Protests have been moved to Saturday nights instead of Friday afternoons during the month of Ramadan, less photogenic, but cooler and less punishing for those who are fasting as the weather has been particularly hot and oppressive this summer.
The police have always claimed that the reason they don’t want the demonstrations held in the street containing two of the occupied houses (including the one with the giant candelabra on its roof and the facade covered with Israeli flags and pennants) is because prayers take place there on Friday afternoons, before Shabat, to which many settler sympathizers flock. It is for this reason that we are exiled to the nearby park and the residents have leave to join us. On Saturday night no particular prayers are scheduled there so the first Ramadan gathering was scheduled to enter the street just like settler sympathizers, who are permitted to do so freely all the time. The police, however, had other ideas and a barrier was already up at the top of the street when we arrived at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday night, just as it is on Fridays. (Strangely enough an activist who came by there on Friday afternoon to check for stray demonstrators who might have missed announcements that the protest was to be held on Saturday night, reported that there was no barrier to protect Friday prayers that day.) It seems that in our upside-down East Jerusalem world, the barriers are really there to protect none too peaceable settlers from non-violent protesters.
Exiled to the park again, we marched to the house from which the Hanouns were evicted about a year ago, led byMajed Hanoun and his family and affixed slogans to it, which was photogenic for the press. Some of the children knocked on the gate, the border police moved swiftly in but didn’t touch or prevent anyone from exercising the right to protest or drum.
I’m always struck by the contrast between awfulness of the situation and the upbeat nature of those protests. Other regulars have also noted this irony. The odd thing is that the Palestinians upon whom the misery of homelessness has been inflicted have warmed to that style and are as enthusiastic as the Jewish students with whom it all began. Over the months I’ve watched Sarah Benninga and Nasser Al-Ghawi become a team, shouting perfectly synchronized, imaginative new slogans in Hebrew and Arabic each week along with the old ones and, together with the drummers, energizing the rest of the participants.
As we marched back to our usual sidewalk on the edge of the little park, a bunch of young settlers jeered at us from across the busy road that connects east Jerusalem to west and the park to Othman Ibn Affan Street. A bearded guy dressed in a black velvet kippa, white shirt and black trousers just like the settlers, but looking somewhat older, came through the crowd on our side of the street and stood on the edge of the throng right next to me. From a large plastic bag he drew a piece of cardboard he’d clearly cut from a Passover matzo carton with not very sharp scissors. He held it aloft and the expressions of the settlers changed as they strained through the darkness and the traffic to read it. I stepped off the sidewalk to get a look at it from the front. It was written in prayer book style Hebrew font and read: “Jews and Bedouins refuse to be enemies” which is a variation on one of the most common placards at the demonstrations, “Jews and Arabs (or Arabs and Jews) refuse to be enemies”. The settlers’ eyes were popping with fury and disbelief as it sank in, a comical way for the rest of us to round things off.
“Jews and Bedouins refuse to be enemies”
As the demonstration seemed about to disperse, a Palestinian demonstrator who was participating for the first time clambered up onto a rock and gave an impromptu, emotional speech. He was half way through before someone handed him a megaphone. His voice and enthusiasm over the unimagined novelty of protesting alongside Jews projected wonderfully without it.
People hung around and chatted afterwards and a Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah resident who commented to me on the warm, more intimate atmosphere of the demonstration at night, told of his satisfaction at the increasingly close cooperation between demonstrators, activists and Palestinian residents, but also of his fears of the effects of thegrowing pressures on East Jerusalem inhabitants. He also confided something that had happened to him a few days earlier. A settler’s five-year-old had fallen down some stairs in a nearby playground in which he too happened to be, with kids from his family. He instinctively rushed to pick the Jewish kid up to check if he was hurt. When the child’s father had reached the scene, instead of thanking him, he had told him to take his hands off the boy.
The most disturbing factor in East Jerusalem is the type of settler the government, and the mayor who serves its most hawkish coalition partners, have permitted to move into the area under full police protection. I once asked some of the angry individuals who have the use of the Al Kurd’s house extension how this chimes with the religion they were brought up in, explaining that I, too, was from a Jewish, religious home where loving your neighbour as yourself was the message and where what they were doing would have been considered barbaric and sinful. In reply, one of the youngest hissed, red with fury, that the people who lived in those houses are murderers. To my question as to exactly which of them was a murderer, he snapped that all Arabs were murderers and that Jews who supported them were even worse. At that point one of the Palestinian residents gently took my elbow and said there was no point in getting upset, they had been brainwashed. When I’d cooled off a bit, I realized he was right, it was the teachers who bear more guilt than those misguided youngsters. Clearly this ideology which bears so little resemblance to religion to those of us who were brought up in it, must have been taught at certain kinds of Yeshivot (Jewish educational institutions for men that focus exclusively on religious studies) in pretty much the same way the Muslim fundamentalists are said to be brainwashed in certain kinds of Madrassa.
PM Netanyahu and Mayor Barkat, neither of whom have objected in any way to the insertion of this type of settler into the heart of East Jerusalem, are secular. They have never attended a Yeshiva, let alone the kind that imbues young men like the East Jerusalem settlers with bigotry. The fire that they are playing with with such apparent insouciance puts the whole country at risk, but the first to pay the price are inevitably the Palestinians.
sh
We need to show our committment to justice. I can think of no better way of doing so than by staging vigils on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Beat the drums loud as to distract the occupiers in their “synagoges”