Palestinians in Israel are protesting the war in Gaza
Unusual Anti-War Demonstration in the Galilee: An Israeli-Palestine, Non-Extremist, and Palestinian Solidarity
Legal aid groups say that following the October 7 attack, Israel imposed a restriction on freedom of expression for all, including Jews, and for Palestinians. While Israelis have protested weekly to demand the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bring home hostages — or more recently to call for early elections — permits for anti-war protests have been harder to come by.
That’s why it was such an unusual sight, one recent Saturday afternoon, when hundreds of people marched through the Arab town of Deir Hanna, in Israel’s Galilee, loudly protesting the Gaza war.
The flag of Palestine was banned by police because it had a red triangle. But like many, 25-year-old Haj Amir defiantly hoisted one over his shoulder.
The march was for an annual event called Land Day, centered in the Galilee but marked more broadly every March 30, to commemorate Palestinian opposition to Israeli expropriation of Arab land. The fighting in Gaza lasted six months, and this year it was also about opposing it.
“We have no fear of reprisals for speaking out”, said Nagm, who brought her four young children. Wearing a headscarf and large, stylish sunglasses, she said it was her first chance to raise her voice against the war. “We are not extremists. We want peace, and we want to express ourselves.”
Palestinians make up 20% of Israel’s population, but have long felt treated like second-class citizens due to lack of job opportunities, disproportionate poverty and under-investment in Arab communities. Many grieve the suffering in Gaza, but expressing solidarity with Palestinians there can be perilous.
Madi says one of her sisters, a university student, has been under disciplinary review for months after posting a poem on social media. It was written by a Palestinian national poet and he mentioned a martyr.
She says another sister switched her online profile to a black image, in a sign of mourning over Gaza, but a work colleague messaged her that it was inappropriate and she should change it.
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“I think [Jewish Israelis] don’t feel safe,” Madi says. They support the war, she believes, because “they think only war and violence will protect them and their children.”
Legal aid lawyers fought for months, taking cases all the way to Israel’s Supreme Court and winning permits for recent anti-war demonstrations.
“It’s shifting, but it’s still a very grim picture from where I’m standing,” says Noa Sattath, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
Some protest permits for Palestinian citizens have also had “very limited and strict conditions,” says Hassan Jabareen, general director of the human rights organization Adalah. Instead of being allowed to hold a protest in the center of a town, organizers were forced to use an out-of-the-way soccer field.
In March, a Palestinian professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem was suspended after suggesting that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and expressing doubts over the extent of alleged sexual assaults by Hamas during its Oct. 7 attack. The university reinstated her, saying she had “clarified” some of the remarks.
Shahd Bishara stopped speaking in public in the first week of the war. Tensions over an earlier conflict with Hamas in 2021 led to street violence between Israeli Jews and Arabs, and Bishara worried it would happen again. “I was scared that I would be attacked somehow,” she says.
That did not happen. A Palestinian citizen of Israel, created a podcasts to allow people to speak out after it was stressed out last fall. “It was called ‘We will not be silent,'” she says. “He gave me a fake name.”
The work she did with Standing Together, a group of Jewish andPalestinian citizens of Israel, has given her confidence. They have held solidarity meetings with Arabs and Jews to find common ground, and have set up a hotline and financial aid for Palestinian citizens who faced harassment. More recently, the group has organized several anti-war rallies.
“To show that we demand a cease-fire agreement, which is the only way that will bring the Israeli hostages back home,” Bishara says. “And second of all, to prevent the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”
At a Tel Aviv cafe, she suddenly freezes mid-sentence after spotting a man in a t-shirt and shorts with a large gun on his hip. Israel loosened its gun laws after the Hamas attack. He gave out 100,000 new gun licenses. It was reported in an Israeli newspaper that there was no Arab community or town resident among those eligible.
Bishara says it’s painful to see the destruction in Gaza and the more than 33,000 Palestinians killed. But she says Israeli media doesn’t show that. She believes that Jews in Israel don’t see what the international society sees in media, and that there is a bubble.
He says that we need to stand up to the extremists in order to keep the status quo, and not allow them to damage it.
He said that this is the dream of the Hamas leader in Gaza. This must not happen. If a war starts in the north, it is our duty to let the Israeli military concentrate on Gaza. Events on the Temple Mount could cause a wide-scale war on a religious basis. And this is very dangerous”
The collapse of the peace process has also brought about a dominance of religious nationalism on both the Israeli and Palestinian side, with the fight to have control over the holy sites at the root of it.
But it’s more than a cynical mobilization of religious symbols, according to Tzidkiyahu. The issue of the Al-Aqsa Mosque has played a major role in Israeli national security for decades.
The name of the attack is significant as Hamas tried to make clear that it was fighting for the whole Muslim world and not just for Palestinians.
JERUSALEM The large green doors at the mosque at Al-Aqsa compound close at 7 a.m. every day, as the Palestinian worshippers exit the building. The Israeli police are in positions in front of the mosque and around the Dome of the Rock prior to the arrival of Israeli Jews.
