Under heavy protection by Israeli forces and severe restrictions on the Palestinians to access the Al-Aqsa mosque and travel through Jerusalem, thousands of Israelis took part in Sunday’s annual Flag March marking “Jerusalem Day,” a commemoration of the occupation of the eastern part of the city in 1967 in a raucous event riddled with displays of incitement, racism and blatant provocation.
The Israeli settlers and their officials celebrate Jerusalem Day to demonstrate that Occupied Jerusalem remains under their sovereignty. The occupation forces were on high alert to ensure the passing of the flag march, shutting down the entrances to the city and restricting access to Al-Aqsa Mosque for non-Jerusalem residents. In Gaza, the sky was filled with Israeli drones. The flag march is a display of the extent of the state’s security apparatus as much as a display of ethnonationalism. Yet, a drone flying a Palestinian flag hovering over the Israeli flag march shattered the image of Israeli sovereignty. And as marchers bearing the Israeli flag poured onto Salah Ad Din Street in Jerusalem, Palestinians haphazardly raised the Palestinian flag in response to settler and military provocations. This response from Palestinians constitutes another turning point and confirms that despite Israel’s best efforts, its attempts to eliminate Palestinian pride and identity have failed.
Jerusalemite Fatma Khader, 50s, says “What a dummy sovereignty, if this sovereign state must pay thousands of its heavily armed forces, and silence the opponents by force.” She tells me that she was in Jerusalem with a group of other elderly locals when they were attacked with pepper spray. “[The occupation authorities] banned many of our friends and kicked all the youth from the mosque, while allowing the settlers to enter.” According to the Red Crescent, nearly 90 Palestinians were injured including elderly, women, and children.
“Although Jerusalem was turned into a military barracks, the Jerusalemites did not surrender to this oppression; they protested, raised the flags and tried to reach Al-Aqsa by all available means,” Fatima continued.
The adoption of Jerusalem Day as an official Israeli national holiday was confirmed by a law approved by the Knesset in 1998, thirty years after the occupation of the eastern part of the city, but the first celebration of this day, which settlers call the “Liberation of Jerusalem” day, began one year after the 1967 occupation of eastern Jerusalem.
At the time, a small number of settlers stormed the Old City, marching across the city from Bab Al-Khalil to the end of Al-Buraq Square. Over the years, the path of the march has changed and expanded to include larger numbers and has become an organized, official event.
During the procession, the settlers under the protection of Israeli forces dance with flags amid chants and songs calling for the destruction of the Dome of the Rock and construction of the Jewish temple, along with anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic chants and slogans. Images and videos released on social media depicted settlers rioting and assaulting Palestinian women and children using pepper spray. One viral video shows a group of settler boys pepper spraying an elderly woman in the street.
I asked the photojournalist Mohammed Idkaik if the settlers or the occupation police hinder his work. He replied bitterly, “No one is exceptional, they assaulted everyone called Palestinians.” He says things have escalated this year. “In the past they feared (the repercussion of) attacking us, but this time they assaulted everyone, no matter who he or she is, even in front of the cameras. They also verbally assaulted us and brazenly said, ‘We killed Shireen,” the Al-Jazeera correspondent who was recently murdered by Israeli snipers. Chants of “Shireen is dead!” could be heard by marchers as they passed by journalists and photographers. The international media silence, well-documented in the wake of Shireen Abu-Aqleh’s death, and political-economic normalization efforts between Israel and Arab nations are main factors behind the Israeli settlers’ bravado. Yet, they still hold their parade as if to reassert or prove their diminishing sovereignty.
Nasser Al-Hedmi, Head of the Jerusalem Committee against Judaization, said that the intensification of the occupation’s oppression in Jerusalem is a result of the occupation authorities themselves feeling inferior given the ongoing on-the-ground developments in Palestine, and the Palestinian people have only their steadfastness to rely on.
According to Al-Hedmi, Jerusalemites today are confronting oppression with popular unity and exercising their right to resist the occupation wherever it is found, whether in Jerusalem or the West Bank or Gaza which indicates the failure of the occupation to complete its sovereignty over Jerusalem.
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