Special Report: Roots of Rage // FAI ONLINE

*Palestinians in Jerusalem protest over the threatened eviction of several Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, flying Palestinian and Hamas flags. 7 May (Reuters)*

Part 1: Iran, Sheikh Jarrah, and Al-Aqsa

Devon Phillips

When the latest round of conflict between Israel and Gaza broke out, I was eager to hear the opinion of my friend who spent years as part of the security infrastructure in Israel. Given only that information, it would be easy to make assumptions about his policy positions regarding the Palestinian territories, but you would most likely misjudge him. His opinions are hardly standard Zionist fare, and he defies political categories. He regularly says things like Israel should give up Jerusalem and has rather unorthodox (no pun intended) ideas about dividing up the Jewish state and a coming decisive conflict. (He doesn’t believe the Bible, but he believes the Bible’s prophetic account of the battle of Gog and Magog, a final war beginning with an attack from Israel’s north.) His political takes are never what you would expect and are guaranteed to make you think.

As a group of us sat down for coffee after a workout, I immediately turned to him and asked, “So, what do you think?” There was no need to be more specific than that—everyone knew what I was talking about: the unrest on the Temple Mount, the Al-Aqsa complex, Sheikh Jarrah, Jewish-Arab violence within Israel, rockets, airstrikes, Iran, Hezbollah, Netanyahu, Hamas, Biden—the list goes on and on.

Before he could answer, people at the table began to chime in, “Did you hear about this lynching in Lod? The child who died? The number of rockets? The Iranian militia in Syria?” Everyone at that table had been in the army, and most carried visible trauma, hyper-vigilant as news became grimmer and grimmer. My friend interrupted them to say: “We can look at this two ways. Either we take each incident on its own, and are consumed by heartbreak and despair, or we look at the larger picture.”

The more I considered his words, the more I knew that he was correct. We can play an endless game of one-upmanship: the number of dead civilians, or that hate crime, or who provoked whom, or what is a proportionate vs a disproportionate response, but until we consider the broader narrative that spans both history and the regional geopolitics, our understanding of the motivations and morality of Israel’s actions will inevitably be skewed.

Understanding what is happening right now in Gaza requires not just understanding the “Israel-Palestinian Conflict.” Just categorizing it as “Israel-Palestine” makes it sound like a conflict with just two sides, and one of those sides has the distinct upper hand. But for Israel, it has never been a conflict strictly between them and the Palestinian Territories, but a more significant regional battleground in which Israel is a speck in a sea of hostilities.

Matti Friedman, in his New York Times article, “There is No Israel-Palestinian Conflict,” explains it best: “To someone here, zooming in to frame our problem as an Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes as much sense as describing the ‘America-Italy conflict’ of 1944. American G.I.s were indeed dying in Italy that year, but an American instinctively knows that this can be understood only by seeing it as one small part of World War II. The actions of Americans in Italy can’t be explained without Japan, or without Germany, Russia, Britain and the numerous actors and sub-conflicts making up the larger war.”

So bearing the need for this broader narrative in mind, let’s dive into several of the root issues and contributing conflicts that lead to explosions across Israel and Gaza this last week.

Iran, Hamas, and Nuclear Talks

A map illustrating the comparative land area of the state of Israel (pictured in blue) as compared with member states of the Arab League (pictured in darker green) and member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (pictured in lighter green).

We can’t begin to zoom into the intra-Israel and Palestinian conflict without looking at the regional realities. Israel is in the middle of the Arab dominated Middle East and North Africa region and sits on .2 per cent of that land. In terms of populations, it is a question of the 6 million Jews of Israel up against 300 million Arabs of the surrounding nations. But even talking about the Israel-Arab conflict would be inaccurate. Two countries that pose both ideological and military threats to Israel’s existence are not Arab but Turkish and Iranian. This consideration tips the scales even further away from a balance of power between the two sides if we are now potentially talking about a Muslim-Israeli conflict with the 1 billion Muslims worldwide. Between Arab neighbors and Muslim countries thousands of miles away, this conflict existed long before the “provocation” of a Jewish state, long before Israel captured the Golan Heights, Gaza, or the West Bank, long before the term “Palestinian” came to have its modern meaning.

