Racist chants mar relatively calm J’lem flag march amid minor clashes
Thousands participate in rescheduled event • 17 Palestinians arrested
Police arrested 17 Palestinians in east Jerusalem during clashes Tuesday evening amid high tensions surrounding the Jerusalem flag march.
About 33 Palestinians were injured in the disturbances, Palestinian media reported.
Dozens of Palestinians rioted in streets close to the march’s route and threw stones at police officers, injuring two, the police said.
Police dispersed Palestinians in and around the Old City ahead of the march.
The flag march was supposed to take place on Jerusalem Day in May but was postponed due to Operation Guardian of the Walls.
Palestinians clashed with security forces in the area in front of Damascus Gate about two hours before the marchers arrived, videos from the scene that circulated on social media showed.
Some 2,000 police officers and Border Police officers were deployed throughout the Old City on Tuesday, and metal barriers were erected to prevent Palestinians from reaching the Damascus Gate area.
Israeli security forces were deployed on the Temple Mount. At least two Palestinians were arrested, and four others were removed from the Temple Mount, Palestinian media reported.
Thousands of right-wing marchers participated in the Jerusalem flag march in high spirits but under heavy police protection Tuesday evening. The event had raised concerns of renewed violence with Hamas and tensions with Arab-Israelis.
Buses brought marchers from at least 29 locations, including settlements in Judea and Samaria, Beersheba, Beit She’an, Petah Tikva, Bat Yam and elsewhere.
The number of participants was far smaller than in previous years, and the march was relatively peaceful. The marchers chanted songs such as “Am Yisrael Chai,” “The nation of Israel is not afraid” and similar refrains.
However, racist chants of “Death to Arabs” and nationalistic chants were shouted by some of the marchers. In one incident outside Damascus Gate, a marcher and an east Jerusalem Arab resident became embroiled in a brief spat.
On the way down from the city center to Damascus Gate, at least two small groups of marchers shouted various nationalistic slogans and songs at Palestinian
east Jerusalem residents on the other side of police barriers.
Some marchers held posters featuring Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and called him “a liar,” while others chanted, “Bennett is a traitor.”
The march gathered on Hanevi’im Street, where a band played Jewish music and the attendees danced.
The march then set off down Sultan Suleiman Street on its way to Damascus Gate, where participants staged the traditional flag dances outside the landmark, before continuing outside the walls of the Old City to Jaffa Gate.
In a change of plans, men were directed through the Jewish Quarter, having originally been set to go through the Arab market, and women were sent through the market instead.
Several far-right leaders were present at the event, including Religious Zionist Party MK Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was warmly greeted and held aloft on the shoulders of those dancing at Damascus Gate.
Religious Zionist Party leader Bezalel Smotrich and his party colleague MK Orit Struck also attended.
“This march is very important,” Struck said. “It shows that the Jewish people control Jerusalem, not Hamas.”
Far-right political activist Bentzi Gopstein, director of Lehava, an Israeli Jewish anti-assimilation organization, was also present, together with far-right activist Baruch Marzel.
A spokesman for the Im Tirtzu organization, one of the organizers of the march, rejected claims that the march was a provocation.
“It’s not a provocation in a democratic country for citizens to wave their national flag in their capital,” the spokesman said.
“We cannot let Hamas dictate to us what is provocation and what’s not, and what is moral and what is not,” the spokesman said. “We are celebrating the reunification and liberation of Jerusalem, including the whole city. To suggest we can only walk through parts of the city is admitting we don’t have sovereignty over the city.”
Daniel Seidemann, a longtime activist for Palestinian rights in east Jerusalem, said he and others had worked to have the march rerouted through the Armenian and Jewish Quarters of the Old City, where it would not arouse any anger, but had failed.
“There were routes that were equally Jerusalem, equally Old City, equally convenient, which
could have been taken without having to deploy the Iron Dome,” he said.
“There is nothing sacred about Damascus Gate, but it is important to the Palestinians,” he added. “Provocation is a feature [of the march], not a bug.”
