First, an honest disclosure: I loved the Shepherd hotel very much.In the first years after the Six-Day War, I was a frequent guest there. My work in the Knesset demanded that I stay in Jerusalem at least two nights every week, and after the war I switched from the hotels of West Jerusalem to those in the Eastern part of the city. My favorite was the Shepherd. I felt at home there.
The charm of the place lay in its special atmosphere. It is located in the middle of that ancient Arab town which itself aroused my intense curiosity. Its rooms have high ceilings and old furniture, and it was run by remarkable people - two elderly Arab ladies who were educated in Beirut and steeped in Palestinian-Lebanese culture.
The area surrounding the hotel is the neighborhood of the al-Husseini clan. The holdings of this vast extended family, with more than 5000 members, comprise the greater part of the Sheikh Jarrah quarter, which also includes the legendary Orient House.
Victim of neglect and ignoranceSyrian actor Abbas Al Nouri, famed for his role in the historical epic Bab Al Hara, recently launched a public campaign to declare Occupied Jerusalem "the eternal capital of Arab culture".
Nouri has petitioned Arab League Secretary General Amr Mousa, and "all Arab ministers of culture" saying: "If there is indeed peace coming to [Occupied] Jerusalem, then let it come via culture, which was and remains, the most important weapon of [Occupied] Jerusalem."
Al Nouri added, "Culture is non-negotiable; a weapon that cannot be disarmed!" This month, the petition had gathered less than 100 signatures on the internet, showing that if anything, the project was not progressing as planned.
I personally signed the petition, and my number was 57. I applaud Al Nouri's initiative, however, saying: noise is better than silence, and activism, no matter how minimal, is better than political coma.
The early results of Al Nouri's campaign should raise more than just eyebrows in the Arab world. Passiveness does not stop there; internet-savvy Arabs have not even tried to challenge Wikipedia, which says: "[Occupied] Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and its largest city."
Additionally, Al Nouri's campaign went by unnoticed in many important Arab media outlets, which were too busy covering other events - like the passing away of Michael Jackson, or the political unrest in Honduras - to allocate prime time for a cause that seemingly, no longer interests Arab audiences.
Occupied Jerusalem, a city that has been besieged 23 times, captured and re-captured 44 times, still remains the topic of Arabic poetry, patriotic songs, paintings, drama, and photography.
What Arabs forget is that no matter how pro-active they are towards the city, reality within the city itself is difficult to challenge. The only people able to really preserve Occupied Jerusalem are the Palestinians of the 1948 areas.
According to a December 2007 census, conducted by Israel, the city has a population of 747,600, of which 64 per cent are Jews, 32 per cent are Muslim, and two per cent are Christian.
The same study shows that Occupied Jerusalem's Jewish population was decreasing, because of the high Muslim birth rate, although nine per cent of the 32,488 people living in the Old City, continue to be Jewish.
That is correct, aided by the fact that many Jews leave Occupied Jerusalem for other parts of Israel because of few job opportunities, and expensive real estate, especially around religious quarters.
For example, in 2005, a total of 16,000 Jews left Occupied Jerusalem, while only 10,000 moved into it. Forty-two per cent of the city's Arabs, however, are young, below the age of 15 and they have been strongly encouraged by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to stay in the city to maintain the Arab identity of Occupied Jerusalem; a legacy long fought for by the late president Yasser Arafat.
Iran and U.S. not fated to be enemies forever- Interview with Stephen Kinzer by Kourosh Ziabari
The post-election episodes that have taken place in Iran, which continue to occupy front-page headlines of world newspapers, have perplexed and mystified many.
Although the dissidents who continue to defy the government’s call for an end to the protests over the June 12 presidential election have failed to provide hard proof that the election was rigged in favor of the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, their suspicions are reasonable and their right to speak out against a perceived wrong unquestionable.
