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International Herald Tribune, France
July 11 2005
Jerusalem mayor tries balancing act
By Steven Erlanger The New York Times
MONDAY, JULY 11, 2005
JERUSALEM
Uri Lupolianski is the first to admit that he is running a very
unusual city - a place considered holy by Muslims, Christians and
Jews, who talk about tolerance more than they actually practice it, at
least here.
Jerusalem has all the problems of big cities - crime, unemployment,
public transportation, garbage. But it also has been the prime
location for suicide bombings and other attacks on civilians: 90
since October 2000, including 34 suicide bombings that have killed
183 people and wounded 1,454.
Then there are the less existential indignities - physical squabbles
among Christian clergy over sacred turf, ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting
on the cross carried by the Armenian archbishop, the demolition of
Palestinian houses for zoning irregularities. And Jerusalem is
surrounding itself by a wall - a concrete security barrier cut by
checkpoints that is, in many places, 10 meters, or 33 feet, high.
But Lupolianski, 54, is almost as unusual as his city, and he
represents a growing power here.
He is Jerusalem's first ultra-Orthodox mayor, a rabbi who is
sometimes accused of favoring Jewish interests over Muslim ones, and
of favoring his co-religionists over the interests of more secular
Jews, an unknown but noticeable number of whom are leaving Jerusalem
for less religiously heated places like Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Haifa-born, he is haredi, a Hebrew word for the ultra-Orthodox that
has its root in fear, awe or dread. He will not shake hands with
women, for example, so his aides carefully, politely, and even
gracefully insert themselves to spare female visitors any
embarrassment.
He has 12 children and 15 grandchildren - so far - he says. And the
haredi make up an increasingly large part of the city's population -
about a third of it, roughly the same as the number of Muslims - and
representing about half the Jewish population.
Currently, Jews make up about 66 percent of the population and Arabs
about 33 percent, nearly all of them Muslim. The number of Christians
in Jerusalem is tiny, fewer than 3,000, while fewer than 9,000 have
no stated religion.
In office since February 2003, when Ehud Olmert resigned to join the
national cabinet, Lupolianski was elected in his own right to a
five-year term in June 2003, beating a wealthy businessman, Nir
Barkat, 52 percent to 42 percent. In his campaign, Lupolianski
promised fair treatment to everyone, and now he says that is what he
is attempting to provide.
"If we take the wrong steps here, we can cause a world conflagration,
God forbid," he said in an interview in his office overlooking the
milky-tea-colored stones of the Old City. "So people have to behave
carefully," he said, in what he calls "a great human mosaic."
Speaking in Hebrew, he said: "We have to take care of three religions
and their interests. But Jerusalem is not just the capital of the
people and state of Israel - it's the heart and soul of the Jewish
people."
Lupolianski was recently criticized for trying to stop a gay rights
parade in Jerusalem - a parade decried by the leading religious
figures of all faiths here, who gathered together at a news
conference to denounce the idea. In the end, the Jerusalem District
Court ordered that the parade be allowed to take place, and a young
haredi man broke it up by stabbing three participants.
Lupolianski is best known in Israel not as a politician, but as the
founder of Yad Sarah, a medical charity named after his grandmother,
who was murdered in the Holocaust. The charity, with almost 100
branches and 6,000 volunteers, supplies medical equipment to those
who need it and runs low-cost dental clinics and centers for disabled
children of any religion.
The big battles in Jerusalem - over housing, zoning, equal education
and land sales - are really small versions of the much larger
national struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. And given their
nature, some of them are beyond Lupolianski's purview: the health
services and the police, for instance, which are run nationally, not
municipally.
Uniquely, Jerusalem, not the state, administers its own educational
system, although the state pays the bills out of national taxes. But
there are controversies here, too, with suspicions that the mayor is
helping religious education more than bicultural schooling.
The Yad Beyad (Hand-in-Hand) School, for instance, has about 250
students, half of them Jews and half of them Arabs. Its education is
bilingual, and it is recognized by both the national and local
governments. But the city recently canceled the school's license to
educate children beyond the sixth grade, leaving this year's
sixth-graders without schools for next year, having already missed
the application deadline for other schools.
