Israel.

But for some Ultra-Orthodox Jews, these views amount to heresy.

Yoelish Krauss is a 39-year-old Haredi activist. He lives in a two-room apartment in the Mea Shearim neighborhood with his wife and their 13 children. Krauss used to run a chicken slaughterhouse in the area until the Israeli police shut it down, accusing him of tax evasion and refusing inspections.

Krauss said he was not surprised to hear Meshi-Zahav’s call for the Haredim to build more connections with mainstream Israeli society. “He runs an international organization,” Krause said. “Of course he would say such things.”

“If you ask me,” Krauss said, “the Haredim need to be more isolated from the rest of society. That’s how we can preserve our way of life.”

Krauss said engaging with the non-Haredi world is a slippery slope. And it would lead to one thing: the Ultra-Orthodox would inevitably become secular. “There’s no way around it,” he said.

A hacker claiming to be from Saudi Arabia brought down several high-profile websites.

They included the sites of the Tel Aviv stock exchange, Israel’s national airline El Al and three Israeli banks.

The immediate damage was limited. Stock trading was not affected. And neither was air travel.

In essence, the incident adds up to politically-inspired acts of digital vandalism. “These are not particularly sophisticated attacks,” said Benji Portnoy, an information security specialist with the company Symantec.

“They’re actually the kind of attacks that can be done pretty easily. No actual damage to the websites that were hacked.”

Even so, Israeli IT experts said on Monday there is reason to worry.

In the past couple of weeks, Israel has been the target in a series of highly publicized cyber attacks carried out by people claiming to be pro-Palestinian activists. At least one – an apparent Saudi hacker going by the name of OxOmar – published credit card information for thousands of Israelis online.

Monday morning, OxOmar reportedly tipped off Israeli news organizations that he was part of an anti-Israel hacker network that was planning to bring down the websites of Israel’s stock exchange and national airline.

Yaakov Lappin, who writes about cyber crime for the Jerusalem Post, said it’s impossible to verify the identity of OxOmar. But the hacker – and others like him – does seem to be having some success.

“We’ve seen examples of these kinds of networks rising up before in this loosely defined “Anonymous” hacking network,” Lappin said. “So nothing that’s taking place now is new. The only development here that’s new is that it’s being directed in a semi-organized way against Israel.”

Lappin said Israel’s government agencies are rather advanced in the ways of cyber security. But the private sector, he said, has some catching up to do. In the meantime, Lappin believes it’s likely this hacker war will continue to escalate. He said he’s been in touch with a number of Israeli hackers, who are planning retaliation.

“They say that they plan on publishing credit cards that were hacked from Saudi websites, Saudi shopping websites and release information about how to break into bank accounts,” Lappin said. “And they’re going to do a tit-for-tat campaign. Every time that Israel’s attacked, they say they’re going tor respond in kind.”

For its part, the Islamist group Hamas which controls the Gaza strip and refuses to recognize Israel has welcomed the recent spate of cyber attacks against the Jewish state. Hamas is calling on Arab youth to join the online campaign against Israel.

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By age 17 though, no one was telling Charka how to draw. He started getting his stuff published in a youth magazine. And he hasn’t stopped.

Charka lives in a Jewish settlement called Zufim. It’s a neighborhood of suburban-style single family homes that sits on a hilltop above the Palestinian city of Qalqilya. Charka reckoned he’s Israel’s only syndicated political cartoonist who is also a settler.

“I really felt in love with that area,” he said. “The olive trees, the rocks, the hills, the everything. The feeling like living in the Bible somehow.”

Charka’s cartoons are full of Biblical references and scenes from Jewish and ancient history. His sense of humor is playful and slightly brutal all at once. The political issues he covers range from Palestinian suicide bombers to Europe poking its nose into Israeli affairs to radical settlers.

And Charka gets a lot of inspiration from his own life experience. One of his books, called “Beyond the Line,” is very much autobiographical. The protagonist is a short, yarmulke-wearing Israeli cartoonist living in a settlement. Other characters include a friendly Arab neighbor, an extremist Jewish settler, a bearded Rabbi and a handsome – but not very bright – TV reporter.

“There’s a stereotype about settlers,” Charka said. “People think they all hate Arabs and they’re against peace. But that’s not the whole story.”

Charka said he has Palestinian friends and that he would like to live in peace with all his neighbors. But like many Israelis, he’s skeptical about the idea of giving the Palestinians a state of their own on the West Bank.

“Peace will only come when each side comes to terms with the reality that the other side is here to stay. Israelis have understood that about the Arabs. But I don’t think the Arabs have never completely agreed,” he said.

