Excuse the metaphor, but the army is being very much of a selfish girl right now, I would say. Unsure of whether "she" really needs me right now based off of her needs and my advanced age (in military terms). "She" is indecisive and is making me sweat it. But the good news is that this old guy has a meeting with the head honcho at the recruitment center to see if some decision can be made, rather than keeping me up in the air. Despite the ambiguity of my future, I decided that I'd return to Israel to attend some work interviews (in high-tech, project management, and non-profit) and keep on trucking in Israel. I still love the place and know that even if I do end up serving in the army, it will be later this year. I want to continue building a life, speaking Hebrew, learning Arabic, meeting people and travelling around this fascinating country.
So, after a day of travelling, I arrived in Jerusalem to get acclimated and ready for some upcoming interviews. I just so happened to choose a hotel right outside of the Damascus gate in the Old City of Jerusalem. The owner, who showed me around the hotel and my room, is a dishonest and seemingly conniving arab guy who, according to tripadvisor.com, has a history of fuzzy math, hugely inflated currency conversion rates, and a "violent attitude". In keeping with the reviews, he did try to screw me over with a 30% premium on the room that I had booked on a website; however, I held his reputation captive by threatening to write an honest review of the place on various travel review websites. He begrudgingly relented and we went our separate ways.
Anyway, at about 5 in the afternoon, a procession of religious Zionist Jews was beginning to swell into a relatively small square directly below my balcony. These guys were celebrating "Jerusalem Day" - the commemoration and celebration of the retaking of Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967. As the numbers grew, so did the decible level of their chants - "HaTikva" and "Am Israeli Chai", among others. As I was sitting on my balcony, taking all of this in, I started to notice that every now a group of teenaged boys would walk up to the barricades and police tape separating the square from the hotel area - a completely Palestinian neighborhood - and would start taunting the bystander Palestinians by yelling racial epitaphs toward them and boasting of Israel's reconquest of Jerusalem. The Arabs were standing and observing the spectacle while cleaning up their shop areas for the end of the day; and I was fascinated that this palpable tension that I had always noticed when in Jerusalem was now tangible and brewing before my eyes.After a hundred or so more Israeli teens ran over to the gathering along the barricade, carrying Israeli flags, some Palestinians started to lined up on the other side, making the few police officers noticeably nervous. I went downstairs to get a picture of this from behind the Palestinians:
It looked to be dying down after 5 minutes of this face off, and so I went up to my room to try to take a nap. I was about to knock off for a bit when I heard some more yelling and commotion. Stepping toward the window that leads to my balcony, I saw an Arab guy launch a huge piece of wood, while another threw some sort of heavy metal object at a cop trying to quell the situation. As quickly as that had started, a bunch of elite SWAT style commandos ran in and started shooting a few rubber bullets at the Arabs. The Jews' reaction to this was, for some reason, to throw rocks at the Arabs and at the hotel building. A few rocks hit my balcony and came very close to hitting my window. Check out the video:
Although the celebrations are merited in my mind, as I believe that Jerusalem, in some capacity or another, should be an integral part of Israel proper, this celebration and the quality of people that it attracted truly exposed the warts in Israeli society. I know I may sound naive when I say that people should really make a concerted effort to co-exist in Jerusalem and in Israel in general; but I feel that the root of this type of discrimination and cycle of hate comes from a deceivingly small number of people on each side of the conflict, and it is at these nationalistic gatherings (Jerusalem Day and Nakba Day, for example) that these diminutive groups are exposed. While it is a sorry spectacle to witness, I can find solace in the fact that maybe since these people are exposed as who they are, the rest of society can ostensibly learn from their poor example of egalitarianism and humanity.
No matter what the moral is of these clashes, it was an interesting thing to come back to. And I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but I really did feel like I came back to a war zone for a bit.
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