Violent society<\/p>\n
Last year, hordes of far-right and ultra-Orthodox marchers flooded into the city, attacking Palestinians and chanting racist slogans. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz described the event as a state-sanctioned invitation for ultranationalist groups to enter the Muslim Quarter, smashing shop signs, breaking locks, battering metal doors with flagpoles and plastering racist stickers across large parts of the Old City.<\/p>\n
Weltmann said that the violence and anti-Palestinian rhetoric that characterised \u2018Jerusalem Day\u2019 had already been increasing in tandem with the growth of the far-right ultranationalist movement in Israel pre-2023.<\/p>\n
Fuelling much of the violence, Weltmann said, was a police force overseen by Ben-Gvir, whose responsibility for policing the events has often run counter to his\u00a0active participation in it.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Religious Zionism movement, which has drawn in much of Israel\u2019s far-right, has been steadily increasing since Israel\u2019s disengagement from Gaza in 2005<\/a>, when many in Israel\u2019s settler community first began to feel that the land captured in 1967 \u2013 Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights \u2013 may be under threat, analysts told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n They describe how the Religious Zionist trend has since been adopted and exploited\u00a0by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his avowedly pro-settler Likud party to wield power and, in the wake of the October 7 attack, underpin its genocidal war on Gaza, killing more than 72,000 Palestinians.<\/p>\n Under the watch of Netanyahu and his far-right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the number of illegal settlements<\/a> in the occupied West Bank has surged. The self-styled \u2018Hilltop Youth<\/a>\u2018, a loosely organised network of radical and violent young settlers, have also grown in both visibility and apparent impunity, while settler violence \u2013 which has long been a characteristic of Israel\u2019s presence in the occupied West Bank \u2013 has exploded<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a deeply confrontational element to the march,\u201d researcher on Jewish-Arab relations, Eram Tzidkiyahu, said, \u201cIt\u2019s not enough for us to celebrate our own victories. It\u2019s about celebrating our victories in the living rooms of the people who lost. Celebrating on your own just doesn\u2019t have the same baggage. It\u2019s about going and chanting from the prayer book, affirming that you are the chosen people, deliberately within the Muslim Quarter [of the Old City].\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe violence is inherent to that, fuelled by hormonal young men seeking confrontation and united in their absolute rejection of the \u2018other\u2019,\u201d he said. \u201cThis didn\u2019t start on October 7. It\u2019s deeply rooted into it.\u201d<\/p>\n Passive police<\/p>\n Israeli police have often done little to prevent attacks on Palestinians during the Flag March, and few Jewish Israelis have been punished for the many crimes committed.<\/p>\n \u201cThe so-called Flag March \u2026 has always been a violent event,\u201d said Ofer Cassif of the left-wing Hadash party, adding that it became more violent in the past few years, especially since October 7.<\/p>\n Cassif accused Netanyahu\u2019s \u201cfascist\u201d government of encouraging the violence.<\/p>\n The Israeli police, which Cassif describes as Ben-Gvir\u2019s \u201cprivate militia\u201d, did not stop \u201cthe violence, the lynchings, the destruction of shops, the aggression and attacks against Palestinians in the Old City, and throughout the city as a whole\u201d.<\/p>\n However, while it was easy for elements within Israeli society to regard the presence of Ben-Gvir, or the violence of the Flag March itself as somehow exceptional, to do so was to miss the point, observers said, particularly in light of the wars on Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s easy to dismiss Ben-Gvir as a clown,\u201d said Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at the Ir Amim activist group. \u201cMany Israeli liberals do this to feel better about themselves. It\u2019s easy. They don\u2019t want to recognise that this is part of Israeli society and, as long as they don\u2019t feel confident enough to say in public that, yes, Palestinians do have rights, they\u2019re part of that, too.<\/p>\n \u201cBen-Gvir is not a clown. He\u2019s Israel: 2026,\u201d\u00a0 Tatarsky continued. \u201cHe\u2019s part of a government and society that, despite wars with Iran and Lebanon, still prioritises the removal of Palestinians wherever they may be above everything else.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Uri Weltmann was tense. He\u2019s the national field director for Standing Together, an organisation of Jewish and Palestinian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114014,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[41,37,497,49,42,5144,498,7581],"class_list":{"0":"post-114013","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-benjamin-netanyahu","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-israel-palestine-conflict","11":"tag-middle-east","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-occupied-west-bank","14":"tag-palestine","15":"tag-the-far-right"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116574313788438196","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/AFP__20250526__487Q6VP__v1__HighRes__IsraelPalestinianConflictJerusalemDay-1748310111.jpg\")
Israeli Minister of National Security and far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir, surrounded by Israeli policemen, waves to other right-wing activists at last year\u2019s Flag March [Ahmad Gharabli\/AFP]<\/p>\n![\"Israeli](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ap_6a05bc8737d92-1778760839.jpg\")
Young Israelis gather outside Jerusalem\u2019s Old City walls before a march marking Israel\u2019s capture of East Jerusalem in 1967 [File: Ohad Zwigenberg\/AP]<\/p>\n