And that’s why Charka is against giving up land for the hope of peace with the Palestinians. He thinks the whole two-state solution idea won’t work, and that the US president is wrong to keep pushing for it to happen.

Charka’s politics put him in profound disagreement with many Israelis, including fellow cartoonist, Uri Fink. But the two men remain good friends, and fans of each other’s work.

“Shay’s work should be seen by everybody because it’s really, really good. Even if you disagree with the politics, like I do, I still enjoy reading it. And I think the voice of Shay has nothing to do with the crazy settlers that you see in the news all over the world,” Fink said.

On a recent day, the news was full of reports about an attack by Jewish settlers on an Israeli army base in the West Bank. Vandals slashed tires and smashed windshields. And not far away, an Israeli officer was injured by a rock in another clash with settlers. The incidents followed a string of suspected settler attacks against Palestinian property, including mosques.

Charka said he was shocked by the events.

“I’m shocked by these people and I think they should be put in jail,” he said. “But I understand where some of their frustration comes from.”

A few days later, Charka published a cartoon showing a masked Jewish extremist standing next to West Bank settlements. The settlement are sitting on top of a giant bomb. The extremist is challenging the Israeli government to try to dismantle illegally-built settler homes… as he’s about to light the bomb’s fuse.

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They are being charged with tracking Israeli military movements in order to thwart actions against Jewish settlements. There are further allegations that sensitive information on Israeli troop movements came from active duty soldiers. For some Israelis, this aspect of the case highlights a trend the Israeli military.

It used to be that the bulk of Israel’s army officers – especially those from elite combat units – came from Israel’s largely secular kibbutz movement. After all, a soldier’s life can be incompatible with Orthodox Judaism’s strict rules on diet, prayer and study. But times have changed.

In the main study hall at the Har Etzion Hesder Yeshiva, located in a Jewish settlement southeast of Jerusalem, pairs of young men are hunched over religious books, debating in the traditional style of Jewish learning. The word hesder means “arrangement” in Hebrew.

And essentially, this is a way for observant young Israelis – mostly men, but some women as well – to combine religious study with mandatory army service.

“Even though it’s a Jewish army, it’s not necessarily a religious army,” said 24-year-old Greg Bank, a South African-born Israeli. He did two years at the yeshiva, then two years in the army, and he is completing his final year of religious study. “It can be difficult sometimes, because of the nature of the army, the environment’s a very physical environment, sometimes you can forget about your more spiritual side.”

But it raises questions about who’s got the ultimate authority in the military, the rabbis or the army commanders? I asked Bank about facing the dilemma as a religious soldier.

“Thank goodness I haven’t been put in that situation,” he said.

“But you’ve got to look at the picture holistically, because it’s very nice saying that we want every bit of land and that every bit of land is important to us, but if we don’t have an army that can defend this land, then everything will fall apart.”

In other words, soldiers must obey orders for the good of the country. But there are some hard-line, pro-settler rabbis who see things quite differently. For them, giving up any amount of Biblical Israel is considered heresy. These rabbis have publicly encouraged young Israelis to serve, but also to refuse orders that contradict Jewish law, as they see it. Take, for example, orders to evacuate any Jewish settlements.

One of the leading rabbis of the Har Etzion yeshiva, Mosheh Lichtenstein said such extreme views are not widespread. But he talked about the inherent tension for his students between religious and military obligations.

“The military says, ‘let’s solve problems by force,’ and religion says, ‘let’s solve them by creating a harmonious and perfect society,’” Lichtenstein said. “So on one level, we want our students to feel the tension and be aware of that. We tell them, they go to the army, not because it’s a good idea, but because it’s a necessity.”

These tensions have flared up in recent weeks and months. Some Israeli men in uniform have objected on religious grounds to female singers at official military ceremonies. Last week, the military ruled that women cannot be prohibited from singing.

It also put in place new requirements for rabbis when addressing groups of student soldiers. The rabbis will have to clear such meetings ahead of time with the military rabbinate, and they will also be accompanied by a military minder. The new rules suggest that the army brass is truly concerned about the impact of increasing religiosity within its ranks.

“Nobody at the top of the army has discussed this publicly,” said Gershom Gorenberg, author of “The Unmaking of Israel”. “So, we’re guessing here.”

If an order came down for a large scale evacuation of West Bank settlements, Gorenberg said he doubts that massive numbers of Israeli soldiers would refuse those orders. But he said that is precisely the scenario that opponents of the two-state solution are trying to put in the public spotlight.

