Men dance the "Flag Dance" in

Jerusalem during the 2011 celebration.

a concert in Sachar Park organized for
Yom haStudent (Student Day), an annual
event to allow Israeli students to relax and
decompress. My students enjoyed them-
selves, staying long after midnight.
The next morning, I took them to Yad
Vashem, the museum and memorial for the
Holocaust, allowing us to reflect on the role
the Holocaust continues to play in the life
of Israelis.
I had planned free time for the students
that afternoon. My plan for myself was
to visit the Middle East Book Store at the
American Colony Hotel. I fantasized sitting
in the beautiful garden, drinking a glass of
cold Taybeh beer. Taybeh, recently featured
on 60 Minutes, is the last Palestinian village
in the West Bank whose entire population
is Christian. Located 35 kilometers north of
Jerusalem, it is the first microbrewery in the
Palestinian territories. By drinking Taybeh
beer, I reasoned, I not only enjoy good
beer, but I also help the lagging Palestinian
economy.

I was able to observe reactions to the
White Soldier. A man wearing a T-shirt
with the slogan Kahana Zadak (Kahana
was Right), referring to Rabbi Meir Kahane,
the far-right leader who preached for the
transfer of Arabs from Israel and who was
assassinated in 1990, shouted at Braun,
"If you are a soldier, go kill Arabs!" and
"Nakba, Harta," ("The Nakba is BS"), refer-
ring to the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe,
the Palestinian term for the tragedy that
befell them between 1947-49, with the
establishment of Israel. Hundreds of vil-
lages were destroyed and an estimated
700,000 people were deported or fled and
not permitted to return.
Other people around the White Soldier
just looked at him.
I was unable to talk with Braun while
he was "on patrol:' as he refers to his per-
formance; however, when I contacted him
later, he told me that day had been the first
time he had undertaken his performance
on Jerusalem Day, using the opportunity
to patrol different sites on the Green Line
as it passes through Jerusalem. He ended
his patrol by the border with the former
Jordanian neighborhood of Musrara
(Morasha in Hebrew).
It was in Musrara, on Nov. 30, 1948, that
Moshe Dayan, commander of the Israeli
army in Jerusalem, and Col. Abdallah a-Tal,
commander of the Jordanian Army, drew
a temporary border that, in 1949, became
permanent by Armistice Agreement. Dayan
used green ink to draw the Israeli line of
the border, hence the name, the Green Line.
My encounter with the White Soldier
reminded me of the soldiers I used to see
in Jerusalem pre-1967, when Jerusalem
was small, romantic and mysterious, on the
frontier I loved.

Time To Observe
While on the minibus on the way to east
Jerusalem, I suddenly changed my mind.
I asked our driver to drop me close to
Madrechov, the pedestrian mall in down-
town Jerusalem. My tired students went
back to the hotel.
I thought the usually bustling Madrechov
would be a good place to take my time and
explore. Surprisingly, when I arrived around
4 p.m. on Jerusalem Day, very few people
were around.
Disappointed, I prepared to return to our
hotel when I noticed an unusual "soldier"
marching toward me. It was the Jerusalem
performance artist Yuda Braun, dressed in
his iconic White Soldier uniform. His mis-
sion is to re-awaken awareness of the Green
Line.
I recognized the White Soldier from
Braun's website (www.whitesoldier.com ),
which I had drawn on in preparing the stu-
dents to understand the ways Israelis con-
test and protest national ideology regarding
the occupation. Braun, born in Canada,
grew up in a settlement in the West Bank,
and like me, is conflicted about the future
of Israel as a democratic state.

Encountering The Crowd
Around 5 p.m., I left Madrechov and
started walking toward our hotel in east
Jerusalem. The main artery of downtown
Jerusalem was still under construction for
the light train so no cars or buses were on
the road. I walked on Jaffa Road and, when
close to Safra Square where the Jerusalem
Municipality is located, I saw several sepa-
rated circles of male and female dancers.
I began to feel that by visiting Madrechov,
encountering the White Soldier and watch-
ing the dancing circles, I was actually
participating in Jerusalem Day — on my
own terms. But my participation was just
beginning.
Close to Jaffa Gate, I turned ont
tan
Suleiman Road, the "main drag" towar
downtown east Jerusalem. There in front of
me, toward the Damascus Gate, appeared a
huge group; in fact, thousands of marching
and singing women.
I soon realized I was in the midst of the
Rikud Degalim, the "Flag Dance?'
Organized and attended by ultra-nation-
alist religious Jews, the Rikud Degalim
procession through the -streets of Jerusalem
to the Western Wall is, for them, a religious

Last year's aggression during the celebration remains haunting.

