Chicago Tribune

JERUSALEM – On a goodwill mission to the Middle East, First Lady Laura Bush was met by protesters and hecklers Sunday as she visited Jerusalem shrines sacred to Muslims and Jews at the most sensitive flash point of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The groups of protesters were small, held back by a cordon of Israeli police officers and U.S. Secret Service agents, but their shouts were a reminder of the caldron into which the first lady ventured.

Near the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem’s walled Old City, about two dozen Palestinians gathered around Laura Bush’s entourage, and one shouted in English: “How dare you come in here! Why your husband kill Muslims?”

Others in the group shouted in Arabic “Get out!” a witness said, identifying the hecklers as members of Hizb al-Tahrir, an ardent Muslim group.

During an earlier visit by Bush to the adjacent Western Wall, a few dozen rightist Israelis held up pictures of Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew serving a life sentence in a U.S. jail for spying for Israel. “Free Pollard Now,” they sang. Pollard was a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy.

Bush’s visit to the Middle East is intended to help defuse anti-American sentiment inflamed by the ongoing fighting in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal last year, and, most recently, a Newsweek magazine report, now retracted, that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet.

The protests were the first encountered by Bush on her five-day visit to the region. She said the incidents showed “what an emotional place this is.”

Wearing a black head scarf in deference to Muslim tradition, Bush went to ground zero of the conflict here: the compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, containing the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest shrine in Islam.

The area is known to Jews as the Temple Mount, the site of the first Jewish temple built by King Solomon and the second temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D.

The contested area has been the site of deadly clashes and is carefully guarded to prevent violence by Jewish and Muslim extremists.

Taking off her shoes in keeping with Muslim custom, Bush toured the gilded Dome of the Rock, built over the rock where Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.

The militant Hamas group called the visit a public relations exercise.

“We in principle don’t reject anyone’s visit to the Al Aqsa Mosque (compound), but we see in the visit of Mrs. Bush an attempt to whitewash the face of the United States, after the crimes that the American interrogators had committed when they desecrated the Koran,” read a statement on the Hamas Web site.

At the Western Wall, Judaism’s most sacred shrine, Bush put a note among the massive stones, in accordance with Jewish custom. The shrine is a remnant of a wall that surrounded the courtyard of the second temple.

Bush also met with Gila Katsav, the wife of Israeli President Moshe Katsav, and other prominent Israeli women, and visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.

She laid a wreath to the dead there and wrote in the visitors book: “Each life is precious. We commit ourselves to reject hatred and to teach tolerance and live in peace.”

In the West Bank town of Jericho, Bush met leading Palestinian women, including Hanan Ashrawi, a lawmaker and well-known advocate of the Palestinian cause, and visited the ruins of the 8th Century Hisham’s Palace.

Echoing her husband’s vision of a Middle East peace settlement, Laura Bush said “the chance that we have right now to have peace, to have a Palestinian state living by a secure and safe Israel, both living in democracy, is as close we’ve been in a really long time.”

“It will take a lot of baby steps and I’m sure that there will be a few steps backward on the way, but I want to encourage the people I met with earlier, the women I just met with, that the United States will do what they can in this process,” Bush said.

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