Entering Jerusalem: Scenes from the March of Flags

Notes from 2016’s Jerusalem Day, an Israeli national holiday.

Emily Raboteau’s essay is from the forthcoming anthology, Kingdom of Olives and Ash, edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, which will be published May 30 by HarperPerennial. She travelled to Palestine and Israel at the invitation of Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli army combat veterans against the occupation.

My childhood friend Tamar, a longtime resident of Jerusalem and a secular Jew, had zero interest in joining me last year for the Jerusalem Day parade. “Try not to get trampled by the mob,” she warned. She stayed at home to plan an iftar meal wherein her Palestinian and Israeli coworkers could break the Ramadan fast together with some of the shepherds from the villages they empowered with electricity in the West Bank. This breaking of bread—rather than the Yom Yerushalayim parade—represented her vision of triumph and accord. Her activist boyfriend, Guy Butavia, escorted me to the parade instead, walking fast as a rabbit along King David Street toward the Old City with his video camera in hand. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, passionately intent on social equality. Not that Guy needed my approval, but I liked him as a partner for my principled friend.

We were going to witness the parade wherein thousands of ultranationalist Jewish celebrants proceed through Jerusalem, ending with a dramatic push through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. The city was divided after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war with the west controlled by Israel and the east by Jordan. Jerusalem Day commemorates the city’s “reunification” in 1967, when Israel conquered East Jerusalem in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, but it’s as much a provocation against Arabs as a celebration of unity. Over a third of Jerusalem’s population is Palestinian, but they’re not invited to the party. Most of them know to stay inside or risk getting beat up or harassed. They mark the same date as the naksa, or “setback,” commemorating their displacement after Israel’s victory. Jerusalem Day represents two antipodal holidays, two parallel universes at odds.

Guy referred to the annual tradition of “the March of Flags” as “the March of Hate.” He’s an activist with Ta’ayush (“living together” in Arabic), a group that uses nonviolent direct action to fight for Palestinian rights. In 2016 he was arrested in connection with his activity, and spent some time in jail. As with the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, filming abuses of power and exposing them is one of Ta’ayush’s most effective tactics in battling state-sanctioned violence.

We trekked past Prime Minister Netanyahu’s residence on Balfour Street, winding our way through the thickening crowd toward the nerve center of the Old City. After visiting Palestinian shepherds in the semi-arid South Hebron Hills, the swift transition back into a fast-paced city gave me culture shock. There, at the bottom of the West Bank, were thirsty-looking olive trees, rolling sun-baked hills of bone-colored rock, people who rode donkeys and gathered water from cisterns, living in caves. Here in the heart of Jerusalem, lining a pedestrian mall, were gelato shops, hair salons, art galleries, upscale boutiques. I chased Guy through posses of young people beating drums and waving blue-and-white Israeli flags. They were mostly adolescents. Zionist youth groups, yeshiva boys, settlers, settler sympathizers, and messianic types bussed in from across the country. Riled-up children.

They passed out stickers that said KAHANE WAS RIGHT, in reference to the late, infamous Orthodox Rabbi Meir Kahane, a member of the Knesset who endorsed annexing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, along with the expulsion of Palestinians, and a lot of other anti-Arab policies that brought Israel to outlaw his hateful political groups. Although Kahane fell from grace thirty years ago, his writings have carried on as foundational texts for most of today’s militant and extreme-right political groups in Israel. Some of Kahane’s manifestos were on sale at the parade, including They Must Go, a screed whose title pretty much speaks for itself.

In what seemed to me a disturbing appeal for restored glory, many parade-goers wore T-shirts silkscreened with images of a rebuilt Jewish Temple, prophesied in the Book of Ezekiel as the eternal dwelling place of the God of Israel on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. The site of the Temple Mount, or Haram a-Sharif (“the Noble Sanctuary,”) as it is known in Islam, was not far off. It was just through the Damascus Gate, inside the Old City, conquered by Israel on this day in 1967. There lies the holiest site in Judaism, the Foundation Stone, where Jewish tradition holds that Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac and where Jacob laid his head and dreamed—the pillow of stone where heaven joins the earth. This rock is just as sacred to Muslims for being the place where the Prophet Mohammed is said to have ascended into heaven, enshrined by the Dome of the Rock that sits on the ruins of the first two temples. City of contradictions. City of layers. City of light.

