The spitting incident, which the city’s minority Christian community lamented as the latest in an alarming surge of religiously motivated attacks, drew rare outrage on Tuesday from the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and other senior figures.
Since Israel’s most conservative government in history came to power late last year, concerns have mounted among religious leaders – including the influential Vatican-appointed Latin Patriarch – over the increasing harassment of the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community.
Those worries over rising intolerance seem to violate Israel’s stated commitment to freedom of worship and sacred trust over holy places, enshrined in the declaration that marked its founding 75 years ago.
The spitting scene, captured on Monday by a reporter at Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, shows a group of foreign pilgrims beginning their procession through the limestone labyrinth of the Old City, home to the holiest ground in Judaism, the third-holiest shrine in Islam and major Christian sites.
Along the way, ultra-Orthodox Jews in dark suits and broad-brimmed black hats squeezed past the pilgrims through narrow alleyways, their ritual palm fronds for the weeklong Jewish holiday of Sukkot in hand.
Further adding to the outrage, Elisha Yered, an ultranationalist settler leader and former adviser to a lawmaker in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, defended the spitters, arguing that spitting at Christian clergy and at churches was an “ancient Jewish custom”.
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