Jerusalem - The Old City

The Old City of Jerusalem
“One fool suffices to burn a whole forest” (Menachem Mendel of Kutzk)

I thought it fitting to come to the Old City of Jerusalem in a situation that seems like a moment before everything breaks loose. To see and hear things unmediated by the mass media and the reporters’ mantras about the ‘status-quo’, to walk the alleys, speak with people, see and hear things first-hand  and feel the pulse.

Three hours in two streets and at two gates. Searing hot noon hours, tension at its highest under the apparent quiet.

Inspections at the gates, checking Palestinian youngsters, body searches as well as the contents of bags and bundles.

Bags containing books and work utensils, bags with food and with medication for grandma belonging to a child and taken out of its pharmacy shopping bag – policeman A. passes the antibiotic pills to policeman B. who obviously is the medical expert of the two.

Along the route, with time, I realize that the struggle here is not over the status-quo nor a religious one. It is a power struggle over who’s in charge.

At the face of things, in view of the numbers of Border Police and Special Police forces at every nook and cranny and alleyway, one could think Israel controls the site which it both officially and unofficially calls “Temple Mount”. True, there is a kind of ‘mount’, but on it stands the Al Aqsa Mosque. And the Al Aqsa compound is the only site in all   the occupied West Bank that is not under Israeli control. In spite of the famous 1967 outcry “the Temple Mount is now ours” – it is not at all ours. The area in front of the metal detector remained ‘sterile’, and as a Border Police officer explained to me while preventing my approaching the machine: “Passage here is only allowed Muslims on their way to pray at Temple Mount”, no one crossed it. This fact only proves with thousands of witnesses that Israel did not control nor now controls the Al Aqsa Compound.

Men and woman knelt in prayer outside the compound.

A Muslim Waqf official told me that a group of Turkish pilgrims who joined their Palestinian brothers in protest refused to go through the metal detectors and also prayed outside.

As always, one needs to look up and see the Jewish settler-colonists sitting in their pyromaniac sense of mastery, secure in their safe and air-conditioned houses here.