Editor’s note: The normal Easter throng was missing in Jerusalem this year due to stringent Israeli security at border checkpoints and in the Old City. Separate celebrations of Easter were officially held in Bethlehem as well as the Old City, much to the dismay of local Palestinian Christians. Reporter Jonathan Miles visited several services in the Old City. Here is his account:
The time is Easter morning, 1920–76 years ago. The place is Jerusalem. And six Jews and six Arabs have been killed in the first bloodshed of the century’s still unfinished struggle for Jerusalem. An officer finds the chief secretary of the British mandatory government in an Easter service pew at the Anglican Cathedral.
“Sir,” he whispers, “you may be talking about peace on earth and goodwill to men in here, but down at the Jaffa Gate the Jews and the Arabs are beating bloody hell out of each other.”
In 1996, it is the Jews trying to keep the peace in the Old City on Easter morning. Israeli police have closed the Jaffa Gate to traffic, so those coming to services enter the city on foot. At 7:30 a.m. the just-washed cobblestones of David Street glow golden under the risen sun. A police van wheels around the corner, the driver putting the last piece of a Passover matzo in his mouth.
Just inside the massive wooden doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, middle-aged women bend over and kiss the slab upon which the crucified body of Jesus is said to have been laid. They anoint the spot with perfumes, which they then dab on their foreheads with a handkerchief. Dozens of burning candles lit by pilgrims are sizzling in the darkened church.
ARMED PATROL: Outside, a hundred yards away, there is a heavily armed patrol of the Israeli border police. “The Muslims are making all of the problems,” one soldier says. “This is a pressure cooker. World War III will begin here. It is quiet with the Christians. They prefer our government, not a Muslim one. The Muslims would kill them. They can’t accept any other religion.”
By the church door, a silver-haired Israeli police officer, a Syrian-born Jew, banters easily in Arabic, his wide grin showing one missing tooth. “Ten years I have been here,” he explains. “My commander is [an Arab] Christian. We have Druze, Jews, and Christians working together.”
Nearby, 24-year-old hairdresser Suhair Habash, from an Arabic family of Coptic Christians, seems to embody the many contradictions of Jerusalem. She has exercised the right of all Jerusalem residents to become an Israeli citizen, and proudly pulls a menorah-embossed passport from her purse. However, she will soon join the ranks of those in exodus from Jerusalem. She will be leaving to marry her fiance and live with his family in Cairo. “The Christians here have problems with the Jews and Muslims,” she says.
“The Jews tell the Muslims that the Christians are good, and the Muslims hate the Christians because the Jews do [that].”
Should Christians talk with Jews and Muslims about Jesus? “I believe that Jews and Muslims will become Christians,” Habash says. “Jesus will move mountains. [He] will do big things, and they will believe.”
A short distance away at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, the 9 a.m. Arabic-language Easter service is coming to an end, and, at the tea hour, 64-year-old widow Larissa Atallah laments that her son could not be with her. Although he lives only a few miles away in Amman, Jordan, he is forbidden to visit his mother on the northern fringe of Jerusalem. “Four times I’ve asked permission for my son and his wife to come for Christmas, and [the Israelis] are not allowing him to come because he lived in Baghdad, which they say is an enemy to Israel,” Atallah says. “What does that have to do with my son?”
She says Muslims believe that Arab Christians and Americans are maneuvering against them. “They think all Christians are helping Israel,” Atallah says.
DIVIDED FAMILIES: Back at the Holy Sepulcher, Bassam Kreitem, 31, and his wife, Muna, emerge at the conclusion of the day’s Greek Orthodox liturgy. He believes he would be a “traitor” to take Israeli citizenship.
Kreitem’s family members in the West Bank, Bethlehem, and Ramallah cannot come to church to pray because of strict roadblocks imposed in the aftermath of the string of suicide bombings by Muslim radicals. “I feel like I am living in a jail,” Kreitem says. “All our land has been taken by Israeli Jews. The Jews treat us like animals.”
Kreitem believes he would fare better under the Palestinian Authority. “They reserved special places for Christians on the Palestinian Council,” he says. “We have not seen anything wrong with them.”
Also attending the Holy Sepulchre service is 35-year-old George Tanous, an Arab Christian who left Jerusalem at age 22. Now a rug wholesaler in San Francisco, he is back for his biannual holiday visit with his family.
“Muslims look at us as crusaders that don’t belong to this land,” Tanous says. “To the Jews, this is the Promised Land. A non-Jew shouldn’t be living here. This is the policy of the government.”
Despite biblical prophecies regarding Jews returning to the Promised Land, Tanous thinks reality tells a different story. “It’s like the Indians in America,” he says. “Imagine if they say, ‘This is our country, go out.’ Who would listen?”
Tanous does not believe Jews, Christians, and Muslims can peacefully coexist in Jerusalem. “Can you take hatred out of the heart?” he asks. “You cannot.”
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