Some thoughts on hate

I pass, every day on the way to college, a little cluster of anti-gay graffiti: Homo = sick; Homo = Danger to Children; Homo = ill; and so on. It is all obviously written by the same person and he (and I am guessing it is a he) has spent a fair amount of time covering the bus shelters, telephone wiring boxes and benches of Bethlehem Street with his marker pen musings. In the scheme of things, they are mostly obnoxious but harmless but one of them sticks in my craw when I see it and is harder to shake off.

It says "Homo = AntiSemite" and it's pointing to another graffiti (by the same person? by someone else?) of a Star of David with the words "Juif" and "Jude" in the middle.

What bothers me about this particular graffiti (graffito? surely not??) is not particularly its suggestion that being gay is somehow unJewish - something that would come as a surprise to a fair few people I know - nor really that it makes you anti-Jewish, though I do know many gay people whose attitude to any religion is pretty cold. But that, by linking homosexuality with the way the Nazis treated the Jews, the person who wrote this graffiti, ascribes to what is basically a loving desire the level of hatred that, even 60 years after the Holocaust, we still find hard to conceive. I have heard homosexuality called many things, but "hateful" is a new one on me and I don't like it. Thoughts on this very welcome.

I heard a related story this morning. We went, as a group, to pray at the Kotel, the Wailing Wall (left). Correction. We went, as a group, to pray at the Kotel but, as we are a group of men and women who pray together, we went, not to the bit of the wall that is in all the postcards, but to a part further to the south near Robinson's Arch. The setting was incredibly moving. Here is a place that has been sacred for 2,500 years, where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac, where Jesus was crucified and where Mohammed began his Night Journey into heaven, and to pray there with my colleagues - men and women standing next to each other and two women leading the service - was an experience I will not forget.

Yet on the coach back to the yeshiva, we heard why we were praying there and not in the main part of the Kotel. And the story saddened me. It turns out that, in 1997, a group of Conservative Jews, men and women, had started to pray together at the Kotel to celebrate the festival of Shavuot. As they were a mixed congregation they placed themselves towards the back of the plaza and off to the side and got on with their own business. Then, according to two people who were there, things turned nasty.

"By the start of the Torah reading, several hundred Haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews] had abandoned their own prayers to come and push, shove, and taunt. To their credit the police and the border patrol were quick to react. They did everything in their power to keep the now-growing and very angry mob at bay. As we made it through the reading of the Ten Commandments, the police were close to losing control. They beseeched us to leave, for they were no longer able to protect us. We were now surrounded by close to a thousand young men pushing, spitting, calling us Nazis and throwing stones... water and fecal matter were being tossed upon us and upon the Torah scroll. I, and not a few others, were hit.

"The crowd of hundreds had now become thousands, with crowds of people from the roofs of the Jewish Quarter homes cheering them on and pointing out where we were: 'Because of you six million Jews died'; 'Go back to Germany!' Some of our prayer shawls were being torn off our backs and stomped on... The mob was accusing the police of being Nazis for defending us."

Rabbi Andrew Sacks and David Fine - from Wailing at the Wall, by Phyllis Chesler

Spitting, throwing stones and accusations of being Nazis - all because men and women were praying together. It is hard to imagine hate so strong that it makes an Orthodox Jew to throw "fecal matter" on to the Torah scroll, something he would normally hold in total respect, let alone on other people. And "Because of you six million Jews died" leaves me speechless. Thoughts on this very welcome too.

And just a final example. Three of us - Robin, a friend from the yeshiva, Julien, an Australian who I met in Damascus (pics below), and I - were walking along the Haas Promenade last night at sunset - the place where I went on Saturday evening - looking down across (Arab) east Jersualem. It's right on the border between the Jewish and Arab parts of the city and there were plenty of Jewish and Palestinian families out for a stroll in the park and enjoying the early evening breeze. Everything is peaceful there. People aren't exactly mixing but you get a glimpse of what a post-peace Israel and Palestine could be like.

As we were taking pictures, three Palestinian teenagers walked by and, with the bravado of people who know you can't understand their language, said something in Arabic (we were obviously Jewish) and laughed. We thought nothing of it but then a couple of Israeli women came over and told us what they had said: 'You're father is dead." Teenage joking, maybe, but in this region jokes can lead to all sorts of ugly places. Maybe it's the heat, but there does seem to be a lot hate to go round.

I liked this van. It's probably deadly serious about something.