But there are larger issues, too, like the relatively poor garbage
pickup in East Jerusalem compared with that of the western side, and
the city's zoning and municipal plans office, which appears to be
trying to restrict Palestinians in East Jerusalem from building new
housing, perhaps to limit the number of Palestinians within the
municipal boundaries.
Recently, for instance, in the Silwan and Issiwiya neighborhoods,
there have been cases of house demolition, sometimes of houses built
a decade or more ago, because the city authorities said that proper
zoning and planning permission had not been granted.
Palestinians like Hind Khoury, the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem
affairs, consider the city to be carrying out national policy and
trying to plant as many Jews in East Jerusalem as possible while
limiting the number of Palestinians allowed to live there.
Lupolianski rejects such criticism. "It's not true we're trying to
keep Arabs down," he said. "It is true that Arabs from Jenin and
Hebron, who are not citizens or residents of Israel, cannot just come
and move into Jerusalem as if they were from Tel Aviv."
About Silwan, he says that the issue is houses built on land
classified as "green," or parkland, and that he would pull down
Jewish houses if they were built there, too. "Would New York allow
people to build houses in Central Park?" he asked.
He stopped, then said: "I say with full responsibility and knowledge
that most of the Arabs here want to be part of Jerusalem and remain
here."
"When I ask them if they would prefer to live under the Palestinian
Authority, they say they want to stay here. The mullahs say to me
that they want to be part of the city. And now we're making them a
cultural center."
As for the separation barrier, Lupolianski considers it a blessing
for helping to stop terror. "I call it 'the gate of life,"' he said.
"The wall you can later remove, but a life you never replace."
But he also argues for more sensitivity to the Arab population from
the national government. "I think the government must act, even if it
costs more, to give humane living conditions to everyone no matter
which side of the fence they may be on."
He has established a working committee with the government to look
into issues like sending teachers across the barrier to schools,
rather than forcing students to cross checkpoints to get an
education.
The mayor says the city is now investing more in services and
infrastructure in East Jerusalem than in the west, even buying
narrower garbage trucks to navigate the streets there. And he is
proud to be pressing ahead with a light-rail system, to ease
congested traffic, that should be running by February 2008.
Jerusalem, which can feel small and even suburban outside the walls
and sites of the Old City, in fact is sprawling, especially after
Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing it from Jordanian control
in the 1967 war. Few countries recognize that annexation, which is
why nearly all countries have their embassies in Tel Aviv, though
there are many consulates and representative offices in Jerusalem,
both east and west, to cater both to Israelis and Palestinians.
Jerusalem stretches over 126 square kilometers, or 49 square miles,
and with a population of 706,300 it is Israel's most populous city,
with more than 10 percent of the country's inhabitants - more than
Tel Aviv and Haifa combined. It has grown quickly with the state; it
had only 84,000 residents in 1948. In East Jerusalem alone there are
now about 400,000 people, at least half of them Jews and their
descendants who moved there after 1967, and who are considered
illegal settlers by the Palestinians and much of the world.
Despite its tourist glitter, now returning to some degree with a
period of truce between Israelis and Palestinians, Jerusalem has
problems more typical of poor countries than of the modern power that
Israel believes itself to be.
Jerusalem is growing quickly, with nearly 18,800 babies born here in
2004, more than the next three largest Israeli cities combined. It
also has Israel's youngest population - with 53 percent under the age
of 25, compared with 30 percent in lively, beachfront Tel Aviv - and
widespread underemployment.
All these figures hint at Jerusalem's largest quandary: the sizable
number of people who are not working. Its large population of
ultra-Orthodox Jews includes many who study for a living and do not
enter the work force; its many Palestinians from East Jerusalem have
endemic problems of joblessness, made worse by security limitations
on travel. And both of these communities have high birth rates.
Jerusalem's unemployment rate is 7 percent, which seems fine compared
to those in the next three largest cities: 9.3 percent in Tel Aviv,
10.2 percent in Haifa, and 10.5 percent in Rishon Letzion.
But given the high percentage of ultra-Orthodox who study and a
disaffected Arab population, only 44.5 percent of Jerusalem's adults
are active in the labor force, compared with 62.5 percent in Tel
Aviv, 54.5 percent in Haifa, and 64.5 percent in Rishon Letzion.
