Tears come easily. Today I watched and listened to a hundred Jewish Israelis outside the U.S. embassy affirm that “grief has no borders,” as they collectively mourned those murdered in Gaza. Some people, like Khalil Abu Yahia were known and loved by the Jewish solidarity activists. And from the breaking in their voices as they spoke, I knew that the others who they didn’t know, who apartheid walls, checkpoints, and a prison ghetto kept them from knowing, were loved too.
Grief knows no borders and ceasefire banners at vigil in Jerusalem. Photo Credit: ISM
Khalil had the vision to see beyond the current colonial realities. As Khalil went from place to place in Gaza with his family, trying to find somewhere safe, experiencing explosion after explosion, missile attack after missile attack, he did not despair. With roofs collapsing around him, he wrote, “I am sure that the hearts of my beloved friends will always be a shelter that can never be destroyed.”
In Jerusalem I saw Israeli activists turn themselves into shelter for Khalil and other Palestinians. Everybody held a name and picture of somebody from Gaza who was killed. These pictures and with them, white roses, were placed at the United States embassy. Closing out the memorial, a speaker said: “May the memory of the righteous be a blessing.”
Out front of the US Embassy in Jerusalem, people place down pictures and names of people killed in Gaza, together with white roses. Photo Credit: ISM
I walked from the embassy to the Lion’s Gate of the Old City. I was seeking to return a prayer rug I found last Friday after Israeli police and military beat and dispersed people assembling to pray. I couldn’t find the prayer rug’s person. What I did find was occupation police on horses charging into people praying. Many people ran to not be trampled. But some people, already on their knees, stayed on their knees. I remember one of these men especially. I couldn’t tell if he was intently focused on finishing his prayers or bracing for his prayerful body to be crushed, or both, but the horses stopped just short. Occupation police not on horses, swept in to continue pushing and beating the worshippers.
To be in Palestine at this moment necessitates consciousness of incalculable inhumanity and atrocity. The worshippers outside the gates to Al Aqsa and the Israeli activists who refuse complicity with their government, have something in common. Their courage, strength, will, commitment, perseverance, and vision is, and always will be, stronger than that of the oppressors.
Sophie Scholl of the White Rose Society, before being executed by the Nazi government that she was taught to obey but then learned to resist no matter the consequences, tells whoever will listen, “Stand up for what you believe in even if you are standing alone.” Rachel Corrie, the I.S.M. activist murdered by Israel for refusing to step aside and allow a home demolition, is similarly remembered to have said, “Let me stand alone.”
I am grateful in this moment for not having to stand alone for what I believe in and seeing more white roses.
Children sit outside of Al Aqsa Mosque after being denied entry. Photo Credit: ISM
Israeli soldiers and police once again blocked the majority of worshippers from entering Al Aqsa Mosque on Friday, December 15th. Among those excluded were many young children who attempted to enter but were prevented by Israeli soldiers and police. The soldiers and police also pushed and beat many people away from the gates of Al Aqsa, down Via Dolorosa, out Lion’s Gate, and beyond, including shoving some women. At least one journalist was severely beaten as well and required medical attention.
An Israeli soldier violently assaults a Palestinian women attempting to attend the Mosque for prayer. Still from Video Credit: Silwanic.net
Israel has laid siege on Al Aqsa Mosque since October 7th. In multiple locations throughout Al Quds (the Arabic name for the city of Jerusalem meaning “the holy”), groups of people once again got as close as they were able to the Al Aqsa Mosque, laid down their prayer mats and prayed.
Palestinians pray surrounded by soldiers blocking their entrance to Al Aqsa. Photo Credit: ISM
At the same time that police and soldiers are denying worshippers entry to Al Aqsa Mosque for Friday prayers, they are desecrating other Mosques, such as the Mosques in Jenin where soldiers have spray painted Mosques, threw trash in them, and sang songs over the loudspeaker used to broadcast the call to prayer.
Graffiti on Mosque in Jenin. Photo Credit: ISM
Attacks on places of worship are against the rules of war, but thus far Israeli army and police have targeted mosques and churches in Gaza and the West Bank and done so without repercussions from international political bodies such as the International Criminal Court or United Nations.
Jerusalem was originally split in two in 1948, the year of The Nakba, when Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from much of their ancestral land and the State of Israel was created, stealing pieces of the city for the settlement of newly arriving Jewish people. That original land grab has since grown through an illegal annexation and ongoing occupation of east Jerusalem. The Old City, the location of numerous holy sites relevant to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, is surrounded by an Ottoman aged wall that is often put to its use in constraining entry into the Old City by the Israeli Army and police. Al-Aqsa stands tenuously on the inside of the wall, while many of its worshipers live on the other side. The sentiment is that extremist, right wing, Jewish Israelis, and their empire, want to demolish the mosque and build a temple in its place.
Map of Old City of Jerusalem, from Jerusalem Story
As we walked down the warmly lit Via Dolorosa on December 8th, we buzzed with anticipation and shared stories of miracles in our own lives, sprinkled with small Arabic lessons; katir, a lot, sa’a ki, yummy, ektalal, occupation. Tears streamed down my face as I touched the ancient stones and walked along the same path of the infamous martyr. I used the ends of my head scarf to wipe my cheeks and tuck myself underneath its warmth. My body was tense with anticipation of hundreds of right wing, jewish extremists charging towards Al-Aqsa, a literal, and symbol of, land they wish to digest.
