“The last time I saw this landscape was five years ago, says Etienne Monin, back in Jerusalem for a week-long mission. At theAt the time, I was a correspondent for Radio France in Jerusalem and at the time, I thought that the conflict was in the process of being suffocated, that it was going to slowly die of old age, forgotten by the leaders of both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, and then neglected by Westerners. Well, here we are again.”
For this special issue of the “War in the Middle East” podcast, Etienne Monin and Marc Garvenes went to the Old City of Jerusalem, “one of the most beautiful places, undoubtedly in Jerusalem”. It is both an open-air book that tells the whole deep history of this region, but it is also a scar, a testimony to the occupation. In Jerusalem, we are far from the front. Life sort of got back to normal last November, but slowly. Compared to the city that Etienne knew, everything is more expensive, people are getting poorer. In this situation, Palestinians have not really returned to work on the Israeli side, in the west. And this magnificent old town mourns these tourists who have not returned four months after the shock of war.
“There was a whole moment when everything was closed. It was really Covid time”, says Angela, a French woman married to a Palestinian. She has lived in Jerusalem for 20 years and considers herself a part of this great mosaic of identity and culture that is Jerusalem.
“There is a strangely chilling calm sometimes precisely because it is true that after October 7, we quickly said to ourselves that things were going to explode everywhere, which in the end did not happen. “
Angela, a French woman living in Jerusalem
“Now it’s a little less covid time because there are stores open, but it’s still quite dead, since the old town lives by pilgrims and by tourism”she explains.
A second wall between Israelis and Palestinians
In this old city, Palestinians are desperate for tourists, ultra-Orthodox Jews are walking quickly towards the side of the Western Wall. We also see soldiers standing guard, groups who still come to learn about the history of the heritage of this sector. Things are taking their course. But here, everything is coded and when we talk to the residents, we see that the gap has widened further. The October 7 attack and the war have further separated Palestinians and Israelis. In Jerusalem, there is like a second wall. Palestinians feel even less visible. Angela feels it in the little things of life, of everyday life, especially when she goes to the Israeli side in shops. “What changes is that every time you enter the store, they will immediately talk to you about the situation whereas before, we never talked about it, evershe testifies. Now when I walk into the store, all of a sudden some people who know me suddenly need to talk to me about what’s going on and how terrible it is.”
For this resident of Jerusalem, what emerges, “It’s a lot of suffering. But as a result, these are people who are so traumatized by October 7 that they only see their suffering. I’m not here to say if it’s good or not good, that’s not the case. “It’s not my role, it’s just a reality.”
“The suffering of the other, whatever it may be, cannot exist because theirs today is too strong.”
Angela, a French woman living in Jerusalem
Angela tempers: “It is not necessarily the suffering of the Palestinians in Jerusalem because the suffering is less here, but there is everything. There are parts of this land where they do not have the same reality of life, where they do not have no passport, where passes are required, where the passage through checkpoints takes hours, where the only bus that is stopped is the Palestinian bus, it is a ban on living, quite simply. In simplicity and to be able to go where we want, when we want, like us French. It’s another state of mind in fact, what they experience on the other side and it’s a pretty crazy resilience.”
A misunderstanding between the two camps
Clearly, Israelis are still reeling from this security failure and this astonishing violence directed against civilians. Four months later, the military operation in Gaza appears to be a show of force. And even if the Israelis no longer really know where they are going, this provides a point of reference in a region at risk. “I think that seeing the mobilization that there was within the army and the mobilization of civilians who left to get involved, I think that yes, it is reassuring and it has brought calmrecognizes Olivier Fitoussi. There are fewer rocket attacks and the situation in the South has calmed down.” This photojournalist at the left-wing newspaper Haaretz has lived in Jerusalem for 20 years. He covered the second intifada. “We are in the process of solving part of the problem”, she judges, her two cameras very close to him, as if he was always preparing for the worst. Like everyone else, he didn’t see October 7 coming.
“There cannot be a future peace process, or we cannot reach any agreement as long as there is an armed group within the Palestinians that puts the lives of our civilians in dangerhe believes. For me, as an Israeli, it is not to annihilate them, it is more to disarm them for the moment and above all to arrest all those responsible. I think that as long as there are Hamas leaders who are free, we will once again be unable to reach any peace agreement or any future solution. The fact that Israelis and Palestinians will be called upon to coexist is an innate fact, nothing can be done about it. We are here, the Palestinians are there.”
