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Joseph Revisited
By Israel Shamir
It is not easy to visit Joseph these days. Roadblocks manned by
nervous Israeli soldiers have surrounded his city of Nablus; trenches or
heaps of earth block the smallest entrances and exits. On a normal
morning, commuters pour in from nearby villages for work or shopping;
now they do so at their own peril, and the local citizens venture out of
their homes at the risk of their lives, as the soldiers shoot without
warning. Still, one can sneak into the old capital of Samaria by foot.
The city rests as the sachet of myrrh between the twin breasts of Mt
Ebal and Mt Gerizim. Nablus is Neapolis of old, founded by Titus Flavius
in the heyday of the Roman Empire. The Roman traditions did not die in
this Palestinian San Francisco with its lavish Turkish baths. It is also
famous for the fragrant olive soap, spicy kubbeh soup, and hardy spirit
of its inhabitants. They fielded a strong guerrilla force against
Napoleon, rebelled against Egyptian invaders, and kept the Jewish
settlers at bay.
During the last uprising, Nablus gained renown as Jabal an-Nar, the
Mount of Fire. Israelis rarely dared to enter the narrow streets of its
old city. Today, this defiant ancient city is the home of Marwan
Barghouti, sometimes credited with the leadership of the uprising.
I came here to visit one of the most charming shrines of the Holy Land,
the Tomb of Joseph, the hero of Bible and Koran stories, a local lad who
‘made it’ in Egypt and was brought back by Banu Israel to be buried
in his ancestral home. The locals have venerated it, as numerous other
shrines and tombs that adorn the hilltops and crossroads of Palestine.
The shrines have deep roots in the Palestinian soul; they predate all
modern faiths, survived all religious reforms, and still are able to
turn a man to God.
One needs to take their names with a grain of salt, as they change with
the passage of time. There are a dozen tombs for Sheikh Ali, and even
Joshua bin Nun has quite a few. Other tombs have multiple names, like
the cave on the Mt Olives, called Pelagia by Christians, Rabia al-Adawiya
by Moslems and Hulda by Jews. While some orthodox Moslem, Christian and
Jewish clerics object to venerating shrines, the common people still
come to beseech for favours, men for glory and harvest, women for
children and love. The tomb of Joseph is no exception. It is a
simple domed building, recently refurbished, standing next to the
ancient mound of Shechem. On any given day, Palestinian peasant women in
black dresses with rich embroidery can be seen paying their respects at
the tomb of the chaste lover, whose long eyelashes reduced the fortress
of Zuleika’s heart. A few months ago, Joseph’s tomb was all over the
news. The people of Nablus fought well-armed Israeli soldiers over the
remains of their ancestor Joseph, as Achaeans fought Trojans for the
body of Patrocles. Some two score Palestinians died there, Israelis lost
one mercenary and a few were wounded. The pictures of the gun battle
were transmitted around the globe, as firefights raged, ambulances raced
to hospitals and morgues, heavy machinegun bursts tore at stones and
flesh. The virtual reality of TV screens accompanied by the voices of
the experts presented the ultimateproof of Arab hate for Jewish holy
places.
The tale of the Tomb’s destruction remained in the news for long time.
An important Muslim divine from Russia was angry enough to write an open
letter to the Palestinians, condemning the sacrilege. Main international
newspapers unleashed harsh editorials on the subject. A visiting Martian
would have presumed that the main desire of Palestinians is to go about
desecrating holy Jewish monuments. For those who did not get it first
108 times, the NYT repeated the story last week. That was just one too
many times for me. This well circulated Jewish American newspaper always
stirs the suspicious side of my brain. I recall their reports on the
impending Jewish pogroms in Moscow in 1990, that somehow never
materialized, but the reports sent one million Russian Jews to Israel. I
remember their reports on the Timishowara ‘massacre’ in Romania,
that turned out to be a fake. But the report led to the summary
execution of the president Ceausescu and his wife. I remember how the
Times agitated against the noble Cuban military assistance to Namibia
that broke the spine of South African apartheid. Knowing the
Palestinians, I had difficulty believing that those who had worshipped
at the shrine for uncounted generations, would destroy it. What I found
at the site of Joseph’s resting place was like a replay of the old
Jewish joke: “Is it true that Cohen won a million in the state
lottery? Yes, it is true, but it was only ten dollars, in a poker game,
and he actually lost it”. Instead of expected ruins, the tomb shone in
its pristine beauty. No traces of war could be seen. The Nablus
municipality hired the best masons, brought in Italian experts and
restored the tomb to its original state. They removed the barbed wire,
the machinegun positions, the armoured vehicles, the soldiers’ scrubby
mess hall, guard slots. An Israeli-built military base vanished to be
replaced by the resurrected holy tomb. It was a joy to revisit Joseph,
as my previous visit, a month before the uprising, was quite
disconcerting.
