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Israel will celebrate the controversial Jerusalem Day festival on Monday amid fears that this year’s event will be especially provocative for Palestinian residents of the city.
Along with a staple ultra-nationalist march through the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, Israel’s far-right government announced in mid-May that the cabinet would, for the first time, hold a “special” meeting in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan.
“The Israeli government is proud to hold its special cabinet meeting marking Jerusalem Day in the City of David – the cradle of our national heritage and the very heart of our united and eternal capital,” said a statement from the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
East Jerusalem is recognised as Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory under international law. Jerusalem Day celebrates Israel’s capture of the city in 1967, when Arab forces were defeated in the eastern part. Israel then declared Jerusalem as its undivided capital, a move that the majority of the international community rejects.
Dimitri Diliani, a member of Palestinian faction Fatah’s Revolutionary Council and a Jerusalem resident, told The National that the decision to hold the meeting in Silwan is “politically calculated”.
“Silwan is an occupied Palestinian neighbourhood under extraordinary pressure from settlement groups and state-backed Israeli terrorist activity,” he added.
“Holding a cabinet meeting there sends a message: it asserts delusional Israeli sovereignty through physical presence on land that remains under military occupation in violation of international law.”
Power struggle
Densely populated Silwan, to the south of the Old City of Jerusalem, has been at the centre of a power struggle between Israeli settlers and Palestinians for years. Since 2010, the municipality of Jerusalem has been trying to transform the area into a park called King’s Garden.
Israeli lawyer and Jerusalem specialist Daniel Seidemann said in a publication by Terrestrial Jerusalem, an NGO that focuses on Jerusalem affairs, that the decision “is basically going to the most volatile area in Jerusalem and playing with matches”.
After the meeting in Silwan, tens of thousands of Israelis, mostly far-right youth, will then descend on Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Old City’s Muslim Quarter, and march along a street that traverses many of the gates to the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. The compound on which the mosque sits is also holy for Jews, being the site of the First and Second temples.
Previous marches have included assaults on Palestinians and their businesses, racist chants, and attacks on journalists. Far-right politicians typically join, with last year seeing visits by ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. In 2011, the march helped spark 11 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas.
“There is profound apprehension in Jerusalem as the so-called ‘Jerusalem Day’ approaches. The occupation flag march, which winds through the neighbourhoods of the Old City, has come to embody the spectacle of Israeli settler-colonial terror,” Mr Diliani said.
