Jerusalem Dispatch: Unorthodox Riot
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The New Republic, September 1, 1997
The border policeman gives me a hard push to the chest and then answers my question. “Of course I’m Jewish,” he says. He has pushed me into an old woman, who loses her Hebrew prayer book and her balance. Beside me, a reporter falls to the ground and is stepped on by the police. It is the evening of Tishah b’Av at the Western Wall, and Jewish policemen, by order of the Jewish government of Benjamin Netanyahu, are shoving and beating a group of Conservative Jews off the Western Wall Plaza. It is like a Jewish soccer riot.
My own personal police officer gives me another shove. “Tell me,” I say, over the shrieking of women and haredim, the ultraorthodox Jews at whose behest the police are doing this dirty work, “how can you deny Jews the right to pray at the Wall?”
I had come to the Wall this evening expecting trouble. I have always been fascinated by rampaging haredim, and they would surely rampage at the sight of Jewish men and women praying together, which is what the Conservative group planned. Though I pray neither frequently nor enthusiastically, I am a Conservative Jew, and I don’t find unreasonable the desire of Jewish men to mourn together with Jewish women the destruction of the Second Temple at the Temple’s western retaining wall.
The police, of course, had asked the Conservative group to avoid provocation tonight, knowing that the plaza would be filled with thousands of Orthodox and haredi Jews, who assert hegemony over Jewish holy places in Israel and deny with regularity any rights to Reform and Conservative Jews. The leader of the Conservative group, Andrew Sacks, told me that officials at first suggested that he hold his egalitarian service without women. When he refused, the police suggested that he hold the service at the Temple Mount’s southern wall, directly under the Al Aksa mosque, which might have suggested to the Muslims above yet another nefarious Jewish plot.
As the group gathered just inside the gated plaza at around 7:30 p.m., the police showed signs of cooperation. Under guard, we were escorted to a parking area about a hundred yards or so from the Wall, separated from it by five parked police vans. When one of the group’s leaders bemoaned the physical distance between the group and the Wall, a police official noted that the Wall could still be seen with the naked eye. By now, the group numbered about 150, and the service commenced. Haredim circled the group. ” Your place is over there,” one officer told a spluttering haredi. “The parking lot is for the Reform.”
Most Israeli policemen understand the differences between Conservative and Reform Judaism about as much as most Israelis do, which is to say, not very well. This is the fault of the American leadership of the two movements, which do not encourage their children to move to Israel, but it is mostly the fault of the Orthodox establishment and their secular protectors in the Likud and Labor parties, who have in recent years systematically marginalized non- Orthodox expressions of Judaism in the Jewish homeland.
Ten minutes into the service, an official from the Holy Sites Authority arrived to tell the police chief, Yair Yitzhaki, that the Conservatives were violating Jewish custom at the Wall by having men and women pray together and must therefore be expelled. I found myself somehow sandwiched between the main body of worshipers and the police line, which allowed me the opportunity to enter into my one-way existential discussion with the officer about the nature of Jewish unity.
During the police action—which didn’t stop outside the gate to the plaza, but ended 100 yards further downhill, outside the Dung Gate entrance to the Old City—black-hatted haredim hollered encouragement to the police. As Yitzhaki watched his men abuse their fellow Jews, a haredi man shouted to him, “Kol HaKavod”—in essence, “good job.”
The Israeli police crossed a bright red line in the state’s relationship with people who could only be called at this point dissident Jews. The Wall has long been the site of violence between the haredim and their more progressive cousins. But never before have the police, without even the pretext of a riot in progress, so violently ejected the non-Orthodox from the Plaza, and not only from the Plaza, but from the Old City.
And so we find ourselves, a half-hour after the aborted attempt to conduct a service in peace, standing in a sunken and muddy pit outside the Dung Gate, finishing the prayers, as thousands of Orthodox Jews moved through the gate on their way to the Wall. The haredim begin to gather on the low stone walls above us, hissing over the voice of the woman leading the prayers.
As the service finishes, the congregation, like any good Zionist congregation—one filled with Israeli army veterans, in fact—begins to sing “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem. This infuriates the haredim ringing us—who oppose the Jewish state and refuse to serve in its army. The hissing becomes booing and then screaming. The police move in among us. Sacks announces that the police are promising us safe passage out of the pit. It seems to me just then that there is a battle brewing here, and it’s not the one between Israelis and Palestinians.