Jerusalem – Laura Bush found herself immersed in the passions of the Middle East on Sunday, as her carefully devised trip to places holy to Muslims and Jews attracted small numbers of vocal protesters.
The first lady, on the third day of her five-day trip to the region, faced demonstrators at the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
“You are not welcome here!” shouted a protester near the Dome of the Rock. “Why are you hassling our Muslims?”
She appeared to be referring to allegations of mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan.
Another woman said loudly: “Koran! Koran!”
Later, in Jericho, Bush spoke of “what an emotional place this is as we go from each one of these very, very holy sites to the next.”
After meeting separate groups of Israeli and Palestinian women, she said: “What we all want is peace, and the chance that we have right now to have peace. To have a Palestinian state living by a secure state of Israel, both living in democracy, is as close as we’ve been in a really long time.”
The process will take “a lot of baby steps,” she added, “and I’m sure it will be a few steps backward on the way.”
The United States will help, the first lady continued. But “it also requires the work of the people here, of the Palestinians and the Israelis, to come to the table, obviously, and we’ll see.”
The main purpose of Bush’s visit was to attend the World Economic Forum meeting Saturday in Jordan, where she highlighted education and women’s rights as central to democracy in the Middle East, a major theme of the Bush administration. But President Bush had encouraged her to visit Israel, and her schedule was carefully planned to provide parallel gestures to both Palestinians and Israelis.
The Noble Sanctuary is known to Jews as the Temple Mount, and it is a potentially explosive spot of earth. It is where the first two ancient Jewish temples stood, the last destroyed by the Romans. And, at the same place, the Dome of the Rock is built over the spot where the prophet Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven.
By the time Laura Bush, dressed in a black pantsuit with a black shawl over her hair, left the Muslim shrine, where about 20 protesters had gathered, the small crowd of onlookers seemed to better understand who this visitor was and pressed closer to her.
She was surrounded by U.S. security personnel and Israeli police officers who pushed back the crowd as she walked to her motorcade.
The large presence of armed Israeli police officers, some in riot gear, angered the demonstrators.
Israeli security officials fear right-wing Israelis may attack the sacred Islamic structures here, either to try to rebuild the temple or to cause a new conflict between Palestinians and Israelis that could derail the plan to pull Israeli settlers out of Gaza.
So tensions were high, and the first lady’s visit, a rare one by an American dignitary, drew a larger police presence than usual.
The ancient man-made plateau overlooks the Western Wall, the last surviving retaining wall of the Second Temple and a holy site for Jews. Bush also walked through protesters to visit it.
She leaned against the massive stones, hot with the bright sun, trying to ignore the crush of photographers, shutting her eyes and praying, then putting a private note – another prayer – into a crack in the wall.
Her aides said that she wrote the note on the flight Sunday morning from Jordan but wanted to keep the contents to herself.
At the Western Wall, another small crowd of protesters shouted for the release of Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew convicted of spying for Israel. He was recently visited in prison by the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Danny Ayalon. But again, Israeli and U.S. security officials kept the demonstrators back.
Laura Bush spent part of Sunday in conversation with a group of well-known Palestinian women, including the legislator Hanan Ashrawi; the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem Affairs, Hind Khoury; Jihad Abu Zneid of the Shufat refugee camp’s women’s center; and Terry Boullata, an educator from East Jerusalem.
Bush also spent nearly an hour touring the new Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem, where she laid a wreath to the dead and wrote in the visitors book: “Each life is precious,” adding, “We commit ourselves to reject hatred and to teach tolerance and live in peace.”
She said the visit to the region had been “very emotional for me and very moving to be here and to see these sites that are very important to me as a Christian, that are in the Old Testament,” and also important to Muslims and Jews, that represent “the cradle of what we think of in our country and around the world as religious thought.”
She heads to Egypt today after visiting a Christian church near Jerusalem.