This past week I took a short but memorable and rewarding trip, both professionally and personally, to one of the holiest cities on the planet.
Below I chronicle my 4 days in Jerusalem. Most of the images are personal photos and many were shared on Facebook, so I’ve included those posts as well. Enjoy!
As any American who has flown to Israel or other parts of the Middle East knows, the key to adjusting to the time difference and getting over jet lag from the transatlantic flight is to stay awake upon arrival. My goal for Day 1 (July 2nd) was to drop off my luggage and keep busy throughout the day.
My hosts (see below) put me up at a charming small hotel nestled in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia. This gave me the opportunity to spend much of the afternoon wandering around the bustling outdoor market (shuk) of Machane Yehuda, a short walk from the hotel.
This shuk is an iconic landmark for tourists, but in recent years its also become a popular and trendy place for Israelis and Jerusalemites for shopping and eating delicious food.
The delectable sights and smells are out of this world. Check out below the array of spices at just one of the dozens of stalls in the market, and the varieties of halvah (a popular Middle Eastern desert) that one shop was selling:
Halvah is typically made from sesame tahini. It’s a candy desert that’s pareve (neither meat or dairy) so its always been popular in Israel where many keep kosher. In central NY I can only buy pre-packaged Joyva halvah in two flavors—marble and chocolate. But at this one stall in Machane Yehuda (see above and this post’s featured image) there were over two-dozen huge blocks of halvah in every type of flavor imaginable.
I had such a great time at Machane Yehuda that I went back for lunch the next day, where I had a delicious Middle Eastern desert called Kanafe, cooked up to order:
I always make a point of visiting the Western Wall (the Kotel) when I’m in Jerusalem.
As we’ve noted in many prior posts, although it’s not Judaism’s most sacred place, Jews have to make do with praying at the Kotel. Because of an absurd and inherently illiberal arrangement known as the ‘status quo’, non-Muslims aren’t permitted to pray or show any kind of religious worship on Judaism’s actual holiest site—the Temple Mount (Har HaBayit):
Basically, Jews have access to the Temple Mount but even mumbling a blessing, shedding a tear, saying the Hebrew word for the place, or picking up a leaf from the ground while visiting there is considered an unacceptable “provocation” that can get you detained by police or thrown off the site, Islamist Supremacy at Temple Mount: US Congressmen detained after falsely accused of praying.
Sometimes even access to the place is denied to non-Muslims for extended periods of time. You can read my post from several years ago about how my plans to ascend to the Temple Mount were derailed on account of violent rioting during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, which prompted Israeli police to close the place to Jews including tourists, Non-Muslims Banned from Temple Mount During Ramadan – Including ME!.
On this trip, I didn’t have the time to stand in the long queue of people waiting to be admitted up to the Temple Mount, so my plan was to make a pit-stop at the Kotel before meeting up with friends and colleagues for lunch and dinner (see below).
Visiting the Kotel is always a meaningful experience.
But my visit on July 3rd was especially moving on account of the hundreds of young Jewish Israeli teens who were there at exactly the same time I was. It was inspiring to see these young Israelis dancing and singing at the Kotel, the holiest site for Judaism in which Jews are permitted to pray:
Because the conference where I was presenting (see below) didn’t start until Wednesday, July 4th I had some time to meet up with several colleagues whose work and activities we’ve highlighted in many prior posts.
My first visit was with Marcus Sheff, Chief Executive Officer of the Jerusalem-based IMPACT-se (Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education). Among its many projects, it focuses on raising awareness about the vehemently anti-Israel and pro-jihadi content in Palestinian Authority-approved textbooks for children in PA schools and those run by UNRWA too.
We’ve covered these IMPACT-se reports in several prior posts, including the efforts by Sheff and his colleagues to bring this shameful issue to the attention of governments that fund the PA:I met with Sheff in a lovely little café (Lechem Tomer—trans. “Tomer’s Bread”) near my hotel. I was eager to hear about IMPACT-se’s many recent successes and Sheff confirmed that his organization has been making significant headway in Europe, and most recently in Britain.
The British government has announced that it will conduct a review of the educational materials produced by the PA. A scathing critique of the use of British aid money to fund an educational curriculum that teaches hate and glorifies terrorism was also delivered this past week in the House of Common by the UK parliamentary group Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), which relied on IMPACT-se reports to make its case.
As for the U.S., Sheff thinks there should be more support for a bipartisan congressional bill that was introduced last month and which IMPACT-se helped draft. The bill calls for the State Department to annually verify whether the textbooks used by the PA and UNRWA meet the UNESCO guidelines for teaching peace and tolerance. Sheff is hopeful that it will advance as more lawmakers learn about how the PA educational materials undermine the prospects for peace by demonizing Israel and encouraging violence.
After hearing all the good news about IMPACT-se, I headed out for dinner with Arnold Roth. We met in a neighborhood restaurant within walking distance of my hotel—Al Dente in the Nahla’ot area off Ussishkin Street (excellent food and definitely not a tourist-trap).
In many prior posts, we’ve written about Roth’s multi-year effort to bring Ahlam Tamimi, the murderer of his teenage daughter Malki, to American justice. Here are a few of our prior posts about it (others can be found at this tag):Basically, as we highlighted in our posts, the problem is that Tamimi is now living in Jordan where she is adored and treated like a national hero. Her masterminding of the heinous attack on Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizzeria in 2001 isn’t considered terrorism but a “heroic act of national armed struggle” for Palestinian self-determination, so that’s why she’s shielded by Jordan’s regime and its courts and is so admired in Jordan and celebrated across the Arab and Muslim world.