There are “rabbis and other ideologues who are publicizing this issue,” Gorenberg said. And these individuals are, “trying to create a deterrent against an evacuation by raising the question of the internal cohesion of the army in that case.”

Children enjoyed some playtime during a recent evening at the West Bank settlement of Migron, outside of the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Approximately 300 residents here are facing possible eviction, because an Israeli court determined the settlement is illegal and should be dismantled in the coming months.

Community spokesman Itai Chamo, holding his toddler in his arms, told me he is not sure if Israeli soldiers would refuse evacuation orders. But he said, “the army is with us.”

“I do my reserves. I do 40 days a year. The military is me, not anyone else,” Chamo said.

Are you worried about getting an order to evict settlers yourself, I asked?

“No,” Chamo said. He has never received such an order and he said he is not worried about getting one anytime soon.

Margolis family in Bet Shemesh, Israel. (Photo: Daniella Cheslow)

At issue is the treatment, and place, of women and girls in public life. 
The one girl who has put a spotlight on Beit Shemesh is Na’ama Margolis. She is a shy, blonde, second-grader who wears glasses and comes from a religious family. Her parents immigrated to Israel from the US and Canada. Last Friday night, Na’ama appeared in a news report that seized national attention. The 8-year-old talked about how she was scared to walk to school, even while holding her mother’s hand, and despite the fact her school is only 300 yards from her family’s home.

Na’ama is afraid of the ultra-Orthodox men who started showing up at her school a few months ago. The school is a religious one, and the clothes the girls wear tend to reflect that. But for this group of ultra-Orthodox extremists, the girls’ clothes aren’t modest enough.

The men have shown up at the school, shouting nasty names, like whore and slut, at young girls and their mothers. They’ve reportedly spit on them as well.

As a result, tensions between the ultra-Orthodox community and the rest of Beit Shemesh are running high. 
Mira Aaronson, whom I met while pushing her toddler in a stroller near her home, dresses like an observant Jewish Israeli woman: her hair is covered, she wears a long-sleeved sweater and an ankle-length denim skirt. Aaronson said this is sad situation, but in Beit Shemesh, nothing short of hatred has developed between Jews like her and the most extreme members of the ultra-Orthodox community.

A low point, she said, was when her daughter’s classroom was broken into and vandalized. 
“Feces smeared all over the classroom,” Aaronson said. “It was like a stink bomb of dead fish and urine.” 


The tensions in Beit Shemesh are partly about ideals of modesty, according to Shalom Lerner, a former deputy mayor. But Lerner said they’re also about territory.

“We have so many ultra-Orthodox people in Beit Shemesh, and in a certain way they’re trying to change the shape of the city,” Lerner said. “It’s becoming very orthodox, with them trying to change the lifestyles of other people.”

Lerner said Israeli authorities made a mistake years ago when they allowed ultra-Orthodox communities to put up street signs that instructed women how to dress modestly, or not to dawdle in front of synagogues.

When police removed signs this week, scuffles broke out between officers and crowds of ultra-Orthodox men. 
Zvika Borenstein, who works in a hardware store in an ultra-Orthodox section of Beit Shemesh, said he’s not happy with the men from his community who have tried to intimidate non-ultra-Orthodox women and girls.

“Modesty is something you learn from parents,” Borenstein said. “Shouting at girls isn’t going to accomplish anything.”


Outside the hardware store, another ultra-Orthodox man who gave his name as Mittelman said he hadn’t heard about the incidents at the girls’ school because he doesn’t read secular newspapers or listen to the news.

But Mittleman said the ultra-Orthodox community must remain segregated from the rest of Israeli society, including its Jewish neighbors.

Meanwhile, the Margolis family is getting a lot of public support. On Monday night, the family’s living room was full of news cameras there to film the lighting of the Hanukkah candles. Rabbi Haim Amsalem, who’s also a member of the Israeli parliament, compared ultra-Orthodox Jewish extremists to the extremists in the Islamic theocracy of Iran.

“We don’t want to live here like in Tehran,” Amsalem said, citing examples of women being forced to cover up. 


Na’ama Margolis’s mother Hadassah told me that she sees the conflict at her daughter’s school as an example of a bigger problem in Israel.

“I’m hoping that all over the country we see a difference and we see a change in the way women are being treated at the moment. I want this craziness to stop,” Margolis said.

On Tuesday, thousands of people came out in Beit Shemesh to protest what they see as an attempt by religious zealots to impose their rules on Israeli society at large. Ahead of the demonstration, Israel’s president Shimon Peres urged people to stand up against Jewish extremism, in what he called a fight for the nation’s soul.

