דא ליינט די פילע מעשה ווי עס ווערט געברענגט אין http://www.hipakistan.com
Headline: Orthodox Jews clash with police in Jerusalem -- Detail Story
JERUSALEM: Israeli police forces clashed on Thursday in Jerusalem with ultra-Orthodox Jews protesting a court sentence handed to a member of the religious community for assaulting a policewoman.
Gabel Eliezer, a 37-year-old Jew from the hard line Toldot Aharon sect, was sentenced on Thursday by a Jerusalem court to three months in prison over the incident, which occurred 15 months ago. He was sentenced for attacking and spitting at the policewoman, who was trying to break up a protest staged in and around a synagogue where members of the community were meeting to discuss the issue of a shop allegedly selling pornographic videos.
Eliezer claimed the police officer entered a synagogue, whose access is reserved to men, and denied the assault charges. Before going to the Ramle prison, where he should eventually only serve two months, groups of anti-Zionist supporters carried Eliezer on a chair as a hero through the streets of the ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood of Mea Shearim.
Among the estimated 5,000-strong crowd of protestors, some of them were chanting slogans against the state and some banners could be seen which read: "The Orthodox Jewry demands international forces for protection from 'Nazionist' oppression". Scuffles erupted between some religious Jews and the large contingent of police forces, and protestors smashed a police car.
The Toldot Aharon sect of haredi Jews came from Hungary during the British mandate of Palestine and are known for their extreme religious observance. Israel counts more than a million ultra-Orthodox Jews, a community made up of hundreds of sects, some of which are anti-Zionist.
According to classified Irish government documents published on Thursday, Italy and Spain canvassed Ireland's support in the late 1940s to put the holy city of Jerusalem under Roman Catholic control within the young Jewish state of Israel.
Details of behind-the-scenes talks on the proposal, which also included Portugal, but never got off the ground, were revealed in the documents made public by the National Archives in Dublin.
Spain, then ruled by dictator Francisco Franco, put forward the first initiative following a November 1947 vote by the UN General Assembly for the partition of Palestine that stipulated that Jerusalem would be established as a "corpus seperatum" under a special international regime.
The scheme for the city, accepted by the UN by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions, stipulated that it would remain in force for an initial 10 years and would then be subject to revision. A 1949 Irish foreign ministry file said there was "great difficulty and complexity" surrounding the problem of how to guarantee the security of and access to the "holy places" in Jerusalem.
It recalled that Jerusalem was "a site of importance for the followers of three great monotheistic faiths" —Judaism, Christianity and Islam and that it had been dominated by 11 empires and states in the course of its troubled history.
The file said the first Irish contact with the Jerusalem question came in December 1948 when Spain was concerned by an implied suggestion by Pope Pius XII that international control of the city and guarantee of the holy places should be entrusted to the United Nations.
That was seven months after the end of British rule in Palestine and the proclamation of the State of Israel. Madrid advocated the "Spanish, Portuguese and Irish representatives to the Holy See should make separate and concerted demarches to the Vatican suggesting that, if any form of international regime were to be established in the Jerusalem area, the mandate should be entrusted to Catholic countries".
Spain believed this was preferable to a body like the United Nations from which the principal Catholic countries in Europe were at that time excluded, the Irish document added.
Having consulted its Vatican ambassador and the Portuguese government, the Irish government came to the conclusion that the Spanish suggestion was "ill-conceived and unrealistic". The matter was, accordingly, quietly let drop, according to the foreign ministry file.
The matter arose again in April 1949 when the Italian government approached us with a proposal that all Catholic nations who are not members of UN should approach the Catholic nations within the international body. Again the plan involved Spain and Portugal. The file said it was understood that Austria was also invited to take part, but declined.
The ambassadors of Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal held talks in the Vatican, but it was felt that "nothing serious" could be done by the non-UN governments acting alone.
 |
|
|