By the end of the last prayer for the day, around 6:30pm, the streets were empty aside from a few families still briskly walking to get home. It was clear that tonight was not the night to be alone outside the mosque. We encountered a family of 3 carrying copious amounts of oranges in a baby stroller and by hand. One of us offered to help and we were quickly swept back to their house through alleyways and over barricades. The Matriarch of the family peeled oranges and her daughter poured coffee as she explained how she tries to go every Friday to pray, but is always turned away by the Israeli military. She shook her head and closed her eyes as she recounted the tear gas they sprayed while she attempted to pray. I asked if she continues to go, even though she has been denied and she proudly replied “yes, of course”. We parted with sentiments of strength, gratitude, and sumud (resilience).
Empty via Dolorosa. Credit: ISM
As we left the forcibly silent Muslim quarter, we were bombarded by celebration, carelessness, and isolation just a few blocks over in a Jewish Neighborhood. People danced in the streets and young men laughed as they walked with assault rifles slung around their necks.
Young men walking through West Jerusalem. Credit: ISM
We all clenched our jaws, silenced our Arabic lessons, and I lowered my scarf to reveal my curls in a hopes to blend in until we swiftly arrived at our home base, astonished by the dissonance; just down the road, their neighbors, were confined to their homes for fear of destruction and extermination.
I was surprised by my shock. Living in the US supplies countless moments of dissonance among neighbors. From the Delmar Divide in St Louis to Skid Row to Chelsea’s 10th ave in NY, we watch as people are displaced, sanctioned, and murdered and their neighbors, with windows facing theirs, feast and dance on the graves of the community they pushed out. I had the same feeling of disappointment and anger walking through that Jewish neighborhood as I do when I walk to visit friends along the Delmar Divide and remember the names of the families that once lived on the south side of the street.
On Monday December 11th there is a call to action for everyone to stop, a total strike. For everyone, around the world to be faced with the stagnation of a mandated ceasefire and to feel the destruction of an entire people. To turn that rage into action.
8 December 2023 | International Solidarity Movement | Occupied East Jerusalem
Marking the first night of Hanukkah, on December 7, around 150 ultra-nationalist, Kahane terrorist linked extremist settlers demanding “full Jewish control” of Al Aqsa Mosque shouted racist abuse and waved banners of violent incitement against Al Aqsa Mosque. The violent-extremist group was granted authorization to march through the Muslim Quarter, but was stopped before it could start when Israeli police confronted the mob for violating the terms of its protest permit and inciting violence. Signs calling for the bulldozer-demolition of Al Aqsa, one of the holiest structures in Islam, were reportedly confiscated.
Clashes between Israeli police and far-right activists at a march through Jerusalem’s Old City on Thursday night. Credit: Olivier Fitoussi.
Permission was granted on the eve of the event, against every indication that march organizers would not be following the tepid ‘restrictions’ placed on the march including an attendance cap and disallowance of the route reaching the holy site. Extremist, settler-colonial citizen forces are granted the right to murder and showered with arms by their government with which to do so. But under pressure through public outcry against the provocative event, occupation police dispersed the demonstration.
Far right march organizers had circulated a declaration through social media linking the events in Gaza with continued zionist incitement to wrest control of Al Aqsa from the Islamic Endowment waqf. Extremist settlers, instead, want to place it under the control of the same occupying force which is committing daily atrocities against occupied and besieged Palestinians, atrocities which have shocked the world.
The Haram Al-Sharif and the Al Aqsa Mosque, was the first place Muslims prayed toward and remains a sacred site of great importance in Islam. It has long been a flashpoint for far right extremist settler and occupation forces’ violence and antagonization of Palestinians through continuous incursions; its majesty the backdrop of the repeated and arbitrary denial of access to Muslims.
Across a timeline littered with incursions into the area, May saw hundreds of settlers marking “Flag Day” by rampaging through occupied East Jerusalem where soldier and settler alike hurled racial insults and assaulted Palestinians in the area. And in early October, far-right extremists repeatedly stormed the Al Aqsa Mosque compound coinciding with the Jewish Sukkot seven day pilgrimage festival. Incited by Jewish ultra-nationalist groups, extremist settlers continued an antagonistic campaign of repeated trampling of the courtyard at the holy site even as faithful Palestinians were being violently denied entry, an arbitrary age-restriction which is ongoing.
Al Aqsa Compound stormed by extremist settlers on October 5, 2023. photo credit: The New Arab.
Al-Aqsa’s administrative workers, including Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, one of Al Aqsa’s main Imams, have endured repeated targeting. Sheikh Sabri has faced terrorist death threats by settler vigilantes, a raid of his home to announce an arbitrary travel ban against him, and an outrageous eviction and notice of impending demolition of his home just days ago. This home demolition is especially egregious because it involves the collective punishment of 100 Palestinians who also live in separate homes inside the threatened structure.
