Today, Explained - Jerusalem

Episode Date: May 14, 2021

Weeks of tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem have escalated into the region's worst violence in years. Two journalists in the holy city explain the conflict and its history. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. It is Eid today. We heard fireworks last night and you can hear the prayers today. This morning, we got in touch with Hind Hassan. She's a reporter with Vice News. She spoke to us from her hotel room in East Jerusalem, which was weirdly pretty chill. It feels relatively calm here in comparison to other places because we're not in Gaza. So, you know, we're not being bombed and Hamas doesn't fire rockets into East Jerusalem because there's so many Palestinians, of course, that live here. So it feels a little bit surreal to be witnessing in real time this war explode around us, but to be sat in a hotel at the moment speaking to you when it's sunny outside, relatively calm, and you can hear Eid prayers in the distance.

Tell me about the war. Jerusalem is seeing some of the worst violence that it has seen in years. We have, over the past few weeks since we've been here, seen Israeli police use stun grenades, water cannons, and even recently rubber bullets against Palestinians in different locations in East Jerusalem. And that violence and anger and protest has spilled over into Gaza and the West Bank and Tel Aviv. In three separate strikes, Israel again showed what it can do at will to Gaza's skyline. We've had Hamas in Gaza firing rockets into Israel proper.

Less than an hour after the Al-Sharouk building was brought down, another rocket barrage began. Again, Israel's Iron Dome interceptors trying to deal with a huge number of targets. And Israel pounding Gaza, and we know that many people have died. Across Gaza, a cloud of grief is spreading. Taking hold of families, infecting a new generation.

In Palestine and Israel, in this region, there's always anger, there's always frustration. This is a product of growing Palestinian anger over Israel's military occupation for the last half century. But what we've seen over recent weeks is a number of things that have all happened at a similar time. It's a very important time for Muslims. And Palestinians during Ramadan, what they do is they go and they gather in an area just outside of Damascus Gate. Damascus Gate is an entry point into Al-Aqsa Mosque. And then just outside it, there is this area where people, these steps where a lot of Palestinians will meet.

They'll break their fasts. They'll talk. They'll socialize. And if you go there and you see it, there's like a carnival atmosphere. You can buy drinks. And it's an area where Palestinians just get together and enjoy themselves. But what happened during Ramadan

was that Israeli police put up barriers which prevented Palestinians from gathering in this area. That frustrated and angered a lot of the people who would go there and protests began. When we arrived two weeks ago, we witnessed this and we even saw 15-year-olds being arrested and taken away by Israel, who was taking a very, very heavy-handed approach to this. That's in one part of East Jerusalem. There's another part of East Jerusalem called Sheikh Jarrah and there are Palestinian families who live there

and they face being forcibly removed from their homes in the coming weeks and months. And so there's been a lot of anger over that as well. You are stealing my house. And if I don't steal it, someone else is going to steal it.

No, no one is allowed to steal it, Yami. What you have, according to Palestinians, are injustices. And what they see is an attempt by Israel to manipulate the borders of East Jerusalem and change the demographic, replacing Palestinians with Israelis. Nabil, who has already had one house seized by settlers, fears what could happen if the court rules against them. We'll be in the streets because all of us, like me, we are old people. We don't work, we don't have incomes, and the cheapest rent around here is $2,000.

How can we afford it? People started protesting because there are more cases currently that could potentially force Palestinians out of their homes than there has been in years. And so, again, there are protests, and again, Israeli police move in. Amnesty International called the police's response disproportionate and potentially unlawful. What's the legality of these evictions in Sheikh Jarrah?

The Palestinians that live in this particular neighborhood, the ones that are facing being imminently forced out of their homes, their grandparents moved there in 1956 when they were displaced by Israel. At the time it was under the mandate of Jordan, gave the deeds to these families in return for the families giving up their refugee status. But then in 1967 the area was captured by Israel and East Jerusalem, which is considered illegally occupied under international law and by the United Nations, fell into the control of Israel. And Israel says that this land, before the Palestinians moved into this land in 1956, there were Israelis who lived there, there were Jewish people who lived there,

so this land actually belongs to Jewish people. And so over the years there have been many court cases in which there have been attempts to try and remove the families from this area, saying that this area should be returned back to Jewish people. But now the Jewish trust that the land was given to, they sold it on to another company called Nahla Shimon International, and that's actually a company based in the United States, and they are now working to try and remove the families from this area. We met the Al-Ghawi family, for example,

who in 2009 were woken up by Israeli forces who came into their homes and dragged them out, and they then lived in a tent outside of their home for seven months and have never been allowed back in. But for a number of years, the other families who live in that area have had cases that have been frozen and they've been in the courts. But now what's happened is it's gone through multiple court systems and court hearings, and now it's reached the Supreme Court.

