The Golden Dome of the Rock, in the acropolis of Jerusalem called noble shrine by Muslims and the Temple Mount by the Jews, rises above the walls of the Old City. The sacred platform, as well as damascus Gate and a closer community called Sheikh Jarrah, have been the scene of bloody clashes in recent weeks.
Rockets, riots and airstrikes that have rocked Israel and neighboring Palestinian territories in recent weeks have once again put one of the world’s most difficult conflicts back on the headlines: more than 250 Palestinians and a dozen Israelis were killed and thousands more wounded before a ceasefire was declared last Thursday. .
Violence first erupted along a mile-long arch of ancient tombs, gates and shrines in Jerusalem that are causing deep emotion among many Jews and Muslims. Located in the eastern sector of the city, which was annexed through Israel in 1980 and is considered a territory occupied through the foreign community, these sites serve as central themes in the Palestinian struggle to stop right-wing Jewish attempts to settle in historically Arab areas.
Immediate unrest began on 13 April, at the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadaan, when a minor security measure proved to have primary and bloody repercussions.
Israeli border police limited access to Damascus Gate, a northern front to the Old City built in the 1530s through Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The original low design excavated in 2013 and dates back to the 2nd century D. C. Jerusalem, which opens to a square within the walls with a column topped by a statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian. The statue has long since disappeared, but reminiscence is preserved in the Arabic call of design: the column door. it’s The Door of Shechem.
The barriers erected at damascus Gate to Jerusalem’s Old City have infuriated Palestinians celebrating the holy month of Ramadan and provoked violent clashes with Israeli border police.
The gate is a sacred site, but Nazmi Jubeh, archaeologist and historian at Birzeit University, called it a “symbol of the Palestinian national struggle” because it is the main link between the Muslim quarter of the Old City and Arab markets and neighborhoods. North. ” It has a folk and sentimental price for many Palestinians,” Jubeh says.
In recent decades, the gate has also had a privileged front to the ancient city through many strictly Orthodox Jews, also known as Haredim. Israel has imposed a strong security presence in recent years after a series of knife attacks, and in 2020 the municipality was renamed the small semicircular square in front of the door for Israeli policemen killed there on duty.
This year, the square was filled with barricades that prevented the celebrants from meeting for a long time in a popular assembly for palestinian youth and their families after the sunset of Ramadan. Palestinian protests angered by restrictions turned into fierce clashes with police on nearby streets. Attacks on the Haredim have fueled the wrath of the Jews.
On 22 April, more than a hundred Palestinians were wounded in fights with Israeli police, who also fought to contain a multitude of Jewish extremists seeking success at the door chanting “Death to the Arabs. “The domain has become, an Israeli journalist providing on-site, “an amphitheatre of violence. “
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Party Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, began firing rockets at Israel in retaliation for what it called Israeli provocations in Jerusalem. On 25 April, Israeli police got rid of the barricades around the door and protests subsided.
By then, however, tension had already spread to the predominantly Arab community north of Damascus Gate, called Sheikh Jarrah.
The risk of additional evictions from Arab citizens in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah community has sparked protests in Israel and the Palestinian territories, adding the demonstration in the Israeli port city of Haifa.
Jarrah, the physician of Saladin, the sultan who expelled the Christian Crusaders from Jerusalem in 1187 a. C. and founded the Ayubi dynasty. The doctor buried on the northern outskirts of the city, and his tomb have become a shrine that attracted Sufis from the Muslim world. A small Arab village that received his call grew up around the site.
The domain had already been used as a cemetery in Roman times. Here is jerusalem’s greatest magnificent burial complex, the Tomb of the Kings, as well as a series of tombs attributed to Jewish sages and saints. those tombs carved into the rock near the Tomb of the Kings is that of Simeon the Righteous, a prominent Jewish priest who, according to the Talmud, met Alexander the Great.
In 1871, a French archaeologist examining this tomb discovered an inscription revealing that the tomb is, in fact, a century-old burial to space the remains of the wife or daughter of a Roman centurion named Julius Sabina.
Jewish teams that maintained their holiness bought the site five years later, and a network of a few dozen Jewish families settled around the tomb later in the century. At the time, the network was dotted with villas belonging to wealthy Arab families when Jerusalem began to spread. outdoors its walls.
When the State of Israel was declared in 1948, war broke out with Arab nations and Sheikh Jarrah fell under Jordan’s power in what has become East Jerusalem. Jewish citizens fled and Palestinians displaced elsewhere due to the confrontation settled in abandoned houses. In 1967, Israel conquered and East Jerusalem annexed.