About two-thirds of the population pay the minimal level of tax, and
there is little industry beyond tourism, which is recovering only now
after the past four years of intifada. The tax base is weak, meaning
that the secular working class inevitably pays more.
The passion of the haredi, many of whom do not recognize the state of
Israel, is one of the glories of Jerusalem, Lupolianski believes.
"For you, he's unemployed, but he studies and his wife works at
something," said Jacob Rosen, the mayor's political adviser for
international affairs, on assignment from the Foreign Ministry. "And
many of them are supported by other haredi who are working in
Brooklyn!"
But the increasingly religious nature of the city - with very few
restaurants or shops open on the Sabbath and many restaurants, like
the famous Fink's, forced to become kosher to survive - is also
driving more secular Israelis away.
In an interview last year, the Israeli writer Amos Oz, who is
Jerusalem-bred, told The New Yorker magazine that he rarely could
bear to spend the night in Jerusalem now.
"It is hyperactive," Oz said. "Everyone is expecting something,
either the messiah or disaster or both. Tel Aviv is becoming more and
more Mediterranean, like the south of France, whereas Jerusalem is
moving in the direction of, I don't know where, maybe like Qum, in
Iran."
Qum is the capital of the ayatollahs, the symbol of a clerical state.
Lupolianski rejects any exclusionary views, and says a great virtue
of the haredi population is that their families are strong and that
they are "very little involved in crime or drugs." Increasingly, he
said, haredi are working in high-tech industries or with computers.
The mayor says he is trying to attract biotech companies, with Hebrew
University and Hadassah medical centers the main incubators.
Lupolianski is sometimes surprised by his situation. "It's hard to
believe that I have to sit, as a religious Jew, with the
representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Armenians to try
to make peace between them," he said. "But I'm their mayor, and they
need to be able to come here and talk to me about their problems."
As a city, he said, "we want to help everyone to preserve their
traditions in freedom, so that everyone can dance their dance - so
long as they don't step on other people's feet."
July 11 2005
Jerusalem mayor tries balancing act
By Steven Erlanger The New York Times
MONDAY, JULY 11, 2005
JERUSALEM
Uri Lupolianski is the first to admit that he is running a very
unusual city - a place considered holy by Muslims, Christians and
Jews, who talk about tolerance more than they actually practice it, at
least here.
Jerusalem has all the problems of big cities - crime, unemployment,
public transportation, garbage. But it also has been the prime
location for suicide bombings and other attacks on civilians: 90
since October 2000, including 34 suicide bombings that have killed
183 people and wounded 1,454.
Then there are the less existential indignities - physical squabbles
among Christian clergy over sacred turf, ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting
on the cross carried by the Armenian archbishop, the demolition of
Palestinian houses for zoning irregularities. And Jerusalem is
surrounding itself by a wall - a concrete security barrier cut by
checkpoints that is, in many places, 10 meters, or 33 feet, high.
But Lupolianski, 54, is almost as unusual as his city, and he
represents a growing power here.
He is Jerusalem's first ultra-Orthodox mayor, a rabbi who is
sometimes accused of favoring Jewish interests over Muslim ones, and
of favoring his co-religionists over the interests of more secular
Jews, an unknown but noticeable number of whom are leaving Jerusalem
for less religiously heated places like Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Haifa-born, he is haredi, a Hebrew word for the ultra-Orthodox that
has its root in fear, awe or dread. He will not shake hands with
women, for example, so his aides carefully, politely, and even
gracefully insert themselves to spare female visitors any
embarrassment.
He has 12 children and 15 grandchildren - so far - he says. And the
haredi make up an increasingly large part of the city's population -
about a third of it, roughly the same as the number of Muslims - and
representing about half the Jewish population.
Currently, Jews make up about 66 percent of the population and Arabs
about 33 percent, nearly all of them Muslim. The number of Christians
in Jerusalem is tiny, fewer than 3,000, while fewer than 9,000 have
no stated religion.