Then I visited Nablus in the company of two tourists, a Christian and a
Jew. We visited the Samaritan synagogue, drank water from Jacob’s Well
in the church, looked into the Green Mosque and decided to pay our
respects to Joseph the Beautiful. An old Palestinian policeman, who cut
his teeth in the British army, allowed us to approach the tomb but
warned us that we won’t be let in. He was right. Young Russian boys in
the Israeli army fatigues, helmets and rifles, popped out and told us,
that in order to enter the tomb one has to go to the army HQ out of
town, submit to security check and interrogation, and come back by the
armoured bus. We moved on to more accessible sites.
For generations, the Tomb of Joseph was cherished and attended by the
people of Nablus, but it was seized by the Israelis in 1975. The
infamous Oslo accords left it as an armed Israeli enclave in the heart
of the Palestinian city. It became a Yeshiva of a Cabbalist sect led by
Rabbi Isaac Ginzburg. His name should ring a bell. He stated in the
interview with Jewish Week, that a Jew is entitled to cut off the liver
of any Gentile in order to save his own life, as the life of a Jew is
incomparably more precious than the life of a Gentile. He was asked by
the interviewer to soften his message, but he remained adamant. Many
Israeli papers republished this interview, as name of Ginzburg was well
known. A year earlier, Ginzburg’s disciples made a sortie to a
neighbouring Palestinian village, and a sect member murdered a 13-year
old girl. He was arrested and brought to trial. Ginzburg was called as a
witness of defence, and under oath, he proclaimed that a Jew could not
be tried for murdering a Gentile, as the commandment ‘Thou shall not
murder’ refers only to Jews. Killing a Gentile is, at worst, a
misdemeanour, said he, as ‘one can not compare the blood of Jews and
the blood of Gentiles’.
In his Cultural History of the Jews, Zvi Howard Adelman of Jerusalem
(available on the website of The Department for Jewish Zionist
Education), quotes Ginzburg and some of his colleagues. One of his
fellow-Cabbalists, Rabbi Israel Ariel, wrote in 1982 in the time of
Sabra and Shatila massacre, that “Beirut is part of the Land of
Israel. . . our leaders should have entered Lebanon and Beirut without
hesitation, and killed every single one of them. Not a memory should
have remained”.
Now, every faith has its fringe extremists and fanatics. Certainly, the
vast majority of Jews, including religious Jews does not subscribe to,
indeed are repulsed by such cannibalistic sentiments. But such revulsion
did not stop the Israeli army from guarding Ginzburg’s Yeshiva. The
revulsion did not stop the Israeli government from subsidizing it, or
from forcing the Palestinians to accept this enclave of hatred in the
heart of Nablus, or from waging a mini-war to promote Ginzburg’s zeal.
The revulsion did not stop the American Jews from their blind support of
Israeli policies. The revulsion did not stop me from paying my taxes to
the government of Israel, knowing full well that part of it went to
support of Ginzburg’s sect. The revulsion did not stop the New York
Times and its American media affiliates from propagating the blood libel
of “Arabs despoiling a Jewish holy place”. Ginzburg is entitled to
his obnoxious beliefs. We live in an age when our tolerance extends to
all save a Christian prayer in schools. One is free to join a Satanist
or a Cabbalist sect. But should such people be armed with Apache
gunships at the expense of American taxpayers? Ginzburg and his sect
have influence far beyond their tiny numbers. They are dangerous for all
Gentiles, and for the ‘rebellious Jews’ like the late Prime Minister
Rabin. In what might have been a small rehearsal for the coming
confrontation over Jerusalem’s shrines, twenty young Palestinians were
made to pay with their lives to restore their right to worship at the
tomb.
Now, as before 1975, local folk and tourists, Moslems, Samaritans, Jews,
Christians and freethinkers can visit the place freely, if they can
escape Israeli sharpshooters. They can put a flower on the gravestone of
a favourite hero of the Bible, the Koran prophet, the lover of
Ferdowsi’s poem and Saadi verses, the truth-seeker of the Sufi
revelation of Jami. Joseph came back to the people who always venerated
him. You are free to visit him, but please leave your tanks behind.
Palestinians fought the army base, not the holy place. The holy places
of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron would be safe in Palestinian hands, as
they have been for uncounted generations. Without the local veneration,
none would have survived. Please remember it when (very soon) the
problem of Jerusalem will come forth.
This latest saga on the events surrounding the Joseph’s tomb is just
one more proof that the American mass media machine is an unreliable
source. The great nation, the formidable superpower gets its knowledge
and navigates its course in the sea of world politics by using a Mickey
Mouse telescope instead of electronic magnifying glasses. If the Jewish
media lords cheat you about Palestine, why do you think they are honest
in any other way? Perhaps the suffering of the Palestinians should help
the Europeans and Americans to notice the reefs ahoy their own ship.
<end>
Israel Shamir is an Israeli writer and journalist. His articles The Rape
of Dulcinea, The Test Failed, Galilee Flowers could be found on many
Internet sites, www.thestruggle.org,
www.antiwar, www.NileMedia
etc.
He can be reached at shamiri_@netvision.net.il,
or write P.O.B. 23714 Tel Aviv 61236
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