Incredibly, Eurovision is staving off Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But not for long

The song contest is one of few things stemming the violence. Once it’s over, anything from the US peace plan to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza will escalate things once more

Hamas, war and Eurovision are three words not normally heard together. But over the last week, the international song competition, known for its hammy acts and sometimes terrible songs, has hurtled straight into the heart of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, becoming the last bulwark against a war between Israel forces and fighters in Gaza.

Last weekend, just days before Madonna is due to fly into Tel Aviv and perform, it really did look like we were at the gates of another devastating conflict.

Militants in Gaza had fired nearly 700 rockets and mortars at southern Israel, Israeli jets and tanks had pounded 350 targets in Gaza. In just 36 hours, 25 Palestinians were dead in Gaza, including two pregnant women and two toddlers. Four were dead in Israel, which is just short of the entire Israeli civilian death toll of the seven-week-long war in 2014.

This was at least the fourth cycle of cross-border flare-ups in less than a year, which, for the short time they last, are everything but war in name. The time periods in between the mini-wars are getting shorter, fuses on both sides are shrinking, the solutions are disappearing.

And this time was considerably worrying. The sheer number of projectiles being fired from Gaza and the unusually high Israeli civilian death toll (including a man killed in his car by an anti-tank missile) in the past would have been a red line for the Israelis.

They deployed an armoured and an infantry brigade to the border ready for a ground incursion. They even began targeted killings for the first time in five years, obliterating a Palestinian fighter they said was a top Hamas financier in a strike on his vehicle.

But the prospect of long-range rocket fire from Gaza raining down on thousands of terrified tourists in Tel Aviv was too much.

Out of nowhere, a truce was announced. Had it not been for Eurovision, I believe, war would have broken out.

So what happens in a week’s time, when the show’s over and everyone goes home?

Michael Oren, a former MK and ex-Israeli ambassador to the US, has an idea.

“Hamas must go. Right after our holiday and Eurovision,” he tweeted without a drop of humour.

“Israel must evict Hamas from Gaza. The US should back us militarily and diplomatically and, together with Arab states, commit to Gaza’s renewal. Peace in the region is impossible with Hamas in Gaza. Israel is ready to act.”

His words echo many within Israel I have spoken to. Everyone, from families exhausted by living under a barrage of rockets in the south to chief election rival Benny Gantz, have criticised prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for losing Israel’s “deterrence” and not being tough enough on Hamas. Many in the south told me they were furious Bibi had put Eurovision before his people.

In Gaza, which is under a crippling 12-year-long Israeli and Egyptian-imposed blockade, the desperation is different. And in many ways deeper. People literally have nothing to lose because the territory is on the brink of total collapse. And I don’t say that lightly.

For Gaza’s militant rulers, the humanitarian crisis is morphing into a potentially existential one for them. This year saw an attempted internal protest in Gaza, dubbed the hunger revolution, against devastating standards of living and poor governing by the authorities. It was snuffed out pretty quickly in a round of arrests and violence.

But this isn’t going away as the dire situation is only going to get worse. In less than a month, unless there are immediate donations, the funding for the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa) will dry up after Washington, Unrwa’s biggest donor, cancelled all its financial support last year.

If that happens, a million people in Gaza will go out without food, Unrwa’s schools, some of the best in the Strip, will close. The agency, which is the second largest employer in Gaza after the Palestinian Authority, will be forced to fire staff. The last time they did that, there were such big protests, the UN lost control of its Gaza compound for three weeks.

Its health services will also be halted. The UN warned last week that it could see 1,700 people shot by Israelis, who need complex surgery provided by the UN, forced to have their limbs amputated.

Their vaccination programme – basically the only line of defence against epidemics because Gaza’s water is so filthy, and it cannot treat its sewage – could also be cancelled. No size of gate can stop disease crossing borders – this could pose a threat to Israel.

Compounding this is the Palestinian Authority’s financial troubles. Due to a fight over tax remittances from Israel (more on that here), the PA is on course for a $1bn budget deficit this year, according to the World Bank.

They have already slashed salaries to those in Gaza causing havoc and could be forced to do the same again.

And all this is happening at the exact time the US is due to deliver on its peace plan: a document the Palestinians have already rejected on the grounds that it will likely be too pro-Israel. (The Palestinians cut all diplomatic ties with the US last year after it recognised the contested city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and slashed funding to Unrwa.)

According to completely unverified leaks in Israeli media, the plan would legitimise pretty much every Israeli settlement in the West Bank (which are illegal under international law) and see the new Palestine, denied a proper army, forced to pay Israel to defend it.

If both sides do not agree, they lose international financial support.

No one knows if these points are really in the peace plan, but indications show the document could end up being a touchpaper for further conflict, rather than a fire extinguisher.

And there simply aren’t enough song contests to stem the tide of violence in the meantime.

(Source: Independent)

Why did CNN fire a pro-Palestinian commentator?

No one gets closer to peace by silencing voices critical of a lethal status quo. We need a candid debate about the grim catastrophe unfolding in Israel

Why is it so difficult, if not impossible, to have a candid debate about the grim Israeli-Palestinian catastrophe that prevails in our midst? What stands in the way of our capacity to grasp the undeniable need for justice for Palestinians and the understandable fear of annihilation of the Jews in Israel? Is the only option a desperate Palestinian counter-violent struggle against the structural and military violence of the occupying Israeli state?

The recent firing of Marc Lamont Hill by CNN for calling for a free Palestine once again opens up this Pandora’s box – with little, if any, hope left for a non-violent solution. Many supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, such as Hill and myself, see this strategy as a last-ditch effort to avoid more bloodshed. This is especially important in the US context, as $3.1bn dollars of military aid currently goes to Israel to support such an unjust and inhumane occupation.

Yet we must persevere and persist in our quest for free Palestinians and secure Jews in Israel. We must put the rich humanity of Palestinians and Jews in Israel center stage by highlighting their equal calls for respect, fairness and accountability. First and foremost, this equality means a wholesale stoppage of the silencing of honest and compassionate voices critical of the lethal status quo.

Palestinians throw stones using slingshots in response to Israeli forces’ intervention during the 18th ‘maritime demonstration’ to break the Gaza blockade by sea with vessel near the north coast border in Gaza City. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Hill’s courageous UN speech in honor of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People was a gallant attempt to highlight the horrendous suffering of and callous indifference to the Palestinian people. Building on the heroic Palestinian tradition of critique and resistance – best manifest in the words and life of Edward Said in the US context – Hill unsettled the toxic status quo and received its knee-jerk response: he was cast as an antisemite and promptly silenced from mainstream media. And for Black critics of Israel, such attacks are especially dangerous given the intimate and fraught history of Black-Jewish relations in the US and the tremendous status that Black freedom fighters have around the world.

 There can be no Jewish security in an Israeli state that occupies and dominates Palestinians
The climate of opinion is shifting against the impunity of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Needless to say, there will be some reckoning. Lies and crimes do not triumph forever. The crucial challenge is how this reckoning will – and must – minimize violence and xenophobic sentiments (be they anti-Jewish or anti-Palestinian).

Hill – like Said – favors a secular, democratic state that respects Jewish and Palestinian citizens equally. I also find this option morally desirable. But is it feasible for two peoples who have such enmity toward one another? Furthermore, the unique history of Jews in the world – from slavery in Egypt, ghettos in medieval times, expulsions, pogroms, and the Holocaust in the 20th century – warrants suspicion of any state shot through with harsh enmity. Security for Jews is a non-negotiable reality in our Jew-hating world – past, present and future. Yet there can be no Jewish security in an Israeli state that occupies and dominates Palestinians.

The most controversial moment of Hill’s bold address was his call for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea”. For most Zionists and many others these last words were cast as anti-Jewish, signifying the destruction of the Israeli state or even the genocide of the Jews. These gross misunderstandings and misconstruals play upon the deep fears and memories of vicious attacks and ugly assaults on Jewish people. These fears and memories are part of the core of what it means to be Jewish, and must be respected.

