Gideon Levy : A Day of Mourning Called Jerusalem Day
Today we are supposed to celebrate this day by law. No person of conscience can do this.
haaretz.com
One day Jerusalem Day will become a national day
of mourning. The flags will be lowered to half-mast. The sirens will
wail and Israelis will stand at attention in memory of their vanished
dream. The 28th of Iyar will enter Israel’s mourning-day calendar,
sandwiched between the Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Tisha B’Av –
a day to commemorate the destruction of the dream that falls before the
day commemorating the destruction of the Temple.
On
Jerusalem Day Israelis will mark the end of their 19 short years of
innocence and the beginning of their state’s institutional, systematic
malevolence. They won’t understand how for years they dared to celebrate
the occupation day as a national holiday set by law and how they could
see Jerusalem, the city symbolizing more than anything else their
state’s tyranny and racism, as the object of their desire. When that
happens, if it happens, we’ll know – society has recovered. It has
recovered from its fatal disease.
Only
a small portion of Israelis mark Jerusalem Day today. To most of them
it means nothing, whether they’re secular, ultra-Orthodox or Arab. The
belle of the ball also doesn’t really interest most Israelis. When was
the last time you visited it for pleasure? When were you at the Western
Wall? And why should you be?
This
holiday was and remains the religious chauvinists’ holiday, celebrated
by a bullying, screeching minority, who mark it in their characteristic
manner. They celebrate Jerusalem’s only joy – gloating at others’
misfortunes – with a march of flags based wholly on the satisfaction of
stomping on the remnants of dignity of the other nation to whom
Jerusalem also belongs.
A
poor city, filthy and neglected, which secular Jews leave as fast as
they can, which the Palestinians cling to with all their meager strength
and which religious, chauvinistic, extremist Jews have long taken over.
It’s a city that sends its settler metastases into every Palestinian
neighborhood, merely to bring misery, to dispossess, to oppress and to
evict. And all this is done under the auspices of the authorities,
including the judiciary, Israel’s most enlightened authority.
This
is a blatantly binational city, which could have been a paradigm of
coexistence in one democratic state, a sort of pilot for establishing
relative justice. Instead it has been turned, due to Israeli greed for
real estate and messianism, into the essence of Israeli dispossession,
aggression, abuse and arrogance.
The
day of “liberation” of this unbearable city, which is the day of its
occupation, is the day that turned it into what it now is, a concrete
monster and an occupation Moloch. Today we are supposed to celebrate
this day by law. No person of conscience can do this.
I
loved Jerusalem when I was young. Even in the short hangover period
after the ‘67 orgy, which infected almost all of us, we were still
captivated by its astounding beauty. At the time we still believed what
they sold us – that the city was “liberated” and “united” forever and
that the Viennese liberal, Teddy Kollek, was an enlightened conqueror.
But
soon its beauty was mutilated beyond recognition, nothing remained, and
the inevitable sobering began. Only the blind and ignorant can still
enjoy it today. Who can take pleasure in visiting a city where the
occupation screams from every stone?
With
the most racist soccer team in the league and the most chauvinistic
mayor in local government – neither by chance – Jerusalem has become the
symbol of the occupation, the most convincing evidence of its
apartheid. More than a third of Jerusalem’s residents — 37 percent — are
Palestinians, who should have had equal rights, but are being
subjugated in every possible way. It is no accident that here, of all
places, is where the desperate uprising of loners was born, the third
intifada.
It
could have been different. Had Israel recognized the Palestinians as
equals to the Jews and the Palestinian people as having equal rights in
the city, today we’d have a different Jerusalem and a different Israel.
But Israel never overcame the temptation. Forty-nine years ago today it
conquered part of the city and since then has done everything to turn it
into a moral ruins.
And this is what we’ll be mourning one day, on Jerusalem Day.
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