Arab Israeli's Auschwitz visit raises criticism

** In this file photo taken on Friday Nov. 13, 2009, Mohammed Barakeh, an Israeli-Arab member of the Israeli parliament, right, is seen during a protest against Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank village of Bilin, near Ramallah. Barakeh's plan to travel to Auschwitz for a Holocaust memorial ceremony has drawn fierce criticism among his people who say the move is inappropriate at a time of heightened tensions with the Palestinians.Nasser Ishtayeh, File / AP Photo

Arab Israeli's Auschwitz visit raises criticism

By DIAA HADID, Associated Press Writer

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

(01-26) 08:21 PST JERUSALEM, Israel (AP) --

An Israeli Arab lawmaker's plan to attend a Holocaust memorial ceremony at Auschwitz on Wednesday has drawn fierce criticism from both Arabs and some Jews, underscoring the deep divisions between the two sides over the legacy of the Nazi genocide.

The uproar of Mohammed Barakeh's visit highlights the deep reluctance among many Arabs to acknowledge the Holocaust for fear of diminishing their own narrative of suffering at Israel's hands.

Barakeh has come under criticism from Israeli Arabs who say his visit is inappropriate at a time of heightened Israeli-Palestinian tensions — particularly amid Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The lawmaker's visit is a rare Arab commemoration of the Holocaust, a step Israel has long encouraged. But Barakeh also says he intends to condemn Israel's policies toward Palestinians during the visit to Poland, striking a profoundly sensitive chord. Many Jews say any attempt to equate the Palestinians' plight to the genocide is offensive.

Barakeh is a member of an Israeli delegation, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, attending a ceremony Wednesday marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. More than 1 million of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II died at the two camps.

Barakeh frequently calls on his Arab brethren to recognize the Holocaust and understand its importance to Jews. Still, he is also deeply critical of Israel.

"The Jews, who are the victims of the Nazis, are now practicing oppression against the Palestinians," Barakeh told The Associated Press. "I want to tell them: You must learn the real lesson, you must fight oppression and repression in all places and times."

Israel's Arabs minority has an often tense relationship with the Jewish majority. Arabs make up about one-fifth of Israel's 7 million citizens, and there are 13 Arab legislators in the 120-seat parliament.

Despite holding citizenship, Israeli Arabs face widespread discrimination and identify strongly with their Palestinian brethren in the neighboring West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The conflict over the Holocaust dates back to the founding of Israel in 1948.

About 200,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel among hundreds of thousands of their children and grandchildren. Israel provided a new home for the survivors and a measure of insurance that no future attempt to wipe out the Jewish people would succeed.

But in the war surrounding Israel's creation, about 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes, leading to a widespread feeling that they were forced to pay the price of the Nazis' persecution of the Jews in Europe.

That perception makes many Arabs in Israel and the territories hesitate to acknowledge the genocide, fearing it gives justification for their own suffering.

Palestinian officials in the West Bank shut down a children's orchestra and banished its conductor in March after they performed for elderly Holocaust survivors. In August, Palestinian officials in Gaza angrily reacted against U.N. officials who suggested including information about the Holocaust at their schools.

Views toward the Holocaust among Palestinians — and around the Arab world — range from outright denial to diminishing the full extent of the genocide.

Two right-wing Israeli Jewish parliamentarians have demanded Barakeh withdraw from the trip.

"I am sure he will use this visit to attack Israel," said legislator Dany Danon. "The fact that he is making (an) analogy between the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinians is outrageous."

Amnon Beeri-Sulitzeanu — co-director of the Abraham Fund, a Jewish-Arab organization that tries to promote coexistence — acknowledges the sensitivities over drawing parallels.

But, he says he hopes the visit will "encourage Jewish leaders in Israel ... to at least understand and learn more about Palestinian history. Obviously there is no comparison or parallel, but I believe it's an important step to trust building between Jews and Arabs in Israel."

Few, if any, prominent Arabs from Mideast nations have made publicized visits to Auschwitz — but Israel's Arab community is an exception. Two other Arab-Israeli lawmakers previously visited the camp in an effort to build bridges, as did a group of about 100 Arab-Israeli writers and clerics in 2003.

Barakeh is the most prominent public figure yet to do so. He comes from a family forced to flee their village during the 1948 Mideast war, and his parliament speeches often sharply criticize Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. He belongs to Hadash, Israel's communist party, which traditionally gathers both Arab and Jewish voters.

For the past two weeks, Barakeh's visit has prompted unusually heated debate in the Arab-Israeli press.

His detractors argue that Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, which is meant to punish Gaza's Hamas rulers but has created severe hardships for its 1.5 million residents, make his visit inappropriate.