Yet they must never be used as an excuse to ignore Palestinian suffering or as a rationale for occupying Palestinian lands and people. This is precisely what happened. Hill’s words – though used by the PLO and Hamas – were not intended to be either antisemitic or a call for genocide. On a personal note, after knowing and working closely with him for over 20 years, I am certain that these words were neither a dog whistle nor an explicit call for genocide. Hill, like myself, is profoundly disturbed by the escalating deplorable anti-Jewish words and actions around the world. This must be vigorously opposed – be it in Pittsburgh, Paris, or the West Bank – but it must not render invisible the misery of Palestinians under the rule of the Jewish state.

 This status quo – this house of cards – cannot stand
The great paradox is that one of the great gifts of the Jewish people to the world – the precious gift of a prophetic tradition from Moses and Amos to Esther and, in recent times, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel – puts justice for all at the center of any vision of the world. Such justice requires respect, fairness, and accountability of the people, for the people, and by the people. When this priceless tradition is crushed by the greed of predatory capitalism, the hatred that accompanies tribal nationalisms, and the cowardly avarice of the US Empire, we get the prevailing Israeli-Palestinian catastrophe. This massive disregard of innocent life, be it thousands of Palestinians or hundreds of Jews, is a sign of moral decadence. And this status quo – this house of cards – cannot stand.

The Israeli state will, like so many others, either continue along the path of authoritarianism and xenophobia or it will embrace the dismantling of occupation, give full citizenship to Palestinians in Israel, and provide land justice in some form. Unlike Hill, I do not foresee a singular, secular and democratic state for both peoples – though, like him, I think it would be best if possible. But I do see a chance of free and secure Palestinians and free and secure Israeli Jews with real self-respect and self-determination guided by not only fears and painful memories but also hopes and inspiring visions of justice for all in a Palestinian state and Israeli state with genuine sovereignty in both. Neither Hill nor I have the answer to this catastrophe but no one gets closer to a peaceful solution by demonizing persons and silencing voices critical of a lethal status quo.

(Source: The Guardian)

Airbnb removes Israeli West Bank settlement listings

Airbnb says it will remove from its listings all homes in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The US firm said it had made the decision because settlements were at the "core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians".

The move has been welcomed by Palestinians but Israel has called it "shameful" and threatened legal action.

The West Bank settlements are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.

Airbnb has previously been criticised by Palestinian officials and human rights campaigners for allowing listings of homes to rent in Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.

A statement from the company said: "US law permits companies like Airbnb to engage in business in these territories.

"At the same time, many in the global community have stated that companies should not do business here because they believe companies should not profit on lands where people have been displaced."

The Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim in the occupied West Bank

Following an evaluation, it said: "We concluded that we should remove listings in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank that are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians."

Saeb Erekat, secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, said it was "crucial for Airbnb to follow the position of international law that Israel is the occupying power and that Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including occupied east Jerusalem, are illegal and constitute war crimes".

But Israeli Tourism Minister Yariv Levin said Airbnb's decision was "the most wretched of wretched capitulations to the boycott efforts".

He said Israel would respond by backing lawsuits by settlement listers against Airbnb in US courts.

The Yesha Council, which represents Israeli settlers, accused Airbnb of becoming "a political site" and said the decision was "the result of either anti-Semitism or capitulation to terrorism, or both".

The decision was announced the day before Human Rights Watch was set to publish a report examining Airbnb's business in the settlements.

The organisation praised Airbnb's decision on Twitter, hailing it as "a breakthrough".

For 2 years, @hrw has spoken with @Airbnb about their brokering of rentals in illegal Israeli settlements. Today, a breakthrough. pic.twitter.com/W6VTuDDXB9

— Human Rights Watch (@hrw) November 19, 2018

(Source: BBC) 

The woman who could be Israel’s next leader

Benjamin Netanyahu’s position seems secure for now. But an unexpected candidate from the hard right is waiting for her moment to challenge him.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is fond of showing his visitors an ancient seal unearthed in Jerusalem, thought to date back more than 2,700 years. Its inscription is similar to the prime minister’s family name—proof of the historic bond between the Jewish people and their land, and perhaps (one might surmise) also of the eternal bond between Netanyahu and his office. After nearly a decade of unbroken rule, the prime minister has created an aura of irreplaceability—for now. His brand, much like that ancient seal, shows no sign of abrasion, and with an election year fast approaching, it seems likely that he will continue as prime minister.

However, since the proliferation of corruption cases against him, a once unthinkable question has arisen among both his supporters and his opponents: Who will eventually replace him? Increasingly, in conversations in political circles, a surprising answer is emerging: Ayelet Shaked, the minister of justice.

A recent survey published in the Israeli daily Maariv found that if Shaked were heading Likud, the party would win the same number of Knesset seats—33 out of 120—as it would under Netanyahu’s leadership. This is no less than a sensation. The road from here to there is long and tortuous: For starters, numerous hungry contenders from within Likud are jockeying for the crown. Shaked, meanwhile, is not even a member of Likud but of its bitterest rival on the right, the Jewish Home party. Still, if Netanyahu has a mirror on the wall telling him that he’s the most popular guy in the kingdom, this may be the moment his political Snow White makes her appearance.

How did an unknown computer engineer transform herself into a potential prime minister in just five short years? How did a woman who once worked for Netanyahu become one of his most formidable rivals? And how did a secular woman from left-leaning Tel Aviv become the most successful spokesperson for the religious-nationalist party and the settlement movement it strongly supports?

Even in Israel—a land of milk, honey, and a fresh news item every 60 seconds—Shaked, just 42 years old, is a head-spinning success story. She’s far from being in the consensus; some admire her deeply, while others see her as nothing less than a danger to democracy. But even her fiercest detractors admit that she is the most effective player currently operating in Israel’s roiling political arena.

“I see myself as someone who’s come along to be a counterbalance,” Shaked tells me at a recent meeting at the Ministry of Justice in Jerusalem. “For many years, the courts had a liberal slant, and my tendency is more conservative.” This doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of Shaked’s agenda.

She’s not religious—which is unprecedented for someone so central to a national-religious party like Jewish Home—and she doesn’t live in the settlements. She was raised in Tel Aviv, the liberal stronghold of Israel, but her ideology is deeply rooted in the hard right that opposes any evacuation of West Bank settlements; that views the Oslo Accords and a Palestinian state as an unmitigated catastrophe for Israel; that believes the courts, the media, and academia all lean strongly toward the left. Shaked promises to change all that.

It is precisely her contradictions that give her power and a unique standing within her own party, as well as in the wider political arena.

Shiloh Adler, a prominent settler leader, tells me: “She doesn’t come from the religious-nationalist sector, and she’s not labeled as a member of one camp or another [within that sector]. This gives her a space that’s interest-free and significant. The rabbis, who are divided according to which camp they belong to, all accept her opinion.”

Roni Bar-On, a former senior government minister, offers a less favorable analysis in an interview. “She’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he says. “She’s not what you’d expect from the religious-nationalist movement, and this works in her favor. The people who are disturbed by what her party represents are soothed by what they see in her, and her base applauds her shrewd sophistication, as in, ‘We slipped in a front someone who captures their minds and does it better than we do.’”

Ayelet Shaked visits a synagogue in Ethiopia in April.MULUGETA AYENE / AP

Shaked herself explains it thus: “I was right wing in my outlook from a very early age, and during my service in the army, which is a melting pot, I was introduced to religious Zionism. I connected with that circle of people on an ideological basis.” After completing her military service, she studied electronic engineering and computer science, worked for five years for the tech giant Texas Instruments, and married Ofir, a former Israel Air Force (IAF) combat pilot who is now an IAF flight instructor. They have two children. In 2006, however, she turned her ideology into a profession and forged a connection with Netanyahu, becoming his office manager. “At the time, Netanyahu was the spurned leader of the opposition, he had only 12 Knesset seats, and people didn’t think he would ever get anywhere,” she recounts, smiling at the outcome of her bet.

