June | 2023 | First One Through

The holy city of Jerusalem, the capital of Israel held two parades over the past couple of weeks. One was done by the right-wing and the other by the left-wing. Each side claimed the moral high ground and accused the other of acting in bad faith.

Let’s speak about both honestly.

The Flag Parade

On May 18, thousands of Israelis marched through the streets of Jerusalem carrying Israeli flags to mark the reunification of the city at the end of the 1967 Six Day War. The tremendous pride in country and messianic feel of Jews controlling Judaism’s holiest site for the first time in almost two thousand years was palpable at the time, and many tried to recreate that sense of awe 56 years later.

*Marchers near Damascus Gate of Old City during Jerusalem Day, 2023*

The parade route into the Old City to the Western Wall could have worked its way through the Jewish Quarter but the nationalist spirit of the marchers directed them through the Arab Quarter, essentially re-educating the Arabs about their defeat. While the march was basically peaceful, roughly 2,500 police officers came to maintain order as past years saw scuffles as the Arabs in the Old City resented the march.

The Gay Pride Parade

On June 1, thousands of Israelis marched through the streets in a gay Pride Parade. While such a parade would have happened without controversy in the liberal and secular city of Tel Aviv, the religious beliefs of devout Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem caused friction.

Thousands of police came to protect the marchers as there were attacks in past years. This year’s event proved peaceful and uneventful.

Some Truths

The Flag and Pride Parades were both legal and unnecessarily provocative. The right wing Jewish nationalists did not need to go through the Arab Quarter and the left wing secular Jews did not need to march through religious sections of the country. Each sought to drive home their own point that they are free and able to hold such events, and enjoyed rubbing the spectators’ noses in the fact.

The left-wing media only focused on the right-wing in both cases. CNN described a “contentious flag march” in which a” number of Palestinian shopkeepers told CNN before the event that they would close their shops in the Old City for fear of attacks by far-right Jewish nationalists.” The New York Times covered the “Conflict With the Far Right Shrouds Jerusalem’s Pride Parade,” with the backdrop of “the most hard-line and religiously conservative government in the country’s history took power.”

Both the right-wing and left-wing held their parades in Jerusalem being proud and provocative, yet the mainstream opinion shapers could only find fault with right-wing and religious Jews. It fed their macro narrative of right-wing White Supremacist Jews as the elite amongst the bigots, despite being the most persecuted group in the world.

Bitter Waters and The Jerusalem Flag Parade

On Defenses: Provocative and Legal / Unprovocative and Illegal

Gay Rights in the Middle East

Pride. Jewish and Gay

The court trial of the man who killed eleven people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA began on May 30, 2023. The murderer, Robert Bowers, faces a total of 63 federal crimes which include:

11 counts of obstruction of free religious exercise resulting in death;
11 counts of hate crimes resulting in death;
Two counts of obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs involving an attempt to kill and use of a dangerous weapon and resulting in bodily injury;
Two counts of hate crimes involving an attempt to kill;
Eight counts of obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs involving an attempt to kill and use of a dangerous weapon, and resulting in bodily injury to public safety officers;
Four counts of obstruction of free exercise of religious beliefs involving use of a dangerous weapon and resulting in bodily injury to public safety officers;
25 counts of discharging a firearm during those crimes

The case is not being built solely on the fact that Bowers killed eleven innocent people and threatened to kill others, but with the added emphasis on the “obstruction of free religious exercise” and of “hate crimes.”

The United States has a law which lays out the protection afforded to people and property associated with religious worship. 18 U.S. Code 247 is called “Damage to religious property; obstruction of persons in the free exercise of religious beliefs,” and lays out the principle of religious protection. Section (a)(2) refers to circumstances in which a person “intentionally obstructs, by force or threat of force, including by threat of force against religious real property, any person in the enjoyment of that person’s free exercise of religious beliefs, or attempts to do so.”

This US law has commonalities in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Articles 2 and 18 of the UDHR entitle everyone “to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

Despite embracing the basic human rights to the free exercise of religious belief, the United States continues to support the “status quo” demanded by the Jordanian Islamic Waqf to prohibit Jews from praying at Judaism’s holiest site on the Jewish Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

While Israel enabled over one million Muslims onto the Jewish Temple Mount during Ramadan, not a single Jew is afforded this basic human right. To add insult to injury, rather than denounce the heinous antisemitic law, the United Nations and United States decry the Jewish protestors as “extremists” inverting the right and the wronged.