Uri Weltmann was tense. He’s the nationwide discipline director for Standing Collectively, an organisation of Jewish and Palestinian peace activists, who had gathered to withstand the tens of hundreds of far-right Jewish marchers heading for occupied East Jerusalem’s Outdated Metropolis.
He had cause to be frightened. ‘Jerusalem Day’, marked by Jewish Israelis yearly to have fun the 1967 seize and subsequent unlawful occupation of town, has change into a chance for hundreds to be bussed in from throughout Israel and the occupied West Financial institution to take part within the ‘Flag March’, the place they maraud by the Outdated Metropolis and assault Palestinians – in addition to Jewish peace activists. Palestinians from exterior the Outdated Metropolis weren’t allowed in by police.
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This 12 months’s occasion on Thursday noticed preventing escape even earlier than the march formally started, as ultranationalist Israelis – a lot of them younger youngsters – attacked Palestinians within the Christian Quarter. The Israelis vandalised property, and Israeli police compelled Palestinian store house owners to shut.
Many different Palestinian companies had already closed for the day, fearing assaults and harassment.
“It’s gotten way more excessive since October 7,” stated Weltmann, referring to the Hamas-led assault on Israel in 2023, which led to Israel’s genocidal warfare on Gaza.
Weltmann and roughly 200 different Standing Collectively activists, carrying purple vests, tried to face between the far-right Jewish marchers and Palestinians, however had been usually attacked themselves.
As in earlier years, the marchers shouted anti-Palestinian slogans, together with ‘Could your village burn’ and ‘Loss of life to Arabs’. They’ve additionally been filmed spitting and hurling insults at Palestinians.
Police have to date arrested 13 individuals, together with each Jews and Palestinians.
The ultranationalist marchers have the total assist of the Israeli authorities. Earlier within the day, Nationwide Safety Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir led a big group of Jewish Israelis into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the place he displayed the Israeli flag in entrance of the Dome of the Rock.
Jordan condemned Ben-Gvir’s stunt, with the Overseas Ministry calling it a “blatant violation of worldwide regulation, an unacceptable provocation, and a flagrant breach of the historic and authorized established order”.
Jordan runs the Jerusalem Waqf Division, which supervises the holy sites in occupied East Jerusalem, in line with a long-standing settlement. Palestinians need East Jerusalem to be the capital of any future Palestinian state.
Violent society
Final 12 months, hordes of far-right and ultra-Orthodox marchers flooded into town, attacking Palestinians and chanting racist slogans. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz described the occasion as a state-sanctioned invitation for ultranationalist teams to enter the Muslim Quarter, smashing store indicators, breaking locks, battering steel doorways with flagpoles and plastering racist stickers throughout massive elements of the Outdated Metropolis.
Weltmann stated that the violence and anti-Palestinian rhetoric that characterised ‘Jerusalem Day’ had already been rising in tandem with the expansion of the far-right ultranationalist motion in Israel pre-2023.
Fuelling a lot of the violence, Weltmann stated, was a police pressure overseen by Ben-Gvir, whose accountability for policing the occasions has usually run counter to his energetic participation in it.
The Spiritual Zionism motion, which has drawn in a lot of Israel’s far-right, has been steadily rising since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, when many in Israel’s settler neighborhood first started to really feel that the land captured in 1967 – Gaza, the West Financial institution, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights – could also be underneath menace, analysts instructed Al Jazeera.
They describe how the Spiritual Zionist pattern has since been adopted and exploited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his avowedly pro-settler Likud social gathering to wield energy and, within the wake of the October 7 assault, underpin its genocidal warfare on Gaza, killing greater than 72,000 Palestinians.
Below the watch of Netanyahu and his far-right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the variety of illegal settlements within the occupied West Financial institution has surged. The self-styled ‘Hilltop Youth‘, a loosely organised community of radical and violent younger settlers, have additionally grown in each visibility and obvious impunity, whereas settler violence – which has lengthy been a attribute of Israel’s presence within the occupied West Financial institution – has exploded.
“There’s a deeply confrontational component to the march,” researcher on Jewish-Arab relations, Eram Tzidkiyahu, stated, “It’s not sufficient for us to have fun our personal victories. It’s about celebrating our victories within the dwelling rooms of the individuals who misplaced. Celebrating by yourself simply doesn’t have the identical baggage. It’s about going and chanting from the prayer e book, affirming that you’re the chosen individuals, intentionally throughout the Muslim Quarter [of the Old City].”
“The violence is inherent to that, fuelled by hormonal younger males in search of confrontation and united of their absolute rejection of the ‘different’,” he stated. “This didn’t begin on October 7. It’s deeply rooted into it.”
Passive police
Israeli police have usually accomplished little to stop assaults on Palestinians in the course of the Flag March, and few Jewish Israelis have been punished for the numerous crimes dedicated.
“The so-called Flag March … has at all times been a violent occasion,” stated Ofer Cassif of the left-wing Hadash social gathering, including that it grew to become extra violent up to now few years, particularly since October 7.
Cassif accused Netanyahu’s “fascist” authorities of encouraging the violence.
The Israeli police, which Cassif describes as Ben-Gvir’s “non-public militia”, didn’t cease “the violence, the lynchings, the destruction of outlets, the aggression and assaults towards Palestinians within the Outdated Metropolis, and all through town as an entire”.
Nevertheless, whereas it was straightforward for parts inside Israeli society to treat the presence of Ben-Gvir, or the violence of the Flag March itself as someway distinctive, to take action was to overlook the purpose, observers stated, notably in mild of the wars on Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.
“It’s straightforward to dismiss Ben-Gvir as a clown,” stated Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher on the Ir Amim activist group. “Many Israeli liberals do that to really feel higher about themselves. It’s straightforward. They don’t need to recognise that that is a part of Israeli society and, so long as they don’t really feel assured sufficient to say in public that, sure, Palestinians do have rights, they’re a part of that, too.
“Ben-Gvir just isn’t a clown. He’s Israel: 2026,” Tatarsky continued. “He’s a part of a authorities and society that, regardless of wars with Iran and Lebanon, nonetheless prioritises the elimination of Palestinians wherever they might be above every little thing else.”