"There's a contradiction in morality between continuing the siege on Gaza and this visit. The Knesset members going to Auschwitz are the ones who demand this siege continue," said Abdel-Hakim Mufid of the radical Northern Islamic Movement.

Prominent Arab writer Zuhair Andraous called it "a slap in the face."

Adding to anger is that members of Netanyahu's coalition have tried — so far unsuccessfully — to criminalize commemorations of the "nakba" that Arabs hold every year to mourn the consequences of their defeat in 1948 war.

"We cannot participate in an Israeli formal delegation that includes right-wing legislators who are trying pass laws preventing us from commemorating our own catastrophe," Andraous said.

Arab Christians try reviving town of Jesus miracle

In this photo taken Sunday, Dec. 20, 2009, Father Masoud Abu Hatoum stands outside a church in the northern Israeli town of Kufr Kana. In the small Galilee town where tradition says Jesus turned water to wine, an ambitious priest, Father Abu Hatoum, nicknamed "the bulldozer" for his enthusiasm, hopes to perform his own miracle, revive a shrinking flock. But he will have a tough time slowing the hemorrhage of Christians from this bleak, economically depressed town, as the young move away to cities like nearby Nazareth. By Yaron Kaminsky | AP Photo

Arab Christians try reviving town of Jesus miracle

By DIAA HADID
The Associated Press
Wednesday, January 20, 2010; 4:26 AM

KUFR KANA, Israel -- In this small Galilee town where tradition says Jesus turned water to wine, an ambitious priest hopes to perform his own miracle - revive a shrinking flock.

Father Masoud Abu Hatoum, nicknamed "the bulldozer" for his enthusiasm, has come up with a few ideas, like re-enacting the New Testament story of Jesus transforming the water for guests at a wedding in the Galilee hamlet of Cana, now this northern Israeli town of Kufr Kana.

"We have to attract people," said Abu Hatoum, who looks as much rock star as priest with his trim beard and large wrap-around sunglasses.

But he will have a tough time slowing the hemorrhage of Christians from this bleak, economically depressed town, as the young move away to cities like nearby Nazareth, which offer bigger Christian communities, more jobs and better marriage prospects.

"Our youths leave the village, they tell us: 'We don't want to die here.' We get old, and they leave," said 65-year-old Said Saffouri, a parishioner whose two sons have moved out of town.

Migration and low birth rates have diminished Christian populations across the Middle East. Israel's community of 123,000 Arab Christians is one of the few in the region whose numbers have held steady - it grew slightly by 2,000 in 2009. But it does face a problem of rural flight to big cities, which leaves traditional small Christian towns like Kufr Kana to waste away.

Kufr Kana was entirely Christian at the beginning of the 20th century, but Muslims began settling in the village first as traders, and then as refugees fleeing fighting during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, locals said. Now the village is home to 16,000 Muslims and 4,000 Christians.

The remaining Christians are already discussing what happens when their community dies out completely: Would local Muslims one day have to oversee the Christian holy sites or would members of the clergy stay behind to do so?

Relations with Muslims tend to be cool but polite. Some Christian residents describe warm friendships with Muslims - while others claim Muslims want them banished from town. Mostly, Christians said they just felt outnumbered.

From a distance, the town reflects its overwhelmingly Muslim population. Visitors can see three minarets spiking up amid the jumble of concrete block houses, with not a church spire in sight.

On a recent Sunday, the Roman Catholic service at the stone-and-marble Cana Wedding Church only drew about 20 worshippers, most of them middle-aged. Another couple of dozen turned out at the smoky, dim and ornate Greek Orthodox church nearby in the old village center, where volunteers built a display for stone jars the church says held the water Jesus turned into wine.

Abu Hatoum's Greek Catholic church attracted some 40 worshippers. That turnout is a tribute to the energetic priest. Before he was sent to the village from Nazareth in the summer of 2009, the church had about 10 regular worshippers, residents said.

Since taking the job, Abu Hatoum announced a series of events he hopes will revive community spirits and encourage the young to stay in town.

For Christmas, Abu Hatoum erected a scaffolding strung with blinking lights around 90 feet (27 eters) high over his church and he billed it the tallest Christmas tree in the Holy Land.

"I would have made it higher," he said laughing, "but I would have needed a license for that."

The gimmick was enough to attract an Israeli television crew, and a spot for the priest on local radio, pleasing parishioners who said nobody had expressed interest in their church before.

In July, Abu Hatoum plans to put on a play depicting Jesus' miracle at Cana. He hopes to pull off a Cana marriage miracle of his own in October with a mass wedding ceremony.

But the grim economics of the town work against his bid to resuscitate the community. With no local industry, the few jobs in Kufr Kana are in schools, the municipal administration, grocery stores, hair salons and mechanic shops.