Today, however, no single nation is more of an existential threat to Israel than the Shiite theocracy in Iran. In 2015, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave a speech that said, “The Zionist Regime will cease to exist in 25 years.” On the next Al-Quds Day, a holiday created in Iran to celebrate the Islamic Jerusalem, a count-down clock to Israel’s destruction in 2040 was unveiled and presumably is still counting down the days. But more than this religious posturing and political saber rattling—Iran is a substantial and material threat.

From the decades since the Islamic revolution in Iran and the Iran-Iraq War, Iran has been fighting a subtle war of dominance through several proxy fights that have slowly but surely established it as a regional powerhouse. Iran has substantial control of several Arab countries through its vast network of militias in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. Indeed, one of the gravest threats to Israel is the Shiite militia Hezbollah, founded and funded by Iran, with hundreds of bases on Israel’s northern Lebanese and Syrian borders. If Hamas, another Iranian-supported militia, had hundreds of relatively unsophisticated (Iranian supplied) rockets to lob at Israel, Hezbollah has an exponentially larger and more sophisticated arsenal.

The Shia Militia Mapping Project of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy maintains an interactive Google Map of known Shia militia locations. Pictured above is Israel’s northern and northeastern border, almost entirely under control of Shia militias.

And here is where Israelis can play out strategic and realistic scenarios: suppose Hezbollah decided to attack from Lebanon and Syria simultaneously. Suppose the precarious monarchy in Jordan fell, and Hamas took over the West Bank, meaning that there would be an uninterrupted highway between Tehran and Jerusalem. These are not far-fetched: when Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, Hamas was elected and gave Iran front-row access to Israel’s southwest border. In the chaos of the Syrian civil war, Iran and Iranian-affiliated militias took advantage of the power vacuum and essentially took control of large chunks of the country, especially the border with Israel. North, East, South, West—Iran has slowly been tightening the noose around the neck of Israel from all sides. So we can see that, from an Israeli perspective, the West Bank is essential to the security of Jerusalem, which we can say is interchangeable with the security of Israel.

But here you might object: “Hamas is an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and radically Sunni. How can you say that they are essentially Iranian proxies or puppets in this conflict?”

There is a surprising history of connections between Iran and the Palestinian cause.

In 1979, Yasser Arafat, a leader of the Palestinian cause, was one of the first international figures to visit Tehran mere days after the success of the Islamic revolution. “Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine,” cheered crowds as they listened to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini praise Arafat and his vision for a Palestinian state. Arafat, in turn, hoped that just as the Iranians trained revolutionaries in Lebanon, they would help train and establish fighters for the cause of Palestine.

As more and more Arab countries signed peace treaties with Israel after their defeats in the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars, many Palestinians felt that the broader Arab world had abandoned them. When Anwar Sadat, the President of Egypt, visited Israel in 1977, the alienation went deep. Two years later, post-revolutionary, non-Arab Iran was ready to take up the “anti-imperial” “anti-western” cause of Palestine. It gave Iran an appeal beyond the borders of its country and beyond the boundaries of Shia Islam, as the true protector of the faith and the defender of Muslims.

The Islamic Republic of Iran proclaimed the last Friday of Ramadan to be “Al-Quds Day.” (Al-Quds is the Islamic name for Jerusalem). Tehran would also establish the Quds Force, led for many years by General Qassem Soleimani, whose stated purpose was the liberation of Jerusalem.

Arafat was mainly and publicly secular in his aims, and the more moderate contemporary Palestinian political party “Fatah” is the direct descendent of Arafat’s PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization. However, the fiercely Islamic Khomeini now had an “in” with Palestinians, many of whom thought Arafat too moderate, and thus the more extreme Islamist group Hamas was born.

After the Oslo Accords and their subsequent collapse with the second intifada in 2001, Iran entrenched itself further into the Palestinian political sphere, building the same gorilla training camps that it had in Lebanon in the 1970s.

In 2005, Israel unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza Strip, removing all Israelis from Gaza and officially ending its military occupation. Elections took place in Gaza, and Hamas won a majority of the seats. This victory set off a war between Fatah and Hamas, and between 2006 and 2007, over 600 Gazans were killed, but eventually, Hamas prevailed. Iran’s long game had paid off, and now the liberation of Jerusalem in the West Bank seemed closer than ever.