Shaked also made a second bet, which ultimately proved even more significant in her trajectory: She recruited Naftali Bennett, another high-tech alumnus, to serve as Netanyahu’s chief of staff. Thus, the settlers’ new political power couple—the very duo that so embitters the prime minister today—got together under the auspices of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The pair survived less than two years in Netanyahu’s bureau before they were unceremoniously ousted because of their poor relations with his wife, Sara Netanyahu. This is common knowledge in Israel’s political circles, but even today, Shaked and Bennett do not speak on the record about what happened. Due to Sara Netanyahu’s immense power and the intensity of her enmity toward them, Bennett and Shaked were forced to seek a new political home outside Likud. The Jewish Home party (in Hebrew, Habayit Hayehudi)—the updated incarnation of the venerable National Religious Party—underwent a reboot that deployed the fresh faces of the former techies in the vanguard, with the rabbis and extremists concealed behind them. In the most recent elections, in March 2015, Jewish Home got only 7 percent of the total votes. But its leaders (with Bennett as the party’s leader and Shaked holding its No. 3 spot) played their weak hand extremely well—during the tense negotiations to form a government, they threatened to bolt the coalition. Netanyahu folded and handed them two highly coveted ministries: Education for Bennett, Justice for Shaked. In the kind of dramatic twist that only Israeli politics can provide, Sara Netanyahu, who didn’t want Shaked as her husband’s employee, ended up with her nemesis as a senior minister and as a member of the exclusive security cabinet.

It’s worthwhile to pause at another station in Shaked’s biography, which helped her build her political base before she entered party politics. In 2010, she established, together with Bennett, a movement called My Israel, an online initiative that engaged in shaming against anyone it deemed insufficiently patriotic. Tens of thousands followed My Israel’s posts, and they were ready and willing to bombard with phone calls, emails, and Facebook posts anyone Shaked marked as a target: journalists, actors, businesses, and at least one judge. In one case, they demanded the firing of an actor who supported an artists’ boycott of settlements, forcing him to retract his support. “We did this in cases where we thought people had crossed the line. It was our way of fighting and raising awareness about these matters,” she said.

My Israel was a milepost in the deepening divisiveness of Israeli society’s discourse, and Shaked hasn’t changed her rhetoric even in her position as a government minister. She has set herself the goal of changing not only the national discourse but also the very marrow of the Israeli right. “The governments that were in power before Naftali Bennett and I went into politics, before the Jewish Home party gained strength, were right-wing governments that carried on with the policies of the left. They didn’t try to change the DNA of the various systems [the justice system, the media, academia]. I definitely set myself the goal of changing these systems from within, and I think I’ve succeeded in doing so. It could be that this is what scares people, because these elites maintained their position for many years and then, all of a sudden, here comes change,” she says.

As America convulses over the confirmation of one conservative to the Supreme Court, the Israeli justice minister has changed, within just one year, the makeup of the country’s highest court: Six out of its 15 justices retired on her watch (under Israeli law, justices are obliged to step down at the age of 70), presenting Shaked with the chance to appoint their successors. Initially, this was a matter of luck, and subsequently, it became a sophisticated series of moves that included some well-aimed arm-twisting. Shaked heads the Judicial Selection Committee, which appoints judges to all Israeli courts; its nine members include politicians, judges, and lawyers. She threatened to curtail the power of the judges on the committee and to delay the appointment of the designated supreme-court chief justice—an aggressive move that worked: The wearers of judicial robes gave in and accepted appointments she advocated, even if they’d originally opposed them. “I think the entire right wing, and certainly religious Zionism and the whole conservative camp, can no longer whine about being underrepresented [in the courts],” Shaked notes with satisfaction.

Mordechai Kremnitzer, a senior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, sharply criticizes these appointments. “She appointed justices she calls ‘conservative,’ but in essence, they’re all people who think like she does,” he tells me.

Kremnitzer stresses that the supreme court is the only effective oversight mechanism when it comes to legislation and the workings of the government, since the executive branch commands a Knesset majority under the Israeli parliamentary system. “One way to destroy democracy is to destroy the final bastion of checks and balances, and the most elegant way to do this is to pack the courts with judges who will say yes to everything the government wants. This won’t be 100 percent successful, because even the most conservative judges come into a system that has an ethos and precedents. But if all that remains of the checks and balances is the sparks of justice issuing from reactionary judges, then we’re in trouble,” he says.

From the justice minister’s standpoint, at stake is not only the question of who will sit on the supreme court but also how its judges are meant to rule. In August 2017, Shaked spoke at the annual conference of the Israeli Bar Association. She does not possess the rhetorical skills of Benjamin Netanyahu—she sounded more like an eager class valedictorian when she took the podium—but her words rocked the entire room. “Zionism should not continue, and I say here, it will not continue to bow down to the system of individual rights interpreted in a universal way,” she said, going on to delineate what she felt needed correction: “The courts’ rulings do not view preservation of the Jewish majority as a value that needs to be taken into consideration.” In other words, in the delicate balance between a Jewish state and a democratic one, she thought the courts had gone too far in the direction of democracy—and that that must be changed.

This is important background to the fate of the controversial nation-state law, which Shaked actively promoted. The law defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, one that must encourage Jewish settlement without ever mentioning the concept of equality as set forth in Israel’s declaration of independence. The law drew widespread public condemnation; even President Reuven Rivlin, whose authority is only ceremonial, intervened to block it, with no success. He labeled it “an expression of uncontrolled fear and not of sovereignty.” As he told me at the beginning of September, “Every citizen of the state of Israel, Jew and non-Jew, is an equal citizen. The individual must not only receive equality, but also feel that he or she is equal.”

For her part, Shaked asserts that “there is no contradiction between the fact that Israel has full personal equality of citizenship but extends national rights only to the Jewish people. Perhaps if the words Jewish and democratic had been included in the final version, it would have been easier to swallow.” After the law was passed, a radio interviewer asked Shaked if the supreme court could revoke it. She replied with a sharp warning: “It will be an earthquake.”

This was interpreted as a direct threat from the justice minister to the supreme court. “Of course, I didn’t mean it as a threat,” she tells me. “I was describing a given situation: The supreme court will not do that. If it had done something like that, it certainly would have led to a war between the authorities.”

Dorit Beinisch, a former supreme-court chief justice tells me: “Minister Shaked’s declaration goes beyond the normal tension between the branches of government. It is a threat against the court before it has issued its verdict, an act that constitutes a blow to judicial independence. There is a lack of understanding here of what a democracy is. These are demagogic expressions that belong to other forms of regime … The system is based on the separation of powers. The courts are entrusted with appropriate checks and balances and judicial review of the other two branches of government—the legislative and the executive—while the balance between the division of the branches’ roles is maintained. It is this balance that the justice minister seeks to subvert. The nation-state law is today pending before the supreme court, and it is prohibited for a politician to take her own stand before the court has ruled on the pending case.”

Even if Shaked’s earthquake message failed to penetrate, she and Bennett have, waiting in the wings, a draft bill to curtail the supreme court’s ability to revoke laws the Knesset has passed.

“Shaked says the Knesset is rational. That’s open to argument,” Kremnitzer says. “I think in recent years, the Knesset has been doing things that are not fully rational. We are in a process of legislation that harms free speech and equality, a kind of political persecution and a kind of regime that delegitimizes positions that are legitimate but oppositional in nature.”

Shaked, as is her wont, is unruffled by the criticism. “The proliferation of obituaries lamenting the death of democracy has become absurd,” she has said in the past, and now she expands on this theme, saying: “The Knesset has balances that will not allow it to pass legislation that would destroy democracy from within. If the Knesset were to pass a law rescinding the voting rights of women or red-haired people, or a bill that extended its term by five more years, this would signal the collapse of our democracy. In such a case, I don’t think that even the court could save us from ourselves.”

The argument, of course, concerns the face of the state of Israel, and it appears that Shaked will play a central role in shaping it. She has been very successful on the judicial front, but, until now, less so in the realm of affairs of state.

Bennett and Shaked are trying to advance a plan for the annexation of Area C, the part of the West Bank (about 60 percent) that is under Israeli control. The plan would require extending citizenship to the Palestinians who live there. “We can definitely take in 100,000 Palestinian citizens,” Shaked says. “These processes take time to ripen. At the moment, the annexation plan looks like science fiction, but I think that slowly, gradually, people will see what’s going on in the Middle East and realize that it really could happen.”

