Jewish-Arab Tension Mounts : Death in Jerusalem’s Old City Ignites ‘Powder Keg’

Three years ago, a senior Israeli government official described the movement of a few score Jewish seminary students into the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s walled Old City as “the fuse in the powder keg.”

Last weekend, three Palestinians from Janin, 50 miles away, lit that fuse, causing what has been called the worst explosion of anti-Arab violence in Jerusalem in years.

On Saturday, according to police, the three stabbed to death Eliahu Amedi, 22, a student at the Shuvu Banim yeshiva, or Jewish religious school, in the Muslim quarter.

The murderers were caught within minutes, but the incident nevertheless triggered outbursts of violence that continued into Tuesday in which classmates of the dead man and other Jews, most of them Orthodox, attacked Arabs at random, stoned and firebombed Arab homes and businesses and vandalized Arab cars.

The violence spread from the Old City neighborhood where Amedi was killed to other parts of both Arab East and Jewish West Jerusalem, and at least 20 Jews have been arrested.

An Arab motorist driving in Amedi’s neighborhood was injured when a rock was thrown through his windshield. In the Muslim quarter of the Old City, an incendiary device was hurled Tuesday into an Arab house, but it was defused before it could cause damage.

Merchants closed their shops Tuesday as a protest over the anti-Arab violence, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was among a number of Israeli officials who condemned the vigilante attacks.

It was clear from conversations with dozens of Jews and Arabs that the outburst has left tensions high and passions raw in a neighborhood where the two peoples live closer to one another than perhaps anywhere else in this disputed land.

“The people who killed the student were from Janin,” said a shaken Murshed abu Sbeh, 30, who fled from his home adjoining the Shuvu Banim yeshiva after students showered it with rocks and at least two Molotov cocktails. “I am their neighbor. What did I do to them?”

Returning briefly to his home Monday with two American reporters and a police escort, Abu Sbeh pointed out a 10-pound rock that he said was dropped from the yeshiva roof into his courtyard, narrowly missing his 50-year-old mother. Other rocks and broken glass littered the area, and black stains around a nearby window marked the fire-gutted apartment of a neighbor that was hit with a gasoline bomb over the weekend.

A few yards away, where Amedi died of 14 stab wounds, his classmates and other Orthodox Jews prayed beside a makeshift monument inscribed, “May the Lord Avenge His Blood.”

While the Arab residents may not have plunged the knives into Amedi themselves, said Andrew Raclyn, they were at least accessories. No one tried to help the struggling victim, and afterward, “they didn’t express remorse at all,” contended Raclyn, a friend of several yeshiva students. “It’s as if a dog were killed.”

Arabs Should ‘All Get Out’

“We won’t be quiet, and we won’t rest until they (the Arabs) all get out of here,” added another young Jew who refused to give his name.

Elsewhere, physical separation might provide enough margin for these powerful emotions to subside, but not in Jerusalem’s crowded Old City, and particularly not in this neighborhood.

The walled city was basically all there was to Jerusalem into the 19th Century, and it remains the modern city’s primary tourist attraction. Within its ancient walls are sites holy to the three great monotheistic religions--the Western Wall, sacred to Jews as the last remnant of the Second Temple; Islam’s Dome of the Rock shrine, built over the spot from which the Prophet Mohammed is said to have ascended to heaven, and Christianity’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, marking the spots on which Christ is believed to have been crucified and buried.

It is also home to about 25,000 of contemporary Jerusalem’s more than 400,000 residents, who live in clearly defined sections within the walls. The largest, the Muslim Quarter, numbers more than 17,000 inhabitants, the Christian Quarter has more than 4,000, the Jewish Quarter about 2,000 and the Armenian Quarter another 2,000.

Except for the Jewish Quarter, rebuilt after Israel captured the Old City from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, the rest of the walled town doesn’t look much different than it must have hundreds of years ago. Narrow alleys, unmarked entranceways and hidden stairways create a maze through timeless stone buildings erected atop the rubble of earlier structures dating back more than 3,000 years.

