Mideast Clash Is Becoming an All-Out Religious War

Nuha Sawalhi has no doubt the conflagration that has engulfed Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip over the past month is about religion.

Standing in the debris of Joseph’s Tomb, in the West Bank town of Nablus, Sawalhi rejoiced on a recent afternoon that Palestinians now control the site, which she calls Sheik Yusef’s Tomb.

“It is our Muslim holy site,” said the 54-year-old Sawalhi, cloaked in the dress of an observant Muslim woman. “When I was a child, I came and prayed here as a Muslim. Please don’t let the Jews come back to this place.”

Around her, reconstruction was underway of the small shrine that a Palestinian mob destroyed Oct. 7 after Israeli troops abandoned the site as indefensible. All evidence that Israelis once controlled the tomb, or that Jews had studied and prayed here since 1974, has been erased.

The man buried here, Palestinians insist, is Sheik Yusef Dweikat, who died in the 1800s, not the Jewish patriarch of biblical times.

“He had no relation to the Jews. The prophet Joseph is buried in Egypt,” said Dr. Ayoub Hamadan, a pediatrician. “This is not a religious war, but the Jewish settlers decided to make it a religious war.”

For Arabs and Jews, some of the most disturbing images to emerge from four weeks of clashes have been those of the destruction each has wreaked on the other’s holy shrines.

On Friday, worshipers arriving at a synagogue in the West Bank settlement of Efrat found its interior walls spray-painted with swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans in Arabic and English.

“Hitler correctly destroyed the Jewish vermin” was scrawled across one wall, said Shlomo Riskin, Efrat’s chief rabbi. “People whose parents lived through Kristallnacht are weeping,” he added, referring to the 1938 Nazi destruction of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses throughout Germany.

The attacks have raised fears that what both sides have for decades insisted is a national war over land is being transformed into an all-out religious war, where compromise over borders and sovereignty will become impossible.

Palestinians charge that it was the Israelis who infused religion into the conflict, triggered Sept. 28 when Ariel Sharon, leader of the right-wing Likud Party, asserted Israeli sovereignty over the compound in Jerusalem that Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call Haram al Sharif.

Palestinians viewed the visit, made with an armed police escort, as a deliberate desecration of the Al Aqsa mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam. They dubbed the riots that erupted after the visit the Al Aqsa intifada and said the young men who have been killed in confrontations with Israeli troops died defending the mosque.

“Sharon set off a spark that spread from Jerusalem to every Arab, Muslim and Christian city and village,” Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat said in a speech Sunday at a summit of Arab leaders in Cairo. Sharon’s visit, he said, “created a new dimension in the Arab-Israeli struggle--the religious one.”

Muslims also have been outraged by the firebombings of two mosques in Jaffa and the burning of tires and spray-painting of hate slogans on a mosque in Tiberias. They were angered by the desecration of a Muslim cemetery in Nesher, burial site of Palestinian hero Iziddin al-Qassam, who resisted British rule and fought Zionists in the region before Israel became a nation.

Jews have decried the firebombings of synagogues in Jaffa, Haifa, Ramla and Shfaram, and the defacement of tombs of Jewish saints in several Galilean towns. They watched in horror the televised destruction of Joseph’s Tomb and were incensed when another mob torched a yeshiva, or school, built over the ruins of a synagogue under Palestinian control in Jericho.

Moderates on both sides fear that the conflict is becoming infused with religion.

“You cannot argue with someone who says: ‘For me it is holy and that is it,’ ” said Ron Huldai, the mayor of Tel Aviv and Jaffa.

“What we are witnessing is a kind of hidden hatred which was maybe there for tens or hundreds of years on both sides,” said Mohammed Hurani, senior lecturer and researcher in Islamic culture and education at Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute and David Yellin College. “If we continue damaging our religious symbols and holy places, it will take a long, long time to remove the bad feelings that will be created.”

Writing in the Hebrew daily Maariv, Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, recently called on Islamic clerics to join him in an appeal for both sides to stop the bloodshed and the desecration of shrines.

“If we don’t show an example on this issue,” the rabbi warned, “the whole Middle East may enter into a bloody whirlpool, a fire whose end we cannot see. . . . Religious wars throughout history were bloody, and their price horrific.”

In Jaffa, where Arab Israeli demonstrations in support of West Bank and Gazan Palestinians became violent, young Arabs sleep every night in the city’s six mosques, on guard against attacks, said City Council member Ahmed Balaha, an Arab.

