A Palestinian refugee returning to his homeland after 70 years would feel he was entering a foreign land. The ancient stepped terraces of the hillsides have been hidden beneath pine woods, turning a Levantine scene into an Alpine one. Of the 500 mosques the state sequestrated after 1948, some survive as prisons or pubs, while others are boarded up. Muslim cemeteries have been paved over and turned into roads. Israel’s religious affairs ministry lists only Jewish places of worship as holy sites.
Immediately after the 1967 war, bulldozers flattened the twelfth-century Moroccan neighborhood that Saladin built to create a vast plaza for prayer in front of the Western Wall of what was once Jerusalem’s biblical temple.
Israel’s antiquities department determines which sites holy to other faiths are worthy of preservation, but has not stopped the destruction. In 2012, a zealot eluded the copious cameras placed around the Old City and took a hammer to the turquoise Ottoman tiles that since the seventeenth century had graced King David’s Tomb on Mount Zion up the hill. Insisting the damage was beyond repair, the authorities then finished the job, removing the fragments to expose Jerusalem stone beneath and turn what had been a Christian and Muslim shrine into a synagogue. “We cleaned it,” the tomb’s curator told me. The police abandoned the hunt for the perpetrator.
The Nea Ekklesia of Theotokos, a sixth-century Byzantine church whose grandeur once rivaled Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia, is also slipping out of view. Situated in the heart of the Jewish quarter, a part of Jerusalem’s occupied Old City Israel has designated for Jewish development, the authorities consider its remains out of keeping with their narrative of exclusive Jewish possession. A car park covers its nave, and access to the chapel runs through a children’s kindergarten and a series of locked gates. The East Jerusalem Development Foundation, a government-appointed body overseeing the Old City’s services, has a key, but requests go largely unanswered. Like other church ruins in the Jewish quarter, there are no tourist signs to point to its whereabouts.
Each year on Jerusalem Day, right-wing Zionists celebrate Israel’s capture of the Old City in 1967 by marching through the Muslim quarter, as if rehearsing a takeover. Their youth groups commandeer school buses and ferry their throng to its gates. “For their own safety,” the police order Muslim residents indoors and barricade off the side streets.
At sundown, national-religious Jews reenact Pamplona’s Running of the Bulls—without the bulls. In the hours before the charge, Palestinian shopkeepers remove the fluorescent bulbs from over their thresholds, padlock their shutters, and vanish. The hawkers and women selling vine leaves squatting on the steps of the grand Ottoman portal of Damascus Gate pack up their wares and withdraw. “There are no Arabs,” exclaimed a delighted Orthodox Jewish American tourist as she arrived to watch tens of thousands of religious Zionist stream down the hill from West Jerusalem through Damascus Gate. “Arabs go to Gaza,” they chanted as they entered the Muslim quarter’s al-Wad Street, and banged their fists on their metal shutters. Many wore armbands declaring “Kahane was right,” honoring the Israeli parliamentarian and rabbi who championed the expulsion of Arabs. “No one will stop us from rebuilding blessed Jerusalem,” cries Shmuel Rabinowitz, the rabbi of the Western Wall, welcoming the crowds as they converge on his plaza. For one night all the Old City’s quarters are Jewish.
If Jerusalem’s Old City is the focal point of religious Zionist ambitions, the Dome of the Rock, where Judaism’s biblical shrine had once stood, is its apex. For Muslims, its esplanade and the Al Aqsa mosque alongside are the third holiest place of pilgrimage, where Muhammad ascended to heaven. Three million Muslims pray there annually, compared to some 400,000 Christian visitors and 10,000 Jews.
Traditionally, the site is subject to a rabbinic ban, violation of which incurs a premature death. Only Jews ritually purified with the ashes of a red heifer, said the rabbis, could enter Judaism’s most sacred ground. The task required divine intervention, since the red heifer is widely considered extinct.
But in recent decades, some national-religious activists have argued that God needs a helping hand. The construction of the Third Temple, the coronation of a messiah, and the application of the Jewish law, halaka, they reasoned, are all human deliverables. Once realized, they would usher in the true Torah State in place of one they deem secular, corrupt and compromising.
Right-wing parliamentarians in the Knesset gave their support. They promoted legislation to give them a foothold on the Temple Mount, allocating a Jewish space where they could pray. When they lost the vote, they beseeched the police force to restrict Muslim access and expand that of Jews. In the summer of 2014, the police obliged. Palestinians under 55 were barred access, and those over 55 had to leave their ID cards with police before entering the esplanade. At times women were banned altogether.
