Photo: AFP
Israeli nationalist groups reportedly chanted slogans such as “death to the Arabs”, “may your villages burn” and “Gaza is a graveyard” during a state-backed march through Jerusalem marking the anniversary of Israel’s capture and annexation of East Jerusalem.
The annual event, which is presented by Israeli nationalists as an assertion of Jewish control over Palestinian East Jerusalem, has become increasingly hardline in recent years. This year’s march culminated with Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir unfurling an Israeli flag near the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, considered Islam’s holiest site in the city.
Most Palestinian residents and shopkeepers in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City shut their businesses and left before the march began. However, clashes later broke out between far-right Jewish activists and Palestinian residents who remained in the area, with both sides allegedly throwing chairs before police intervened in large numbers to separate them, The Guardian reported.
A 19-year-old marcher identified as Ariel Amichai said he had joined the event to demonstrate what he described as Jewish ownership of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. He also reportedly claimed that Palestinians should leave because, in his view, the land belonged to Israel.
Amichai, who reportedly travelled from Modi’in near Jerusalem, also said he believed Jerusalem Day was the only occasion when Jews could enter the Muslim Quarter through Damascus Gate, although the gate is used daily by both Israeli Jews and Palestinians.
Participants in the march were transported from different parts of Israel and from settlements in the occupied West Bank as part of a large operation supported by the Jerusalem municipality and government ministries. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich was also reported to have taken part.
After many Palestinians left the Old City, tensions reportedly shifted toward confrontations between nationalist marchers and activists from Standing Together, a Jewish-Arab organisation that said it was trying to protect Palestinian residents from political violence.
A Standing Together organiser, Suf Patishi, reportedly said around 400 volunteers wearing the group’s purple safety vests had been deployed across the city in an effort to prevent attacks on Palestinians. Patishi acknowledged risks to volunteers but argued that Palestinians faced far greater dangers.
Among the counter-protesters were reportedly a number of religious Jews. One ultra-Orthodox participant, who identified himself only as David, said he was disturbed by what he described as violent behaviour within his own community. He characterised the attacks as a desecration of God’s name and said he joined the counter-protest to promote the opposite values.
At the Al-Aqsa compound — known to Jews as the Temple Mount — Ben-Gvir danced with supporters while they sang slogans declaring the Temple Mount to be under Jewish control. The minister has been associated with efforts to weaken the long-standing status quo arrangement established after Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967, under which non-Muslims are prohibited from praying at the site.
Later on Thursday, Ben-Gvir posted on Telegram that, 59 years after what he called the “liberation” of Jerusalem, he had raised the Israeli flag on the Temple Mount and claimed that Israeli governance had been restored there.