In office since February 2003, when Ehud Olmert resigned to join the
national cabinet, Lupolianski was elected in his own right to a
five-year term in June 2003, beating a wealthy businessman, Nir
Barkat, 52 percent to 42 percent. In his campaign, Lupolianski
promised fair treatment to everyone, and now he says that is what he
is attempting to provide.
"If we take the wrong steps here, we can cause a world conflagration,
God forbid," he said in an interview in his office overlooking the
milky-tea-colored stones of the Old City. "So people have to behave
carefully," he said, in what he calls "a great human mosaic."
Speaking in Hebrew, he said: "We have to take care of three religions
and their interests. But Jerusalem is not just the capital of the
people and state of Israel - it's the heart and soul of the Jewish
people."
Lupolianski was recently criticized for trying to stop a gay rights
parade in Jerusalem - a parade decried by the leading religious
figures of all faiths here, who gathered together at a news
conference to denounce the idea. In the end, the Jerusalem District
Court ordered that the parade be allowed to take place, and a young
haredi man broke it up by stabbing three participants.
Lupolianski is best known in Israel not as a politician, but as the
founder of Yad Sarah, a medical charity named after his grandmother,
who was murdered in the Holocaust. The charity, with almost 100
branches and 6,000 volunteers, supplies medical equipment to those
who need it and runs low-cost dental clinics and centers for disabled
children of any religion.
The big battles in Jerusalem - over housing, zoning, equal education
and land sales - are really small versions of the much larger
national struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. And given their
nature, some of them are beyond Lupolianski's purview: the health
services and the police, for instance, which are run nationally, not
municipally.
Uniquely, Jerusalem, not the state, administers its own educational
system, although the state pays the bills out of national taxes. But
there are controversies here, too, with suspicions that the mayor is
helping religious education more than bicultural schooling.
The Yad Beyad (Hand-in-Hand) School, for instance, has about 250
students, half of them Jews and half of them Arabs. Its education is
bilingual, and it is recognized by both the national and local
governments. But the city recently canceled the school's license to
educate children beyond the sixth grade, leaving this year's
sixth-graders without schools for next year, having already missed
the application deadline for other schools.
But there are larger issues, too, like the relatively poor garbage
pickup in East Jerusalem compared with that of the western side, and
the city's zoning and municipal plans office, which appears to be
trying to restrict Palestinians in East Jerusalem from building new
housing, perhaps to limit the number of Palestinians within the
municipal boundaries.
Recently, for instance, in the Silwan and Issiwiya neighborhoods,
there have been cases of house demolition, sometimes of houses built
a decade or more ago, because the city authorities said that proper
zoning and planning permission had not been granted.
Palestinians like Hind Khoury, the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem
affairs, consider the city to be carrying out national policy and
trying to plant as many Jews in East Jerusalem as possible while
limiting the number of Palestinians allowed to live there.
Lupolianski rejects such criticism. "It's not true we're trying to
keep Arabs down," he said. "It is true that Arabs from Jenin and
Hebron, who are not citizens or residents of Israel, cannot just come
and move into Jerusalem as if they were from Tel Aviv."
About Silwan, he says that the issue is houses built on land
classified as "green," or parkland, and that he would pull down
Jewish houses if they were built there, too. "Would New York allow
people to build houses in Central Park?" he asked.
He stopped, then said: "I say with full responsibility and knowledge
that most of the Arabs here want to be part of Jerusalem and remain
here."
"When I ask them if they would prefer to live under the Palestinian
Authority, they say they want to stay here. The mullahs say to me
that they want to be part of the city. And now we're making them a
cultural center."
As for the separation barrier, Lupolianski considers it a blessing
for helping to stop terror. "I call it 'the gate of life,"' he said.
"The wall you can later remove, but a life you never replace."
But he also argues for more sensitivity to the Arab population from
the national government. "I think the government must act, even if it
costs more, to give humane living conditions to everyone no matter
which side of the fence they may be on."
He has established a working committee with the government to look
into issues like sending teachers across the barrier to schools,
rather than forcing students to cross checkpoints to get an
education.
The mayor says the city is now investing more in services and
infrastructure in East Jerusalem than in the west, even buying
narrower garbage trucks to navigate the streets there. And he is
proud to be pressing ahead with a light-rail system, to ease
congested traffic, that should be running by February 2008.