Introduced on Laylat al-Qadr (the Islamic night of decree), when the Quran was first revealed to Muhammad and Islam’s holiest night, and in the midst of the 2014 Gaza war, the new restrictions could not have been better timed to inflame. The previous year hundreds of thousands of families had thronged to the esplanade, spending the night camped out on its ancient paving stones. Now it was all but empty. Youths calling themselves the Mourabitoun, or religious sentinels, who had entered the Temple Mount before the ban came into effect, set the Israeli security post at the entrance to al-Aqsa alight.
The following morning Zionist rabbis rallied their flock to the mount. Moshe Feiglin, the Knesset’s then deputy speaker and a senior parliamentarian in Netanyahu’s Likud Party, arrived with an armed escort. In partial deference to the rabbinic injunction against violating hallowed ground, he took off his shoes and ascended the steps of the Dome of the Rock, where the temple’s inner sanctuary had stood. “Remove all Muslims from the Temple Mount,” he harangued the police.
Inside al-Aqsa Mosque, the Mourabitoun upturned bookcases and used them as barricades. They hid behind and aimed firecrackers at riot police. Police shot back with stun grenades and tear gas. At 11 a.m., when Jewish visiting hours were complete, Israel’s forces withdrew, leaving the mosque floor strewn with cartridges. Youths caked in powered limestone to dampen the effects of the tear gas emerged undefeated and immediately began hurling stones at the riot police from the esplanade’s gates. The police shot back, and elderly worshippers and this writer took cover behind the mosque’s marble pillars retching from the tear gas. Had the carpets caught fire, al-Aqsa’s mufti told me, the mosque might have gone up in flames. The Muslim world—Shias and Sunnis as one—would have set aside their sectarian differences and rushed in, perhaps deposing the Jordanian king en route. That evening, halfway down its bulletin, Israel’s media reported another day of Muslim disturbances on the Temple Mount.
The Israeli government justifies its recourse to force on the basis that anything short of a heavy hand might be mistaken for weakness. But the demand for recognition of its Jewish claims, while denying those of others, can trouble even its sympathizers.
Of all Jerusalem’s established sects, the Armenians were the smallest and most vulnerable. In 2009, they erected a monument to their victims of the 1915 genocide anticipating empathy from a population deeply enveloped in its own experience of genocide. Instead the authorities ignored the Armenian patriarch’s appeals and banned its public display. Each day tens of thousands pass by an unremarkable green iron fence on the road from the Old City’s Jaffa Gate to the Jewish quarter unaware of the monument lying behind. At first, the patriarch thought that Israel feared for its relations with Turkey. When Turkish-Israeli relations approached a breaking point, he wondered whether the crosses on the monument caused offense. Then the municipality suggested a slice of church land might sway the mayor. Ultimately, it seemed, Israel feared the monument might threaten its assertion of the uniqueness of its genocide.
Each year, Israel’s Holocaust Day—it marks a different one from the rest of the world—begins with Ashkenazi cantors reciting the official dirges for the dead in Israel’s state memorial, Yad Vashem, and ends in the far north of the country, at the Ghetto Fighters’ House, with a military tribute in which Israel’s top general vows the Holocaust will never happen again. A fresh corps of Israeli army cadets descends the steps of an open-air amphitheater bearing flaming torches. Addressing the nation Netanyahu reminded his people in 2014 that Israel was “stronger than ever” and “pulsates with an iron will to ensure the future of our people.” After the generals, politicians and military troupes had marched off, a diminutive, frail Holocaust 86-year-old survivor walked onto the vast stage, and spoke in a still small voice.
“We have secured our physical existence, not our values,” said Haviva Aranyi. “They are in danger.” The Holocaust, she said, began not with the election of Adolf Hitler, but the decades of hate speech and social exclusion that preceded it. The following morning, over a breakfast of sliced cucumbers in her bungalow on a kibbutz near the border with Lebanon, she was still elated from the reception her had received (the audience had clapped for her speech alone), but described her unease at the country she had lived in for 60 years. She fretted that Israel was hemorrhaging its humanism by incarcerating Palestinians in walled enclaves. “We have to keep asking how genocide happened, to stop it happening again,” said Aranyi, who as a Hungarian partisan had broken the locks of rail carriages carrying Jews to concentration camps. “Elsewhere. And here.” Each year some 100,000 soldiers pass through the halls of the Yad Vashem, carrying their guns. On the news, Netanyahu rehearses his scare-mongering polemic that each generation produces a new exterminator of the Jews, and the military is the guarantor of the Jewish nation’s survival. At the entrance to his refurbished office on the border with Gaza, Israel’s Southern Division Commander has hung two photos, one “Warsaw ghetto boy” and another of a shower of phosphorus munitions exploding over Gaza City.