The Greek Orthodox monastery of St. George’s is built into a steep, tan cliffside in the Judean desert. The place dates back to the 4th or 5th century. Today, St. George’s is home to 10 monks. One is said to spend most of his time praying – or sleeping – in a cave nearby.

The site is also a popular destination for Christian pilgrims. One of them who gave her name as Dominique, stood in a chapel wearing a loosely-tied headscarf, with her hands folded and tears streaming down her cheeks.

“With the whole of my heart, with the whole of my spirit,” she said. “I am really excited and happy to be over here.”

“I’ve been crying,” she added. “I’m shaking and I can’t explain even that.”

And she’s far from alone. Last year, 3.5 million tourists visited the Holy Land. Two-thirds of them were Christians. The Israeli government, which controls the borders not only to the Jewish State but to the West Bank as well, sees real potential in faith tourism. And it’s reaching out to Christian pilgrims in a big way.

One of the most popular sites for Christians is Qasr al-Yahud. That’s Arabic for “Palace of the Jews.” It’s the spot in the Jordan River where Jesus is said to have been baptized.

The modern-day pilgrimage site sits in the middle of a minefield between the Israeli-controlled West Bank and the Kingdom of Jordan. In recent years, Israeli authorities have spent lots of money removing mines and renovating to make the place accessible to tourists, like Gordon Wong.

Wong is a Methodist pastor from Singapore. After baptizing several pilgrims, he climbed out of the waist-deep, greenish-brown water onto a newly built wooden deck.
“Before you get married, you already fall in love with the person you want to get married to,” Wong explained.

“So, you’ve already started that relationship, you already know. But the wedding ceremony is a public demonstration of that. You’re saying you’re not ashamed to be identified with this person. That’s really what baptism is. They already have this love of Christ. Now, they want to declare it to others and what better place to do it than here.”

The average tourist spent $ 1,700 each last year, according to Israeli statistics. That adds up to billions of dollars for the local economy. In a short interview, Israel’s Minister of Tourism, Stas Misezhnikov said the Jewish State wants to expand the Christian tourism market for financial reasons, obviously. But for another reason as well.

“Every satisfied tourist,” Misezhnikov said. “He becomes the ambassador of good will [for] the state of Israel. It’s very important to us.”

That was evident during a Holy Land recent visit by a small group of American Evangelical pastors and broadcasters. One of the Israeli officials who met with the group was the Minister for Public Diplomacy, Yuli Edelstein.

“We are very glad that you are here and that you can see things and talk about things,” Edelstein said.

Pastor Joseph Davis from High Point Church in Dallas, Texas told me his visit to Israel was not just about faith, but about politics. Davis said he will go back home and tell Americans what he believes is really going on in the Holy Land today.

“It troubles me greatly to hear that Israel is still at the place of talking about giving away land,” Davis said. “I personally don’t believe that giving away more land is going to solve the issue.”

It is next to impossible to completely remove politics from a visit to this part of the world, according to Uwe Graber. He is the head of the German Lutheran Church for Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Jordan.

Graber said the growing number of Christian pilgrims coming to the Holy Land is tremendously good news for pilgrims and for their local hosts. But he said he tends to encourage visitors to focus on the spiritual rather than the political when they visit here.

“There are so-called fact-finding missions and often I have the impression that they have found their facts ahead, before they come and here they just want to reconfirm the facts they found ahead,” Graber said. “That’s not good.”

Visitors should really, make up their minds afterwards.

Graber said he also urges Christian pilgrims to do more than just visit the holy sites. He tells them to actually meet the people who live here, especially people of non-Christian faiths… Jews, Muslims, Druze and Bahai. That, he says, makes for the most valuable kind of pilgrimage.

US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (Photo: Wiki commons)

And its been getting advice from the Obama administration on how to deal with the uncertainty.

Israel should do more to mend fences with some of its neighbors.

That was part of a message sent by secretary of defense Leon Panetta in a recent speech. Panetta was careful not to blame Israel alone for its increasing diplomatic isolation.

But it’s a problem, Panetta explained. And he urged the Israelis to take bold action to fix it.

When he was asked what Israel should do about the long-stalled peace process with the Palestinians, Panetta said, “get to the damn table.” Panetta repeated the mantra about an unshakable US commitment to Israel’s security. But he also seemed to be asking Israel for more diplomatic effort.

Not just with the Palestinians. But with other regional players, starting with Turkey and Egypt. Israel’s relations with both countries have suffered big setbacks this year.

“I think Israelis are scratching their heads in terms of Panetta’s no doubt well-intentioned but hopelessly naïve and irrelevant admonishment,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, a foreign policy expert at the Shalom Hartman Center in Jerusalem.