Jerusalem, which can feel small and even suburban outside the walls
and sites of the Old City, in fact is sprawling, especially after
Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing it from Jordanian control
in the 1967 war. Few countries recognize that annexation, which is
why nearly all countries have their embassies in Tel Aviv, though
there are many consulates and representative offices in Jerusalem,
both east and west, to cater both to Israelis and Palestinians.
Jerusalem stretches over 126 square kilometers, or 49 square miles,
and with a population of 706,300 it is Israel's most populous city,
with more than 10 percent of the country's inhabitants - more than
Tel Aviv and Haifa combined. It has grown quickly with the state; it
had only 84,000 residents in 1948. In East Jerusalem alone there are
now about 400,000 people, at least half of them Jews and their
descendants who moved there after 1967, and who are considered
illegal settlers by the Palestinians and much of the world.
Despite its tourist glitter, now returning to some degree with a
period of truce between Israelis and Palestinians, Jerusalem has
problems more typical of poor countries than of the modern power that
Israel believes itself to be.
Jerusalem is growing quickly, with nearly 18,800 babies born here in
2004, more than the next three largest Israeli cities combined. It
also has Israel's youngest population - with 53 percent under the age
of 25, compared with 30 percent in lively, beachfront Tel Aviv - and
widespread underemployment.
All these figures hint at Jerusalem's largest quandary: the sizable
number of people who are not working. Its large population of
ultra-Orthodox Jews includes many who study for a living and do not
enter the work force; its many Palestinians from East Jerusalem have
endemic problems of joblessness, made worse by security limitations
on travel. And both of these communities have high birth rates.
Jerusalem's unemployment rate is 7 percent, which seems fine compared
to those in the next three largest cities: 9.3 percent in Tel Aviv,
10.2 percent in Haifa, and 10.5 percent in Rishon Letzion.
But given the high percentage of ultra-Orthodox who study and a
disaffected Arab population, only 44.5 percent of Jerusalem's adults
are active in the labor force, compared with 62.5 percent in Tel
Aviv, 54.5 percent in Haifa, and 64.5 percent in Rishon Letzion.
About two-thirds of the population pay the minimal level of tax, and
there is little industry beyond tourism, which is recovering only now
after the past four years of intifada. The tax base is weak, meaning
that the secular working class inevitably pays more.
The passion of the haredi, many of whom do not recognize the state of
Israel, is one of the glories of Jerusalem, Lupolianski believes.
"For you, he's unemployed, but he studies and his wife works at
something," said Jacob Rosen, the mayor's political adviser for
international affairs, on assignment from the Foreign Ministry. "And
many of them are supported by other haredi who are working in
Brooklyn!"
But the increasingly religious nature of the city - with very few
restaurants or shops open on the Sabbath and many restaurants, like
the famous Fink's, forced to become kosher to survive - is also
driving more secular Israelis away.
In an interview last year, the Israeli writer Amos Oz, who is
Jerusalem-bred, told The New Yorker magazine that he rarely could
bear to spend the night in Jerusalem now.
"It is hyperactive," Oz said. "Everyone is expecting something,
either the messiah or disaster or both. Tel Aviv is becoming more and
more Mediterranean, like the south of France, whereas Jerusalem is
moving in the direction of, I don't know where, maybe like Qum, in
Iran."
Qum is the capital of the ayatollahs, the symbol of a clerical state.
Lupolianski rejects any exclusionary views, and says a great virtue
of the haredi population is that their families are strong and that
they are "very little involved in crime or drugs." Increasingly, he
said, haredi are working in high-tech industries or with computers.
The mayor says he is trying to attract biotech companies, with Hebrew
University and Hadassah medical centers the main incubators.
Lupolianski is sometimes surprised by his situation. "It's hard to
believe that I have to sit, as a religious Jew, with the
representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Armenians to try
to make peace between them," he said. "But I'm their mayor, and they
need to be able to come here and talk to me about their problems."
As a city, he said, "we want to help everyone to preserve their
traditions in freedom, so that everyone can dance their dance - so
long as they don't step on other people's feet."