And the Supreme Court is going to give a decision imminently, potentially in the next month, to decide whether to accept the appeal of the Palestinian families or whether to deny it and therefore put them in a situation where they could be forced out of their homes at any given moment. And that's the reason why there's been so much particular focus on Sheikh Jarrah, because these cases that have stalled over many, many years have now reached a head. So it sounds like we've got like maybe three things at least going on here.

We've got historic tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. We've got the celebrations of Ramadan that are being policed and arrests. And then we've got these forced evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. When exactly do all of these elements come together and reach a boiling point? As it got towards the end of Ramadan, and it was one of the holiest nights of Ramadan, what happens is people in the grounds of al-Aqsa, Palestinians and other people who go to visit, they go and they pray and they stay all night. So they don't leave because it's a holy night and people want to stay there and pray. But what happened was the Israeli police wanted them to leave.

They came onto the grounds. They ended up storming the grounds of an Aqsa compound, firing stun grenades, using rubber bullets. Hundreds of Palestinians were injured, and it was all recorded on mobile phones and that footage quickly came out and circulated everywhere. And this for Muslims all over the world is an outrageous thing to witness, to see one of their holiest sites in Islam during one of the holiest days in Ramadan

to be stormed by Israeli police angered a lot of people. And it was after that event that Hamas sent an ultimatum and it said that Israel needs to remove its forces from al-Aqsa Mosque and it also needs to stop with its threats against Palestinians who live in Sheikh Jarrah. And that if Israel did not stop on both these fronts by 6pm on Monday the 10th of May, that it would retaliate. And exactly at 6pm, we were in East Jerusalem and we could hear those rockets being fired in,

and we were told they landed west of Jerusalem. And then we were told that more rockets were fired into the south of Israel. And then at that point, it was war. Tonight in Tel Aviv, images that change everything in an escalation that has already spiraled so fast. Israel's missile defense systems lighting up the sky as they try to intercept incoming Hamas rockets. And Gaza was then pounded by Israel. As the deaths mount, so does the feeling that this is just the beginning. My daughter-in-law and my grandson died, and my granddaughter is missing without any trace. And since then, we've seen all those losses of civilian life.

I've spoken to colleagues and journalists who are inside Gaza and they've sent me voice notes moments after there's been an attack. And we know that children have been killed. We know that there have been over 80 deaths there. And the Gaza Strip is a small area of land that is blockaded. There's no way out for people. They're literally trapped in an open-air prison with nowhere to go. And there's very little place to hide. So these bombs and these attacks, no matter how targeted the Israeli military says that they are,

always has the potential to kill civilians. And that's what we have seen happen. Hamas has been firing hundreds and hundreds of rockets that have landed in Tel Aviv in the south of Israel. And that has also killed seven Israelis, at least. Having been there for weeks, do you just see this as a constant escalation? It has absolutely felt like a constant escalation since we got here. We came here to cover the story of Sheikh Jarrah, and we had absolutely no idea that there would be a war. But the minute that we landed, and the minute we went to Damascus Gate and then Sheikh Jarrah, things were changing and what was happening hour by hour. How does it feel now? Is it like a no end in sight situation?

Is it like we got to find a way to stop this? Where does this go? At the moment, we're hearing so many different things and so many different rumors. We have sources that are inside Gaza that are updating us literally by the hour. And one hour we're being told there's potentially going to be a ground invasion. And the next hour we're being told that there is potentially going to be a ceasefire. There is a lot of tactics being played. There's a lot of maneuvering. There's absolutely going to be people negotiating on behalf of both Hamas and Israel. We honestly, at this moment, we're just waiting with bated breath to see what happens and hope that this does end very soon so that the lives of innocent civilians can be saved.