Shaked, too, sees clearly that the annexation plan could put Israel on a confrontational path, even with the current supportive American administration—and even more so if the administration changes. “Sadly, it’s impossible to ignore the processes taking place in the Democratic Party. You know, the party itself is becoming less and less what’s considered Zionist,” she says. When I ask her whether this is the result of processes occurring in Israel, she responds: “We’re also seeing a strengthening of the Palestinian narrative among liberal circles, not only in the United States, and we must deal with this, too. Clearly, the Democrats will return to power at some point—things always change there—and it’s obvious that we have to maintain good relations with them and explain what’s going on in Israel.”

And what about her personal future? Israeli politics is a stage packed with an abundance of parties, connections, and separations, and now it’s entering an election year. The strong rightward drift continually strengthens Shaked’s party, and Shaked herself. In this turbulent arena, one hears her name mentioned more and more frequently as a potential heir to the throne. She is cautious—it is customary for the right wing in Israel to back its leader at all costs—but she does not rule it out.

“Look, I don’t disqualify this idea. As a woman, moreover, I think this is a very important message,” she says. “But in the post-Netanyahu era, Naftali Bennett is best suited to be prime minister. This is not to say that after a long career in politics, as a member of Knesset and justice minister, it’s something I wouldn’t want in the distant future.”

And what if, even so, a political constellation arises that would enable her to bypass Bennett? “There’s no such thing as a political constellation; no one is given the premiership as a gift,” she says. “To be prime minister, you need to fight many entities, you need to be very determined. It’s not going to fall in your lap. And right now, in Israeli politics, Prime Minister Netanyahu is the person most determined to be prime minister.”

Of that, there are no doubters on either side of the political map.

(Source: The Atlantic)

Trump threw a match into Jerusalem with no plan to put out the fire

The killing of 52 Palestinians is the result of the US president’s folly in giving Netanyahu what he wanted 

The images coming out of the region today said it all. In one frame there is the Israeli president, Benjamin Netanyahu, looking like the cat who got the cream, sitting next to Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, at the opening of the new US embassy, which has just relocated to Jerusalem.

And in the second frame, there is Gaza, suffused in teargas smoke during protests in which 52 Palestinians were killed, and 1,200 wounded by Israeli fire. Perhaps reflecting on these images, the former US peace negotiator Martin Indyk bizarrely noted that the contrast was a “bittersweet moment”.

But this is not the usual duality of experience on the eve of the day that is both the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Israeli state and the concurrent Palestinian nakba – by which some 700,000 people were either forced from or fled their homes in the war that led to Israel’s creation. This is a violent escalation that was foretold, the result of a deliberate upturning of international conventions. It is the US presidency striking a match and throwing it into the tinderbox of Jerusalem, half of which is deemed by the international community to be occupied by Israel and intended as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Palestinians protest near the border of Israel and the Gaza Strip, left, while dignitaries including Sara Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump attend the opening ceremony of the new US embassy in Jerusalem. Photograph: AP

Amid widespread condemnation of both the US embassy move and Israel’s deadly, disproportionate response to unarmed protesters, rightwing agitators are already pushing their usual with-us-or-against-us binaries, suggesting such denunciations are by definition anti-Israel. Don’t fall for it. The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has issued a statement condemning Israel’s use of live ammunition in Gaza as showing “appalling indifference to human life”. Daniel Seidemann, founder of the Israeli NGO Terrestrial Jerusalem, had warned about the US embassy move that “there will be blood”, adding: “Utter hopelessness is the great destabiliser.” And Chemi Shalev, a senior columnist for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, notes the “current bedrock of US-Israeli relations: fundamentalists, messianics and avid fans of end times” – referring to Trump’s evangelical Christian supporters who cheered the US embassy move, based on an Armageddon prophesy that does not end well for Jewish people.

Netanyahu had long been asking the US to move its embassy and ditch the Iran nuclear deal. In the past week Trump has delivered both, decisions that have rocked an already volatile region. Yet these dangerous shifts are not the sign of a new US policy. Letting the grinding Israeli-Palestinian conflict drift on, even while Palestinians are suffering the everyday realities of occupation, would be bad enough, but no worse than the default international stance has been for some time.

But with the embassy move, Trump has deployed that far-rightist trick of disruption for the sake of it. There is no follow-up, no renewed talks in the pipeline, no international diplomacy, just the usual, multipurpose mumblings from Trump about sealing a good deal. This is no Middle East policy, unless you count as policy the practice of being a fire-starter and appearing to sanction overwhelming Israeli violence. And as we are seeing today, it is those living in the region who will suffer the punishing consequences of his folly.

(Source: The Guardian)

Gaza clashes: 52 Palestinians killed on deadliest day since 2014

At least 52 Palestinians have been killed and 2,400 wounded by Israeli troops, Palestinian officials say, on the deadliest day of violence since the 2014 Gaza war.

Palestinians have been protesting for weeks but deaths soared on the day the US opened its embassy in Jerusalem.

Palestinians see this as clear US backing for Israeli rule over the whole city, whose eastern part they claim.

But US President Donald Trump hailed the move in a video message.

He told the dedication ceremony that it had been a "long time coming", adding: "Israel is a sovereign nation with the right to determine its own capital but for many years we failed to acknowledge the obvious."

The US, he added, remained "committed to facilitating a lasting peace agreement".

What happened at the border?
There have been six weeks of protests at the Gaza border, dubbed the "Great March of Return" and led by Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas.

Hamas had always said it would step up the protests before Tuesday, when Palestinians hold their annual commemoration of what they call the Nakba or Catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands fled their homes or were displaced following the foundation of the Israeli state on 14 May 1948.

On Monday, the Israeli military said 40,000 Palestinians had taken part in "violent riots" at 13 locations along the Gaza Strip security fence.

Palestinians hurled stones and incendiary devices while the Israeli military used snipers, as black smoke poured from burning tyres.

The health ministry, run by Hamas, said children were among those killed.

The Israeli military said it had killed three people trying to plant explosives near the security fence in Rafah. Aircraft and tanks had also targeted military positions belonging to Hamas in the northern Gaza Strip, it said.

Israel says the protests are aimed at breaching the border and attacking Israeli communities nearby.

There were also violent clashes between Israeli police and protesters who raised Palestinian flags outside the new embassy. Several protesters were detained.

By no means over
Feras Kilani, BBC Arabic, at the protests in Gaza

Tuesday is expected to be a very big demonstration because it is a day known by the Palestinians as the "Catastrophe" that followed the creation of the state of Israel.

Palestinians will go to bury the dozens of people killed on Monday and then they will come again to demonstrate. You can imagine the situation with all this anger, thousands of Palestinians will come here and will try to cross the fence to return to what they see as their land - what they do not see as Israel but as Palestine.

It is expected to be bigger than Monday and more bloody.

What has the reaction been?
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas condemned what he called Israeli "massacres against our people", and declared three days of mourning.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said: "Every nation has the right to defend its borders. Hamas clearly says its intentions are to destroy Israel and sends thousands to break through the border for that end."

A number of Western nations including the UK called for restraint.

• EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said: "We expect all to act with utmost restraint to avoid further loss of life"
• Germany said Israel had the right to defend itself but should do so proportionately
• One of the strongest statements came from UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, who condemned the "shocking killing of dozens, injury of hundreds by Israeli live fire"

“Shocking killing of dozens, injury of hundreds by Israeli live fire in #Gaza must stop now. The right to life must be respected. Those responsible for outrageous human rights violations must be held to account. The int'l community needs to ensure justice for victims” – #Zeid. pic.twitter.com/hBb7825Sp8

— UN Human Rights (@UNHumanRights) May 14, 2018

What has the US opened and who attended?
A small interim embassy will start operating from Monday inside the existing US consulate building in Jerusalem. A larger site will be found later when the rest of the embassy moves from Tel Aviv.

The opening ceremony was brought forward to coincide with the state of Israel's 70th anniversary.

Mr Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner, who are both senior White House advisers, joined US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan for the ceremony.

After Ivanka Trump had unveiled the seal of the embassy, Mr Kushner said in his address: "When President Trump makes a promise he keeps it... We have shown the world that the US can be trusted. We stand with our friends and allies."