Since then, Jewish settlers have tried, with common success, to use Israeli courts to evict Arab citizens from the assets they claim as their own, but palestinians have no legal right to claim their homes before 1948.
“Sheikh Jarrah is of old importance with regard to the nationality and identity of Palestinians and Jews,” said two Israeli academics, Lior Lehrs and Yitzhak Reiter, who studied the neighborhood. The clash between the two groups, they added, “reflects an under-development trend of the Jewish agreement in the center of East Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods. “
In recent years, the Jewish faithful have begun to pray in the grave more and in greater numbers. The volatile combination of genuine state, faith and politics temporarily reached a boiling point.
This spring, as Israel’s Supreme Court set out to rule on the eviction of 58 Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah’s homes, weekly protests against such a move intensified. During a demonstration on 9 April, Israeli police beat a member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, who was taking part in nonviolent action.
On 6 May, members of a far-right Jewish party and local Palestinians on a street in Sheikh Jarrah began exchanging insults and throwing chairs and stones. The minor tumult temporarily became a primary Muslim manifestation centered on the Jerusalem Temple Mount, an irregular rectangle. in the southeastern aspect of the Old City covering more domains than the Pentagon.
The Dome of the Rock shines behind the Muslim worshippers Laylat al-Qadr, or the night of fate, marking the moment when God first revealed the Qur’aan to Muhammad. The shrine was the scene of bloody fighting between Israeli security and Muslims before and after the May 8 celebration.
Israeli nationalists wave their nation’s flag at a 2011 march through the streets of Sheikh Jarrah, a historically Arab community near Jerusalem’s Old City, to celebrate Israeli takeover in 1967.
Few places in the world are so complete with history, politics, faith and legends. Successive temples made it the ultimate position of worship in Judaism until the Romans destroyed the vast complex in 70 a. m. C.
With the advent of Islam in the 7th century, the first Muslim leaders built the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque to mark the position where they believed the Prophet Muhammad had made his evening in paradise.
The two buildings, in a park setting with courtyards, gardens and beautiful views, are among the oldest and most venerable Islamic structures in the world. For Muslims, what they call the Noble Shrine, or simply al-Aqsa, is the third most sacred position. Islam after Mecca and Medina.
In 1967, Israel took the acropolis and declared it part of the expanded Israeli capital. The platform itself remained under Muslim rule but was placed under Israeli security control. Tensions between the faithful and Israeli security broke out periodically during the Ramadan period when tens of thousands of others flocked to al-Aqsa (see centuries of architecture coming together in Jerusalem’s Old City).
Following protests at Damascus Gate and Sheikh Jarrah, thousands of Palestinian faithful piled up in the acropolis to pray and demonstrate against evictions. A giant contingent of Israeli infantry also provided and temporarily erupted the violence. On 7 May, more than two hundred Palestinians were injured, many of them by rubber-coated metal bullets and crippling grenades, while 17 police officers were injured by a shower of bottles, shoes and stones.
May 10 marked the 54th anniversary of the Israeli take-in of East Jerusalem, when Israeli nationalists marched through the streets of the Old City waving Israeli flags, and also on the day the Supreme Court will rule on Sheikh Jarrah’s deportation case. and the court’s ruling was postponed, but during that time the violence had gotten out of hand. Hamas rocket attacks led to Israeli bombing of Gaza in retaliation.
The riots temporarily spread to israel’s combined Arab-Jewish cities, one in five Israelis is Arab, as well as to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, home of the Palestinian Authority, as well as more than a hundred illegal Jewish settlements under foreign law. .
On 18 May, a day when Palestinian leaders called demonstrations and strikes, Israeli forces in the West Bank killed a Palestinian and wounded more than 70, as well as two wounded Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, in Sheikh Jarrah, police targeted the Arabs with water cannons. protesters, while Arab protesters at Damascus Gate faced Israeli security.
Egypt negotiated the ceasefire signed through Israel and Hamas. Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official, said Israel had provided “assurances that Israeli aggression in al-Aqsa mosque and Sheikh Jarrah will stop,” a statement rejected as a “total lie” through Israel. Few believe that, in fact, peace is in sight.
When asked about the lifestyles of a long-term solution to the crisis, Reiter gave a consensual response in Jerusalem: “I’m not sure, it’s complicated. “
Andrew Lawler is a journalist and has written about the debatable excavations in Jerusalem for National Geographic. His most recent book, Under Jerusalem, will be published in November.