On Sunday, a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli security guard in the chest in the Jerusalem central bus station; the perpetrator was immediately arrested and the guard is now said to be in stable condition. Otherwise—and despite predictions that massive and uncontrollable Arab violence would greet President Trump’s recent Jerusalem announcement—there has been relative calm in Israel’s capital, something that is not clear from much of the reporting on the subject. Emma Green records Arab Jerusalemites’ response to their leaders’ call for “three days of rage”:
The area outside of [Jerusalem’s] Damascus Gate is literally set up like a stage: big steps lead down on three sides to the lowered platform where people emerge from the Old City. A few dozen people stood on the steps and chanted in Arabic, holding a sign featuring a truck that called on America to “dump Trump” and another sign showing the president’s lips as urinals. A throng of journalists surrounded this group, outnumbering them roughly three-to-one. As protesters moved, the cameras shifted around them, moving like a flock of birds near a power line. Most Palestinians, however, went home.
A half-mile away at the Educational Bookshop on Salah Eddin Street, Najwa Muna fussed with her coffee machine and worried. That morning, she and her husband Imad had opened their store as usual. But they had closed the previous day when young [Arab] men came running by and yelling “Close, close, close!” . . . “It’s not good for us,” Muna said. She doesn’t like strike days, [which were declared on the previous days], when kids don’t go to school and people don’t work and they can’t open their store. It was “too dangerous” to stay open when Palestinian leadership called for a shut-down, she said, [implying that she feared retaliation from Palestinian organizations]. . . .
Back at the Damascus Gate, twenty-two-year-old Wissam Abu Madhi watched the protests from the sidelines with a group of friends. He had been protesting, he told me, but stepped out to finish his cigarette. “This is not angry days. These are normal days,” he said. . . . For his part, Abu Madhi says he wishes the Israeli government would make east Jerusalem a little nicer. . . . He pointed to the Damascus Gate area. “Why shouldn’t we have here a garden, and here a basketball court? This thing that I prefer, the government could do.”
Even though he came out for the protest, he’s more focused on finishing his degree at Hebrew University and keeping his job in Beersheba, where he works on air conditioners, than pushing for political change. . . . “Just [wait] one hour, and you’re going to see everything’s okay,” Abu Madhi said. “You’re going to see an Arabic man and a Jewish man sitting here.”
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