Given Iran’s clearly and regularly stated intentions toward Israel, it is no wonder that Israel has said that they will never accept a nuclear Iran. To do so would be to essentially sign their death warrant. Much of the Western world also believes that a nuclear weapon in the hands of Iran would be disastrous. In 2014, the Obama administration began negotiations to try and delay the inevitable with the Nuclear Deal with Iran. When the Trump administration later backed out of the Iran Deal and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel with little blowback, it seemed that both the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict had waned, and the heavily sanctioned Iran could not long sustain the many proxy wars it had committed itself to across the Middle East.

RELATED READING // Read our FAI Wire special report on the Iran Deal here.

But Iran continued to gain power across the region, despite nearing bankruptcy. In 2021, the Biden administration re-entered talks for a renewed Iran Nuclear Deal in Vienna, and though not much has been officially stated, most reports imply stalemated negotiations. In the middle of these Vienna talks, international coverage of Sheikh Jarrah evictions in East Jerusalem and protests at the Al-Aqsa Mosque coincided with Al-Quds Day, and Hamas in Gaza issued an ultimatum: withdraw security forces from the Temple Mount and Sheikh Jarrah, or they attack. Iran unequivocally voiced its support. When rockets began to fall and drones began to be shot down, it became evident that Iran’s support was not merely vocal but that they also had directly supplied the Hamas and Islamic Jihad arsenal. Iraqi Shiite militias on the Israeli-Syrian border voiced their support and signaled their readiness to join the fight. Hezbollah increased its readiness levels. Israel prepared for what might become a multi-front war.

RELATED READING // Read our FAI Wire article looking back over the first ten years of the Syrian Civil War here.

The message was not lost on the negotiators in Vienna. Iran could send a barrage of hundreds of rockets from the south, but it could send a salvo of thousands of rockets from the north. Even without a nuclear weapon, Iran essentially holds the fate of Israel in their hands. The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is not a sideshow when it comes to Iran or Iranian Nuclear weapons. It is at the very heart of it. Though many Palestinians might view Iran as their only reliable ally in their fight against Israel, Iran has used them and the Palestinian cause for over forty years for their own purposes. Though perhaps there is an apocalyptic religious backing to Iran’s complete rejection of Israel, it has little to do with human rights. Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, while encouraging and taking credit for Hamas’ victory and decrying Israel’s “racist criminal behavior” regularly meets with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, possibly the most significant war criminal and human rights violator of our times, an Iranian puppet who has unleashed absolute hell on Syria and has the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands. Though Iran loves to frame issues like “Sheikh Jarrah” from a humanitarian standpoint, they haven’t a leg to stand on when it comes to human rights, either at home in Iran, or their interests abroad.

Sheikh Jarrah and Legal Quagmire of Land Rights

Much of the international community’s eyes were focused on Israel and Palestinians of East Jerusalem and the West Bank because of two words: Sheikh Jarrah. Every time I logged into Twitter, I saw the trend #SaveSheikhJarrah. Because most of my Twitter follows are reporters in the Middle East/Arab world, it seemed every other tweet on my feed was saying Israeli settlers were violently seizing land and evicting its Palestinian owners. It seemed like the broader controversy of Israel was playing out in miniature, and everyone, from celebrities to congresswomen to respected journalists, was saying that not only were Israel’s actions immoral—stealing and turning families out into the street during Ramadan—but it was also evil, a case of ethnic cleansing.

Protestors gather outside of the Israeli consulate in Chicago on May 12, 2021. Shafkat Anowar, AP.

As I scrolled and scrolled, seeing the same basic premise parroted over and over, I instinctively knew there had to be more to the story. The optics, for Israel, were terrible: pictures of jeering orthodox teenagers surrounding a woman wearing hijab. Pictures of protest signs that had the words “Colonialism,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” “Settler Violence,” “Free Palestine.” It was the last week of Ramadan when emotions were running high. Rioting broke out, and arrests were made. “Why,” I asked myself, “would Israel do something so provocative during Ramadan? There has to be more to this story.” I vaguely remembered reading a New York Times article almost a decade ago about Sheikh Jarrah and knew some legal complications surrounded that name. So, I began to dig.

Sheikh Jarrah is a predominantly (but not exclusively) Arab neighborhood about two kilometers (that is, one mile) outside of the Old City in Jerusalem. As part of East Jerusalem, it is considered by the UN to be part of the West Bank, and therefore an occupied territory. Israel considers the territory to be fully annexed. However, its history begins long before Israel took control over it in 1967.

