Thread by @YairWallach

1/ It's a grim day in Israel/Palestine and more grim days are to come. In this moment we need to find new pasts that would make different futures possible.
And we can start where it all started this time, in Arab Sheikh Jarrah and its Jewish connection.
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THREAD

2/ Sheikh Jarrah was a Palestinian upper class neighbourhood developed since the 1860s. It also housed the cave-tomb associated with ancient priest Shimon ha-Tsadik, Simeon the Just, a site of Jewish pilgrimage since the middle ages, purchased by the chief rabbi in 1876.

3/ The annual celebration of Simon ha-Tsadik took place in Lag ba-Omer (late April/early May). It was the largest Jewish public celebration in 19th-early 20th century Jerusalem, of Sephardim and Asheknazim, known in Arabic as "'Shathat al-yahudiyya", the festival of the Jews.

4/ Gad Frumkin (b. Jerusalem 1887) describes his Belarus-born father enjoying the festival smoking the hookah, while kids play on swings and watch the entertainers with dancing bears; eating "Hamla Malana" (grilled green chick peas), Ashkenazi egg cakes and Sephardic Burek.

5/ But it wasn't just Jews - the entire city came out to enjoy the spring festivities. Here in the memoirs of Wasif Jawyhariyya, Christian Palestinian Jerusalemite, an oud musician. "Everyone spent the entire day singing songs... I never wasted an opportunity to be among them".

6/ The modern history of Sheikh Jarrah has everything from coexistence to ethnic cleansing:
Shared celebration of a Jewish festival in which everyone joins; A Muslim neighbour sending his child to the Jewish school of Hakham Gershon (from Menachem Klein, Lives in Common);

7/ Jews forced out of the neighbourhood in 1948 as fighting escalates; Zionist forces occupy it driving Palestinians out (but only temporarily, before it was reoccupied by Jordanian forces);

8/ Palestinian attack on a Jewish supplies convoy to Mt Scopus hospital - killing 78 poeple, mostly medical staff. It was in retaliation to the Deir Yassin Massacre, which happened four days earlier, in which Irgun militants killed 107 villagers, mostly women and children.

9/ Recently: Jewish settlers, backed by the state, using pre-48 claims to drive out Palestinian refugee families, who cannot make similar claims regarding their own lost properties in Israel; weekly solidarity demonstrations of Israeli Jews and Palestinians against evictions.

10/ So no, what is happening now in Sheikh Jarrah is not about "ancient hatreds", or a clash of civilisations, or some unresolvable cultural differences. No, it's about a very modern conflict, the legacy of the 20th century. It's about power and inequality.

11/ So the question for us, which parts of Sheikh Jarrah's history we want to remember, and for what future? A future of Jewish settlement, dispossession, and discrimination, or a future of living together, as we try to redress the cumulative trauma and injustice.