Another Friday of restricted prayer in the Esplanade of the Mosques of old Jerusalem, another humiliating Friday for its participants, filtered by the soldiers who guard the access. “What do they expect us to do? We are not Gandhi, sorry. Is there no justice? There is no peace,” says Mahmud Hamad, 50 years old, ninth generation of a family that lives in the holy city, as he leaves.
The Gaza war exacerbates the domestic fracture in Israel between the 7.1 million Jewish citizens (73.6% of the 9.6 million population) and the Arabs (21.1% or 2 million). “Of course we are not equal nor do we have the same rights. And they know it,” concludes Hamad, an example of an intricate territory that the founder of the State of Israel, Ben Gurion, summarized better than anyone: “Too much history for so little territory.”
And Hamad is one of the 360,000 Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem who have never accepted Israeli citizenship on principle – they are entitled to this – and enjoy the status of “permanent resident”, common for descendants of the Arabs who lived here before 1948. year of the creation of the state of Israel and the Nakba, the humiliating defeat of the Arab coalition that tried to prevent the existence of said State.
These days, all Arab Israelis express ipso facto discomfort and indignation even though the majority say they are dissatisfied with the Hamas terrorist massacre on the fateful September 7. “Hamas does not represent us,” they repeat. They are Israelis, yes, but their feelings are with the Gazans. And they tell and tell details of what they consider to be systematic and daily humiliating treatment by the omnipresent security forces, like this Friday in Old Jerusalem.
“My mother who lives alone in Nablus (West Bank). Since the war started I can no longer go to see her every day, as I did before. Between the army checkpoints and the aggressiveness of the Jewish settlers who shoot you or threaten to kill you, it is very dangerous. Nobody stops them,” explains Soram Salam, owner of a store in Ramallah, headquarters of the Palestinian National Authority and papier-mâché capital of a state that never materializes. Nablus is an example of the Palestinian complaint: the settlements have ended up diluting its Arab primacy.
“See these grounds? (departure from Tel Aviv towards the West Bank). My grandfather owned many hectares here. They expelled him in 1948, we have the property titles but nothing, dead paper. We have not even received compensation for lands that were ours,” explains Carlos, a Christian from Ramallah who makes a living as best he can – as a journalist’s driver in this case – and assures, like everyone else: “we are not second-class citizens. , third! Every day there are more settlements, more colonies. For them there are public funds, for us, little.”
These are not times of self-criticism, but of indignation, frustration and helplessness. Of whites and blacks. Some allude to 1948 as the point to correct. Other Israeli Arabs are credited with the limited benefits of the 1993 Oslo peace agreements, which provided for the departure – to say a solution is saying something – of the two states. “And what has happened since 1993? More settlements, more settlers in the West Bank, more Palestinian deaths,” summarizes Mahmud Hamad, who says he has been arrested 19 times since he participated in the first Intifada, at the end of the 1980s. “And after weeks in prison, the judges “They always set me free,” he summarizes.
The Via Dolorosa was empty this Friday, without any of those pious groups that walk through its stations, sometimes with a man carrying a cross. Even the attendant who sweeps the small chapel of Station VII “greets” the journalist with fury. “This is the fault of their governments, the US and Europe, who come to Israel to show support and say nothing about the children who die in Gaza.” Now calmer, he insists that they are treated – even in Jerusalem – as inferior citizens. And he mentions 1948, when 700,000 Arabs left this capital of the holy land – thank goodness it is holy. Always the past. And the grievance that Israel has prospered, unlike neighboring countries, a refuge for the expelled.
“A guard told me that either he was going to leave or he was going to shoot him in front of me,” explained the previous Friday another Arab who was going with his eleven-year-old son to pray on the esplanade. This Friday, it is Mahmud who recounts a humiliation. A friend of his, who does not speak Hebrew, was beaten away at the access control. “There are no objective criteria, it all depends on the soldier. Today there were hundreds of us, when the normal thing is tens of thousands. And then they boast that they let us pray and exist,” he adds. He claims to know every stone of this desolate old city of Jerusalem, where even the gate of Damascus is silent.
“When you leave Ramallah and there is the first checkpoint, don’t expect to be treated well. They humiliate us, they despise us, they see us as terrorists. If they could, they would make us disappear,” said another merchant in Ramallah, reluctant to give his name.
The State of Israel, progressive in its conception, established legal equality between Jews and non-Jews in the basic laws of 1950 (there is no Constitution, such as Great Britain). The passage of time, events and their drift, acrimony have blurred that egalitarian aspiration. Israeli Arabs complain that their schools receive less funding and that’s where the disparity begins. An Israeli Arab family head has 11.7 years of education, a Jewish one 14.4. Monthly income is 40% lower. “Today, almost all Arab towns and cities have a lower standard of living than where the Jewish population predominates,” according to data and conclusions from a report by the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the oldest think tanks in the United States. .
The “revenge” is in the birth rate: the Arab family unit has an average of 4.4 children, compared to 3 for the Jewish family. And an attachment to this land, which overflows with history. “Yes, of course, I could go live abroad with my wife and children,” explains Mahmud Hamad in perfect English. I will never do it. If I still have hope? We live in hope! “If we lose her, we lose everything.”