In the third century BC, a famous High Priest, “Shimon Hatzadik,” or “Simeon the Just,” was buried outside of Jerusalem, and the area was named after him and frequented by Jewish pilgrims. This area later became a predominantly Arab neighborhood during the Ottoman Empire and named “Sheikh Jarrah,” after another famous person interred there: Saladin’s physician, who fought the Crusaders in the 1100s.

In 1875, some plots in Sheikh Jarrah were purchased from its Arab owners by Jewish communities. Rabbis Avraham Ashkenazi and Meir Auerbach registered this land purchase with the Ottoman land registry. The Jewish communities then lived in the Arab neighborhood for over seven decades, through the end of the Ottoman Empire to the end of the British Mandate.

When independence from British custodianship seemed to be drawing near, the Jewish owners of the property in Sheikh Jarrah tried to register their ownership of the property with the British. They could not complete the registration process for all the plots before Israel declared its independence in 1948.

Almost immediately, Israel was at war with its Arab neighbors. The Old City of Jerusalem and the surrounding neighborhoods (including Sheikh Jarrah) were captured by Transjordan (now called “Jordan.”) The Jewish families were evicted from their land, and Transjordan took custodianship of the properties under their “Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Properties” law. Israel enacted a similar law in territory under its control called “Custodian for Absentee Property.”

Both Israel and Jordan were not keen to let these properties remain empty. Indeed, with large numbers of refugees on both sides, the most practical option was to use properties as a means of resettlement. The abandoned title would then be transferred to the new owners. Many Arab properties in West Jerusalem transferred to Jews under this law, and many Jewish properties in East Jerusalem transferred to Arabs. But for whatever reason, in 1956, Jordan leased but did not transfer title deeds of the lots of Sheikh Jarrah properties belonging to absentee enemies to 28 Palestinian families.

Then came the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel regained control of Jerusalem. With this retaking of Jerusalem, a city that had changed hands so many times in less than a century, the question of property ownership was a complex one. All the “enemy” (that is, Jewish) properties under Jordanian custodianship reverted to Israel. To deal with the strange situation, Israel passed a law allowing Jews whose families were previously evicted by Jordanian or British authorities could reclaim their land. However, this reclamation had two requirements: one, the claimant must have a legitimate title deed or proof of purchase and two, existing residents had to have no title deed or proof of purchase.

So, in 1973 the properties in question were re-registered by Community Committee and the Knesset Israel Committee with Israeli authorities. Initially, courts granted the Palestinian residents protected tenant status on the condition that they paid rent to the Jewish groups and maintained the properties. Though initially accepting the ruling and signing papers to that effect, after several years tenants stopped paying rent, making them eligible for eviction. Tenants re-challenged ownership through the courts, where the case has been in process for almost 50 years, with accusations of forgeries and double standards from both sides. Compromises were offered, with the property owners suggesting they not collect rent until the next generation become the primary residents. However, several properties have made their way through the courts with rulings in favor of the Jewish landowners, and evictions have slowly taken place over the years.   The District Court of Jerusalem was set to rule on four disputed properties, but the ruling was postponed as tensions quickly escalated, and protests became violent. Hamas and its allies seized on the possibility of evictions to stir up anger in the West Bank and internationally, setting the stage for them to issue an ultimatum.

When Israel described Sheikh Jarrah as a “private property dispute,” it was met with scorn by advocates and allies of Palestine. “Everything that is wrong with the dynamics between Israel and Palestine is in this conflict. Palestinians are losing their homes. Israeli nationalist settlers are establishing enclaves in East Jerusalem, what we hope will be the capital of the Palestinian State. Palestinians have no chance for justice when they have to go to Israeli courts which will definitely rule in the favor of their fellow Jews.”

Israelis, too, will say that everything that is wrong about Israel-Palestine relations is in Sheikh Jarrah. Jewish communities legally purchased land that had a sacred significance to them. After trying to pursue justice through a relatively liberal court system and offering incentives to tenants of not collecting rent for decades, when a legal ruling finally comes through, the world cries genocide and ethnic cleansing.

While Sheikh Jarrah was a significant mitigating circumstance for the outbreak of war, the situation at the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex genuinely lit the fuse.

