Ira Glunts writes:
Palestinians have long claimed that their freedom of expression and
desire to celebrate their culture has been brutally suppressed by the
Israelis. Well, the Israeli police, according to this report in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, broke up several events celebrating Arab cultural heritage in East Jerusalem earlier today, kicking off the Al Quds Capital of Culture
Festival.
The Israel Defense Forces radio web site reports that a large number of municipal police and Israeli Army Border Guards have been deployed in East Jerusalem and in the surrounding villages to stop “any event related to the festival from taking place.”
According to the Palestinian news agency Ma’an, dozens of soldiers broke into a planning meeting for the festival on Thursday night at the Christmas Hotel in East Jerusalem. The soldiers harassed the participants, seized documents and a laptop.
The Arab Cultural Capital event is a yearly cultural celebration which showcases the arts. Last year the festival took place in Damascus, Syria. This year's Jerusalem celebration will include events in Gaza, Nazareth and Ramallah and Lebanon, in order to include Palestinian refugees. Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to participate in the opening ceremony which will be televised from his office in Ramallah.
The Palestinian Authority, which organized the festival, also had plans to fly a paper glider painted with the colors
of the Palestinian flag over the walls of the Old City. The Israelis
consider this to be a demonstration of Palestinian sovereignty in
Jerusalem, which is illegal. Today they arrested Palestinians who were releasing balloons in a mother's day celebration. The "Palestinian governor of Jerusalem" escaped arrest, according to that report!
This is typical of the Israelis, but American Jews do not know a lot about it. During Oslo the Israelis kept pulling down the Palestinian flag at their "unofficial" headquarters at the Orient House in East Jerusalem. There was a movie a few years ago that had a scene of a balloon with Arafat's face painted on it floating over Jerusalem. It was hilarious. Maybe the glider is life imitating art.
The larger issue: Ma'an News is reporting on Palestinian fears that Israel is trying to destroy Arab cultural identity. This program is not going over well in the Arab world. The National out of Abu Dhabi writes:
Mr [Yasser] Qous, an Old City resident
who has been arrested 12 times since he was a teenager, was not
surprised that Israel would seek to prevent the cultural events from
taking place.
“I think we [Palestinians] need to realise that we
have lost the military and political battles. What is left now is the
cultural battle. The Israelis realise this and we must, too, before it
is too late, before the multilayered history of Jerusalem is buried by
an Israeli sovereignty that recognises and explores only Jewish
history.”