“I think that today, among Israelis, there is a problem of incomprehension on the Palestinian side. Because what happened on October 7 in the morning has been very little denounced and I think that it has really created a divide.”
Olivier Fitoussi, Israeli photojournalist
“If we even take the Arabs of East Jerusalem, they feel oppressed and today, it is not them who are oppressed, it is the Israelis who are oppressedjudges the photojournalist. And there is a misunderstanding.”
“I don’t want to see the Israelis who disappointed us”
It is still too early to be able to talk between Israelis and Palestinians. Everyone cultivates their pain. Even people on the left have been shaken up in their beliefs. Those who defended the two-state solution are no longer sure if they can now trust the opposite camp and some Palestinians feel let down. “Personally, I live in Jerusalem and I liked going to the lobby of my villa because it’s a Palestinian place in every way. My grandfather, he had his first hotel before 1948 which was called the Hôtel Moderne and today I no longer go there”, says Huda Imam. Before October 7, this figure of the cultural world in East Jerusalem, the annexed part, was close to what is called the peace camp which fights the occupation. “I don’t want to see the Israelis who disappointed us, completely disappointedshe continues. So yes, today, I do not want to meet Israelis or pay Israelis so that they can continue the genocide in Gaza. There is no more communication, but it is among many people that this gap is widening. At the time, while I was working at the university, we still had quite a few invasions and incursions on Gaza, but also on Nablus, Jenin… And we always had the academic, artistic Israeli voice, the Women in Black movement which protested so that their voice could always be present against the Israeli government. And they weren’t yet as radical as they are now. Today, we don’t hear anything at all.”
“The Palestinians are very disappointed that the voice of humanity that existed among Israelis is today completely silent. We cannot speak of dialogue when we see children dying of hunger, it is not possible.”
Huda Imam, Palestinian actress
Huda Imam spent a lifetime in Jerusalem organizing cultural events. “The Israeli Occupation put me in prison because of thisshe remembers. There is a confusion in their heads, which is to say that they think that all Palestinians are terrorists. I am opposed to the occupation, but I am not necessarily for Hamas or Jihad, the FLP [Front populaire de libération de la Palestine] or even Fatah. I can be completely independent politically. Palestinians today, normal people like us, we need to live in peace, we need to live legally in our land.”
Give birth to a new reality?
After four months of war, the ruins are on both sides of the border. In Gaza, it is obvious with the bombings. In Jerusalem, this can be seen in the difficulty in envisioning a peaceful relationship. Very quickly, diplomats brought out the old two-state solution, which is nevertheless considered incompatible today with the scale of colonization. There is no horizon yet but there is the return of a reality: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains gaping and the idea of a political solution is making a comeback after years of purely security management. “The centrality of the conflict is now very evidentestimates Ofer Zalzberg, a former member of the International Crisis Group. People who were desperate are revisiting the subject. We cannot say that the same solution that was proposed 20 years ago is necessarily applicable today. It must be adapted to today’s reality but I think that a speech about, not solutions in the harmonic sense, but steps which can give birth to a new reality with less oppression, less violence, we see that it reappears and with more energy.”
“We are at the stage of collective trauma that continues every day, so it is too early for a public discourse about the future.”
Ofer Zalzberg, formerly of the International Crisis Group
According to him, dialogue is not yet possible for the general public: “Currently, on the Israeli side, there is less support for a Palestinian state and for the idea that Israelis can trust matters related to their security, to others and in particular to the Palestinians. And on the Palestinian side, there is a stronger will to have a state and be independent, to be able to defend ourselves. But it is perhaps too early to ask questions like that.”
Hope today therefore rests on the incredible vitality of both societies. Organizations are already working to try to reconnect. The Ramadan period at the beginning of March, on the other hand, will be a test. This is usually a tense moment. This year, the Israeli far right is blowing over the embers to try to derail the rapprochement. We will therefore all have an eye on the Esplanade des Mosques, also called the Temple Mount for the Jews, which has once again become, to everyone’s surprise, a point of balance in the Middle East.
In this episode: Angela, Olivier Fitoussi, Huda Imam, Ofer Zalzberg
Director: Etienne Monin, Marc Garvenes, Dimitri Paz and Pauline Pennanec’h