Tens of thousands of Jewish Israelis joined an annual nationalist march on Wednesday through the heart of Jerusalem to celebrate Israel’s 1967 capture of the city’s eastern half, with some chanting extremist slogans calling for violence against Arabs.
The rally, known as the Dance of the Flags or the Flag March, has long been a flashpoint for tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, but security forces were especially worried the event could spark violence this year because of the eight-month-long war between Israel and Hamas, and a steep rise in violence on the West Bank. The march winds through Jerusalem’s Old City toward the Western Wall, one of Judaism’s holiest sites.
Chanting, dancing and waving blue-and-white Israeli flags, the marchers made their way through the Old City’s Damascus Gate into largely Palestinian areas of Jerusalem’s Old City. The marchers banged on the shutters of shops closed by Palestinian owners who feared attacks and chanted slogans that included “may your village burn down” and a biblical verse tweaked to call for “revenge on Palestine.”
The Israeli police said they arrested 13 people “involved in various violent incidents” in the Old City. Some of the Israelis attending the march also hurled bottles and jeered at journalists from Arabic news outlets, who were watching the area from a designated platform. Officers later moved in after the bottle-throwing continued, detaining five more people, the police said.
When asked about the violence against journalists, Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, said: “Attacks of that nature should be prevented when possible. When they can’t be prevented they should be fully prosecuted, people should be held accountable under the law.”
The demonstrators included many younger Jewish Israelis, wearing clothing emblazoned with the slogans of the religious right’s high schools and military academies.
“We need vengeance,” said one marcher, Noam Goldstein, 15, a high school student from a small Israeli settlement near the Palestinian city of Hebron, in the West Bank. “They’ve committed attacks against us, so we need to be avenged. That doesn’t mean we need to kill every last one.”
But he added: “I want this entire land to be ours.”
After Israel’s 1948 founding, Jerusalem was divided in two: Israel controlled the city’s western neighborhoods, while Jordan controlled mostly-Palestinian East Jerusalem. During the 1967 Mideast war, Israel conquered East Jerusalem and later annexed it, a move not recognized by most countries, which still regard it as occupied territory.
Tensions inflamed by the yearly rally commemorating the takeover helped touch off an 11-day conflict in May 2021 between Israel and the Palestinian armed group Hamas. Hamas fired rockets at Jerusalem as the march was about to kick off, triggering rocket-alert sirens and sending thousands scrambling for cover.
On Wednesday, Shilo Tzoref, a 19-year-old student at a religious school, or yeshiva, sought to distance himself from some of the more violent chants. “The central idea is that Jerusalem belongs to us,” he said. “You shouldn’t hit every Arab you see in the street. It’s a holy day celebrating Jerusalem, it’s not about having a fistfight with our enemies.”
Earlier on Wednesday, some Jewish Israelis had ascended to the Noble Sanctuary, a hotly contested holy site known to Muslims as the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and to Jews as the Temple Mount. Under a longstanding arrangement at the sensitive holy site, non-Muslims are allowed to visit but only Muslims may pray.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister and a far-right political leader, also joined the procession. Mr. Ben-Gvir, who has long pushed for Jewish worship at the Noble Sanctuary, said that Jews had freely prayed on the Temple Mount in accordance with his orders to police, bucking the status quo.
“We’re here to tell them that Jerusalem is ours, Damascus Gate is ours, and the Temple Mount is ours,” Mr. Ben-Gvir told reporters at the march.
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