People of all faiths, including Palestinian Muslims, have an inalienable right, echoed in OCHA’s International Standardsarticle 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, of freedom from religious-based discrimination. Palestinians regularly attempt to reach Al Aqsa Mosque for Friday prayers, but are blocked by Israeli barricades, police, and military who attack the worshippers while they are praying week after week. Human rights defenders holding a non-violent presence to document the restriction, assault, and harassment of Palestinian Muslims at their holy site, have had their phones and passports confiscated and have been forced from the site by occupation soldiers. Despite these provocations, and the recent jailing and forced deportation of a Belgian human rights defender while documenting an illegal home demolition, international human rights defenders continue to document and intervene in human rights violations.
The violent, extremist settler march was an incitement to further violence and marginalization of indigenous Palestinians and the obscene violation of a holy site meant to be a welcoming sanctuary to those whispering prayers within its walls. The organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, blueprints the odds between the Jewish faith and this supremacist Zionist ideology; “Zionist interpretations of history taught us that Jewish people are alone, that to remedy the harms of antisemitism we must think of ourselves as always under attack and that we cannot trust others. It teaches us fear, and that the best response to fear is a bigger gun, a taller wall, a more humiliating checkpoint.” Their statements and demonstrations are part of a growing worldwide Jewish resistance to occupation, apartheid and the systematic dehumanization which maintains them. “Rather than accept the inevitability of occupation and dispossession, we choose a different path. We learn from the anti-Zionist Jews who came before us, and know that as long as Zionism has existed, so has Jewish dissent to it.”
Many Palestinian families remember the stories of their great grandparents who recall how Palestinian Arab and Jewish neighbors babysat for each other and were not only at peace, but close friends, prior to the imposition of settler-colonialism. Palestine, “the land of barakah” (the land of blessings, peace, salvation, liberation, and spiritual presence) and site of the stories that have shaped so many Jewish, Christian, and Muslim lives is experiencing a tragedy of unimaginable proportions. The Al Aqsa Mosque, the soul of Jerusalem, is at the epicenter of the fate of this land and its people, with reverberations around the world; a crossroads between liberatory survival and genocidal desolation, of human rights and the restriction thereof, justice and justice denied.
On December 3, Israeli Occupation forces converged on the Sawaneh neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem evicting its residents and pinning intention-of-demolition orders to all families in the building albeit their target was solely the home of one of Al-Aqsa Mosque’s main Imams, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri. The order affects 18 homes, ultimately impacting over 100 Palestinian residents of the building.
(Photo credit: Anadolu Agency 3/12/23)
Noted in Hebrew, the demolition orders state, “In order to minimize damage, you must immediately remove possessions from said premises. If you do not, the state will not be responsible for damages.” The titled headline announces, “We hereby affirm you of our intent to demolish the house according to court order.”
Sheikh Sabri is no stranger to incitement against his person and property as he has been the subject of the arbitrary harassment, arrest, and imprisonment which has become the signature of the occupier whose very existence depends on silencing liberatory voices representative of justice and dignity for the Palestinian people, including when the 85 year old Imam’s home was stormed by occupation forces who imposed a 6 month travel ban for the stated reason that he had been deemed a “security threat.”
With several families residing in the building being the recipients of this same demolition order which will displace them as a consequence of the targeting of Sheikh Sabri, it is again evidenced that the Israeli government, Israeli authorities and the Israeli occupation forces are in violation of International Humanitarian Law, specifically Article 33 on collective punishment. The article states, in no uncertain terms, that “Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.” Thus, the purveyors of prolific violations of human rights of an entire people continue to be rewarded for their troubles with impunity, copious funding and arms provisions to wage further war crimes, genocide and countless other daily transgressions. For now and the immediate future while whatever veneer of an appeals process accessible to Palestinians saddled with notices of home demolitions is acted out, their already daily lot has been made heavier with this additional form of torment.
Reports from across the occupied West Bank flash across the eyes of the world like a disturbing stop-motion reality; settler incursions, beatings, murders, abductions, theft, vandalism and death threats. One of the most heinous tributaries of such threats floated Sheikh Sabri’s name across it just one month ago.
The extremist settler Telegram channel “Nazi-Hunters,” known for incitement to murder Palestinians across the occupied territories as well as inside of Israel has named Sheikh Sabri as a target, joining him with the journalists, student activists, Al-Aqsa administrative workers and others being targeted for terror attacks and death ostensibly for ‘Nazism,’ which has become code among violent ideological zionists projected onto Palestinians and allies resisting oppression and occupation.
Screenshot of “Nazi Hunters” Telegram channel. Photo credit: Middle East Eye
The channel displays images of Palestinians with crosshairs placed over their faces, encouraging the choir to circulate the calls for murder, “share a lot maybe it will reach the Nazis themselves and they will kill themselves out of fear.”
As noted by UNRWA’s Demolition Watch site, home demolitions are a leading cause of Palestinian’s continued displacement and their toll on families cannot be overstated, “The impact of home demolitions on children can be particularly devastating. Many children affected by demolitions show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.” The effect leaves emotional wreckage long after the rubble from the felled house has been cleared.