Mr Kushner also referred to Mr Trump's withdrawal from the "dangerous, flawed and one-sided Iran deal", drawing applause from the guests.

Mr Netanyahu said: "What a glorious day. Remember this moment. This is history. President Trump, by recognising history, you have made history. All of us are deeply grateful."

Mahmoud Abbas condemned the embassy as a "settlement in East Jerusalem", saying that the US was "no longer a mediator in the Middle East".

Arab League chief Ahmed Abul Gheit said it was "shameful to see countries participating with the US and Israel in celebrating the former's embassy move to occupied Jerusalem in a clear and grave violation of international law".

Why is the embassy move so controversial?
The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem is not recognised internationally and, according to the 1993 Israel-Palestinian peace accords, the final status of Jerusalem is meant to be discussed in the latter stages of peace talks.

Israel has occupied East Jerusalem since the 1967 Middle East war. It effectively annexed the sector, though this was not recognised by any countries until Mr Trump's declaration in December 2017.

Since 1967, Israel has built a dozen settlements, home to about 200,000 Jews, in East Jerusalem. These are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

Various countries once had embassies based in Jerusalem but many moved after Israel passed a law in 1980 formally making Jerusalem its capital.

(Source: BBC)

'This land is just dirt': A rooftop view of Jerusalem

For its Season of Culture, the ancient capital has thrown open its rooftops to encourage residents to see beyond their blinkered boundaries. But the reality is a city where the divides are growing deeper, writes Hannah Ellis-Petersen in the Guardian. Read on:

The rooftops of Jerusalem can be deceptive. From up here, the domes and towers of the hundreds of churches, mosques and synagogues glimmer on the skyline in what seems like peaceful coexistence; the neighbourhoods below come together in a unified sprawl.

But down below, it is a city defined by barriers. They may not be as tangible as the towering security wall that divides Israel and the Palestinian territories a few miles east, but they are just as divisive and inviolable. Living side by side in Jerusalem are communities who exist with no interaction with one another – kept apart by fear, nationalism and religion.

To some extent it has long been thus, and not just between Israelis and Palestinians. There is also segregation along secular and ultra-orthodox lines, and the residual hierarchy between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews that emerged when Israel was created in 1948. Of the 900,000 residents of Jerusalem, 37% are Palestinians, 32% are ultra-Orthodox Jews and the rest are made up of secular and religious nationalist Jews and the tiny Christian population.

A view of East Jerusalem and the separation barrier, taken from the tower of the Augusta Victoria hospital church

While Israelis typically live in the west and Palestinians in the east of Jerusalem, mixed neighbourhoods do exist. In the winding alleys of the old city and the streets of downtown, the diverse inhabitants peacefully cross paths every day. Yet as rightwing nationalism seeps into the culture, and technology threatens the traditional ultra-orthodox way of life, the fractures of Jerusalem are growing deeper. Today communities live, not entwined, but in isolated parallel.

“Fear has become a fact of life here,” says Pnina Pfeufer. “There are many places in Jerusalem I know nothing about, and I’ve lived here my entire life. And I think that’s true of every person who lives here.”

Pfeufer is looking out over the city from atop the Bikur Cholim hospital, where she is a participant in a new city-wide project to open up rooftops, from west to east Jerusalem, that are usually private or inaccessible to the public. Some are art installations; others are the homes of interesting figures, both Israeli and Palestinian. Initiated by Mekudeshet, the Jerusalem Season of Culture, the project aims to encourage people to look beyond their blinkered boundaries and see their city afresh.

Orthodox Jews pass Israeli Defence Forces soldiers in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City

Yet nothing in Jerusalem is apolitical. The foundation that runs Mekudeshet is Israeli, opening Palestinians who take part to accusations of normalising the occupation. What’s more, the only rooftops of Palestinians that were made accessible are in the old city; there are none in east Jerusalem.

“In the mind of many Israelis, there is a black hole called East Jerusalem,” says Mekudeshet’s executive director, Naomi Bloch Fortis. “Nobody knows where it is, what it means, where it starts and ends, what its status is. In the national consciousness, East Jerusalem just means fear. We are on a journey to collaborate with Palestinians, to get to know East Jerusalem and remove that fear. But it is a long journey and very delicate, and to use a rooftop in the heart of East Jerusalem, well, we cannot.”

The project traces a line across a divided city via its rooftops. And the stories of the volunteers who have opened their homes to strangers, regardless of ethnicity or creed, speak to a multi-layered Jerusalem, one rarely seen in a conflict-obsessed news cycle: a colourful, fractious and potent city.

We visited six.

The view from Koko Deri’s roof in Musrara in West Jerusalem

The Israeli Black Panther: ‘I smell the scent of destruction’
Koko Deri’s rooftop is a cornucopia. Piles of chairs, teapots, jugs, masks, stools and carpets obscure every surface. On one wall is a vast oil painting of Napoleon and Josephine, adorned with diamante gems and stickers. “I added in the stuff the artist forgot,” Deri says with a wink.

It is a monument to a lifetime of collecting, and a reflection of the colourfully camp personality of a man in his 60s who has lived in the same house his entire life (“not counting my three times when I lived in jail”). Yet in the 1950s and 60s, when he was growing up here, the building was derelict and Deri’s family had no possessions at all: “Not even underwear.”

His parents were among the millions of Moroccan Sephardic Jews who moved to Israel in 1949 for the promise of an abundant life; instead, they found themselves ghettoised. “The European Ashkenazi Jews lived in the comfortable apartments and decided how the country would be run, and they treated us Arab Jews as suspicious, as the other, almost like slaves,” he says. “We lived in this jungle, the 60% of us, and then there were the 40%, the European Ashkenazi Jews that lived in beautiful apartments, who went to good schools, who lived a totally different life, who were just a mile away. That was the segregated reality of Jerusalem – and it was there right from the beginning of this new society.”

Koko Deri on his rooftop in Musrara

This rooftop once looked out over the barbed wire fence of the green line and the Jordanian sniper watchtowers. After the six-day war in 1967, the green line fence came down – and the view of Jerusalem changed radically. Instead of barbed wire and sniper towers, Deri could see for the first time into life in East Jerusalem, and finally crossed paths with Palestinians, “who we realised were not the monsters we had been told”.

It was here that Deri and 10 others formed the Israeli Black Panther movement in 1971, which fought against the prejudice against Sephardic Jews, most of whom had emigrated from Arab countries. It was inspired by its US namesake: “We were the black Jews, you see.”

Their street protests in the early 1970s, which attracted crowds of over 10,000, would often end in clashes with the police, but “it was not only violent”, says Deri. “One of our first actions was in the Ashkenazi neighbourhoods, where they would all get their milk delivered at 3am on their doorstep. We would go round and leave notes on the milk bottles, saying: ‘The milk that you are giving to your cat could feed 10 people in Musrara.’”

Indeed, the Israeli Black Panthers initially felt more closely aligned to the Palestinian cause in their fight for equal rights. Deri went to Paris to meet with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and was invited to the US to meet Malcolm X and Angela Davis. After the Yom Kippur war in 1973, the movement fractured, but the battle lines are still present.

A shot taken from Deri’s rooftop

“Back then, we were fighting about human rights, not religion,” says Deri. “Now, when I look out, I smell the scent of destruction in Jerusalem. This society as we know it in Jerusalem and in Israel has about 20 years left and after that it will implode. And that’s not because of outside enemies, it will be what we have done to ourselves with religion. Even in biblical times, that’s what happened; the settlers are the modern-day zealots. It’s already starting – you can feel it in Jerusalem right now. Today it is a city filled with hate.”

The view from Abu Yehia’s roof in the Old City

The repentant jihadist: ‘The angels sit with me on this roof’
As a young Palestinian man, Abu Yehia was “filled with anger and hate”, he says, as he pours lemonade afloat with fresh mint leaves and the call to prayer rings out across the rooftops.

His Muslim Quarter home, which his family has owned for hundreds of years and once served as a bathhouse, is so close to al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City that you’re almost perching on top of the black dome. Like Deri, he too served time in jail for violence and protest – but on the other side of the conflict.