On the other hand, there are those who allege interference by foreign powers attempting to fuel unrest and destabilize the government with the eventual goal of regime change in mind, suspicions which are also not unreasonable given the historical record, which contains no shortage of precedents for similar actions.
The 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup d’etat that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was one such example, well remembered in Iran but often purged from U.S. accounts and unknown among much of the American public.
Stephen Kinzer has done much to remedy this with his book All the Shah’s Men, which documents events leading up to and following the coup in extraordinary detail. An award-winning journalist for the New York Times, Kinzer was at one time also the paper’s bureau chief in Istanbul, and has received an honorary doctorate for his lifelong contribution to journalism.
Stephen Kinzer generously set aside time from his busy schedule, which includes work writing a new book on realpolitik in the Middle East set to come out early next year, to join me in an interview for Foreign Policy Journal to try to clear up some of the ambiguities surrounding Iran’s disputed election and to share his view of the events that have followed and the controversy that has captured the world’s attention.
Israeli firms accused of profiting off Holocaust- Families battle for assets in court
Israel’s second largest bank will be forced to defend itself in court in the coming weeks over claims it is withholding tens of millions of dollars in “lost” accounts belonging to Jews who died in the Nazi death camps.
Bank Leumi has denied it holds any such funds despite a parliamentary committee revealing in 2004 that the bank owes at least $75 million to the families of several thousand Holocaust victims.
Analysts said the bank’s role is only the tip of an iceberg in which Israeli companies and state bodies could be found to have withheld billions of dollars invested by Holocaust victims in the country -- dwarfing the high-profile reparations payouts from such European countries as Switzerland.
“All I want is justice,” said David Hillinger, 73, whose grandfather, Aaron, died in Auschwitz, a Nazi camp in Poland. Lawyers are demanding reparations of $100,000 for Bank Leumi accounts held by his father and grandfather.
The allegations against Bank Leumi surfaced more than a decade ago following research by Yossi Katz, an Israeli historian.
He uncovered bank correspondence in the immediate wake of the Second World War in which it cited “commercial secrecy” as grounds for refusing to divulge the names of account holders who had been killed in the Holocaust.
“I was shocked,” said Dr Katz, from Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv. “My first reaction was: ‘My God, this isn’t Switzerland!’ ”
In 1998, following widespread censure, Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion in reparations after they there were accused of having profited from the dormant accounts of Holocaust victims.
Dr Katz’s revelations led to the establishment of a parliamentary committee in 2000 to investigate the behaviour of Israel’s banks. Its report came to light belatedly in 2004 after Bank Leumi put pressure on the government to prevent publication.
Investigators found thousands of dormant accounts belonging to Holocaust victims in several banks, though the lion’s share were located at Bank Leumi. Obstructions from Leumi meant many other account holders had probably not been identified, the investigators warned.
The parliamentary committee originally estimated the accounts it had located to be worth more than $160m, using the valuation formula applied to the Swiss banks. But under pressure from Leumi and the government, it later reduced the figure by more than half.
A restitution company was created in 2006 to search for account holders and return the assets to their families.
Meital Noy, a spokeswoman for the company, said it had been forced to begin legal proceedings after Bank Leumi had continued to claim that its findings were “baseless”.
The bank paid $5m two years ago in what it says was a “goodwill gesture”. Ms Noy called the payment “a joke”. She said 3,500 families, most of them in Israel, were seeking reparations from Bank Leumi.
The bank was further embarrassed by revelations in 2007 that one per cent of its shares -- worth about $80 million -- belonged to tens of thousands of Jews killed during the Holocaust.
Mr Hillinger, who was born in Belgium in 1936 and spent the Second Wold War hiding in southern France, today lives in Petah Tikva in central Israel.
He said before the outbreak of war his father and grandfather had invested money in the Anglo-Palestine Bank, the forerunner of Leumi, in the hope it would gain them a visa to what was then British-ruled Palestine.
Although his parents escaped the death camps, his grandparents were sent to Auschwitz and died in the gas chambers shortly after arrival.
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