Hind Hassan, she's with Vice News. Shortly before publishing time, we saw reports that Israeli troops had entered Gaza, which would be a major escalation of this conflict. Vox reached out to the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, who clarified that there may have been some misinterpretation. They said, and I quote, there are currently no IDF ground troops inside the Gaza Strip. they said, and I quote, All of this leads back to Jerusalem. In a minute, why. Thank you. They're digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter.

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in Jerusalem. There was policing of Ramadan gatherings in Jerusalem. So let's try and wrap our heads around the significance of Jerusalem, shall we? To begin with, there is this place, which is sacred to both Jews and Muslims. Gershom Gornberg is an Israeli journalist and historian based in Jerusalem. The only reason explanation for Jerusalem being here as a city is the holy place. I always like to say about it is if, you know, you had a really good fifth grade teacher who taught you where to find cities by holding up the map and pointing to where there's rivers and ports and good farmland and sources of water and all that. Nobody would point to where Jerusalem is. You know, the ancient water source was poor. It wasn't on the trade route. The farmland is mediocre. There's no oil here. There's no port. What is there? There's a holy place. And that holy place becomes holy successively to each

group that arrives here. It may, according to archaeologists, have been a holy place before it was conquered by the ancient Israelites in 1000 BCE, a pagan holy place. In any case, it became the site of the first and second Jewish temples, and then Christianity as a successor religion made it the holy city. And then in the 7th century CE, the city was conquered by Islam and the same spot became sacred to Islam as Al-Aqsa. And this is the mosque with this sort of golden dome. That's the Dome of the Rock. Underneath the Dome of the Rock, there is a rock. And in Islamic tradition, the Quran says that God took Muhammad on a night journey from where he was in Mecca to the furthest mosque.

And in Islamic tradition, the furthest mosque is this mosque in Jerusalem. Now, Jewish tradition, that is precisely there is where Abraham, the founder of Judaism, bound his son Isaac to the altar by God's commandment and then was told by God that he did not have to sacrifice him, which is, in a sense, the founding experience of Judaism, the most extreme experience. Academic history is really irrelevant here. What makes Jerusalem important is the stories that people tell and believe about it. I like to say that the strategic facts in Jerusalem are stories. What does this historically holy city look like on a normal day?

Well, in most of the city, it looks like a city. You know, there's traffic and there's trash cans and there's shops open. And it's an extremely mixed city. There are three large populations. There's the Arab-Palestinian population. There's an ultra-Orthodox Jewish population. And there's all the rest of the, there's an ultra-Orthodox Jewish population, and there's all the rest of the Jews who are not ultra-Orthodox. In daily life, things are much more mixed than that, especially on the western side of Jerusalem, in the main

center of the Jewish city. You see lots and lots of Arabs every day, and probably more in recent years than ever before. The other day, I saw a comment by some American politician about, you know, what's going on here and sort of referring to it in American race terms. And I said to myself, you're not looking through a window, you're looking through at a mirror. That's an American issue. A Jew who knows Arabic at a native level and knows local customs can walk around East Jerusalem and be mistaken for an Arab completely, or vice versa. Has there been a point in history where this felt peaceful, where the ownership and the, or the co-ownership of the city or the meaning and the symbolic importance of this city to so

many different groups somehow functioned at a level that we haven't seen in recent memory. And, you know, I don't know what life was like in what was basically a small town of Ottoman Jerusalem, for instance, you know, where probably both Arabs and Jews were united in really disliking these Ottoman taxmen. What I will say that I think is really critical for people outside to understand is that we pop onto your news screens when things have come apart here. and months where people go by, go through their lives. And yeah, the ongoing situation and the occupation is deeply unequal and unjust, but people live their lives. And they even live their lives in interaction with each other. And things aren't burning. And in those periods, along with, I feel, having to be aware of the fact that one group of people rule over another group of people is an essentially unfair, unjust, and unstable situation, you can also see the hints

of what else could be, that this could be a city where people work together and go to each other's universities and go to each other's concerts and are more aware of each other's holidays probably than anywhere else between the river and the sea. You know, I mean, if you're living in Jerusalem and you're Jewish, you know when it's Ramadan. And if you're Arab, you know when the Jewish holidays are. are, there is an incredible potential here for a shared city that is awaiting the political leaders who have the courage to make it happen. And since we're talking about a religious place, I really pray that that happens quickly. Well, let's talk about some of the politics. Who runs the city of Jerusalem?

