Intimidating behaviour beside procession of worshippers seen as another sign of victimisation and was condemned by Netanyahu
A video of ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting on the ground beside a procession of foreign Christian worshippers carrying a wooden cross in the holy city of Jerusalem has ignited intense outrage and a flurry of condemnation in the Holy Land.
The spitting incident, which the city’s minority Christian community lamented as the latest in an alarming surge of religiously motivated attacks, drew rare outrage on Tuesday from the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and other senior figures.
Since Israel’s most conservative government in history came to power late last year, concerns have mounted among religious leaders – including the influential Vatican-appointed Latin Patriarch – over the increasing harassment of the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community.
Many say the government, with its powerful ultranationalist members, such as the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has emboldened Jewish extremists and created a sense of impunity.
“What happened with rightwing religious nationalism is that Jewish identity has been growing around anti-Christianity,” said Yisca Harani, a Christianity expert and founder of an Israeli hotline for anti-Christian assaults. “Even if the government doesn’t encourage it, they hint that there will be no sanctions.”
Those worries over rising intolerance seem to violate Israel’s stated commitment to freedom of worship and sacred trust over holy places, enshrined in the declaration that marked its founding 75 years ago. Israel captured East Jerusalem in a 1967 war and later annexed it in a move not internationally recognised.
There are roughly 15,000 Christians in Jerusalem today, the majority of them Palestinians who consider themselves living under occupation.
Netanyahu’s office insisted on Tuesday that Israel “is totally committed to safeguard the sacred right of worship and pilgrimage to the holy sites of all faiths”.
“I strongly condemn any attempt to intimidate worshippers, and I am committed to taking immediate and decisive action against it,” he said.
The spitting scene, captured on Monday by a reporter at Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, shows a group of foreign pilgrims beginning their procession through the limestone labyrinth of the Old City, home to the holiest ground in Judaism, the third-holiest shrine in Islam and major Christian sites.
Raising a giant wooden cross, the men and women retraced the Old City route that they believe Jesus Christ took before his crucifixion. Along the way, ultra-Orthodox Jews in dark suits and broad-brimmed black hats squeezed past the pilgrims through narrow alleyways, their ritual palm fronds for the weeklong Jewish holiday of Sukkot in hand. As they streamed by, at least seven ultra-Orthodox Jews spit on the ground beside the Christian tour group.
Further adding to the outrage, Elisha Yered, an ultranationalist settler leader and former adviser to a lawmaker in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, defended the spitters, arguing that spitting at Christian clergy and at churches was an “ancient Jewish custom”.
“Perhaps under the influence of western culture we have somewhat forgotten what Christianity is,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “I think millions of Jews who suffered in exile from the Crusades … will never forget.”
Yered, suspected of involvement in the killing of a 19-year-old Palestinian, remains under house arrest.
While the video, and Yered’s comment, spread like wildfire on social media, the chorus of condemnation grew. Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, said spitting at Christians “does not represent Jewish values”.
The country’s minister of religious affairs, Michael Malkieli, a member of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, argued such spitting was “not the way of the Torah”. One of Israel’s chief rabbis insisted spitting had nothing to do with Jewish law.
Activists who have been documenting daily attacks against Christians in the Holy Land were taken aback by the sudden wave of government attention.
“Attacks against Christians have 100% increased this year, and not just spitting, but throwing stones and vandalising signs,” said Harani. “Excuse me,” she added, addressing Israeli authorities. “But where were you?”
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My
Comments :
There is no principal difference between (for example)
Christianity and Judaism, for both phenomenon are explicitly founded on a
religious belief system.
Although followers of Judaism are defining themselves
as deriving (genetically even) from an Ancient "People" (*), both systems in reality are the result of nurture
(indoctrination) rather than of nature (genotype : there simply is NO such a thing, as a Jewish Gene, so there is NO such a thing, as a Jewish Race).
It is however no incident that the recent (verbal) resistance - notably coming from the very fanatical constituents of Netanyahu's extremist coalition (Eli Cohen and Michael Malkieli (**)) - against the spitters (conveniently spitting on Christian Palestinians, whose territory has been stolen by Jewish-Zionists), is reverberating so loudly these days.
After all the yearly river of billions of Benjamins, crucial to support and maintain the violent colonial
settler project in the ME, are coming from nations with a Christian tradition such as the
USA.
Do remember in this very context, that it has been people like Pompeo (ex-CIA
chief and ex-secretary of State) who are publicly stating, that "Israel
has a Biblical Claim to Palestine and [therefore] is no occupying nation."
What the Christian Zionists do not reveal however, is the fact, that the Jewish peoples (from the perspective of the Christian belief-system that is) are supposed (in the sense of obliged) to "return" to The Holy Land of their ancestors".
Return, in order to free Jerusalem, so the Christian Divine Supreme Leader
can have "his Son" returned to Earth ("the second Coming of Jesus"), and redeem the true believers
(whereby the Jews are supposed to be converted in advance to Christianity in order to
fulfill the aforementioned Holy Promise).
In short : Our world is intoxicated by religious Zealots, ultimately prepared to destroy humanity in order to have their religious doctrines realised.
(*) A People, being chosen by their supreme religious Leader (his Head-office being situated somewhere on a secret extra-terrestrial Location) and predestined to (exclusively) populate "the Holy Land of Jisrael", in order to facilitate the representative of their religious Leader on a chosen moment, being released towards Earth.
(**) The recent massive resistance (public outcry) against the ultra-orthodox c.q. ultra-nationalist coalition of Netanyahu, that in fact is threatening of devaluating the crucial safe-guarding (against the Law-making Knesset, (the latter) functioning against the background of the total absence of a Written Constitution) role of the Supreme Court, predominantly is deriving from the fact, that this coalition is trying to change the very definition of who may call him or herself a Jew.
Thus potentially excluding a lot of present inhabitants from using their "Birthright" to live in "Jisrael", thereby reducing the number of "legitimate owners" of that violent settler colony in the direction of a level, far below "the nessecary authentic demographic minimum"
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