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Palestine Diaries: Part 2 – Rally in Sheikh Jarrah
After getting settled in to the hotel and finding our bearings (somewhat), our delegation was off to Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighbourhood in East Jerusalem in which Israelis and Palestinians march together every Friday against the eviction of Palestinian families.
Sheikh Jarrah is home to approximately 3000 Palestinian residents. Many of them are refugees who were housed in Sheikh Jarrah by the Jordanian government shortly after 1948 in exchange for giving up their refugee status. The evictions put them at risk of becoming refugees a second time. While Israeli courts over the past 40 years have given a legal facade to many of the evictions, the laws on which these rulings are based incorporate double standards for the Palestinian and Jewish residents of Palestine/Israel, and themselves are in violation of international law as they amount to an illegal annexation of territory by Israel.
Unfortunately, Sheikh Jarrah has attracted the attention of settler interests who see it as a strategically important place to exert control over as part of their broader goals to take control over enough land to prevent East Jerusalem to be part of a future Palestinian state. As these settlers tend to be violent extremists, they will harass Palestinian families in a variety of ways, including vandalism and filing false complaints with the police. The Israeli police take the side of the settlers, and sees their role as mainly to protect the presence of the settlers, regardless of their actions.
Upon leaving the old city, we saw a boisterous gathering of people marching towards Sheikh Jarrah. They were banging drums and chanting – while my unilingualism made it impossible to understand the chants, I could tell by the signs that this was the march. We followed the marchers into Sheikh Jarrah, arriving at the site of the rally. Originally, they would meet up at a park in Sheikh Jarrah and then march to houses of Palestinian families who were being evicted. However, police brutality and arrests have meant that the rallies as of late have been mostly confined to the park. On the day that we were there a march was attempted, however Israeli police blockaded the road to prevent us from marching. I guess the “only democracy in the Middle East” can’t handle a bit of peaceful protest.
At the rally in the park, I picked up a copy of a Maoist newspaper from a lonely-looking man handing them out (evidently revolutionary propagandists are one of the things which are the same around the world) and proceeded to walk around the crowd. While my lack of knowledge of Hebrew or Arabic prevented me from reading some of the signs, I could see slogans such as “Obama: Freeze Settlements Now,” “Viva la Liberta,” “Stop Ethnic Cleansing” and “Do not destroy my house.” A pirate flag flew high over the rally – probably a reference to the attack on the Gaza freedom flotilla which occurred not long before we left. Children were making freshly squeezed orange juice for rally-goers. As this was during world cup fever, the rally was punctuated by the familiar buzz of vuvuzelas.
This rally this week featured a special celebrity guest – those rallying for peace and justice were serenaded by the songs of Irish folk singer and peace activist Tommy Sands. Sands initially wished to play in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, however an appearance in Israel was cancelled when he refused to submit to demands that he not play “Peace on the Shores of Gaza,” a song he wrote which became the anthem of the MV Rachel Corrie. Sands exhorted us through song to “sow the seeds of justice in your daughters and your sons.” Looking over the crowd, I could see Sands’ words ring true as I saw the faces of many young Israelis and Palestinians rallying together against oppression.
The police were also different from what we would see in Canada. Brandishing assault rifles, they were much more heavily armed than Canadian cops. As a line of police marched through the crowd near me, I glanced at one of their assault rifles. The person carrying it had evidently taken the time to tape two magazines together to speed up the reloading process – as if he expected to empty a full magazine from an M-16 at a peaceful protest. The presence of such heavily armed police makes for a chilling environment, one which drives home the seriousness of organizing in Israel/Palestine. It also reflects positively on the many people working hard for peace and justice in such a chilling environment that they continue their work despite the overbearing police presence and colonial state.
I was also amazed at the sustained solidarity shown at these rallies. Hundreds of people rallying weekly against the eviction of these families for over a year now is a kind of sustained public solidarity within and across communities that we tend to not see very often in Canada. Often, our rallies in Canada are one-off gestures, but in Sheikh Jarrah, they are weekly events.
Seeing this rally made me think of how “dialogue” initiatives are often promoted in Canada as a solution to the conflict. These are often pointless at best as they put the cart before the horse, and profoundly negative at worst because they frame the conflict in a religious light and blame the violence on irrational hatreds rather than concrete systems of oppression, and are often used as the carrot (albeit not a particularly big one) in the carrot and stick approach used to silence political activism aimed at the problem of Israeli apartheid. But in East Jerusalem, Israelis and Palestinians are marching together against oppression. Surely working together in progressive, anti-apartheid movements is much more productive than the “Hey, let’s gather some folks to eat falafel together – as long as we don’t talk about serious issues!” school of peacebuilding.
Overall, the rally was an inspiring bit of solidarity across cultural lines, and showed that despite the colonialist mentality and the seemingly more and more right-wing givernment in Israel, there are still people who believe strongly in peace, justice and equality for everyone in Israel/Palestine.
After a bit of sightseeing, Day 1 ended back at the hotel where members of our delegation got to know one another over dinner and drinks. We came from all walks of life and all across Canada, and we still had a lot to experience together…
Brian Latour is a student, activist, and student activist living in Winnipeg. Read more by Brian Latour.
