jerusalem day, 2025
i said i didn't want to write a full post but i kind of just did
I don’t think I have it in me to write an entire post on Jerusalem Day as I did last year. It was more of the same.
Though I was roughed up by cops, harassed by settler youth and got a fair amount of pepper-spray in my eyes, the resulting adrenaline failed numb me this time to the overwhelming anguish surrounding the holiday as it had in 2024.
Last year I had been itching to reveal to our readership the sheer baseness of the Flag March. Far-right youth with a seemingly endless capacity for hatred, Palestinians putting their lives on pause, shuttering their businesses and locking themselves in their homes by mid-afternoon to make way for our obscene show of sovereignty. Despite the horror of it all, reporting on the parade imbued me with an exhilarating sense of purpose.
This time around, I had no desire to write the story afterwards and no desire to upload the photos I took. Perhaps because the cynical outlook burgeoning in my heart these past few years has morphed into outright despair of the world.
This risk of falling into this mindset deeply worries me. Such an outlook — which by nature snuffs out curiosity — would harm my ability to do my job as a reporter. When I feel that I might be despairing of the world, I return to a section of A.B. Yehoshua’s collection of political essays, Between Right & Right, that I read as an 18-year-old. He was writing about the Holocaust.
“After the experience of the Holocaust it is natural to be left with no faith in man or his actions. We, the sons of the victims, have a redoubled right to express our profound disappointment with the world. But this, too, we should remember, that despair of the world is a Nazi stance, that Nazism also was born of a feeling that by its nature the world is valueless, that good cannot be expected of man, that the only valid values are might and cunning. Whoever arrives at a nihilistic stance in wake of the experience of the Holocaust paradoxically deeply confirms an implicit Nazi thesis. To be bearers of hope and faith in man is not easy after the Holocaust, but if we wish to be consistent in our anti-Nazism we must take up this challenge as well.”
There are a few details about the Flag March which I deemed not newsworthy enough to put into the actual article I wrote. I want to quickly list them here.
In the morning, a large group of religious Zionist youths converged outside one of the entrances to the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa complex. A handful of Palestinians — a wizened hijabi lady and a father with his two young children — were stopped in their tracks. Border cops put up barricades separating the crowds. Rula Daood, cofounder of the Standing Together movement who had been there with other activists to fend off right-wing violence that day, stood alongside them. She was clearly steeling herself against tears.
When the Jerusalem Day revelers had cleared out from the area after a long ten minutes, the crowd control barricades were removed. The two children were still afraid to pass through and only did so at their father’s urging.
Because I wasn’t wearing a kippah and tzitzit, police grouped me in with a cadre of left-wing activists and kicked me out of the Muslim Quarter at around noon. They threatened to arrest me after I showed them my press ID. I walked to the Christian Quarter while typing as fast as I could on my phone, hoping to send out a liveblog and grab a bite to eat before venturing once again into the Muslim Quarter.
As I was walking, a dozens of young men in kippot rushed past me. I quickened my pace. I came upon them in a nearby alley, beating on an old Palestinian man holding two pizza boxes. They knocked his food to the floor. Left-wing activists came to the scene and threw themselves between the man and the dozens of far-right youth, diverting their attention from the Palestinian to the purple-vested “Jewish traitors.”
I stood at a distance from the scuffles next to the old man — who let out a vexed sigh while looking at the pizza slices now scattered on the ground.
Police arrived to the scene. A drunken Palestinian appeared in the alley we were all gathered in. I don’t recall where he came from. He set down some plastic grocery bags he had been carrying, whipped out his belt and tried to chase after the remaining religious Zionist youth, but was quickly stopped by the cops. They beat him pretty badly, completely ignoring the Jewish youth, who had escaped further into the Christian Quarter.
The drunken man resisted arrest for quite a while. He was tackled to the ground over and over by the three officers, before a growing crowd of Palestinians. One left-wing Jewish activist urged the police to treat him gently, repeating the phrase “gently officer” over and over again until another cop shouted at him.
At some point during all this, the man’s plastic grocery bags disappeared. I don’t know where to.
A middle-aged Palestinian lady with sunglasses and blonde extensions asked me where the man’s juice had gone. “The Jews took his juice!” she said. I felt guilty as I tried to keep myself from chuckling at the wordplay.
She went on a long lament to me and a left-wing activist about how the police don’t do anything against violence when its perpetrated by Jews. We were both dazed from the violence, in a state of semi-shock, nodding along while smoking Camels.
When first arriving in the Old City at around 9:30 a.m, I sat down outside the Austrian Hospice and waited for it to open. I was right next to a young Russian woman as she phone called with a friend.
Once she hung up, I struck up a conversation with her, asking if she too planned on going up to the Hospice once it opened.
This was the young woman’s first time in Israel, she told me. She came here on a four-day trip to see the Russian rockstar Boris Grebenshchikov live in Tel Aviv.
She was disappointed to find that precisely on the day she chose to visit Jerusalem’s Old City, over half the shops had closed for fear of nationalist violence.
The Russian tourist was unaware it was Jerusalem Day. She had no clue what the holiday was in the first place.
Later that morning, I sat down nearer to Damascus Gate for something to drink before receiving my (utterly worthless) press pass outside the walls of the Old City. I took note of a group of Israelis who sat down near me and order arak. Two middle-aged couples, presumably secular Mizrahim. I quietly observed as one of the women took a sip from her arak, took a hit from her inhaler, then drank some more.
One of the men in the group began to chat up the shopkeeper, asking the best way to get to the Western Wall. Not wanting to walk the distance to the holy site, he asked the shopkeeper if he could arrange someone to come pick them up in a cart for a fee. The shopkeeper called a friend, and within a few minutes, someone arrived to give them a lift.
Alright, sorry this is poorly written but I wanted to put this somewhere. Good night.