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The man who sold Jerusalem
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The secret sale of a priceless plot of land in the
Holy City has threatened the fragile balance between
the religions. Donald Macintyre reports on the Greek
Orthodox priest accused of selling out his Palestinian
flock for Israeli gold.
The Independent (UK)
10 May 2005
These are tense times for Abu Walid Dijani, proprietor
of the New Imperial Hotel. The Arab hotel, one of the
oldest in Jerusalem despite its name, has been at the
centre of the city’s turbulent history many times,
thanks to its strategic location just inside the Jaffa
Gate,.
>From a balcony here in December 1917, General Edmund
Allenby looked across Omar Ibn al Khattab square after
dismounting his horse outside the walls and entering
the Old City on foot to mark its liberation from the
Turks.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the hotel housed a small
cinema, and its elegant ballroom was a favourite
Palestinian wedding venue. In 1967, during the Six-Day
War, it was occupied and used as a base by Israeli
troops, then returned to the Dijani family, the
tenants of the property, which is owned by the Greek
Orthodox Church. But during more than a century the
old hotel has never faced a greater threat.
For it is at the centre of an international scandal
which has infuriated the Greek government and may yet
help sabotage the chances of a comprehensive peace
settlement to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. It
has also fuelled local demands from the Church’s angry
flock of 200,000 for the Greek hierarchy to be
replaced, as in other Christian communities, by Arab
prelates.
Irineos I, the beleaguered Greek Orthodox Patriarch –
or as his most senior bishops have repeatedly referred
to him since an unprecedented meeting of the Synod
voted to depose him last Friday, the “ex-patriarch” –
is accused of being behind a secret and politically
explosive property deal.
Under it, three large buildings on the north side of
Omar Ibn al Khattab square have been made over by
198-year leases – to all intents and purposes sold –
to a group of as yet anonymous Jewish investors. What
makes the deal so politically radioactive is its
potential to alter the delicate ethnic and religious
balance of the Old City.
The shops, the Imperial and the Petra hotel, are just
inside the Jaffa Gate, at what is the most popular
entry-point, but also the junction of the Christian,
Muslim and Armenian quarters. Under the “Clinton
parameters”, laid down at Camp David in 2000, the
Christian and Muslim sectors were to fall within
Palestinian control, on the principle that what was
Arab would be Palestinian, part of a new Palestinian
capital of East Jerusalem, and what was Jewish,
Israeli. Any peace deal would have to ensure secure
access for Jews seeking to enter the Jewish quarter
and to pray at the Wailing Wall.
But a Jewish foothold, and there is a widespread
presumption in the Old City that settler organisations
passionately devoted to the idea of an “undivided and
eternal” Jerusalem as the Israeli capital are involved
in the purchase, on the north, indisputably Arab, side
of the square would create a new and dramatic Jewish
“fact on the ground”, calling into question the Arab
character of the quarter and torpedoing Bill Clinton’s
stipulation for “maximum contiguity” in the then
existing sectors in Jerusalem.
Mr Diwani, whose father, Mohammed, took a “protected”
tenancy” of the hotel from the Church in 1949, was by
his own wildly understated account, “surprised” when
he read in the Israeli newspaper Maariv in March about
the transaction. But he has been aware for a long time
of the intense interest of Jewish figures in the site
.
About 18 months ago, he says, a pleasantly spoken
American aged about 70, “Jewish but without a kippa”,
says Mr Dijani, turned up unannounced and asked the
proprietor to spare 10 minutes to show him round. As
they paused on the second floor, “He looked me in the
eyes and said, ‘How much do you need for me to buy you
out?’ I smiled and said I have never thought of this
question. He said, ‘How can a man like you go to sleep
without thinking of a price’?” But Mr Dijani politely
insisted his tenancy was not for sale in such
circumstances and his visitor left.
When the story broke in the Israeli press – possibly
leaked to “soften up” public opinion about the secret
$130m deal – Mr Dijani sought an audience with the
Patriarch. He says his family had long enjoyed warm
relations with the patriarchate. But even in a Church
frequently riven by scandal and intrigue, Irineos is a
controversial figure.
Paradoxically, Israel refused to recognise him for
three years after his election in 2001 because of his
perceived alliance with the Palestinian Authority, and
Yasser Arafat, in particular. But its grudging
decision to do so in 2004 was this year overturned by
an Israeli court on the grounds that Irineos had won
his election with the help of criminal figures from
Greece, including Apostolos Vavilis, a convicted
heroin trafficker.
Vavilis has also been the central figure in Greek
criminal investigations as an associate of Archbishop
Christodoulos, head of the Church in Greece, who has
himself been engulfed in a scandal over reports
accusing his clergy of engaging in the illegal trade
in antiquities, trial-fixing and sexual misconduct.
In an interview while still on the run, Vavilis
claimed that Irineos had offered him $400,000 to run a
dirty-tricks campaign against his two main electoral
rivals but had failed to pay up. In an atmosphere in
which rumours about homosexuality among the Greek
clergy are rife, the dirty tricks supposedly included
unfounded allegations against rivals, and the wholly
baseless assertion that the Patriarch’s main opponent,
Archbishop Timotheos, had hired a Palestinian hitman
to assassinate him.