Small Courtyards

One building abuts the next, with small courtyards, hidden from the view of the street, often providing the only open space within the equivalent of two or three city blocks.

It’s a claustrophobic existence in which both the residents and the city fathers see religious and ethnic separation as a particularly important ingredient in maintaining the peace.

In the late 1970s, however, a few Jews began moving into the fringe of the Muslim Quarter, occupying a handful of properties whose ownership was still listed as Jewish from an earlier era when the neighborhood had been mixed.

The real trouble began in 1980, when Abraham Dwek, a Syrian-born Jew then living in New York, founded what later became the Shuvu Banim yeshiva in gratitude for having escaped an Arab threat on his life during a visit to Jerusalem.

The school’s students have been mostly newly observant--the Jewish equivalent of born-again Christians--and a number of them are ex-convicts. They follow the teachings of a 19th-Century Jewish mystic called Nachman of Bratslav.

Shuvu Banim is today one of a handful of yeshivot in the Muslim Quarter, and their students make up the bulk of what are now about 300 Jewish residents there.

Beginnings of a Human Tide

The students contend that they are there only for religious reasons, but to the Arabs they are the same as Jewish settlers on the Israeli-occupied West Bank--the beginnings of a human tide threatening to sweep them from their homes.

“The feeling of being encroached upon that the Arabs have . . . is creating part of the tension,” commented Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, who has publicly opposed the spread of the yeshiva population in the Muslim Quarter. “I’m not (talking) about rights--we have the right to the entire city. . . . I’m speaking about the wisdom of certain actions.”

According to Arab residents, the behavior of the yeshiva students ranges from inconsiderate to outright hostile.

“They’re always praying at crazy hours of the night and shouting,” said Murshed abu Sbeh. “They sleep in the daytime and pray all night.”

Abu Sbeh’s is one of three families that normally live in a network of small rooms on the floor below the yeshiva. They are among 20 Arab families that reportedly fled during the weekend violence.

Poisoned Meat for Dog

Izak Moussa Khales, another yeshiva neighbor, contended that students threw poisoned meat into his yard to kill the family’s dog. His father, Moussa Mahmoud Khales, 88, said he bought the dog to protect his family from harassment by the students.

The elder Khales said the Jews want to force him to sell so they can take over his property. However, he said, scooping up dirt from from his small courtyard garden for emphasis, “I won’t sell a handful of this soil to them for a million pieces of gold. Not even one small stone. More than 60 years ago, we bought every meter of this land with Palestinian money. They want us to leave, but we will never give up our land. We will stay here until we die. And after we die, our children will remain.”

There have been repeated brawls, stone- and bottle-throwing incidents between the yeshiva students and their Arab neighbors, city officials confirm.

The few Jewish families who live in the Muslim Quarter “get along fine with the Arab community,” said a spokesman for Mayor Kollek. “It’s the yeshivas, the organizations, that are causing the problems, not the families.”

Kollek’s Arab affairs adviser, Amir Heshin, told Israel radio Tuesday that the city’s policy is to “limit as much as possible” the spread of yeshivas in the Muslim Quarter. “I don’t believe the Muslim quarter is the appropriate place for Jewish yeshivas, especially these days,” he said.

‘Father of Youssef’

Hannoch Ben-Arza, an observant Jew, has operated a religious bookstore on the edge of the Muslim Quarter for 17 years. He speaks Arabic and said his relations with his Arab neighbors are generally good. They call him, in the Arabic fashion, Abu Youssef--literally, “father of Youssef.”

It’s different for the yeshiva students, Ben-Arza said. “Usually the connection between these people and Arab people is not like neighbors, because these young people don’t think about what is the mentality of the Arab people,” he said. “And the Arab people are afraid of the young people.”

“This is crazy!” Ben-Arza said of the weekend violence against the Arab residents. “It doesn’t have to do with what happened Saturday (the murder). This yeshiva has problems with the Arab people.” He described the students as “hotheaded.”