The Supreme Court -- which since 2004 has included an Arab Israeli judge among its permanent members -- is the highest judicial authority in Israel and, alongside the Knesset and the executive, the nation’s third branch of government. It functions both as the highest court of appeal and as a high court of justice that can (and sometimes does) invalidate legislation that violates the human rights guaranteed by Israel’s Basic Laws. It is worth adding here that not only Israeli citizens, but also Palestinians in the occupied territories are permitted to petition the court against acts and decisions of the state. Among other things, the court’s decisions have altered the route of the West Bank separation fence to minimize hardships that it causes to Palestinians.
The Supreme Court building, which has only housed the court since 1993, is a beautiful structure flooded with natural light. The architectural design includes many symbolic elements, most notably the combination of lines and circles that represent, respectively, law (“Your laws are straight,” Psalm 119:137) and justice (“He leads me in circles of justice,” Psalm 23:3). Here is a picture of one of the building’s court rooms.
Our other destination for the day, the Israel Museum, is widely considered the acme of Israeli cultural institutions. The museum is extensive and impossible to see fully in one day. It includes the Shrine of the Book, containing the famed Dead Sea Scrolls; an archaeological museum with the world’s largest collection of artifacts found in Israel; the Judaica and Jewish Ethnography Wing, which houses Jewish ceremonial artifacts from all over the world; the Fine Art Wing, which during our visit housed the exhibit “Real Time: Art in Israel, 1998-2008”; the Ruth Youth Wing, which housed the exhibit “Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust” (the works that comprised its sister exhibit, "Looking for Owners," had already been returned to France when we visited); and a huge model of Jerusalem as it existed in the time of the Second Temple.
I mainly wanted to see the “Real Time” exhibit and found it interesting, though not for the most part very moving or inspiring. Unfortunately, I can’t show any pictures of the exhibit except this clandestine one of Ohad Meromi’s “Boy From South Tel Aviv.” (I say clandestine, because photographs were apparently not permitted, though I didn’t realize that until a gruff Israeli security guard saw my camera and nearly confiscated it from me.) However, The New York Times published a fairly good and exhaustive review of the exhibit here.
No pictures were permitted in the “Orphaned Art” exhibit either, but for the Associated Press review see here.
Here is the Shrine of the Book from the outside (again, no pictures permitted inside).
And here is the model of Jerusalem. The large structure on the right is the Second Temple.
With the museum closed, we are ready to follow once more in Mark Twain’s footsteps and set out for Tel Aviv (Jaffa in his case). Like him, “we are exhausted. The sun has roasted us almost.” After four days in Jerusalem, we too are “surfeited with sights…. They swarm about you at every step; no single foot of ground in all Jerusalem or within its neighborhood seems to be without a stirring and important history of its own.” We look forward to returning to a modern city where one can “steal a walk of a hundred yards without a guide along to talk unceasingly about every stone you step upon and drag you back ages and ages to the day when it achieved celebrity.” I’m sure we’ll return for more sightseeing. But for now, like Mark Twain, we pause on the summit of a distant hill, take a look back, and bid farewell to the “venerable city which had been such a good home to us.”
3 comments:
The Supreme Court did indeed order the army to modify the route of the Occupation Wall at one location – through the village of Bil’in, to be more precise – but this is yet to be implemented by the army, which has so far disregarded the Court’s orders.
Enjoy Tel Aviv, don’t forget your swimsuit!
Dear Mohamed, I think you underestimate the extent to which Israel's Supreme Court has adjusted the route of the separation barrier: Three years ago, The New York Times reported the following: “Pressed by the Israeli Supreme Court and the United States, Mr. Sharon has pulled the separation barrier much closer than it had been to Israel's 1967 boundaries, which were the armistice lines of the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war and became known as the green line. Even including the three major Israeli settlement blocs of Maale Adumim, Ariel further north and Gush Etzion in the south, the land between the green line and the barrier is 8 percent of the West Bank - close to the 5 percent in the proposal that President Clinton was putting forward in 2000, at the end of his negotiations with the Palestinians and the Israelis. And even that provisional, unilateral 8 percent, before final-status negotiations begin, means that 99.5 percent of Palestinians would live outside the barrier, in 92 percent of the West Bank, with 74 percent of Israeli settlers inside it” (“Israel, on Its Own, Is Shaping the Borders of the West Bank,” April 19, 2005).
POSTSCRIPT: On July 28, 2008, Haaretz reported: "After a five-year battle, the defense establishment has finally given in: It agreed to dismantle a 2.4-kilometer stretch of the separation fence north of Qalqilyah. The move will return 2,600 dunams of agricultural land to its Palestinian owners. The dismantled stretch will be replaced by 4.9 kilometers of fencing closer to the Green Line, at a cost of more than NIS 50 million.... The fence in this area was built in 2003, and residents of several nearby Palestinian villages promptly petitioned the High Court of Justice against it. They won several legal victories over the years: The court ordered the fence be moved closer to the Green Line around Bil'in, Alfei Menashe and Tzufin.... In the Bil'in ruling in 2007, the court reiterated that the fence's route must be dictated by security, not a settlement's expansion plans."
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