A few souvenir shops stocked with wine cater to the thousands of Christian tourists who breeze through every year. But the village is only a brief stop on most itineraries, and tourists contribute little to local coffers, said Islam Amara, of the Kufr Kana municipality.

Most Arab towns in Israel have the same concrete-block bleakness and appear impoverished compared to Jewish communities nearby - a legacy of decades of budgetary discrimination by Israeli governments and mismanagement by local municipalities.

Christians are a tiny part of Israel's Arab minority of some 1.4 million, or 20 percent of the country's population of 7.4 million. Another 50,000 Christians live in the West Bank and Gaza, among nearly 4 million Muslims.

The relatively more prosperous cities of Nazareth and Haifa, both with large Christian minorities, give Kufr Kana's young Christians an escape route from boring village life.

The more they leave, the stronger the feeling of isolation among those who remain.

"We just don't feel welcome here," said Janette Elias, 60. Two of her three sons now live in Nazareth, Jesus' traditional boyhood city, about a 10-minute drive away.

Church volunteer Ihab Mukabal, 31, says his brother hopes to find an apartment in a nearby Jewish town. "There's nothing to attract people to stay here," Mukabal said.

The unkempt cemetery behind Abu Hatoum's modest church highlights the community's decline.

The oldest marked graves belong to twins Fadel and Fadil Dbayeh, born in 1899 when Kufr Kana was entirely Christian. By the time they died, in 1965 and 1966, Christians and Muslims were equally numbered, locals say.

The number of those buried in the cemetery was double those who attended church that Sunday.

Israel to Build Two Fences on Egyptian Border

By AP / DIAA HADID

 

(JERUSALEM) — Israel's prime minister has ordered the construction of two massive fences along the long and porous southern border with Egypt, saying he wants to stem a growing flood of African asylum seekers and to prevent Islamic militants from entering the country.

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the structure would help preserve Israel's Jewish majority, while providing a layer of protection along an open border with an area suspected of having an al-Qaida presence.

"I decided to close Israel's southern border to infiltrators and terrorists after prolonged discussions," he said in a statement. "This is a strategic decision to ensure the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel. Israel will remain open to war refugees but we cannot allow thousands of illegal workers to infiltrate into Israel via the southern border and flood our country," he said.

The two fences will cover nearly half of the 150-mile (250-kilometer) border. One section will be near the Red Sea port of Eilat. The other will be in southwest Israel, near the Gaza Strip town of Rafah.

Government spokesman Mark Regev said government ministers approved the plan Sunday evening. He said a date hasn't been set for construction and it is unclear how long it would take to complete the fences.

The project is expected to cost about $400 million, according to local media reports.

The structure would come in addition to a massive fence surrounding the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, as well as a separation barrier that snakes along parts of Israel's more than 400-mile (680-kilometer) frontier with the West Bank, biting into chunks of the territory as it runs. Egypt has its own fence along Gaza's southern border, and is reinforcing the area with underground metal plates to shut down tunnels used to smuggle goods and weapons into Gaza.

The planned Egypt fence, like the West Bank and Gaza barriers, is rooted largely in security concerns.

The military began planning the fence in 2005 after Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip, fearing that militants would freely travel to Egypt and sneak into Israel. These concerns were underscored in early 2007, when a Gaza suicide bomber sneaked into Eilat through Egypt.

But the massive influx of African migrants into Israel in recent years has given the project added momentum. U.N. officials and human rights workers estimate some 17,000 to 19,000 people have poured into Israel through the southern border since 2005, most of them from Eritrea, Sudan and other war-torn African countries, searching for a better life in Israel's relatively affluent Western-style society.

Most of them live in crowded slums in Tel Aviv or Eilat, where many work as dishwashers and hotel bellboys.

The new arrivals have created a dilemma for authorities. On one hand, they strain Israel's social service system, and officials fear they could upset the country's demographic mix, possibly tilting it away from a Jewish majority. About three-quarters of Israel's 7 million citizens are Jewish.

On the other hand, Israel is a country created in large part as a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, and many feel they cannot turn their backs on the Africans, believing the government must be more sensitive to their needs.

Advocacy groups also note that the asylum seekers are far outnumbered by foreign workers who have flown into the country legally and overstayed their visas.

Israel's policy toward the asylum seekers has been muddled, with frequent changes in rules and procedures.

At present, Africans who cross into Israel through Egypt are detained for several months in a nearby prison while their applications are processed.

Most are eventually given one-month visas to stay in Israel that they must renew every month, said Yonatan Berman of the Hotline for Migrant Workers, an advocacy group that helps the asylum seekers. They are not allowed to work, but the government turns a blind eye.