Al-Aqsa, Damascus Gate, and Ramadan

On April 13, almost a month before Hamas fired the first rocket in the latest Gaza conflict, Ramadan began. Coincidentally, this day was also Memorial Day in Israel, a day of national mourning for those who died defending the country. Israel’s President Rivlin was scheduled to make a speech at the Western Wall plaza.

The Western Wall, a limestone retaining wall, is the only remaining ruins of the Second Temple and the holiest place in Judaism. It sits on the side of a steep hill of what Jews and Christians call “the Temple Mount.” For Muslims, this hill is known as Haram esh-Sharif, or “the Noble Sanctuary.” The Dome of the Rock, the Dome of the Chain, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque sit atop the hill that is the third holiest site in Islam, surrounded by four minarets.

These minarets proved to be a point of contention on this particular day. Because the Western Wall lies at the base of the Haram esh-Sharif, the call to prayer for Ramadan would probably interrupt and drown out the Presidential Memorial Day address. Israeli officials requested that mosque officials not broadcast prayers, but mosque officials refused, seeing the request as disrespectful. According to mosque officials, Israeli police cut the cables linked to the loudspeakers on the minarets, starting Ramadan off on a very bad foot, and marked a distinct escalation in tension.

This tension only increased when police decided to close an important gathering place for young Muslim men during Ramadan—the Damascus Gate plaza. Israeli security decided to prevent dangerously large crowds and prevent violence, but it was yet another slight on top of cut speaker cables to Palestinians. Protests began to take place almost nightly at the Damascus Gate.

Violence began to spill out beyond the Damascus Gate when Palestinian teenagers recorded attacks on Jew on public transportation and uploaded the recorded assaults to TikTok. Far-right Jewish groups began counter-protests, some of which also dissolved into violence.

On April 25, in an attempt to lower the temperature, Israel re-opened the Damascus Gate plaza, but it was too late—they were past the point of no return. When the “Speakergate” and Damascus Gate incidents were connected with the upcoming Sheikh Jarrah rulings protests, all events combined Palestinian anger at being “forced out of Jerusalem.” Continued protests and Israeli police responses kept the offense fresh and in the international news.

The sharpest escalation came on Friday, May 7—Al-Quds Day—when word reached Israeli security services that rocks and other weapons were being stockpiled in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. After days of protests on the Al-Aqsa Complex where Hamas flags were flying, and rhetoric was getting increasingly threatening, police entered the Al-Aqsa Complex that evening. A clash between police and rock-throwers began that lasted hours, and hundreds were injured.

On Monday, May 10, it was Jerusalem Day—an Israeli celebration of the capture of all of Jerusalem in 1967 with a parade that ends at the Western Wall. On the same day, the rulings of Sheikh Jarrah were set to take place. The Israeli government first re-routed and then canceled the parade, then postponed the Sheikh Jarrah rulings. But another clash on the Al-Aqsa complex between stone-throwing and firework-shooting rioters and police canceled any deescalating effects. Hamas said that if Israel did not remove security forces from the Al-Aqsa Complex by 6 PM that evening, rockets would fall. And shortly after 6 PM, they did.

The month of Ramadan indeed marked a time of increased alienation, anger and violence between the residents of East Jerusalem and Israelis. Still, isolated images and 10-second video clips were often the sources of international outrage, but frequently these pictures lacked the context for proper interpretation. For instance, there was a much-shared video of a sea of Jewish people celebrating on the Western Wall plaza while above them, a large fire burned on the Al-Aqsa Compound. Were these people celebrating the destruction of the Al-Aqsa mosque, or were they celebrating Jerusalem Day, as they would every year? Was it the tear gas of the Israeli security services that desecrated the Temple Mount, or was it Muslim rioters’ fireworks that set fire to their own compound that was the desecration? Are the flags of Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization, on the Temple Mount a peaceful protest, or are they the forerunners of a massacre which Hamas was openly calling for at the time? At what point is it appropriate for government forces to enter a holy site used to stockpile weapons?

Perhaps you have different answers to these questions, but they are worth asking. Maybe the answers are found not on the surface or in slogans, but in framing this fateful month in centuries that preceded it and beyond a few neighborhoods in Jerusalem to power players in the greater Middle East.

Keep an eye out for the next installment of “Roots of Rage” where we will be covering such topics as: Hamas, Land for Peace, Intifada, Arab-Israeli Citizens, Israeli and Palestinian Authority Elections, Antisemitism in Western contexts, and the PR/Optics war in the media.