Bahai faithful unshaken by rockets in Israel

by Michaela Cancela-Kieffer Thu Jul 20, 11:14 AM ETHAIFA, Israel (AFP) - The Bahai believe that Moses, Christ, and Mohammed are all messengers of God and unlike their holy city of Haifa their faith in coming world peace is unshaken by Hezbollah’s rockets.Dozens of Hezbollah rockets have exploded in this port city, 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the Lebanese border, since the militia last week captured two Israeli soldiers andIsrael responded with a massive bombardment.Streets may be deserted, but the rockets, which killed eight railway workers in Haifa on Sunday, matter little to 100 pilgrims from the Bahai faith who arrived on Monday for a nine-day visit.The Bahai, who believe in “the fundamental unity of all the great religions”, was founded inIran’ in the 19th century by their prophet, Baha’u'llah.Haifa is home to the Bahais’ governing body, the sparkling white Universal House of Justice, as well as the shrine of the Bab, he who announced the coming of Bahaullah.His remains are housed in a splendid hillside mausoleum overlooking Haifa bay, amid spectacular and well-manicured terraced gardens, which the movement says was visited by half a million people in 2005.British couple Gillian and Anthony Henderson have come on pilgrimage from their home in Vancouver, Canada.Anthony is easy to spot in the near-deserted city, wearing a Scottish kilt, indicative of the diversity of the varied Bahai cultures — spanning 75 nationalities and several million followers — so says the movement.“We decided we would come because we waited many, many years,” says Anthony. “You have to apply (to come here on pilgrimage) most of the time you wait for five or six years.”“It’s hard to put it into words, it is the most holy place in the world for us,” says Gillian. “To be able to visit is the biggest blessing. We have to do it at least once in our life.”The Bahai, banned and persecuted in Iran, are not involved in politics, but have great affection for theUnited Nations’ United Nations. Their founder banned proselytizing in Israel, the Jewish state.Albert Lincoln, the Bahais’ “secretary general” as the movement has no clergy, will not comment on the current conflict but explains his community has “a message of peace and unity for the human race.”Gillian says all the pilgrims prayed together on Monday.“It was very emotional considering the situation, we prayed very much for mankind and peace and we hoped for a peaceful resolution for all people.”The British couple, who have left six children at home, have not been in a conflict zone before and have had to adapt to a life of air raid sirens and rocket blasts.Some 700 volunteers and 150 employees work in the luxurious complex, built with donations from the faithful, all white marble and Persian carpets.Followers believe in the coming unification of humanity even if the world must first go through difficult times, such as those that started with the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah on July 12.“The world is getting darker and darker, but we have a more long-term vision,” says French architect Daniel Caillaud who has lived in Haifa since 1988.During a visit to the pristine gardens “whose beauty shows the optimism of the Bahais” according to Indian follower Elisa Rasiwala, 53, the air raid siren shrieks once more, heralding the next rocket attack on Haifa.“Our holy places are currently in the middle of the world in every sense. This is the eye of the storm,” says the 59-year-old. “There’s no doubt. The future is promising.”
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WEDDING UNDER ROCKETS

A rabbi conducts a wedding ceremony for Israeli couple Shlomi Bouskila, 30, right, and Maya Lougasi, 28, second left, inside a bomb shelter where they’ve been living for over a week, in the town of Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, Thursday, July 20, 2006. All residents of northern Israel have been ordered by the army’s Home Front Command to stay nearby shelters until further notice.





Thursday July 20, 2006 HAIFA - A fresh Hizbollah rocket barrage across a
swathe of northern Israel killed one person and
wounded at least 14 others, medics said. A man in the town of Nahariya was killed just after
he had helped some of his family into a bomb
shelter and was returning for others when a
Katyusha hit him, Israeli media said. Eli Bein, director of the Magen David Adom
ambulance service, said the sight was reminiscent
of the scenes of suicide bombings as the rocket hit
the man directly. “It is a terrible sight,” he told
Army Radio. Rockets hit at least 12 towns and villages,
including four in Haifa and at least two in
Tiberias. Also hit were Safed, Acre, Kiryat
Shemona, and Gush Halav region near Safed. Israeli military officials say more than 700
Hizbollah rockets have now landed in Israel since
the crisis began, killing 13 Israelis. Israelis, stunned by Hizbollah rocket attacks, have
told pollsters they want their Army to smash the
guerrillas. “We are killing those we need to kill,”
said civilian Hanna Dehan, speaking near Haifa. But in a sign that life goes on even under extreme
pressure, the booms of Hizbollah rockets in Haifa
have not distracted one couple preparing for their
nuptials. Dressed in their full wedding regalia,
Imad Mousa and his fiancee Anita Mishal smiled
sweetly as their wedding photos were taken
overlooking Haifa’s crystal bay. “I am a bridegroom under fire,” Mousa said. “The
noise bothers us, but what is more important than
getting married?” They plan to get married on Saturday in Mousa’s
village of Kfar Yasif in the northern Galilee,
which has also come under attack from the Lebanese
guerrillas. Mishal comes from Haifa and wanted
wedding pictures from her home town. The couple, Arab citizens of Israel, bemoaned the
bloodshed. “War is bad for everyone,” said Mousa. - REUTERS

