Pride Parade | 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.