0

n May 20, while my friends and
family celebrate Jerusalem, "City
of Peace in Ann Arbor, I will be in
Jerusalem, leading a study tour sponsored
by Wayne State University's study abroad
program for WSU and University
of Michigan students
While planning this year's
18-day itinerary, I reflected on
my experiences last year.
I was in Jerusalem on June 1,
2011, leading a group of six stu-
dents and faculty on a "Middle
East Experience: Study Tour
to Israel and the West Bank" I
hadn't planned for my students
to participate in celebrating Yom
Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day).
However, plans or no plans, the
city had a way of drawing me in.
Established after the 1967 War, when
Israel captured east Jerusalem and the
Old City from Jordan and annexed them
to Israel, Yom Yerushalayim is a national
holiday celebrating the reunification of
Jerusalem as the sovereign capital of Israel.
I have a long and conflicted relationship
with Jerusalem. I was a student at Hebrew
University during the 1967 War and was
among the thousands of Israelis who
rushed to the Western Wall just days after
the war ended, on Shavuot, when it was first
opened to the public.
It was an exciting and euphoric time full
of hope for peace, for co-existence among
Jews and Palestinians in Jerusalem. I was
among a small group of Israeli and foreign
students from the university, Jews and
Arabs, who wanted to show we could live
together in Jerusalem.
We rented rooms in Hotel Petra, close
to Jaffa Gate, and lived there for several
months. However, while I felt secure in
the Old City, I was warned by the Israeli
Border Patrol that it was too dangerous for
an Israeli woman to live there. I left disap-
pointed and frustrated.
After several years in the United States
pursuing my Ph.D., I returned to Jerusalem
in 1979 to be curator of ethnography at the
Israel Museum. The settlements around
Jerusalem were gaining territory and popu-
larity, aided by the Israeli government's

incentives for buying apartments in Ma'ale
Adumim ("Red Ascent"), nine kilometers
from Jerusalem.
I considered this, but could not bring
myself to live beyond the Green Line, the
pre-1967 borders. Instead, I rent-
ed a small house in Mazkeret
Moshe, a picturesque west
Jerusalem neighborhood built
in 1882 near Machaneh Yehuda
market.
This was my beloved
Jerusalem home for the next
several years. My work was
exciting; I especially loved doing
fieldwork among Palestinians in
the West Bank and Gaza, collect-
ing costumes and folk art for the
Israel Museum.
Though I left Jerusalem 25
years ago to pursue an academic career, I
return often. Every visit is emotional and
heartbreaking.

Far From United
By the time Jerusalem Day 2011 arrived,
my students and I already had been in
Jerusalem for more than a week, staying at
the Victoria Hotel in east Jerusalem. From
here, we witnessed directly the myriad ways
Jerusalem is far from a "united" city.
I rarely saw Jewish Israelis in east
Jerusalem and did not see any collaboration
in business. In my favorite bookstore/cof-
fee shop on Bab el Zahara, the Educational
Book Store, a place always filled with tour-
ists, I didn't meet even one Israeli during
the two weeks I frequented the shop.
The intention of our tour was to visit
places and sites in Israel and the West
Bank central to understanding the conflict
between Jews and Palestinians. We visited
the village of Lifta, on the outskirts of
Jerusalem, the only abandoned yet mostly
intact Arab village in Israel, a symbol of the
destruction of the Palestinian community.
And we visited the east Jerusalem
Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah,
where we heard firsthand from Palestinian
residents about their struggle against being
displaced by new Israeli development.
For the eve of Jerusalem Day, May 31,
I had arranged for our students to attend

Jerusalem Day on page 30

May 17 • 2012

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