Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Two Marches, Two Futures for Jerusalem

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jul/07/two-marches-two-futures-jerusalem/
Two Marches, Two Futures for Jerusalem
David Shulman
One of the oddities of life in Jerusalem is that everyone knows where 
the future border will run between the Palestinian East and the Israeli 
West—despite the tiresome insistence of the Israeli government that the 
city will never again be divided. For example, north of the Old City the 
line will correspond more or less to what is now called Road Number One, 
a four-lane road that runs roughly north to south until it reaches the 
Walls of the Old City, where it turns sharply west just before the 
Damascus Gate. I drive this road several times a week on the way up to 
my office at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, and the dividing 
line between Palestinian and Israeli neighborhoods couldn’t be more 
clear. On the left side of the road, heading north, are the 
ultra-orthodox neighborhoods Me’a Shearim and Beit Yisra’el; across the 
street, on the right side of the road, is the well-known Palestinian 
neighborhood Sheikh Jarrah and the principal Palestinian shopping 
street, Salah ed-Din. The communities on the two sides of the road 
receive vastly different levels of investment in education, transport, 
social services, and other infrastructure.
Despite the government’s continuing attempts to evict as many 
Palestinians as possible from East Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh 
Jarrah and plant colonies of fanatical Jewish settlers in their place, 
the line is still very clear. It was thus not by chance that on June 
2—Jerusalem day, and the forty-fourth anniversary of the reunification 
of Jerusalem in the Six Day War—the municipality sponsored and largely 
financed a mass march in favor of further Jewish settlement in East 
Jerusalem (and, indeed, throughout the occupied West Bank). With police 
protection provided by the state, tens of thousands of marchers followed 
Road Number One south and west into Sheikh Jarrah and then into the Old 
City. The very idea of dividing the city is anathema to those who 
organized and took part in the march—although most know very well that 
there is no hope whatever of achieving any settlement with the 
Palestinians without such a division. The march was clearly meant as a 
statement of the right-wing goal of asserting and cementing Israeli 
sovereignty over the entire city by pursuing the settlement project in 
Palestinian neighborhoods. As it happens, the marchers also called out 
aggressive and overtly threatening messages aimed at the Palestinian 
population and at Israelis who support Palestinian independence that 
should not be minimized or overlooked.
Most of the marchers were young people, and probably a majority of them 
were settlers. (The police estimate of the turnout was 25,000, almost 
certainly on the low side; others estimated over 40,000.) For much of 
the way, this huge crowd was chanting slogans that, I think it’s fair to 
say, Israelis have never heard at such a pitch—slogans such as “Butcher 
the Arabs” (itbach al-‘arab) and “Death to Leftists” and “The Land of 
Israel for the People of Israel” and “This is the Song of Revenge” and 
“Burn their Villages” and “Muhammad is Dead” (the latter with particular 
emphasis outside the mosque in Sheikh Jarrah and then again as the march 
entered the Muslim Quarter of the Old City). It’s one thing to hear such 
things occasionally from isolated pockets of extremists, or from 
settlers in the field in the South Hebron hills, quite another to hear 
them from the throats of tens of thousands of marchers whipping 
themselves into an ecstasy of hatred. The slogans call up rather 
specific memories: I couldn’t help wondering how many of the marchers 
were grandchildren of Jews who went through such moments—as targets of 
virulent hate—in Europe. Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah and the 
Muslim Quarter of the Old City watched in horror, but there were no 
attempts to meet the hatred with violence.
For nearly twenty-fours hours the settler mob maintained a huge, raucous 
presence in the streets of East Jerusalem, taking particular delight in 
marching through the Muslim Quarter at 4AM. Some of the marchers threw 
stones at Palestinian passersby near the Damascus Gate. The police, who 
largely stood by while this was going on, arrested three activists from 
Shiekh Jarrah Solidarity and nine Palestinians protesting in Silwan, of 
whom seven were children, along with a few settlers.
So here you have one vision of the future of Jerusalem—and, sadly, it 
looks very much as if the current wave of racist hysteria is only 
gaining strength in Israel. Moreover, as is usually the case with modern 
nationalism, the political center and the more moderate right show no 
signs of attempting to hold back the tide. Indeed, a number of members 
of the government, which is in any case dominated by settler parties, 
regularly contribute to the inflammatory rhetoric. What’s left of the 
old Israeli left is fragmented, diminished, and politically ineffectual.
And yet the peace camp is not dead. A joint Israeli-Palestinian 
initiative is planning a counter-march—under the banner “Marching for 
Independence”—on July 15 of possibly historic significance. The numbers 
will be much smaller—maybe 2,000 or so, if the organizers are lucky—but 
the meaning of the event will certainly transcend the bare numerical 
count. Something quite new is under way in Palestine. September is 
getting closer, and with it the possible proclamation of the Palestinian 
state at the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Even if the United 
States casts its veto in the Security Council against Palestinian 
independence— a paradoxical move, given the official and long-standing 
American support for a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders— the 
reality on the ground may begin to change.
Many, from Ehud Barak, Israel’s Minister of Defense, down to the 
grass-roots Palestinian activists I meet in the territories, expect to 
