“Next year in Jerusalem” - inshallah

The League of Arab States has elected Jerusalem to be the Capital of Arab Culture for 2009, which would include exhibitions, festivals, book fairs, etc.

I saw this poster by the Ramallah municipality, with the tongue-in-cheek tag line “Next year in Jerusalem”.

This isn’t a passing sentence, though, and whomever wrote it was a ballsy and pretty sarcastic guy - for “Next year in Jerusalem” is actually the ending of many a Jewish prayer, mainly the Passover seder and, in some communities, the end of the Yom Kippur service as well. To quote “A concise encyclopedia of Judaism”, "its purpose is to remind Jews of the coming era of the Messiah, when all the Jewish people will return to Jerusalem”.

(it is also the title of an excellent book by the co-founder of B’tselem, Daphna Golan-Agnon).

And while there’s a lot of technical debate around the continued use of the sentence in Jewish prayers - since the city is now easily accessible for Jews - the sentence takes a whole different meaning for Palestinians, who are now banned from accessing the holy city.

Let there be no mistake: East Jerusalem is occupied, according to international law, and the 200,000+ Jews who moved there in the past few decades qualify as settlers who, under article 49 of the fourth Geneva convention (regarding the illegality of transferring civilian populations into occupied territories) should not be there.

Now, however, East Jerusalem has been declared ‘annexed’ by the State of Israel and as such is disconnected from the rest of Palestine. Pending an Israeli military authorisation that is usually never granted, Palestinians aren’t allowed to visit Jerusalem, which is just 30 minutes away from here. Almost all Palestinian males under the age of 40 haven't been allowed to see their capital city in nearly a decade. It's ludicrous.

Rather than being the expression of hope it represented in Jewish prayers, “Next year in Jerusalem” is now a lamentation for the Palestinians, an irony of a next year that will never come.

And as for the “Capital of Arab Culture” celebrations - suffice to know that meetings of the organizing committee are banned in East Jerusalem by the Israeli police because it’s a Palestinian project (even if it a formally separate entity from the Palestinian Gov); and that the man who heads the organizing committee (and who lives in Ramallah) is being, as we speak, banned from entry to the Palestinian territory, as the Israeli authorities took advantage of a short business trip he took to block him out. He awaits in Amman. Oh, and he’s also a British citizen - not that it matters much to the Israelis.

Next year in Jerusalem, huh?

Bullshit. Never gonna happen.