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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 April 1999 Issue No. 425 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 April 1999 Issue No. 425
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Israel backs Islamists?
By Graham UsherOn 30 March, the million-strong Palestinian community in Israel observed Land Day, the now annual event held to remember six Palestinians shot dead by Israeli police during protests against Israel's land confiscation policies in March 1976. Despite rallies in the Negev and the Galilee, the protest was the quietest in living memory, with barely a stone thrown in anger.
Five days later -- amid ceremonies for the Roman Catholic Easter Sunday -- major clashes erupted in Nazareth, the largest Palestinian city inside Israel, leaving a toll of 12 Palestinians injured, 11 arrested and 30 cars vandalised. Here, too, the dispute was over land, but it wasn't with Israel; it was between Nazareth's Palestinian Christian and Muslim communities. Nor did the trouble end there. Over the next three days, two shops in Nazareth -- one Muslim and one Christian -- were firebombed while Israel's Islamist movement declared a commercial strike in the city.
In response, Nazareth's Christian churches closed in protest at the violence. "Things are getting out of hand," said a spokesman for the Nazareth municipality, Suhail Diab. "The city is in a mess after a year of incitement on a sectarian basis."
In fact, trouble between Nazareth's Christian and Muslim communities has been simmering for longer than a year. The immediate cause is a disputed plot of land near Nazareth's main Church of the Annunciation, where, according to Christians, the angel Gabriel appeared before the Virgin Mary. The municipality, led by its Christian mayor, Ramez Jeraisi, has long wanted the area to be turned into a plaza in readiness for the millennium celebrations in 2000. The Islamists claim that, prior to 1948, the land had belonged to the Waqf (Muslim religious endowment) and that its return by Israel's Land Administration means that it should now be used to build a mosque. Since December 1997, an Islamist "protest tent" has been pitched on the site to prevent any municipal construction. But these sectarian disputes are laden with other, more social fractures.
Israeli border police stand guard in front of a demonstration of about 300 Muslims in Nazareth last week vowing to build a large mosque on a disputed site (photo: AP)
In November 1998, Israel's Islamist movement for the first time took control of Nazareth municipality, winning 10 of the 17 council seats, and causing a head-on collision with Jeraisi's plans for the disputed land. The result reflected the changing religious composition of Nazareth.
Historically a Christian city, Nazareth today is home to 60,000 Palestinians, 70 per cent of whom are Muslims. Despite this, much of the political and economic power in the city is -- or is perceived to be -- in Christian hands. Thus the current conflict is not simply over whether 1,860 square metres of turf should be a plaza for Christians or a mosque for Muslims. It is also redolent of Christian anxiety about becoming a "minority" in their "own" city and Muslim grievance over real or alleged discrimination, especially of the religious kind.
It is a divide Israel has been swift to aggravate. Secular parties in Israel such as the Communist-led Hadash bloc -- which supported Jeraisi for the mayorship -- accuse Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud Party of stirring up sectarian tensions by quietly supporting the Islamists against Jeraisi. It is a charge given substance by the intervention of Israel's Interior Minister and Shas leader Eliahu Suissa. Last month, he threatened to dissolve the Nazareth municipality on the grounds that, four months after the elections, Jeraisi and the Islamists had failed to agree on a governing coalition, largely because of the "plaza" dispute.
Should Suissa act on the threat, he would implicitly be helping the Islamists, since the removal of Jeraisi would delay any construction beyond the year 2000 deadline. Jeraisi responded by placing the issue in the government's court. Following the Easter Sunday clashes, he issued the following statement: "If it turns out that the disputed lot is Waqf land, I will be the first to demand its return to its rightful owners. But if it turns out to be state land, the address for a solution is exclusively the government."
Whatever the eventual solution, in the wake of the clashes, the priority of Palestinian leaders -- whether inside Israel or from the Occupied Territories -- has been to mend the rift between Christian and Muslim in Nazareth.
On 5 April, the PLO executive urged the city's Palestinians "to end all infighting and commence a dialogue" in the name of "national unity." Yet -- 23 years after Land Day -- the clashes in Nazareth have exposed to all just how fragile that unity has become.
For National Democratic Alliance (Al-Balad) leader and prime ministerial contender, Azmi Bishara, such conflicts are the bitter fruit of a process in which Palestinians in Israel have subordinated their national identity in exchange for "more political rights and a higher standard of living" as citizens of Israel.
Speaking in 1998, Bishara warned: "If we give up on or are confused about our national identity, we will not move to a transnational or post-national identity... We will become pre-national. We will become the minorities Israel wants us to become: Druze, Muslims, Christians but not a nationality."