“Thirty years ago, I was part of the Islamic jihad,” he says. He would roam the streets of Jerusalem, blinded by loathing for his Jewish neighbours. “They were my biggest enemy. But I ended up in jail for five years – and there I saw everything. I realised my life was being wasted. My wife divorced me, I lost my house, I didn’t even have my own clothes, I’d lost everything. And I just thought, ‘What was it all for? Why did God send me here, in this cell detained with 10 other people?’ It made me realise the path I had chosen was wrong, that I needed to find another path.”

Abu Yehia: ‘I ended up in jail for five years – and there I realised my life was being wasted’

His rooftop sits at a symbolic crossroads: it overlooks not only al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock but is also situated in a holy triangle between the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (one of the holiest sites for Christians) and the western wall (one of the holiest sites for Jews). Here, in the shadow of three of Jerusalem’s most religiously significant monuments, Abu Yehia follows his new path: he invites strangers of all religions to come and share dinner.

“From eating together comes conversation and understanding,” he says. “All three religions are here on this roof. It is a holy place. Sometimes I sit here and I pray to God and I feel that the angels come and sit here with me. Up here it does not matter if you are a Muslim or a Jew: we are all just human beings. Real peace will only come when we remember this. And I’m talking about real peace – not the peace that politicians speak about – and that’s why I open up my house, to bring people together with food.”

He gestures to a vast platter of yellow rice, then to the heavens. “My real place is up there, and there is only one question when you go: what did you do? Were you a terrorist or did you create peace?”

Pnina Pfeufer on the roof of Bikur Cholim hospital

The Orthodox Jewish feminist: ‘The Haredim, they build walls’
All Jerusalemites stay within their communities to some extent, but none more so than the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population: the Haredim. Standing on top of the rooftop of Haredi hospital Bikur Cholim, Pnina Pfeufer looks down at the people bustling below, riding bicycles or pushing prams, recognisable by their distinctive clothing: men in long black coats and wide-brimmed black hats, their faces framed by two ringlets of hair; the women dressed modestly in long skirts, most often wearing headscarves or wigs, with their real hair shaved off.

Pfeufer has lived in this city all her life, but until three years ago she had never set foot in East Jerusalem. She is not unusual. “The Haredim have less and less need to go out of our own neighbourhoods,” she says, “and that creates more separation.”

In Jerusalem, they have practically built their own city within a city. In order to cloister their way of life from the corruption of secular modern society, they have their own schools, shopping malls, sports clubs, parks and hospitals. Smartphones are outlawed in all schools and most homes, as is the internet. (There are sanctions if you use a smartphone without a rabbi’s permission, or if a student is found to have a computer at home.)

Ultra-Orthodox Jews in West Jerusalem

Women in particular face an endless list of restrictions. In 2016, the Israeli Supreme Court had to ban signs instructing women not to use the main street in an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood, and ultra-Orthodox leaders lobbied to omit women’s faces from adverts on buses. The Haredim also happen to be the fastest-growing population in Jerusalem.

Pfeufer, meanwhile, is the rarest of gems: a feminist who was raised ultra-Orthodox with aspirations for political office. “The things about being ultra-Orthodox is that you’re meant to fit into a box very neatly,” says Pfeufer. “The Haredi community was created 200 years ago in Europe as a counterculture to the reform movement and emancipation, and it still is a counterculture today. The one thing you can say about all Haredi groups is that they build walls.”

Yet, as the world becomes ever more reliant on technology, the Haredim’s entire way of life is under threat. A lucrative market has emerged in Jerusalem creating tech that caters for the ultra-Orthodox, including smartphones with filtering software. “But rejecting technology isn’t working,” says Pfeufer. “The younger generation are accessing the internet, they are using technology. And it’s becoming impossible to live and function in the world. There are Haredi people who one day opened the internet and suddenly, boom, the entire world came at them in their early 20s. That can be very unsettling. For some people, it’s a trigger for leaving the community entirely.”

A Haredi woman in West Jerusalem

Pfeufer is a testament to the fact that not all Haredim live within these confines. More ultra-Orthodox men and women are taking degrees and entering the general workplace. Yet a Haredi woman has yet to take political office, which makes Pfeufer’s ambitions to be elected to the Jerusalem city council highly provocative. Moreover, her politics lean to the left, directly opposing the rightwing nationalist shift in the Haredi community as a whole.

She also began a Haredi feminist group, which has hundreds of members, and fights for women’s access to education and media debate. But she feels the segregation of the city acutely. “More hardcore traditional Haredim see the fact that I’m a woman as more of a threat, and working people who tend to be more rightwing nationalist, more Zionist, see my opinions as more of a threat.” She offers a sad smile.

A view from the roof of the Clal Centre on Jaffa Road

The artist: ‘In the end, this land is just dirt’
The Clal Centre encapsulates the strange contradictions of Jerusalem. Inside, a shop selling Torah scrolls neighbours a lingerie emporium. It is home to Jerusalem’s only sex shop, yet the top floors of the building are occupied and owned by an Evangelical Christian group who sing songs of worship non-stop for days. It’s in a mixed cosmopolitan area, but the rooftop – where artist Sharon Glazberg is hosting a live installation – overlooks ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods, including the Prima Palace hotel favoured by the ultra-Orthodox for going on escorted dates.

Glazberg chose to use its strange neutrality as a place to bring the most contested and holy soil in the city: a vast pile of red earth, dug up from beneath al-Aqsa mosque, the place the Jews call Temple Mount and the Muslims call al-Haram al-Sharif, which contains what she calls “the ashes” of the Jewish temple destroyed in AD70. Glazberg has animated the soil: it moves up and down as if it is alive and breathing.

Sharon Glazberg on the roof of the Clal Centre

“When you isolate things, take them out of their context, you can look at them a little bit differently,” she says of the soil, which she obtained from an archeological project. “And a new perspective on Temple Mount is definitely hard to find in Jerusalem.”

Indeed, it’s a provocative idea in a city that just three months ago was rocked with violent clashes over the holy site, fuelled by the stabbings of Israeli police and the installation of metal detectors at its gates. A couple look at the installation with disbelief and amusement. “This is just the sort of thing that will spark the third intifada,” says one with a wry laugh.

Yet she feels her audience’s harmonious reaction says as much as the violence.

Glazberg’s installation on the Clal Centre rooftop, which features 2.5 cubic metres of earth dug up from under Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif

A footprint in the earth

Seven people aerate the mount’s dirt for seven days

“It’s really beautiful how people come here and treat it completely differently. Yesterday, a Haredi came here and prayed for an hour with closed eyes, so intensely, and when he left he just took a bit of the ashes. And a Christian woman asked if I could leave some of the earth here, because she wanted to come here again. People have left me songs they wrote about Jerusalem, really beautiful things. Someone even played the flute.”

Glazberg laments that few Palestinians have been able to see the work, typical of a liberal Israeli echo chamber. “There has not been enough of a Muslim audience, to my disappointment,” she says. “It is definitely the weak point of the work, of so many things that happen in this city.”

Hyperventilation – an installation by Ayela Landow on the roof of the Clal Centre

Nor has the reaction been uniformly positive. An ultra-Orthodox friend raised objections. “I asked him: ‘We live in a wireless age, why are you placing so much importance on this physical earth?’ And his reply was: ‘Yes, but where does the router sit?’ You see, all the people that fight over this place, they really believe that this earth is the router and from there you get all the best reception for the spirit of God.” She laughs as a wind whips up a layer of the fine red soil into the air.

“To me that’s the problem. Everyone in Jerusalem puts so much on this land, on this soil, which in the end is just dirt.”

Palestinian boys practice parkour on the Galizia roofs, opposite the Dome of the Rock, in the Old City

The parkour gang: ‘The police don’t bother us on the rooftops’
As audiences gather to view an earnest installation involving flags on a rooftop in the Old City, something much more interesting is happening nearby. A group of young Palestinian boys do backflips, jump across the uneven surfaces and vault from dome to dome. On the streets, they get stopped constantly by Israeli police. Up here, the city is theirs.

‘I feel so much more free on the rooftops. The IDF and the police also bother us a lot less’

“We are not as free in a playground as we are on the rooftops, because here people don’t see us. A playground would feel like a trap,” says Mahmoud Shaladi, 13.