Before the Jerusalem patriarch was recognised by Ariel
Sharon’s cabinet, he entrusted the financial affairs
of the Church to the patriarchate’s financial manager
Nicholas Papadimas, apparently granting him power of
attorney. Mr Papadimas has disappeared after facing
allegations about at least $700,000 reportedly missing
from church accounts. The Patriarch told Greek
government officials that the financial manager had
forged documents and abused his authority to sell a
shop in Jaffa Gate.
Mr Papadimas, also undeterred by his fugitive status
from publicising his own version of events, has been
quoted in the Greek and Israeli press as saying the
Jaffa Gate transactions were authorised by Irineos.
The newspaper Haaretz said Mr Papadimas claimed the
Patriarch had done it to ingratiate himself with the
Israeli authorities.
Mr Dijani says when he visited the Patriarch, he asked
him: “Your Beatitude, why don’t you say, ‘I have made
a mistake and ask the whole world to stand by me’?”
When the cleric repeated his denials, Mr Dijani says
he said: “But you gave [Mr Papadimas] the power of
attorney.”
Irineos’ position was not helped when investigators
sent last month by an increasingly worried Greek
Government failed to come up with a convincing
explanation. “From all the pieces of evidence
requested, only a few were given to us,” their
official report said. “In themselves, they were not
helpful or informative enough for our case.”
Although the Israeli courts have not always fully
upheld the cover afforded by a protected tenancy, Mr
Dijani still represents a possible obstacle to a
complete takeover of the hotel. He suggests there
might have been three possible scenarios. “One was
that the deal gave ample time to the patriarchate to
buy me out after a while; the second was they would be
very patient. The protected tenancy lasts for three
generations and they would have to wait until after my
grandsons had run the hotel. But that would be a very
long wait. And the third would be that they would
bring all sorts of pressure on me to leave this
place.”
The last might be especially true if, as some Israeli
commentators, lawyers, along with ecclesiastical
sources have freely speculated that the Israeli
government is, even indirectly, behind the deal. The
sum is certainly larger than usually employed by
settler groups. The Israeli authorities categorically
deny any part in the transaction.
But there is a precedent. In the early 1990s, the
patriarchy, the biggest ecclesiastical landowner in
the country and owner of perhaps 20 percent of the Old
City, sold St John’s Hospice, close to the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre, to settler interests in a deal
which turned out to have been financed by the Housing
Ministry, acting through a foreign company and on the
orders of the then minister, David Levy.
Either way, the patriarchate is now locked in what is
surely the deepest crisis in its 16-century history.
Irineos left the patriarchate after the synod meeting
which his dwindling band of supporters insist was not
properly constituted, and returned under Israeli
police guard early on Saturday morning to his
residence, from where he has continued to insist he
remains as patriarch, in defiance of his most senior
colleagues. Last night he was summoned to Istanbul by
the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox
Christians, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I,
for urgent discussions.
But in the end, the future of the Patriarch may be
less important than that of the property deal made on
his watch. As Dimitri Dilani, of the National
Christian Coalition, a Palestinian pressure group in
the church which is also critical of the Palestinian
Authority for not having withdrawn its recognition of
Irineos before, put it: “We have won a battle but we
are a long way from winning the war. We need the land
returned and the fate of the money established.”
Last Saturday, in the crowded offices of the
patriarchate, the senior prelates seemed
euphoric-almost light-headed about their courage in
voting to disown him the evening before. But
Archbishop Alexios of Gaza, for example, was almost
casually dismissive about the prospect of unstitching
a deal with huge regional implications. “Of course,
what has happened is a dark moment for the
patriarchate,” he said. “But this can’t be cancelled.
An official thing has taken place.”
Archbishop Timotheos, widely seen as the mastermind
behind Friday’s palace coup, said: “Our Israeli
friends should understand that we haven’t voted
against them but against the behaviour of the
Patriarch who did all these things in a secret way.”
Asked if attempts would be made by the dissidents to
anull the deal, the archbishop said he could not
discuss “political matters” until after the elections
he said would be soon, to replace the Patriarch. For
all Israel’s protestations about not interfering in
the internal affairs of the patriarchate, its power to
give, or deny, recognition to a patriarch cannot fail
to exercise an influence.
The move to acquire the properties, prompting the fear
among many Christians in the Old City that the
settlers may soon arrive to occupy them, is on a par
with many other purchases, outside the Old City as
well as inside it, which resulted in about 1,800
settlers now in residence in various strategic points
inside East Jerusalem neighbourhoods populated by
230,000 Arabs.
Like the expansion of Maale Adumim to join up with
Jerusalem, the routing of the separation barrier
outside the city and other developments appear
calculated to head off the prospect of Jerusalem
becoming the capital of a viable Palestinian state.
And they appear to cut directly across Condoleezza
Rice’s warning this year to the Israeli government not
to do anything that would pre-empt final status
negotiations with the Palestinians on the city.
Daniel Seidemann, the Israeli lawyer who has been
monitoring, and opposing, such settlement activity in
Jerusalem for years says any peace plan would now have
to apply “microsurgery” to guarantee secure passage
for Jews through the Armenian quarter to the south of
the square, through to the Jewish quarter and the holy
Wailing Wall. He adds: “All of a sudden the border
becomes mobile. You have a settler presence. The
people [who acquired the properties] here were not
making a random hit.”