I shielded my eyes and looked toward that golden dome, the most eye-catching thing on Jerusalem’s cityscape, dazzling in the sunset. The atmosphere grew more charged as we approached that mighty power source. The March of Flags would start at the crenelated gate and culminate at the last remnant of the Second Temple—the Western Wall. The masses sang and chanted so loudly their voices grew hoarse. The eternal people do not fear a long journey, they belted. Jerusalem of Gold.

I remarked that it felt like a pep rally, one where everyone really believed in the team. “They’re brainwashed,” Guy said with great pity. Then he directed his lens at a unit of armed Israeli soldiers who’d blocked off a street entrance to an Arab neighborhood with a tank that would use its cannon to spray their bodies and homes with “skunk water” if they dared try exiting to protest the march. Skunk water is a putrid-smelling form of non-lethal crowd control developed in Israel to keep demonstrations in check. (Several police departments in US cities, including St. Louis, were reported to have bought it in the wake of uprisings and protests against police brutality.)

“That’s the smell of the occupation,” said Guy. “It’s worse than a skunk. It stinks like raw sewage and rotting corpses. It doesn’t go away for days. It can make you sick. The term Israel uses for this pollution is ‘sanitize.’”

I thought of the fire hoses police targeted on nonviolent protesters, including children, in Birmingham in 1963. The pressure from their jets was strong enough to peel bark from a tree.

“Why don’t they just use water?” I asked Guy.

“Not cruel enough.”

One of the police noticed Guy filming and placed his hand on the grip of his assault rifle. We moved on, weaving into that amped young crowd. “Get ready. It’s about to turn ugly,” said Guy. He braced himself to record the slogans, jeers, and acts of vandalism he’d witnessed at past parades: Mohammed is dead; The third temple will be built and the [al-Aqsa] mosque will be burned; Death to Arabs, and so on.

“Imagine they are storming through your neighborhood and you aren’t allowed on the street, or to run your shop, or leave your house and they are chanting death to you and your prophet,” Guy said. I acknowledged it would be hard for me, in that scenario, to turn the other cheek. Someone shouldered him, hard. A teenager in an ankle-length skirt.

“Why don’t you point your camera at the Arabs throwing stones?” she spat at Guy, though the only Arabs in sight were shop owners being roughly steered out of the Muslim Quarter’s market by Israeli police, to clear the way for the March of Flags. I’d planned to buy souvenirs for my kids in the labyrinthine souq with its trinkets, sandals, ouds, doumbek drums, Turkish delights, carpets, spices, and backgammon boards inlaid with mother-of-pearl, but today was not to be the day. I wasn’t here to be a tourist, but a witness.

Guy thought it unsafe for me to be at his side, and directed me toward what looked like a safe perch from which to watch. Suddenly he was gone, swallowed up in the noisy throng. I worried for him. Now I knew why Tamar warned me not to get trampled. There were thirty thousand people and two thousand police officers in attendance at the parade. I climbed onto the post to the side of the steps leading down into the swarming plaza of Damascus Gate.

The revelers rode on one another’s shoulders. Packs of boys dancing in horas. The next generation. I was old enough to be their mother. They seemed like their voices had only just changed and yet in no time at all they’d be required to serve in the army. The air was suffused with testosterone and great potential, enough voltage to power a city. “What are they singing?” I asked a sympathetic Hebrew speaker below my perch. Worship God with happiness, he translated. The air was electric. Their chorus reached a fever pitch. God will defend us, they sang, pumping their fists. I was touched by their expressions of faith and terrified of their zeal. We will win. It sounded to me like a battle cry.

As a mother I wanted to shake those boys by the shoulders for acting uncouth. I wanted to flip a doctrinal switch in the current of their energy to force it back to the basic precept Jesus quoted from the Torah (Leviticus 19:34) when he said we should love our neighbors as ourselves. This parade felt to me like the opposite of that mitzvah. As believers, as bullies, the boys surged into the mouth of the Damascus Gate. It felt like a desecration—not merely because they believed Jerusalem belonged to them alone but because their misguided ardor was so close a surrogate for actual joy. I thought of my own children whom I tell the most important thing in life is kindness, to use their words and not their fists, who are black in the United States of America, and therefore also endangered. An armed policeman stared me down with bloodshot eyes. I realized then that I was crying. I turned my face from his because I felt afraid.