Majd Abuattduan, also 13, butts in. “I feel so much more free on the rooftops. The IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] and the police also bother us a lot less on the roofs, though they do still come round here to tell us to stop. Most of us who are doing this sport are trying to keep it healthy and clean – no drugs, no alcohol, no smoking.”

The boys, between the ages of 13 and 17, first saw parkour videos on Facebook, and were given clothes and some tools for practising by a local NGO. Now they come here almost every day.

‘We’re not afraid of the police or the army because everything we do round here, someone will try and stop us anyway’

Even here there are restrictions. “A few of us were arrested because the police told us it was an illegal sport for us to do on the roofs,” says Ahamad Shalodi, 14. “And Israeli families round the neighbourhood are also giving us a hard time. We used to have mattresses around here to practice on, which we used to hide, but they got burned. But we’re not afraid of the police or the army because everything we do round here, someone will try and stop us anyway.”

They look with bemusement at the art that has temporarily taken up residence in the rooftop domain they have long claimed as their own. Soon it will be gone, and they can reclaim their training ground. “I don’t know what those flags are,” says Hamzah Salem, 17, casting only a glance over at the work. “We’ve been seeing it for a few days, but no one has explained it to us. It’s not for us and we’ve been told to move.”

The view from the roof of the Citadel youth hostel in the Old City

The hostel owner: ‘The inequality is getting worse’
October 2015 was the last time Jerusalem was really convulsed by violence. But for Chris Alami, a Palestinian who has lived in the Old City all his life and runs one its most popular youth hostels, it is not religious violence that splinters Jerusalem but economic inequality. The Israeli government is pushing to make its mark on every corner of the city, he says – but it only invests in neighbourhoods without Palestinians.

“The face of the city is changing, architecturally and in terms of infrastructure, but not to benefit us,” says Alami from his hostel roof, where as part of Mekudeshet he is inviting people to sleep overnight for free. “Everyone pays the same exact taxes, but you go to Damascus Gate [in the Muslim Quarter] and you see fewer street cleaners, fewer garbage bins and fewer street lights, but more soldiers.”

He grows angrier. “And it’s even worse in Palestinian neighbourhoods like Silwan. You don’t see paved streets, and there will be just one big garbage bin overflowing with rubbish. That tells the Palestinians who live here: ‘You are not welcome here, we don’t want your streets to be clean, for you to be comfortable.’ And that inequality is getting worse.”

Hannah Ellis-Petersen takes in the view from the roof of the Citadel youth hostel

While the current consensus is that another intifada is unlikely anytime soon, Alami says the tensions of the city are palpable. “I’ve been fined so many times, been prosecuted for things that were so unreasonable, even jailed for one month,” he says. The poverty and police harassment has led him to believe Jerusalem is “a slingshot that is getting stretched and stretched and stretched, and one day soon it’s going to be launched”.

Alami’s family have lived in Jerusalem for more than 700 years, since the times of the Crusades. From his roof, which offers one of the best views over the Old City, he points to the churches, mosques and synagogues that are monuments to regimes past and empires fallen. “Look, nobody here lasted,” Alami says. “Not the Romans, not the Turks, not the Christians, not the Muslims, not the Jews, not the British. No matter how powerful they were, no matter how great they were, no one has lasted in Jerusalem. In the end, Jerusalem has always belonged to Jerusalemites only.”

A final shot from the roof of the Citadel youth hostel

Note: All photographs by David Levene

'Haifa is essentially segregated': Cracks appear in Israel's capital of coexistence

For decades, Haifa has been Israel’s model of what a ‘mixed’ Jewish-Arab city could be. But as the country’s 70th anniversary nears, the strain is showing, writes Ian Black in the Guardian. Read on: 

Ben-Gurion Boulevard climbs from the bustling port on Haifa’s Mediterranean shore up Mount Carmel towards the famous Bahai shrine, its gleaming golden dome surrounded by lush terraced gardens. On the south side of the palm-lined road, on a spring lunchtime, the Fattoush restaurant is packed with customers chatting noisily in Arabic and Hebrew over Levantine and fusion salads, cardamom-flavoured coffee and exquisite Palestinian knafeh desserts.

Fashionable eateries like Fattoush are one reason why Israel’s third largest city and its biggest “mixed” one, as officially classified, is held up as a model of Jewish-Arab coexistence. Not everyone agrees with the concept, of course, and the “c” word is often qualified, placed in inverted commas, or simply dismissed as propaganda. Official figures say Arabs make up 14% of Haifa’s 280,000-strong population; unofficial estimates are closer to 18%, swelled by students and commuters from nearby Galilee. Public spaces, at least, are open to all. And the ever-present Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, usually, softer-edged than elsewhere in the country.

“I prefer to talk of shared existence rather than coexistence,” says Yona Yahav, the veteran Jewish mayor. “Haifa’s Jews and Arabs are the same Jews and Arabs as in Jerusalem, but here things work in a stable way.”

Yahav’s office is lined with portraits of his predecessors, the first two wearing Ottoman tarbooshes. The street outside bears the name of one of them, Hassan Bey Shukri. Yahav flourishes a copy of a Hebrew newspaper notice mourning Shukri’s death in 1940. “I can promise you that this won’t happen if I die,” he jokes. He is also keen to point out that his secretary, Reem, is an Arab. “I can’t tell you that all Jews love Arabs and vice versa, but people do feel safe here.”

No one questions that the city is special. “If all of Israel and Palestine could be like Haifa, I’d be happy,” muses Amjad Iraqi, a twentysomething Palestinian intellectual. “It’s not lovey-dovey. Life is essentially segregated but every community accepts that you can do your own thing. It’s not perfect, but it’s still better than everywhere else.” Asaf Ron, who runs the municipally funded Beit Ha’Gefen cultural centre, argues that it is all about promoting empathy. “Many Israeli Jews don’t know any Arabs. We need to break down stereotyping and fear.”

Wadi Nisnas, a predominantly Arab neighbourhood. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Ayman Odeh, Israel’s most prominent Arab politician, lives in the Kababir neighbourhood, with its handsome mosque and stunning views over an azure sea. He also believes his home town is different. He served on the city council before being elected to the Knesset in 2015. “The situation between Jews and Arabs has always been better in Haifa than anywhere else in Israel, but it is far from equal,” he insists. “The mood is good and there is a sense of sanity. But it is not an island.”

The local HQ of Odeh’s party, the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, is on Ben-Gurion Boulevard opposite Fattoush. It is ironic that the street is named after David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish state’s founder and first prime minister. But there are many similar examples: the Istiqlal (“Independence”) mosque is at the junction of Shavei Zion (“Returnees to Zion”) and Kibbutz Galuyot (“the Ingathering of the Exiles”) streets. Zionism Avenue snakes across the Carmel to the downtown Arab quarter of Wadi Nisnas.

Identity issues will be in the air in Haifa this month and next when Israel celebrates the 70th anniversary of its independence and Palestinians mourn the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, that the 1948 war represented for them. “Arabs don’t take part in Independence Day celebrations,” says Yahav. “They don’t feel it is their holiday.” Johnny Mansour, a historian from the Greek Catholic community, will be joining a “march of return” to some of the hundreds of Arab villages destroyed after the war – the same symbolic commemoration that has triggered the recent deadly upsurge of violence on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Fattoush, proudly flaunting its Palestinian nationalist credentials, will be closed to mark the occasion.

1948: A fateful year
Haifa once represented modernity and progress but feels less dynamic these days. In the twilight years of the Ottoman empire it was the terminus for a branch line of the Damascus-Hejaz railway. Allenby Street is named for the British general who freed the town in 1918, soon after the Balfour declaration backed the establishment of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. The port opened in 1933, followed by an oil pipeline starting in Iraq. At that time, explains historian Motti Golani, half the Jewish population spoke Arabic. During the second world war, when Italian aircraft bombed the city, Jews and Arabs huddled together in basements.

