“This will not save the Holy Land, it will only unfortunately put it in a pool of blood,” the bishop told Ecumenical News International in a telephone interview the day after the 6 March attack. “The shooting attack is shocking but the whole past week has been shocking.”

A Palestinian gunman opened fire on a crowded library and study hall of the Mercaz Harav seminary, killing eight people and wounding 11 others. The seminary, or yeshiva, is located near the entrance to Jerusalem, and is home to several hundred students. It is the flagship yeshiva for the religious Zionist movement.

The attacker was a 20-year-old resident of East Jerusalem and according to reports had been employed by the seminary as a driver. An investigation into the attack is yet to be completed.

Media reports stated that Gaza’s streets filled with crowds passing out sweets and armed men firing in the air in celebration following the attack. The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which is in control in Gaza, issued a statement blessing the attack and pledging it would not be the last.

Gaza has been under Israeli military attack for a week, and more than 110 Palestinians have died during violence on Israel’s southern border with the territory, where militants have launched Qassam rocket attacks into Israeli southern towns for over a month.

Bishop Younan called on all religious and political leaders to stand up for justice and peace. He said Christian leaders are in dialogue with Muslim and Jewish religious leaders concerning the situation.

“If we allow ourselves to be led by violence we will be led nowhere,” said Younan. He said moderates need to be prepared to be faced with opposition from the extremists. “The extremists on both sides are taking over. We are seeing the beginning results of that … We have to allow the voice of the moderates to be heard louder than the voice of violence.”

Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, an Islamic scholar and founder of Wasatai, a new Palestinian Islamic group said, “Radical religious movements are trying to put all their efforts toward derailing the peace process. Unless we can create a peace culture this radical movement will succeed.”

Dajani noted that Israel must realise it can not assure its security by building separation walls or other strong-arming measures. In order to create an atmosphere of peaceful coexistence, Israel should relax the conditions at checkpoints and roadways for Palestinians who have nothing to do with the violence, he said.

“Collective punishment only plays into the hands of the radicals,” he said.

Rabbi Ron Kronish, director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, said he supported calls for a cease-fire knowing that, difficult though it may be, Israel will need to talk with Hamas. “It’s a difficult thing to say on a day with so many funerals, but there will be a cease-fire either sooner or later and it is better to have one sooner before more people are killed.” He explained that religious leaders must take up the responsibility of calming the tensions in the current situation rather than fanning the flames.

“We need a religious voice for sanity,” said Kronish.

[With acknowledgements to ENI. Ecumenical News International is jointly sponsored by the World Council of Churches, the Lutheran World Federation, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, and the Conference of European Churches.]

The post Jerusalem bishop laments return to cycles of violence in Israel Palestine appeared first on Ekklesia.

Leaders of churches throughout the world, including the National Council of Churches USA (NCCUSA), have expressed shock and sorrow over the 6 March shootings at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem.

A Palestinian gunman, a resident of East Jerusalem, entered the rabbinical school and began shooting, killing eight people and wounding at least nine before the gunman was fatally wounded by an off-duty Israeli Defense Forces officer.

Israel has said that those who carry out such actions must “pay the price”, but after 12 Israelis and 120 Palestinians have died following recent military action in Gaza, critics say that the cycle of recenge must end, and that the lives of all must be given equal regard.

Now Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has approved a plan to build up to 750 new homes in a Jewish settlement in the illegally occupied West Bank territories.

The project was first signed off in 1999, but stopped two years later after Palestinian labourers refused to go on.

Israel’s housing minister has said the construction at Givat Zeev would address “the demographic needs of Jerusalem”. But the decision provoked an angry reaction from Palestinian leaders.

For the Palestinians there are few issues as contentious as the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, says the BBC’s Crispin Thorold in Jerusalem.

On 7 March five leading US religious leaders drafted a statement deploring the Jerusalem bombing. Along with Evangelical Lutheran presiding bishop Mark S Hanson, others who signed were the Rev Michael Kinnamon, NCCUSA general secretary, New York; the Rev John H Thomas, general minister and president, United Church of Christ, Cleveland; the Rev Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the General Assembly, Presbyterian Church (USA), Louisville, Ky.; and Bishop C Christopher Epting, deputy for ecumenical and interfaith relations, the Episcopal Church, New York.

“We pray for all of those who have died, and for their families and loved ones,” the religious leaders said in the statement. The leaders said they pray for the other students at the seminary, “who will carry the scars of this horror for the rest of their lives.”

“This killing compounds our sadness over the recent violence in Gaza and Israel. Acts of terror and reprisal are abhorrent,” the leaders wrote. “We are thankful that it appears these events will not derail the peace process. We pray that such tragic deaths not be allowed to inflame more violence, but rather be a spur to redouble efforts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire, and to all the more vigorously pursue peace.”

The US religious leaders have called on political and religious leaders for Israelis and Palestinians to rededicate themselves to working for peace, and to provide leadership that is “so desperately needed for peacemaking to continue.”

They also called on US President George W. Bush and other US leaders to support both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership, and to continue efforts for a “secure, just and viable solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Other Christian leaders have made similar appeals.

The post Fears for Israel-Palestine future follow horror at Jerusalem shootings appeared first on Ekklesia.

The findings, issued yesterday (3 December 2007), disclosed for the first time that Iran has not been pursuing a nuclear weapons development programme for the past four years.

The secret report was declassified over the past 48 hours and made available to the media. It constitutes a significant shift from previous estimates.

“Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons programme suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005,” the report says.

The intelligence agencies are not saying that there is no nuclear problem however; just that what some analysts have been calling ‘the crunch point’ is years rather than months away.

The report’s findings will be a boost to those in Europe, including France and Germany, who have long argued that continued political and diplomatic dialogue and pressure is a better way forward on Iran than sabre-rattling.

Religious groups, too, have been seeking a peaceful but forthright conversation with their counterparts in Iran, with one Mennonite-galvanised delegation of church leaders going to Tehran earlier in the year and reporting an openness to conversation.

Those wanting to pursue jaw rather than war stress that it is not a ‘soft option’, however, and that issues of human rights, militarisation, democratic freedoms and the mistreatment of religious and other minorities remain very much ‘on the table’.

The new intelligence findings are unlikely to silence neocon hard-liners in the USA, including ex-ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who has regularly mocked diplomacy and called for bombing.

He and others will claim the findings as a triumph for military pressure, though experts say that the chronology and complexity of the situation does not easily bear this out.

The post Intelligence report on Iran nukes undermines US hawks appeared first on Ekklesia.