HAIFA ‘S The peaceful place

HAIFA ‘S The peaceful place
Filed under: Uncategorized — iahab @ 6:10 am
EPORTER’S NOTEBOOK: Haifa, a Model of Arab-Jewish Coexistence, Now a Target By Ori Nir July 21, 2006 Lutfi Mash’ur, the late editor of Israel’s largest Arabic weekly newspaper, al-Sinara, used to say that in the face of Jewish-Arab enmity and violence, he would look to Haifa for hope. It’s hard to know what he would have said this week, as Hezbollah rockets reigned down on Israel’s third largest city, a place where Jews and Arabs live more harmoniously than almost anywhere else in Israel. Haifa has a history of partnership between the two communities, and a mayor who champions equality and works to transform multiculturalism into an asset. As a result, the city has become a model for how Jews and Arabs can come as close as possible to living in “mundane harmony,” to borrow a phrase from Mash’ur, who died last month and was mourned by both Arabs and Jews. Unlike other mixed towns in Israel, Jews and Arabs in Haifa do live together in the same apartment buildings. They work together at the port, at the city’s Rambam hospital and at Haifa University. Some even socialize and celebrate their living together - a rare phenomenon in a country so bitterly divided along Arab-Jewish lines. This week they were huddling together in bomb shelters across town. “The rockets don’t discriminate between Jews and Arabs,” said Dani Neuman, executive director of the Haifa Foundation. Shortly before he spoke with the Forward from his Haifa home, two brothers - both Israeli Arab citizens, the younger 3, the other 7 - were killed by a Hezbollah rocket in the neighboring town of Nazareth. Haifa’s Arabs make up less than 10% of the town’s 250,000 population, but the city has been attracting many young professional Arab citizens in recent years. It is becoming the hip cultural center of the Arab population living in the Galilee The majority (52%) of the 1.16 million residents living north of Haifa are Arabs. And on summer nights - when Hezbollah isn’t showering northern Israel with rockets - the Galilee’s young Arab elite, in fancy cars and trendy clothes, shmooze on Haifa’s David Ben-Gurion Boulevard. At the foot of the Bahai gardens, which ripple from the top of Mount Carmel like cascading Hawaiian leis, Arabs and Jews socialize together, enjoying good food, good company and a gorgeous view. But coexistence in Haifa runs much deeper than the nightlife. The city’s mayor, Yonah Yahav, insists on involving Arab parents in his push to provide excellent public education for their kids (70% of Arab parents still send their children to private schools). He is trying to involve Arabs in city planning, and he celebrates their contribution to the city’s multicultural ethos. Last year, I asked Yahav to explain Haifa’s secret. Without much thought, he replied, “Hasan Shukri.” The legacy of the city’s legendary Arab mayor, who between 1914 and 1920 ruled Haifa as the CEO of a successful Arab-Jewish joint venture, is a tradition of mutual tolerance and mutual respect. In 1948, when thousands of Haifa’s Arabs packed up to flee as the war erupted, members of the city’s Jewish labor federation - the strongest community organization in town - handed out leaflets pleading with their Arab neighbors to stay. Yahav keeps one of those leaflets in his drawer. “There is a history of coexistence, and there is almost no history of trauma here,” Yahav said. “There were no religious wars here. It’s no more than a fishermen’s village that has evolved into a thriving town. That’s all.” But that’s not all. What the government of Israel doesn’t do on the national level, Yahav does locally. Take affirmative action: At the request of Arab parents, the mayor recently opened a democratic school for Arab students. And, his administration is investing more, per capita, in Arab students than in Jewish students. Why? To lure them away from private church-run schools, some of them outside Haifa, and into local public schools. “For me, it’s give and take: Give equality and respect and you’ll receive loyalty,” Yahav said. None of this is to deny that tension between Arabs and Jews runs deep here. Militant anti-Israeli graffiti appears in Arabic every now and then in predominantly Arab neighborhoods, and hate crimes against Arabs have occurred. But these tensions don’t run as deep here as they do in other parts of Israel. It is true that on July 13, a day into the current hostilities, dozens of Arab residents - and a handful of Jews - demonstrated in downtown Haifa against Israel’s attack in Lebanon, to the fury of many Haifa Jews. But when the first rockets hit Haifa, the demonstrators ran for cover in bomb shelters along with everyone else. For the most part, “there is coexistence here, there is integration and practical cooperation in a normal and natural fashion,” said Fathi Marshood, an Arab who directs the Haifa office of the New Israel Fund’s training and empowerment center, Shatil. “It is a place where Jews and Arabs really can work together, argue, have a dialogue of equals and work toward joint interests as equals.” Not many Arabs in Israel can say this about their community relations with their Jewish neighbors. Whether Hezbollah’s rockets will bring Jews and Arabs closer together remains to be seen. On the one hand, both Jews and Arabs suffer casualties, anxiety and material loss. On the other, this crisis feeds into the conflicting national narratives of the two communities. Many Israeli Arabs have relatives in Lebanon. Many of them blame Israel - as much, if not more - than Hezbollah for the suffering on both sides of the border. “This could go both ways,” Neuman of the Haifa Foundation said. And it probably will, simultaneously, as the schizophrenic relations between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel always do. In Haifa, however, when Jews and Arabs return to Ben-Gurion Boulevard, Neuman said, “I expect relations to return to what they have always been. They are resilient enough.”