A host of Israeli pedagogues have appealed for a reappraisal of Israel’s Holocaust syllabus, in hopes of promoting universal values of anti-racism, tolerance, and humanism over the particularist narrative of self-reliance at any cost. All people have the potential for genocide, says Yehuda Bauer, Israel’s preeminent Holocaust historian, who is now in his nineties. He worries that Netanyahu’s government “misuses and abuses” the Holocaust. By way of example, he notes how Netanyahu used the threat to Jewish demographic superiority to intern “the external threat” of asylum seekers. Though they are fleeing genocide in southern Sudan or Eritrea, whose regime has one of the world’s worst human rights records, Netanyahu commits them to “modern concentration camps” in the desert, he protests. But even the country’s liberal press seem to have tired of his diatribes, Bauer complains. “We have become a nation of bystanders.”
At Israel’s second, smaller Holocaust museum, the Ghetto Fighters’ House, the curators also worry about how the Holocaust curriculum is contributing to the rising nationalist tide, which they consider a core ingredient of genocide, and have opened the Center for Humanistic Education in the hope of offering a remedy. Its tally of Second World War fatalities lists the seven million German dead above the six million Jews. While Yad Vashem has closed down its program for Arab students, the center offers joint courses for Arab and Jewish students, often—given Israel’s segregated education system—meeting for the first time. Rather than teach the Holocaust as “Jewish family history,” they examine how racism overran Nazi Germany and scrutinize their own society for modern methods of social exclusion. Across a black wall, white letters float upward to form the names of the 4,800 villages destroyed in the Holocaust, before separating and dissolving again. In the darkness the facilitator encourages the students to tell the stories of their grandparents who might also have lost their villages. “My grandmother fled Romania and rebuilt her life in Israel,” one student says. “I’ve never met my grandmother,” says another. “She was expelled in 1948 to Lebanon, aged four. We speak sometimes on Skype.”
I ask the curators whether they might display the names of the 450 Arab villages lost after Israel’s creation alongside those of Jewish villages in Eastern Europe, or erect a plaque to the Palestinian village of Samaria, on whose ruins the museum was built. They say they are strapped for funds, and worry that they could be deemed criminals under legislation banning the use of public funds to remember the Nakba, which was pushed through the Knesset by Netanyahu’s government. The program already attracts three times as many Arab teenagers as Jews, and the local authorities are threatening to scrap it. “The Arabs want to engage with the country’s past. For the Jews it is easier not to know,” one of the supervisors tells me. “I don’t want to feel perpetually accused,” one of his Jewish students protested.
Two months after Aranyi ended the Ghetto Fighters’ House commemoration, Netanyahu unleashed Israel’s worst devastation of Palestine since 1948. For 50 days Gaza was a target bank. Some 2,200 people were killed, the oldest aged 92 and the youngest four days old. Extended families died in a single bombardment. Even the country’s liberal newspaper, Haaretz, which in normal times might have held the government to account, joined the war effort. News bulletins on Channel 10, supposedly the most critical of Israel’s television networks, reported the terror campaign Gaza had waged against Israel with its rockets, which as on most days inflicted no casualty, alongside coverage of buxom girls sunbathing on tanks. There was no mention of the devastation in Gaza. Banners hung from balconies enjoining Israelis to “hug a Golani,” the name of an elite infantry brigade on the front line. Daniella Weiss, a popular radio presenter, silenced a rare Palestinian interviewee who spoke of scores of children killed by their artillery in Shujaiyia, a Gaza suburb where he lived. “We don’t know the real numbers,” she insisted.
Unable to rely on the media to broadcast the Palestinian death toll, an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, commissioned an advertisement. The broadcasting authority banned it. Unaware of the destruction Israel had inflicted, a survey reported that 45 percent of Israeli Jews felt Netanyahu had used too little firepower on Gaza; only 6 percent thought he had used too much.
At an audience of American immigrants at a synagogue in Beit Shemesh, midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Moshe Feiglin, the Likud firebrand who walked proprietarily on the steps of the Dome of Rock, proposed killing tens of thousands of Hamas members and expelling Gaza’s 1.8 million people “in accordance with humanitarian standards.” Retired American doctors, army officers, and judges munched on carrot sticks and pretzels and nodded. “Just nuke ’em,” said a young American woman.
In different times, Israel’s Western allies might have held it in check. But preoccupied with turmoil elsewhere in the region, both they and Israel’s erstwhile Arab foes were too busy on other fronts. So commonplace and large was the population displacement and sectarian cleansing elsewhere in the region that Israel’s six decades of dispossession of Palestinians appeared, if not paltry, a regional norm. The 2014 Gaza offensive, its most punitive to date, taught Netanhayu that he could act with effective impunity. European powers wrung their hands, but shied from taking action.
For all its insistence on its differences, Israel was part of the club of sectarian Middle East states in which one millet suppressed and bullied another in order to reign supreme. It called itself a democracy but so gerrymandered the borders and restricted access to citizenship that though it ruled over a non-Jewish majority, Jews comprised 90 percent of its parliamentarians.