Two mosques in Jaffa were firebombed Oct. 7, after Joseph’s Tomb was trashed and three Israeli soldiers were kidnapped on the border with Lebanon by the Muslim militia Hezbollah. After he was told that one mosque had been hit by a Molotov cocktail that burned an outside wooden door, Balaha called police and headed for another mosque that lies on the coastal road connecting Tel Aviv and Jaffa. It was on fire.

“These attacks are very dangerous,” Balaha said. “I have asked the imams to say that it is forbidden to hurt any place of prayer.”

The next night, in one of Jaffa’s poorest neighborhoods, 80-year-old Yaza Nataf heard a window shatter on the small synagogue next to her house and smelled smoke. Her late husband had built the simple structure 50 years ago to serve Jewish immigrants from Arab nations. About 20 elderly Jews still pray there every Friday.

Rushing to the building, Nataf’s daughter and son-in-law found that a Molotov cocktail had set ablaze the ark that holds the Torah scrolls. They put out the flames and rescued the scrolls. A second Molotov cocktail hit the building a few nights later but caused no damage.

As the Nataf described the attacks, the sound of a muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer could be heard from a nearby mosque.

“My relations with my Arab neighbors have always been very good,” said Nataf, who uses a wheelchair. “Neighbors are neighbors; we tell each other happy holidays on our holidays.” But now, Nataf said, she is frightened and her children are urging her to move.

“I cannot understand this thing,” Nataf said. “What did the synagogue ever do to them? OK, there is a quarrel between Arabs and Jews, but why hurt the synagogue?”

During the riots in Jaffa, Israeli Arabs threw rocks at Jews’ cars and buses and damaged the post office and an Israeli bank. Jews damaged Arab-owned businesses and homes. But both sides agreed that the most serious assaults were on their holy sites.

The Israeli government condemned the attacks on mosques as the work of hooligans. It also condemned the attacks on Jewish holy sites under the Palestinian Authority’s control, saying the assaults show that Arafat’s administration cannot protect such sites and should not be given sovereignty over the Temple Mount, where the Jews’ ancient temples once stood.

Palestinians say that what happened to Joseph’s Tomb and the Jericho yeshiva was the work of mobs whom their police could not control. In both instances, the Palestinian Authority condemned the destruction and ordered the sites repaired.

Under the Oslo peace accords, the Palestinians agreed to preserve all Jewish holy sites and, specifically, to allow Israel to protect Joseph’s Tomb and give yeshiva students access both to the tomb and to the ancient Jericho synagogue.

But Palestinians regarded the military encampment protecting Joseph’s Tomb, in the heart of a Palestinian city, as an affront and the militant Jewish settlers bused in every day to study there as agents provocateurs. Despite the entry in the biblical book of Genesis that says the Jews carried Joseph’s bones from Egypt and buried them in Nablus, Palestinians say the tomb is not a true Jewish holy site--a claim many Israeli archeologists say is true.

The ancient synagogue in Jericho was different. The synagogue and yeshiva are under the control of the Palestinian Authority. For years, Jews have prayed and studied there without incident. But a mob attacked the building during the first week of October and damaged the yeshiva before police and Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat turned them away.

Since then, the Palestinian Authority repeatedly refused to let journalists examine the damage--until Thursday, when Erekat allowed state-run Israel Television to film the newly restored yeshiva. He said the Palestinian administration paid about $50,000 for repairs such as replacing the carpeting and painting the walls.

“For four years, the thing I was most proud of was that we had this Jewish synagogue in Jericho and armed Palestinian police outside the door, protecting it,” he said. “The night the mob attacked it, I felt my whole world was collapsing.”

The restoration, Erekat said, was meant as “a message to Israelis and Palestinians that there will be a morning after and a week after, and Israelis and Palestinians have to live together.”

So far, said Benjamin Shiloh, advisor to a committee on Arab affairs appointed by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to improve conditions for Arab Israelis, Jews and Arabs have been lucky during this wave of violence. “There were actually very few religious shrines hit during this unrest,” he said, and only one, Joseph’s Tomb, was destroyed.

“But the effect of these attacks is very huge. It starts, and you never know when it stops,” he said. “We hope that this burning of synagogues and mosques is over. But we all know that politics and religion are the most explosive cocktail.”