Just before the march began, Ra’am (United Arab List) Party leader Mansour Abbas condemned the event, calling it “an unbridled provocation whose purpose is shouting, hate, incitement to violence and an attempt to inflame the region for political purposes.”
Abbas said Public Security Minister Omer Barlev (Labor) and the police should have canceled the event.
“There is no doubt that the goal of the march organizers was to challenge the new government and exhaust it with a series of explosive incidents in the coming period and set us back with unnecessary escalations that will endanger lives,” he said.
Ben-Gvir said Bennett was “marching with the leftist government” instead of in the flag parade.
“This is the face of the Bennett government,” he said. “The base of their coalition opposes the flag parade in Jerusalem and calls it a provocation. Instead of Naftali Bennett marching with us, he is marching with an extreme leftwing government. We will not fold in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people.”
Given its structure, the Islamic Republic in Iran is ostensibly a semi-democratic government. It is true that the regime has a lifelong Supreme Leader, but on the other hand it also boasts a Montesquieu-esque separation of powers, and each of the three branches of the government seem to exercise a degree of independence in deliberation and action. Most importantly, the regime regularly holds elections in which people vote for apparently different candidates.
But the truth is that the Islamic Republic is one of the most authoritarian regimes in human history. Why, then, in spite of all these colorful elections, the Islamic Republic is an inherently authoritarian regime? The answer is that the regime is consciously taking advantage of a democratic process to reproduce authoritarianism.
From the very beginning of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the leaders of the regime constituted the function of elections in Iran as a demonstration of public support for the political interests of a particular class.
Accordingly, unlike the free world, elections in Iran are not intended to lead to a change of leadership, but to the bolstering of the ruling class.
To maintain the illusion of elections, the regime engineers the process in three main stages and many more sub-phases. 1) The first stage is the Guardian Council, where only the candidates endorsed by the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards are approved. 2) The second stage is government and media propaganda in the domestic and international scene, showcasing the elections as free, fair, competitive and influential in the affairs of the nation. 3) The third stage is vote-rigging, in which the designated candidate of the Supreme Leader and the IRGC is announced as having received the highest vote.
Whoever comes out of the regime’s ballot box, their main task is to advance the interests of those in power, which almost always conflicts with the interests of the people outside of power. As such, elections in Iran at best do not change the situation, and under normal circumstances only worsen the conditions. Elections, ideally, are supposed to ensure continuity of change – not maintenance of the status quo.
However, there is no circulation of power in Iran. The Islamic Republic is a totalitarian oligarchy ruled by two Islamist clerical and military components that are almost inseparably intertwined. By instituting an authoritarian constitution and taking over almost all the financial resources and coercive forces of the nation, these two have established themselves in key positions of power for life.
There is no way that popular participation in the regime’s closed circle of elections can bring about any meaningful change in Iran. The Supreme Leader honestly and explicitly maintains that “every single vote cast in the ballot box is in effect a vote for the principle of the Islamic government and shows that people have complete trust in the system.” In fact, Khamenei counts so much on popular participation to promote the legitimacy of his regime that he recently damned absenteeism as a “grave sin” and declared casting blank ballots “haram,” which means forbidden by religion.
As such, betting everything on an extremely shaky nuclear deal with the top state sponsor of terrorism and hoping that whatever comes out of its Pandora’s box of elections will be in our best interest does not bode well at all. Not to mention that we have already been down that path; not once, but quite a couple of times. Trying – and repeatedly failing – in that endeavor for two decades has only pushed Iran further and further away from the West, into the arms of the more dangerous Oriental despots in Russia and China. When the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei manages to conjure one of his minions out of the ballot box in a week, the circle of his “Look to the East” policy will become complete.
The path to peace and stability in the Middle East passes not through but across the apocalyptic alliance of the Ayatollahs and the Guards. That is something Western leaders need to keep in mind when they soon go back to Vienna to resuscitate the disastrous nuclear deal and once more grant legitimacy to the Islamofascist regime in Iran.