By 1948, the population was 70,000 Jews and 65,000 Arabs. But war changed that. In April, as fighting raged and the British prepared to leave, all but 3,000 Arabs were expelled or fled to Lebanon or the West Bank. The history of that fateful year remains bitterly contested: the Jewish mayor – unaware of military planning – urged Arab leaders to stay but they felt unable to comply with the terms for a truce. Newly arrived Jewish immigrants moved into abandoned homes in Wadi Salib. Many houses, defined as “absentee property”, are now in a state of advanced decline. The city’s flea market is held in the shadow of a crumbling Turkish bathhouse, Hammam al-Pasha. Impressive new glass and steel towers, housing the city’s courts, loom over the ruins.

Arab refugees from Haifa disembarking at Port Said, Egypt in 1948. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

Haifa occupies an important place in Palestinian collective memory thanks to local luminaries such as Emile Habibi and Toufik Toubi. Habibi wrote the best-known novel by a Palestinian in Israel: The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist. Etched on his grave are the words: “I remain in Haifa.” Acre-born Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated by the Mossad, captured the essence of the conflict in his novella Return to Haifa, in which a visiting Palestinian refugee encounters an Israeli woman who survived Auschwitz. Palmer Gate, the entrance to the port, is where Holocaust survivors came ashore and terrified Palestinians fled by boat to Acre or Beirut, mostly never to return.

‘Coexistence is not equality’
Emile’s shawarma restaurant – Haifa’s legendary best – is always crowded. Abu Shaker, near the port, serves superb hummus. Both are no-frills Arab-run establishments with large Hebrew signs outside and a majority of Jewish customers. But the city’s reputation for inter-communal harmony can be illustrated by even more impressive – if non-culinary – achievements: 32% of the doctors at the Rambam hospital are Arabs. Arabic is heard in Haifa’s shops and on its streets and buses in a way that it rarely is in West Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. The offices and clinics of Arab lawyers and dentists line the streets of overwhelmingly Jewish and upmarket residential areas. In other “mixed” Israeli cities like Jaffa, Ramle and Lod, Arabs are poorer and less socially mobile.

Hadar HaCarmel, up the hill from Wadi Salib, is Haifa’s most diverse neighbourhood. In its western quarter, 60% of the population is Arab. On Masada Street, a hipster cafe culture has blurred ethnic differences that are normally easy to spot. “Coexistence!” shrugs Arik, a Jewish antiques dealer. “In Haifa there’s no choice.” Yossi, who runs a nearby record shop, lives in Kababir; Walid, an Arab architect, in the largely Jewish area of Merkaz HaCarmel.

Haifa’s tolerance is tested at regular intervals. In October 2000, at the start of the second intifada, 13 Arab citizens were shot dead by police while demonstrating in solidarity with their kinfolk in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Yahav’s predecessor ensured the city remained calm. It was harder three years later when a woman suicide bomber from Jenin blew herself up and killed 21 others in Maxim’s restaurant – jointly owned by Jews and Arabs. In the Lebanon war of 2006, a missile fired by Hezbollah killed two elderly Arabs. Successive Israeli wars against Hamas in Gaza – in 2008-9, 2012 and again in 2014 – saw anger flare. “In Haifa, Arabs and Jews live alongside each other, but when there is tension they move apart,” argues Amjad Shbita of Sikkuy, the Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality. “Haifa’s coexistence is the best in Israel, but it can still be easily damaged.”

Palestinians in Haifa and across Israel have grown closer to relatives and friends beyond the pre-1967 “green line” border with the West Bank, but their lives are very different and they have their own issues close to home. In 2013, protests erupted over a government plan to demolish the homes of“unrecognised” Bedouin communities in the Negev and build a Jewish town. Two years ago, after an unusually hot autumn, fires consumed large areas of the Carmel, triggering accusations by rightwing Jewish politicians of an “arson intifada” – though no one was ever charged.

A Palestinian refugee stands next to graffiti depicting assassinated Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. Photograph: Nasser Nasser/AP

Haifa-based NGOs have their work cut out tackling discrimination in social services and budget allocations. The worst poverty is in Halissa, a mainly Arab neighbourhood where violence is blamed on rivalry between Bedouin clans and relocated collaborators from the West Bank. “The Israeli idea of coexistence is about a majority and a minority – the strong and the weak,” observes Tom Mehager of Adalah (Justice), which is devoted to securing the rights of Israel’s Arab citizens – and has vocally condemned the army’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza. “Coexistence is not equality. Speaking the same language and eating hummus together doesn’t mean Jews and Arabs are equal.” Jafar Farah, who runs the Mossawa (Equality) centre, compares the relationship between the two peoples to one between “a rider and a horse”. And that, he insists, “is how Yona Yahav deals with the Arab community in Haifa.”

‘In Haifa it’s not hate, but not love either’
Education provides important insights. In Haifa, as elsewhere, Jewish and Arab children mostly attend separate schools. Many Arab children (the majority are Christians), study in fee-paying church schools, and a few dozen in Jewish ones. There are no Jews in Arab public schools, where standards are poor. The curricula are different too. “People want to stay within their own communities to speak in their native languages, have days off on their own holidays, and learn about their own history, culture and religion,” says Asaf Ron. “Assimilation through attending the other community’s schools is a free choice that almost no one chooses.”

 The whole country is based one separation in a very profound way
Merav Ben-Nun, Yad beyad

The Yad beyad (“Hand in Hand”) private network of bilingual schools complains about long waiting lists and a struggle to secure municipal support. In its kindergarten in Hadar, Arab and Jewish six-year-olds sing songs and are captivated by nursery rhymes that interchange Hebrew and Arabic – a heartwarming but highly unusual sight. “The whole country is based on separation in a very profound way,” says Merav Ben-Nun, its community organiser.

Higher education is a different story. Haifa University is 40% Arab, and the Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, 23%, though Arab graduates are unlikely to find jobs in security-related industries. Arab students are younger than Jewish ones, who mostly spend up to three years from the age of 18 doing the compulsory military service from which the vast majority of Arabs are exempt. “Arab and Jewish students sit in the same classes but barely speak to each other,” notes Golani. National holidays – Holocaust Day, Memorial Day and Independence Day – feel especially awkward on campus.

Independence Day is celebrated in Haifa with concerts, folk-dancing and firework displays, but the highly polished jewel in the crown of the city’s coexistence narrative is the annual “Festival of Festivals”, held in December to mark Hanukah, Christmas and the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. Tens of thousands of Jewish visitors throng the narrow streets of Wadi Nisnas, marvelling at the feeling that they have gone abroad for the weekend. Yahav is especially keen to promote the month-long event.

Older Palestinians tend to be relaxed about this, but younger activists can be contemptuous about condescension or racism towards “colourful” natives. Many are keen to assert their growing self-confidence in the face of what they condemn as Israeli “apartheid and settler colonialism” – in the words of a strategy paper that was drawn up in the cafe Fattoush last December.

The closure of Haifa’s Arab theatre, al-Midan (“The Square”), is cited as an example: state funding was withdrawn after it staged a play about a Palestinian security prisoner. The defiant response was to create an autonomous crowdfunded alternative – al-Khashabi (“The Stage”). Its Arabic-language performances are translated into English, but conspicuously not into Hebrew. “Independent Palestinian institutions do not believe in coexistence,” explains Al-Khashabi’s director, Bashar Murkus. “We believe in dialogue from a position of strength and independence.” His colleague Khoulood Tannous flatly refuses even to use the “c” word. “No one is shelling us here,” she adds. “It’s no Gaza, nor the West Bank. It’s mind games.”

The annual ‘Festival of Festivals’ marks Hanukah, Christmas and
Eid al-Adha. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Politician Ayman Odeh’s disapproving view is that influence should matter more than identity to Israel’s Palestinian minority, in Haifa and beyond, and that joint struggle is the key to a more equal future. “Arabs are developing autonomy at the expense of Arab-Jewish cooperation,” warns Sikkuy’s Shbita. Neither side harbours illusions about the other. “In Haifa it’s not hate, but there’s not too much love either,” is the stark conclusion of Omer Shaffer, a Jewish Technion postgraduate who was both moved and surprised when an Arab colleague told him to “take care” when he went off to do a stint of reserve army duty at a checkpoint in the West Bank. “It’s pretty indifferent. We’ve found a way to ignore each other without killing each other.”