see in September a Palestinian version of the “Arab Spring.” No one 
knows exactly what form it will take, but dress rehearsals have already 
begun—for example on May 15, Nakba Day, when mass demonstrations of 
Palestinians from Syria managed to break through the fence at Majdal 
Shams in the Golan Heights. On that same day more than a thousand 
demonstrators—among them Palestinians, young Israelis, and International 
supporters—who marched at the Qalandiya checkpoint separating Jerusalem 
from Ramallah, and were pinned down for seven hours by a barrage of 
teargas and other aggressive crowd control measures by the soldiers at 
the checkpoint. Although it received far less attention in the press, it 
was the demonstrations at Qalandiya that, in my view, most clearly 
pointed to what lies ahead.
A Mediterranean variant of Gandhian-style mass protest has by now taken 
root among Palestinian communities in several parts of the West Bank: 
Ma’asara, Nabi Saleh, Dir Kadis, Na’alin, and Bil’in, to mention only a 
few. There is by now a clear awareness among many that non-violent 
resistance is far more likely to be effective against the Israeli 
occupation than violence; and these days the humane principles of Gandhi 
and Martin Luther King are frequently and clearly articulated in Arabic 
by grass-roots Palestinian leaders.
An eloquent statement of the philosophy and method was delivered on June 
5 by Bassem al-Tamimi, one of the leaders of the Nabi Saleh protests, at 
his trial at an Israeli military court for organizing demonstrations. 
Al-Tamimi’s text will, I am sure, someday be taught in schools, maybe 
even in Israel; it is remarkably reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi’s famous 
statement to a now forgotten British judge in Ahmedabad in 1922, when 
the judge sentenced him to jail for six years.
Non-violent resistance is also the official policy of the Palestinian 
government in Ramallah. Salam Fayyad, the Prime Minister, spoke in the 
village of Bil’in on June 24th, where the non-violent protest sustained 
by the villagers for over seven years against the appropriation of 
village lands by the Separation Barrier was finally crowned with some 
success (the Army has begun to move the Separation Barrier at Bil’in 
slightly to the west, in partial compliance with an Israeli Supreme 
Court Ruling from 2007. The village will, however, still lose about a 
third of its lands to the Barrier): “The results of popular resistance 
may be slow,” Fayyad said,
but they are guaranteed, and the whole world is with us. This [the 
success of popular resistance] is something that is inevitable. It’s not 
over by any stretch of the imagination – this is just the beginning, but 
it’s a good beginning. It took a long time…[The moving of the Wall] 
underscores the immense power of nonviolence.
No one would claim that all Palestinian factions have renounced 
violence, but spokesmen for the government in Ramallah have argued, with 
some justice, that the recent Fatah-Hamas rapprochement reflects a 
recognition by Hamas that they have failed and that the non-violent 
strategy of the moderates is working. The Jerusalem march on July 15th 
is another important step. For the first time ever, all of the 
Palestinian factions that have organized protests throughout east 
Jerusalem, including the highly effective neighborhood committees and 
various NGO’s active in Palestine, are joining with Israelis, under the 
aegis of the Solidarity movement in Sheikh Jarrah, for political action. 
It’s also important to note that young people are taking the lead. In a 
way, the march is expected to mark the triumph of the mode of 
non-violent protest in Palestinian Jerusalem, in line with what is 
happening elsewhere in the West Bank.
East Jerusalem, caught between the Separation Barrier and the Green 
Line, its lands annexed to Israel in 1967, has been demoralized and more 
or less neutralized politically for the last several years; what we are 
seeing today is an attempt on the part of the some 300,000 Palestinians 
who live there to reclaim the political weight that should naturally be 
theirs. The fact that this is happening in close cooperation with young 
Israelis from the left is a promising development. For those that have 
been mobilized, there is clearly a firm common ground. The Solidarity 
website states unequivocally: “There is no choice for anyone advocating 
an end to Israeli control over the Palestinians other than supporting 
the only realistic way left to achieve this goal: recognition of an 
independent Palestinian state.”
Here, then, is the other future for Jerusalem, the alternative to the 
settlers’ program. On one side, we have a violent, mystically charged 
racism with its vision of brute domination of one people by another, and 
of an endgame of perpetual disenfranchisement and dispossession. On the 
other side, we have the prospect of a free Palestine, with its capital 
in East Jerusalem, the end of the Occupation, and the realistic hope of 
an agreement based on compromise and mutuality, an agreement whose 
details are by now common knowledge and broadly acceptable to a majority 
on both sides of the Green Line (it is one of the paradoxes of Israeli 
politics that Israelis consistently elect governments far to the right 
of their own positions, while polls continue to show that about 
two-thirds of Israelis support an agreement along the lines everyone 
knows are feasible). You’d think it would be an easy choice.
-- 
Namib
"La force ne fait ni raison ni droit ; mais il est peut-être impossible 
de s'en passer, pour faire respecter le droit et la raison" (Saint-Just)

 certainly on the low side; others estimated over 40,000.)
Curioso come certe cose non cambino mai, a qualsiasi latitudine, con 
qualsiasi regime.
PP



Secondo la questura, alle Termopili c'erano solo una ventina di facinorosi.


 Secondo la questura, alle Termopili c'erano solo una ventina di facinorosi.
Chissà che numeri dette la questura di Bisanzio al tempo della rivolta 
di Nika
PP

 Palestinians without such a division.
certa gente coltiva strane convinzioni religiose.