He said the Obama administration is failing to grasp what the so-called Arab Spring means for Israel.

“There is nothing more frightening for Israelis when we look around the region and see the rise of Islamist regimes, which may or may not be all kinds of things,” Halevi said. “They may be pro-democratic or anti-democratic, but one thing they all are is hostile, not just to Israel’s policies, but Israel’s existence.”

These are confusing times in the Middle East. And the Obama administration appears to be in a state of confusion itself, said Jonathan Rynhold of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

In the case of Turkey, for example, Rynhold said the big reasons why its relationship with Israel has changed so much is mostly due to Turkey’s internal dynamics.

“And the same really goes for Egypt,” he added. “I mean, at the end of the day, this is a very deep change in Egyptian politics and there’s not really much that Israel can do on the strategic level.”

On the tactical level, Rynhold said Israel could use carrots and sticks with its potential partners and rivals as the region works through this period of transition. But that’s a long-term process, he said. Most of what develops in the Arab world will not be determined by outside influences.

One former Israeli diplomat has a very different view. He welcomed the speech by Panetta, because he said Israel’s current government is guilty of sitting on its hands at a critical time. The government should not be taking a wait and see approach, he said. Things are not likely to get any easier as time goes on.

Paul Hirschson, spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, said he’s heard this criticism before. He said there is an ongoing debate inside Israeli policy circles over whether to reach out or to pull back. At the same time, Hirschon said this might not be the time for Israel to be taking big risks.

“What’s going on in the Arab world right now, what we are calling the ‘Arab Spring’, is not about us. It’s about them,” Hirschon said. “And it’s the Arab populations taking responsibility for themselves. And the truth is that we really do need to sit on the sidelines a little bit and see how it develops.”

Maybe this will turn out to be a time for Israel to engage to its neighbors diplomatically. But if it that does happen, it’s likely to take place carefully and quietly.

Standing on the front steps of a Cairo courthouse, her round face wrapped tightly in a fuchsia headscarf, Ibrahim admits she is nervous. But there is something that gives her confidence. That is the group of about a dozen Egyptian friends, activists and lawyers who came to court to support her.

A young bearded Egyptian engineer named Hossam al-Din introduces himself to me as a Salafi, an ultra-conservative branch of Islam.

Al-Din says he met Samira Ibrahim in early February in Tahrir Square. He has gotten to know her since then and he’s here on Tuesday because what happened to Ibrahim could happen to any Egyptian girl – Christian or Muslim, he says – under this military government. He says, that is not acceptable.

Ibrahim has described what happened to her – in detail – in a video posted online (below in Arabic with English subtitles). But the broad outline of her story goes like this.

Ibrahim, along with 16 other women, were detained during a demonstration on March 9th. She was held for four days. During that time, she says soldiers beat her repeatedly. They subjected her to electric shocks. They screamed at her and threatened her. Then, worst of all, they made her strip so that a man in military clothes could check to see if she was a virgin. She felt like she had been raped.

In June, Ibrahim filed a criminal case against the army. But that case has gone nowhere. So, she is also pursuing a case in civil court, with the help of several human rights groups. They are asking judges to rule on the legality of Ibrahim’s treatment by the military. If they win the case, it could amount to a most serious legal blow to the Egyptian military’s supreme political control over Egypt.

Ahmed Hossam is Ibrahim’s lawyer. In a smart grey suit, he stands outside the courtroom smoking one cigarette after another. He says this case is incredibly sensitive politically. Hossam is not sure which way it will go.

Observers say it is hard to overstate just how much courage it takes for Hossam’s client to go through with her case. Ibrahim is not the only woman who has been subjected to forced “virginity tests” while in military detention. But the subject of sexual abuse carries a powerful stigma, says Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch.

“Egypt remains a very conservative society and even talking about the fact that these virginity tests took place is very difficult for young women, in fact most of the women who’ve been subjected to these forced virginity tests have not wanted to come forward.”

Tuesday in court was a big disappointment. The judge did not make a ruling. Instead the case was postponed until late December. After the announcement, Ibrahim was visibly frustrated.

“I’m not angry,” Ibrahim says. “They’re just stalling, trying to kill my case. But I’m not going to give up.”

Ibrahim’s lawyer said the case is probably being held up because the political atmosphere is so sensitive right now, with the recent violence and ongoing parliamentary elections. “There’s not much to do now,” he said. “Except to wait.”

As for Samira Ibrahim, she will be not waiting for anything. Minutes after the disappointing announcement in the courtroom, she joined a small group of demonstrators and together, they marched straight back to Tahrir Square.