Yehuda Glick is the leader of the movement that wants Jewish prayer at the compound. The U.S.-born rabbi and right-wing former Israeli lawmaker comes in with a group. They stopped at the stairs leading to the dome of the rock to pray.
The Dome of the Rock is considered one of the holiest sites in Islam and many Jews want to build a third temple there.
“This is what we are here for: to make sure this is a house of prayer for all nations. And when I come here, we always pray, that’s what we do here,” Glick tells NPR.
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Palestinian Aida al-Sidawi lives blocks away from the mosque in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City and has been banned from going to the mosque for six months.
“Perhaps because when settlers come to Al-Aqsa, I stand close and watch them, sometimes I say ‘Allahu akbar!’ Sidawi says God is great if he sees them singing, dancing or praying.
She is part of a group of mostly old Palestinian women that consider themselves as protectors of the mosque, especially during the times when Jews are expected to visit.
“Al-Aqsa is the key to peace and the key to war. “If they continue to keep their hands off Al- Aqsa, everything will quiet down, just the way it used to be,” Sidawi says.
After Israel began its occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, the country agreed to continue an arrangement aimed at maintaining religious balance: Jews would pray at the Western Wall and Muslims would pray at the Al-Aqsa plateau. Non-Muslims can visit Al-Aqsa at certain hours, but they can’t pray there.
The official policy of the Israeli government is that. There has been a steady challenge to the status quo in recent years, as the far-right has taken important positions in the government.
Itamar Ben-Ghor was later named national security minister and overseer of the police. Ben-Gvir’s wife is a leader in the Temple Mount movement, and she advocates for the Temple Mount to be strictly Jewish.
“Tell me, 25-30 years ago, did we have any issues here? No,” Sidawi says. There were no break-ins. By Israeli Jews. The police blocked the settlers from entering when they tried to pray.
Analysts say Israeli police, which used to have a moderating presence on the site, now mainly protect Jews who go there to pray. They say the officers often restrict Palestinian and Muslim access arbitrarily, especially younger men — some of whom have clashed with police at the site.
In recent years, when Ramadan and the Jewish holiday of Passover overlapped, police raids on Al-Aqsa sparked further conflict, with militants in Gaza and Lebanon firing rockets at Israel.
“On a daily basis, Israel violates the status quo by any interpretation,” says Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli attorney and expert on Jerusalem. There are displays of Israeli triumphalism on the Temple Mount.
The Beyadenu group, which lobbies for Jewish sovereignty at the Temple Mount, has been under pressure not to go to the Temple Mount because of the war in Gaza, according to Abe Truitt.
“There are only Muslim shrines and no dedication to the Jewish shrines underneath them. I would say that if you look at it in current terms, there is no balance,” Truitt says.
Source: Tension at Al-Aqsa Mosque is deepening with each day of the Israel-Hamas war
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For many young Palestinians, Ramadan — which began March 11 and ends this week — was the first time in nearly six months that they were allowed to enter Al-Aqsa.
Mickey Levy, a Knesset member for the centrist party, said that the Temple Mount is an “exploding barrel of the world” and that it is appropriate to handle it carefully. It is right that people who have a lot of experience make the decisions, not a minister or another who wants to set the area on fire.
While the sun is setting, many Muslims gather at the compound to buy dates, chickpeas, and bread from vendors in Old City and then break their fast on one of the many lawns around the Dome of the Rock. Children are running around playing sports.
A group of three young women are taking selfies with the Dome of the Rock in the background. They speak on the condition that NPR use their first names only, out of fear of Israeli police.
“This is my home and this is my paradise. We love the atmosphere here, even with the difficulties Israel places in front of us, we come as much as we can. She took a long bus ride from her home in Israel to get here.
Ameera is from East Jerusalem and she says that they fear something will happen in this place. “Of course, we come here to pray, but also to be in peace and comfort and be together, because these are things we don’t have outside.”
The arena is full of young men and women, many from inside Israel who are making a point of being here. Many Palestinians say Al-Aqsa is the single most critical issue in their lives.
“You get sad because you can’t go to Al-Aqsa and you think of why, and you get sadder for your brothers and sisters in Gaza,” says Bisan. Over the last few years, we’ve seen settlers go in and do whatever they want while we are banned. It’s really painful.”
In 1994, in the West Bank city of Hebron, following years of tensions between Jewish settlers and Muslims over the Ibrahimi Mosque, also known as the Cave of the Patriarchs, American-Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein opened fire at Muslims who were praying there, killing 29 people.
“Goldstein was a Temple Mount activist and he had a direct relation with the holy sites,” says Eran Tzidkiyahu, a scholar at Hebrew University who has an expertise in the Jewish-Muslim struggle over the holy sites. The war is in the background, and our minister of national security is a big fan of the author, since he has a poster on his wall.
Analysts think that most Israelis don’t take the Temple Mount movement seriously and look at it as a fringe group.
