A civilian clings to hope in Jerusalem
Israel Defence Forces in training in Southern Israel. Creative Commons photo.
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(OPINION) The drill is familiar to me— and all 950,000 civilians in Jerusalem.
It starts with an innocuous event, often overlaid with religious or nationalist symbolism. Then a spark happens, the politicians spew out their rhetoric, the police set up barriers hoping to keep separate the holy city's three major groups - so-called secular Israelis, ultra-Orthodox Jews and Muslim Palestinians. (Christians, of whom the two biggest denominations are Greek Orthodox and Armenian, are too few to matter in the balance of terror).
The city seethes while people pray that no one is killed, and the ensuing funerals and riots set off a deadly cycle. So far at least 30 people have died in recent violence.
This time the circumstances were different because of the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. Freed from months of lockdowns, thousands of flag-waving youth planned to mark the anniversary of the unification of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War on Monday by parading through the Old City's Damascus Gate and marching down the alley that turns into the Via Dolorosa and ends at the Western Wall.
The route is a provocation, since it is equally convenient to enter the Dung Gate and avoid the Muslim hotheads.
In previous years, hundreds of police were deployed to keep order. But the best-made plans never worked, and violent fistfights would often result, sometimes involving flag poles as weapons, or knives.
Trying to prevent a worst-case scenario, Israel police cautiously banned the parade this year.
At the same time, Muslim activists congregated on the steps leading to the medieval Damascus Gate, the ceremonial entrance to the Old City built by Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1537. The police determined that the presence of throngs of youth was a powder keg waiting for a spark. Trying to disperse those crowds of teenagers flush with the zealous righteousness of nearly a month of Ramadan fasting proved difficult.
The crowds were reinforced by young adults, all male, arriving from the West Bank to pray at the Haram ash-Sharif - the contested holy site Jews call the Temple Mount. Apart from Ramadan, Arabs from the West Bank - like East Jerusalem captured in the 1967 war - are unable to enter Israel without rarely given permission.
The throngs were alarmed by the century-old baseless lie that Jews plan to dynamite the holy precinct's al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock. (That libel was invented by Hajj Amin al-Husseini (c.1897-1974), the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a genocidaire who spent World War II in Berlin as an unconditional collaborator with the Nazis, and whose toxic legacy continues to haunt the people of Israel and Palestine.
Armed with stones which the rioters had stockpiled in advance, the worshippers attacked Israel police on the Temple Mount. Jews and Christians had already been banned from visiting the holy site, which is only accessible for a few hours a day five days a week under peaceful circumstances.
Adding a further layer of tragedy and conflict, many of those officers are Arabic-speaking Druze who have a generations-long feud with the Muslims.
Trying to avert an explosion, the police were ordered to avoid fatal fire in their anti-riot response.
Hamas leaders in the quasi-independent Gaza Strip ratcheted up the tension by issuing an ultimatum that the Israel police withdraw by 6 p.m. on Monday. The police remained in their positions.
Then Hamas and other militants, or terrorists as Israel prefers to call them,
fired a volley of 20 rockets at Israel. One scored a direct hit on a home in the city of Sderot in southern Israel.
The residents had taken shelter in their concrete reinforced room and were unhurt physically. Their home was reduced to shambles.
Trains were stopped in the south, lest an unlucky strike by an unguided rocket cause a mass-casualty event.
In Jerusalem, the air raid sirens wailed, reducing my wife Randi to hysteria. We live in a house built in 1886 long before the building code made bomb shelters mandatory. We reviewed the civil defense drill which I've gone over with her scores of times: open the doors and windows to let a shock wave pass through lest you be turned into hamburger by shards of flying glass, and then seek shelter in a corner offering maximum protection.
One time we were caught in Independence Park near our house when the air raid alert went off. We laid down on the ground and covered our heads with our hands. Above our heads we watched the plume of the explosion as a high-tech missile intercepted the low-tech rocket, resulting in a shower of debris.
I reminded Randi not to go outside without Bella, our gentle giant of a pit bull whose look might put off a knife-wielding attacker.
And so we return to reciting King David's Psalms: "Though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death, I shall fear no evil."
Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.