Just another Friday in the Holy Land

As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, "If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace - but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side."

Today we walked the Via Dolorosa with Christians from all over the world. The ratio of Palestinians to internationals was smaller than in previous years because of the reduction in the number of 'worship permits' Israel made available. At each corner troops and police asserted the Empire's ownership of the city, arresting some of those too zealous in their expressions of dismay, although at one point some scouts carrying a cross managed to breach a cordon adjacent to the Holy Sepulchre, asserting a different Sovereign.

Poetic resistance aside, Jerusalem's Palestinian Christians remain in this 'Friday of Grief', as the Arabic for Good Friday would render it. While Palestinians behind the wall are able to compartmentalise, to some extent, the effects of occupation and day-to-day life, the situation for Jerusalemites is one of permanent limbo. Since they rejected Israel's offer of citizenship in 1967, which would have conceded their rights under international law to residence in a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, they have been subjected to a form of collective punishment for this insolence.

Sheikh Jarrah is but one example of this selective use of a law which offers less protection than pain, the ongoing expansion of settlement blocks another. But the city is not only held in a constrictor's coil, it has a cobra's venom is in its veins.

Education deserves particular attention. It is not permitted to build a Palestinian school in Jerusalem. Hence overcrowded domestic properties deliver this curriculum under the jurisdiction of the Jordanian awqaf. If you want a reasonable number of teachers per pupil you'd better go to an Israeli school where it is illegal to teach the story of Palestinian displacement. If you want your child to retain their Jerusalem residency then they need to present a diploma from each year they've been at school, and these must be consecutive. If not, when you graduate, you are denied the right to live in your home city. What's more, if you graduate from the highly respected Al Quds University your degree is not recognised by Israel, while degrees from the far more controversial Islamic University in Gaza are recognised. It isn't trespassing on sacred turf.

And back to that turf. Villages and towns around Jerusalem, such as Jaba, have had their main entrances closed under the wholly untenable pretext of security. The effect is that Palestinians now may take hours to reach their own agricultural land via checkpoints into and back out of Israel, making its management almost impossible. And, you guessed it, when land is not being worked regularly it can be claimed by the Israeli state.

On the Mount of Olives I saw where the wall has cut off one Palestinian home from the resident's mother's home. Householders can stand on their roofs and talk to one another, but to visit takes well over an hour. Nearby, as compensation for being pulled out of Gaza, militant and heavily armed settlers have been given Palestinian land and a vacated police station in a Palestinian area on the mount of Olives. As in Sheikh Jarrah, children now play under the eyes of those who despise their presence, and under the barrels of their guns.

Where is the way out? There's migration, either to the West Bank, still divided into cantons by Israeli controlled roads within Israeli controlled borders, or abroad if you can afford it. There are other options. East Jerusalem has 5000 drug addicts, an enormous proportion compared to the the West Bank, and the pressure of life in limbo creates only very few alternative escape routes. Jerusalem is a place of contest in which one side has all the power. It is a place where tension is so heightened your hair stands on end. A Jerusalemite child is not allowed, in short, to be Jerusalemite unless they jump through the Empire's hoops.

All of this is because, as Netanyahu claims, Jerusalem is Jewish. One of the enduring mysteries of a world in which Zionism is tolerated is how it can be acceptable for Israeli politicians explicitly to declare their desire to establish a Jewish state with a Jewish Jerusalem as its capital, and for western governments to assent. Imagine if Abbas tomorrow changed the PA's agenda to claiming an Islamic state with Jerusalem as its capital. All hell would break loose.

I guess it's because they look like us. They're democratic Europeans, we suppose, and they even have minorities to prove it. And, we continue, let's face it, it's hard work living next to those other people, whom tourists are told by operators to avoid if they can. It's dark, dangerous and smelly in their parts of the city, evidence of their sub-us-ness (rather than that they receive a fraction of the municipal spending Jewish areas receive). One friend of mine met a European tourist who'd accidentally booked a hotel room atop the Mount of Olives. She was petrified.

Perhaps the conflict is best explained as the Western freedom charade in microcosm. Israelis have the money, they have the guns, they have the civilisationist narrative, they have the religious zealots who justify their violence through recourse to canon. Palestinians have their ties to the land, but these are being severed and corroded, and we only pay attention when a bomb goes off.

We in the west have made the error of making sense of the conflict here as a two sided contest with almost equivalent claims on each side. This is a nonsense. While we must recognise the root causes of tyranny, which lie in European soil, we must also call it what it is. Israel has no moral, legal or historical justification for the way it behaves.

So back to the Via Dolorosa. The message of it, in the light of Resurrection, is one of hope and victory through total defeat. But right now it feels that those admirable Palestinians who refuse to resort to violence as they protest are being crushed and being ignored. The desolation of Good Friday and Holy Saturday really means something here.