Israel requested Egypt tighten its border patrols. Amnesty International says Egyptian security forces have killed 39 people, mostly Sudanese and Eritreans, trying to cross into Israel between 2008 to mid-2009. More updated figures were not immediately available. Both countries have been criticized by human rights groups for their approach to the problem.

In Cairo, Egypt's foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said his government had no objections to the fence, as long as it is on Israeli territory. "This is a matter which concerns Israel. This is something which Israel is building inside its territories, so let it be," he told reporters.

Security and crime concerns have also prompted Israel to erect the fences. Israeli officials frequently issue warnings urging citizens to avoid travel to the neighboring Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. The area is believed to be a stronghold for al-Qaida-inspired extremists who have aligned themselves with lawless Bedouin tribes in the area. In 2004, a total of 32 people were killed in a pair of hotel bombings in the Sinai.

Smugglers use the porous area to traffic women into Israel's prostitution trade, and it's also a main conduit for drugs entering the country.

But its many walls illustrate Israel's sense of isolation in a largely hostile region. The West Bank barrier in particular has sparked international criticism because it frequently juts into the West Bank, drawing accusations that Israel is using it to gobble up land claimed by the Palestinians.

There are also fences separating Israel from hostile Lebanon and parts of the Golan Heights, which Israel annexed after seizing the Syrian territory in the 1967 Mideast war.

"Defense against terror activity clearly requires a fence," Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio Monday. "Good fences make good neighbors," Barak said, noting only Israel's western border — the sea — did not need to be blocked off. "Along the sea we don't need a fence," he said.

Aussie runner to run 52 marathons in 1 year

Australian distance runner hoping to 'run like crazy' with 52 marathons

 

By Diaa Hadid, Associated Press Writer

TIBERIAS, Israel — Pledging to "run like crazy," an Australian distance runner has begun an ambitious quest to complete 52 marathons in 52 weeks.

If 33-year-old Tristan Miller can pull it off, the Melbourne native will have overcome the pain of getting divorced and losing his job to accomplish a feat few people could even imagine.

He plans to run about 1,360 miles (2,200 kilometers) while flying all over the world, coping with jet lag, unfamiliar foods, little training time and wildly different climates.

"This isn't the smartest thing I've ever done, but it's definitely the best thing I've ever done," Miller said after completing his second marathon of the year in Tiberias, a northern Israeli town located on the shores of the biblical Sea of Galilee.

Miller finished the race in 3 hours, 52 minutes, 36 seconds, nearly 30 minutes slower than his personal best of 3:23 and 10 minutes off the pace of last week's marathon. He put down the gap to his body being weakened by a lingering cold he caught in snowy Berlin and the heat of an unusually warm Israeli winter day.

"I've probably got one three-hour marathon in me, but probably only just one," Miller said.

The Australian finished in the middle of the pack at the Tiberias Marathon, where spectators lined the streets, clowns entertained the crowd and one onlooker brought along his pet alligator.

Miller ran the first 26.2-mile (42.2-kilometer) marathon in his quest last week in Switzerland. Next week, he plans to run in the Indian city of Mumbai before heading to the Canary Islands on Jan. 24. In all, he plans to compete in 42 countries.

The Australian's life took a turn for the worse in 2003. His marriage fell apart -- the divorce was amicable, he says -- and he began drinking for solace.

A friend then encouraged him to run with him, and Miller found meaning in long jogs.

"I think my life was in a bit of a cloud by the time I got divorced," Miller said. "(But) I found my way out of my cloud. I found it, because you start running and the cloud lifts and life is clear again."

Miller was already a distance runner when he lost a high-tech job in Melbourne last April. Instead of looking for a new job, he sold his apartment and decided to use the money to run marathons all over the world.

To keep him company, Miller asked his best friend -- New Zealand native Darren Foss -- to accompany him.

"You want to be with someone when you see some of the most amazing places in the world," Miller said. "And he can carry the other camera."

When he decided to take up running for the year, Miller had completed five official marathons and one ultra-marathon -- a 56-mile (90-kilometer) run in South Africa in May. He says his health is good, and as long as he recovers properly between marathons, he believes can do it. He says he has found other runners who have done similarly intense schedules, but not on a global scale.

But training is a challenge. Last week, Miller got stranded in snowed-in Berlin for several days after the bad weather canceled his flight. He couldn't run n Berlin because of a cold.

Food is another problem: Miller prefers to eat brown rice, vegetables and "a bit of meat" -- but he stays frequently in hotels without a place to prepare food and has to rely on eating out.

Miller thinks the year's marathons will cost about $150,000 for himself and Foss. The Australian is looking for sponsors, and is promising to give half to UNICEF.

In the meantime, he's preparing for the next marathon.

"I've got 50 to go," Miller said. "It doesn't seem so far."