Between 1948 and 1967, Jerusalem was a divided city with a border and barbed wire and concrete walls running through the middle of it. And in 1967, in the June 1967 war called the Six-Day War by Israelis, Israel conquered the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. And it formally annexed under Israeli law, not recognized by anybody else, East Jerusalem. So, East Jerusalem is legally, for Israeli purposes and only for Israeli purposes, part of the state of Israel, unlike the West Bank. And East Jerusalem on a municipal level is administered by, you know, by Jerusalem City Hall. And the basic Palestinian position, you know, the sort of universally declared Palestinian position is that East Jerusalem should be the capital of a

Palestinian state. How has the power balance shifted in recent years, especially with the former president moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem? Well, there were two things that were important about that. One is, once again, in terms of symbols. Trump was prejudging one of the critical issues in any negotiations between Israeli and Palestinians in favor of Israel. The hardest subject they had to talk about was Jerusalem. We took Jerusalem off the table. So we don't have to talk about it anymore. They never got past Jerusalem. We took it off the table.

You can't take Jerusalem off the table. That's, you know, it's like you and I are having a legal argument. And I say, you know what? The house is mine. So now I've taken that off the table. Well, your lawyer is not going to agree with that, right? The other thing is the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem used to function de facto as the American embassy to the Palestinians. And Trump closed that unit,

which was a giant foot in the face to the Palestinians. It was just one more way of saying we really don't care about your opinions. The other thing that has to be said is that the new administration came in and Middle East has been very clearly an extremely low priority for the Biden administration, up to just as another symbolic thing, not yet having appointed an ambassador to Israel. It seems like the Biden administration is trying to sort of change that impression in the past, I don't know, 48 hours. I had a conversation for a while with the Prime Minister of Israel, and I think that my hope is that we'll see this coming to conclusion sooner than later. Lots of statements and comments coming from the administration at the very least.

I'm not sure what that means for Jerusalem. Since we're talking about Jerusalem, I'll say this in Jerusalem terms. the very least. I'm not sure what that means for Jerusalem. Since we're talking about Jerusalem, I'll say this in Jerusalem terms. There is a saying in the Talmud from a couple of centuries after the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. An ancient rabbi said, from the day the temple was destroyed, prophecy was taken away from the prophets and given to fools and children, which is a way of saying, don't make prophecies. I think that every journalist should keep that in mind. Fair. So, I don't know what will happen next. It could be that outside actors, including Egypt, and even possibly if the United States sort of wakes up to the problem, the United States or other actors get involved and push both sides to reach another

ceasefire, then there will be another problem that has to be dealt with, which is that the events of this week have also set off clashes within Israel in mixed Arab-Jewish towns, which have had a tremendously damaging effect on Arab-Jewish relations. And at the same time, some really, really strong calls by public figures on both sides, Jewish and Arab, for ending the clashes and for learning to live with each other. So, I can't tell you whether this is going to be the springboard for a growing conflict, or whether it could be the brush with terrible conflict that will push people to wake up and say that they have to deal

with the issues. I obviously hope for the latter. I think that that opportunity is there. I think that there are all sorts of people who are seeing this is crazy. What are we doing to each other? Why do we keep doing this over and over again? The illusion that in particular the Netanyahu government has tried to promote over the years that he's been in power is that the Palestinian issue can be ignored. And this is a reminder that the conflict hasn't gone away and that, you know, Israel cannot carry on quietly with its life without dealing with the fact that there are millions of Palestinians either living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem or in territory whose borders are controlled by Israel in Gaza, maybe this will be the push

to wake up and start dealing with the issues again instead of acting like, oh, we can just live with this chronic disease. Terrible as what's happened this week is, I would hope that it could lead to something positive. That's a hope. I stress it's not a prediction. Gershom, thank you is a journalist based in Jerusalem. He's also the author of several books, including The End of Days, Fundamentalism, and The Struggle for the Temple Mount. I'm Sean Ramos for him. The Today Explained team includes Halima Shah, Emily Sen, Victoria Chamberlain, Will Reed, Miles Bryan, Muj Zaydi, and Afim Shapiro, who's our engineer. Amina Alsadi is our supervising producer.

Liz Kelly Nelson is the VP of audio at Vox. Jillian Weinberger is the deputy. Music on the show comes from the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. And Noam Hassenfeld, Laura Bullard checks our facts. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.