Roth told me that at the moment his efforts to have this depraved woman extradited to the U.S. have been stalled by a combination of factors:
During our meeting, Roth’s frustration with the U.S. government—especially the State Department—was palpable.
There’s now an unsealed 2013 U.S. criminal complaint against Tamimi, a $5M reward on her head and an FBI Most-Wanted-Terrorist poster in English and Arabic displayed at the U.S. Embassy in Amman.
But these positive developments came about only after pressure over many years to make them happen. So Roth—the bereaved parent of a U.S. terror victim—isn’t convinced that there’s any actual policy to bring Tamimi to trial in the U.S.
He told me that the government seems to just be “going through the motions” of claiming that it wants to bring her to justice when the reality is that it has no real plan for doing so. He’s particularly baffled by all the stonewalling, the “mystifyingly slow decision-making” and the unresponsiveness of relevant State Department officials.
His thinking is that the Justice Department and FBI are committed to getting justice for Malki and the other Americans killed and severely wounded in Tamimi’s mass murder and that the problem likely lies with other branches of the U.S. government. They’re reluctant to “annoy the Jordanian government” and an important U.S. ally with multiple requests to have Tamimi taken into custody and to extradite her.
It’s clear that Roth is losing faith in the U.S. government. He also doesn’t think that any members of Congress will help either (at this time, no legislator had shown any willingness to assist). So Roth told me that for now his options are limited. He’s continuing to raise awareness and hopes that more media outlets will be willing to “shine a light” on his hunt for justice and that investigative reporters will take up the story and get to bottom of why it’s proving so difficult for the U.S. to apprehend and put on trial the murderer of his child.
This meeting left me very sad and also furious at the same time by the obvious fact that politics is continuing to get in the way of justice and what U.S. law requires when Americans are harmed abroad in acts of terrorism.
It’s worth noting that Trump isn’t really handling this any differently than Obama did. Jordan’s King Abdullah has been repeatedly hosted by the President at the White House, and many meetings between Abdullah and other administration officials have taken place in Washington. But Roth says that never once has the issue of Tamimi’s extradition come up in any of these visits.
I did manage to stay busy and awake on the first day of my trip and got a good night’s sleep. On Day 2, I headed out to Jerusalem’s Talpiot neighborhood. There, I met Gerald Steinberg who directs NGO Monitor, among Israel’s foremost watchdog groups.
Over the years, we’ve highlighted many NGO Monitor reports. Recent posts have focused on its research which exposed the funding network of the (non-Jewish and not-for-peace) Jewish Voice for Peace and that documented UNICEF’s reliance on data provided by a host of virulently anti-Israel Palestinian NGOs, some of which have ties to terrorist groups:Steinberg filled me in on NGO Monitor’s continuing efforts to reign in the political power of a narrow group of unaccountable and polarizing NGOs that operate in Israel with substantial funding from foreign, primarily European, governments (see his recent article on the issue).
Throughout our conversation, we kept coming back to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) which provides considerable levels of funding to vehemently anti-Israel and pro-BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) organizations in both Israel and the U.S.—some of which have been alleged to have connections to terrorist groups. So far though, this exposure of RBF’s funding hasn’t pushed American Jewish communal organizations—like the ADL or AJC—to publicly condemn it.
The last two days of my trip were spent with the organizers and fellow participants of Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi’s conference on the national, international, and religious status of the city of Jerusalem in modern times.
Established in 1969, Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi is a prominent think tank named after Israel’s second president and located in Rehavia (about a block away from my hotel). The primary mission of its Institute for Research on Eretz Israel, which hosted the conference, is to promote cross-disciplinary research about the land of Israel from antiquity to modern times and to advance the scholarship, while also informing the general public.
I delivered the opening remarks at the conference which included more than two dozen Israel-based scholars and practitioners from across the country’s premier universities, colleges and institutes. I said a few words about my own work on the city and summarized the state of the field of Jerusalem Studies. Mine was the only talk delivered in English, but I managed to follow along with the rest of the proceedings just fine, my Hebrew not as rusty as I had expected.
It was very special to be the only professor outside of Israel to speak at the conference and at its opening session, where my talk followed Israel President Reuven Rivlin’s welcome and greetings streamed via video.
Most impressive was how many Jerusalem residents came to the sessions.
Over 400 people pre-registered to attend, requiring livestreaming of the proceedings to an overflow room in addition to the main hall. The conference spanned two 10-hour days, with nearly 30 scholarly presentations, yet most of those in the audience stayed until the very end on both days. I noticed that many were even taking copious notes.
I learned a lot at the conference from experts across a remarkable range of disciplines. Here’s just a few of the insights about Jerusalem that I didn’t know before:
[ Herzl re-interred at Mount Herzl, Jerusalem | Newspaper headline reads he is buried in “holy ground” | credit: Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi]
Jerusalem can’t really be visited properly in just 4 days. There’s too much to see and do in Israel’s amazing capital city, so if you go I’d recommend setting aside at least a week.
Miriam F. Elman is an Associate Professor of Political Science and the Inaugural Robert D. McClure Professor of Teaching Excellence at the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, Syracuse University. She is the editor of five books and the author of over 65 journal articles, book chapters, and government reports on topics related to international and national security, religion and politics, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She also frequently speaks and writes on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) anti-Israel movement. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter @MiriamElman
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