The Kadima party has been inciting hate for selfish political reasons, MK Yisrael Eichler (United Torah Judaism) accused Tuesday, addressing the Knesset.

“Gentlemen, the people of Israel is heading for civil war. Tribes are incited against each other – so that Kadima can justify having entered the government,” he declared.

Kadima received just one ministerial post upon joining the coalition in a last-minute political about-face. Eichler said the party hopes to appease voters by increasing its influence at the expense of hareidi-religious parties Shas and United Torah Judaism. It plans to do so by inciting the public to hate hareidi-religious young men who learn Torah full-time rather than enlisting in the IDF, he said.

“What are they waiting for? ‘Let’s make a draconian law that will force Shas and United Torah Judaism leave the coalition, and then we’ll have the Ministry of the Interior, the Housing Ministry, the Finance Committee… and the vice ministerial positions for Finance and Education,’” he argued.

He defended the fact that most hareidi men do not enlist. Torah learning “has protected us for the 64 years of the state’s existence, [the state] remained standing solely in the merit of Torah study,” he said.

He compared criticism of those who learn Torah full-time to the sin of the spies described in the Bible. “The spies did not understand that in Israel it’s not might vs. might, but rather, spirit vs. might,” he said. “Whoever does not understand the power of Torah, the strength of the spirit rather than physical strength, is likely to give us cause to mourn for generations to come.”

A right-wing organization that was granted use yesterday of an ancient East Jerusalem spring said the move would keep Haredi men from bothering the tourists by taking illicit dips in the nude. But opponents say the zoning board decision is just another way of imposing Israeli control over Palestinian resources.

Gihon Spring in Silwan is already a pilgrimage site for religious Jewish men, most of them ultra-Orthodox, seeking to benefit from the waters thought to impart blessings to those who take a ritual dip, which can be done only when fully unclothed. Yesterday the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee granted Elad, an organization that seeks to boost the Jewish presence in predominantly Arab parts of Jerusalem, the right to designate a 1.5 meter by 1.5 meters section of the spring as an “immersion pit.”

“There have been several times when embarrassing situations arise at the site,” said Elad spokesman Udi Ragones. “The idea is to regularize the immersion pit.”

The pit is similar to a mikveh, but is smaller than most ritual baths and is not enclosed. It is also open to the public, said Elad director David Be’eri – but, he added, those who use it “must come naked.”

The immersion pit is part of a larger construction project the planning committee approved yesterday for the area that includes Beit Hama’ayan, a large building that overlooks the mouth of Gihon Spring. As part of the plan, Elad was granted the right to build a large tourist center with an observation deck above the spring and the archaeological remains that have been discovered over the years.

The project is being funded by the municipality and the national government, and is being carried out in conjunction with the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. Silwan is built on the City of David, considered to be the site where King David established his kingdom.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the construction project, of course.

“It’s another phase in the settlers’ takeover process,” said archaeologist Yoni Mizrahi. “Unfortunately, Israel’s planning authorities see archaeological excavations as Israeli asests that must be preserved in closed complexes.

“It’s clear that the mikveh is not intended for the Palestinian residents,” said Mizrahi. He noted that the spring was shut down for excavations in 1995 and has not been easily accessible to residents since then.

According to one Jewish tradition, the spring is considered to be the spot where Adam went after his sin in the Garden of Eden. Some also say the Holy Temple priests occasionally immersed in the Gihon.

If Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Mursi were to become president, Egypt’s capital would no longer be Cairo, but would be Jerusalem, a prominent Egyptian cleric said at a presidential campaign rally, which was aired by an Egyptian private television channel.

“Our capital shall not be Cairo, Mecca or Medina. It shall be Jerusalem with God’s will. Our chants shall be: ‘millions of martyrs will march towards Jerusalem,’” Safwat Hagazy said, according to the video aired by Egypt’s religious Annas TV.

The video, which went viral after being posted on YouTube, was translated into English by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

“The United States of the Arabs will be restored on the hands of that man [Mursi] and his supporters. The capital of the [Muslim] Caliphate will be Jerusalem with God’s will,” Hegazy said, as the crowds cheered, waving Egyptian and Hamas flags.

“Tomorrow Mursi will liberate Gaza,” the crowds chanted.

“Yes, we will either pray in Jerusalem or we will be martyred there,” Hegazy said.

Hegazy’s speech came during a presidential campaign rally at the Egyptian Delta city of Mahalla, where Mursi attended along with the Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohammed Badei and members of the group and its political wing the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), Al Arabiya reported.

Mursi will challenge Egypt’s former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq in the upcoming runoff elections, scheduled to take place June 16 and 17. Shafiq, an air force general, was the country’s last prime minister before former president Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down by a popular uprising in February 2011.

Last week, a court sentenced Mubarak and his interior minister to life imprisonment for their role in the killings of up to 850 protesters in the January 25 uprising that ended Mubarak’s 30-year rule. Six senior police officers were acquitted for lack of incriminating evidence. Hegazy led thousands of protesters at Cairo’s Tahrir Square against the verdicts.

In May 1967, Yossi Shemy, a trombone-playing paratrooper from Kibbutz Bet Zera, was called up to reserves. He took his Yashica camera and rigged it to his battle vest. He was 23 years old and, although he had seen combat several times before, this was his first war.

He had no interest in history. Not in making it and not in documenting it. The only thing that interested him, he told The Times of Israel recently, was to keep his head down and to keep himself alive. Shemy, who lost an eye, much of his hearing and a large chunk of his skull in a Fedayun ambush near the Dead Sea in February 1969, actually used more colorful language than that. He was quite emphatic. All he had wanted was for it to be over and for him and his friends to be sent home safe and sound.

The camera? That, he said, was simply part of him. “I take pictures the way you dump a spoonful of sugar in your coffee,” he said.

When it was over, after his company charged through the Lions Gate and secured the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, he took the six rolls of film he had shot and put them in a wooden box in a drawer in Kibbutz Beit Zera. Then he sent a terse, formal letter to the men who served with him: if they wanted a photo they should mark it properly, legibly, and send him the necessary 25 agurot and he would develop it and put it in the mail.

The commander of the paratroop brigade, Motta Gur, the one who had the pleasure of speaking the three most famous words in modern Hebrew – “the Temple Mount is in our hands” – took a few of his shots and published them in a book called Lions Gate. Shemy was not credited. Others took similar liberties. He did not care.

“I’m just not interested in those kinds of things,” he recalled. “I care about what kind of pipe I have in my hands, what kind of tobacco I have in the pipe; I care about my children, my grandchildren; that’s it.”

But his son, Shem, a doctoral candidate in philosophy and a documentary filmmaker, did care. He believes that the shots his father took – under fire; while looking for his older brother, Elisha, who fought beside him in the same brigade; while storming through the alleys; while admiring the uncommon beauty of a nurse wheeling one of the wounded to a victory parade on the Temple Mount — show a different side to the war, a boot-level view, one in which the pain of the paratroopers, who lost 98 men in two days of combat, is not papered over with collective glee or drowned out by Naomi Shemer’s bell-clear voice singing “Jerusalem of Gold.”

Reluctantly, and with the urging of Elisha, a professional trumpet player who still carries the scars of the war, he agreed to publish the photos here — 45 years later to the day, June 7. Some of them have already been shown. Others are appearing for the first time. And others still, under his son and brother’s guidance, are being readied for a book entitled “Six Days of War in Black and White” that they hope to release next year.

Shemy is now aged 68. Finally, having spent much of his career as a TV cameraman, the insistently unsentimental photographer of 1967 is documenting history.