To many left-leaning Western activists and journalists, writes Matti Friedman, Jews going to pray on the Temple Mount are in fact “storming” al-Aqsa mosque, a Hamas spokesman calling on his followers to decapitate Jews is “a call for social justice,” and “Hamas rockets are no longer being fired at Israeli civilians, [but] at ‘Israeli apartheid.’” And what of the reality behind these distortions?
Being an observer in Jerusalem always means gauging two opposing forces: the one pulling the city apart, and the glue keeping it together. The former gets plenty of attention from observers, and the latter almost none, but both are always in play in this city of nearly a million people. The glue is on display in malls and taxis and hospitals, the places of no interest to journalists or politicians, where Jews and Arabs of different ideological stripes interact carefully in their daily lives to a greater extent than ever before, moving things forward to a future that’s unknowable but could be better. That has been the trend here in the past few years. But it’s the other force, the destructive one, that we’re seeing now.
My work on this short dispatch was interrupted on Monday evening, for example, when a siren went off and I had to join my family in our apartment’s safe room, because Hamas in Gaza had pledged to protect Jerusalem and did so by firing a barrage of rockets at it. It was a good demonstration of the disconnect between the expressions of support the city receives from people who aren’t from Jerusalem, and the way those people’s actions—and I’m not referring only to the Arab side—disregard the actual human beings who must find a way to live together.
The forces of disintegration, the ones pushing us backward, are strong, and not confined to the limits of Jerusalem. When this latest round of violence began, a new Israeli government coalition appeared to be in the process of formation, one that would rely on the votes not just of an Arab party, but of the Islamic Movement. That would have been a remarkable step forward, one reflecting the welcome trends many of us see on the ground in Jerusalem, in Arab communities across Israel, and in countries like Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. Now the violence has frozen the coalition talks. For progress to happen and take root, the glue of daily life needs to hold. Right now, a lot of people are doing their best to make sure it won’t.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/jerusalem-glue-matti-friedman