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No Tourists, no income: The collapse of livelihoods in Jerusalem’s Old City
Some people are describing the impact of the latest confrontation between Israel and Iran as one blow too many for the traders and craftspeople who used to make their living in the Old City of Jerusalem’s market. “The situation today is worse than it has ever been before,” says Hijazi Rashq, a member of the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce and Industry — which is one of the only organizations that keeps track of the conditions facing Palestinian traders in East Jerusalem. “It’s another nail in the coffin of a market that has actually been dead for the past three years.”
According to Rashq, “when the war with Iran began, the market effectively shut down and took on the atmosphere of a military zone. This is during the holy month of Ramadan, the most important time of year for most of the traders, who were hoping to make up for some of the losses they suffered over the past few years. What happened was the exact opposite.” Without any customers, some of the traders decided only to open their stores on Fridays and Saturdays. Even so, they could only do so if the police allowed them (as explained below). Others were forced to find work in the western part of the city — often taking menial jobs in cleaning and maintenance — just to provide an alternative source of income for their families.
“This is the worst period we’ve ever been through,” says 35-year-old Siraj Abu Asab, who runs a store selling souvenirs to tourists. “Even if they were to allow us to open the shop, we wouldn’t earn any money because the Old City is completely empty of visitors. Eighty percent of my business comes from tourism; local sales make up just 20%. Needless to say, tourism has been nonexistent since Oct. 7 and now, because of the war and the curfews, even our local customers have vanished. Before the start of Ramadan, I bought goods valued at 105,000 shekels ($35,000), but as soon as the war broke out, I was ordered to close my store because it doesn’t have a protected space. I only managed to sell 10 items on the internet — but I still haven’t received payment for those sales.”
Anyone who visits Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market or walks along Jaffa Street will see a city that is very much alive — despite everything. But if they were to continue walking toward the walls of the Old City and were to pass through one of its gates, they would discover a very different situation: row after row of shuttered stores — dozens, perhaps hundreds. Wrought-iron doors, rusty padlocks and signs hanging in doorways that haven’t seen a paying customer in months. There’s no one around, so owners aren’t even trying to sell anything. The narrow and empty alleyways have turned it into a ghost market.
“We have been running a business in this store for almost 100 years,” says Ahmed Dandis, 60, who owns a toy shop at the entrance to Damascus Gate. His shop was closed for almost the entire war. “The shop has been passed down from generation to generation. We used to sell clothes, but a few years ago, I decided to start selling toys instead. There has been a downturn in commercial activity in the market for the past five years which eventually ground to an almost complete halt. During the recent war, everything was closed.”
If Dandis and the other traders had hopes that an influx of Ramadan visitors would turn their fortunes around, the outbreak of the war with Iran put an end to them. “I bought $25,000 worth of goods and I didn’t sell a single item. Everything is still sitting in the store,” he said. According to Dandis, the relatives he used to employ in the shop have been forced to quit and look for work in the western part of the city.
The financial lifeline for thousands of families
The market in the Old City of Jerusalem is one of the oldest in the world and provides an economic lifeline for thousands of families. While there is no official figure on the number of shops and stalls in the market, estimates vary from 1,000 to 2,000, depending on the definition used. A field survey conducted in 2019 and 2020 found 2,075 stores operating in the market. Previous estimates by the Palestinian Chamber of Commerce in the city spoke of around 1,400 shops, while figures published by Israeli authorities in the 1990s indicated that there were 1,896 businesses there. Whatever the correct number, thousands of people work in the market; unofficial estimates put the number anywhere between 2,600 and 3,700. The vast majority of them are Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, the Old City or the adjacent neighborhoods.
The question now is what will happen to these people. According to figures from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, around 75% of the Palestinian families and around 84% of the children in East Jerusalem in 2022 were living below the poverty line. Against the backdrop of the economic collapse described by the market traders and the accompanying statistics, the crisis in the Old City is not just about financial losses; it is also affecting the daily lives of residents. In 2020, the closure rate of stores in the market was around 30%; according to Rashq, “since October 7 and all the security events that followed, that rate has increased significantly.”
Noor al-Daya is 19 years old and lives in Aqabat al-Khalidiya in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. She says that, during the first few days of the most recent war with Iran, the Old City was under almost complete closure; only residents officially registered as living in the Old City were allowed to enter. This completely disrupted their daily routine. According to al-Daya, in addition to these restrictions, there was also an escalation of tension and violence within the Old City. She also lost her job working at a hotel near Dung Gate after the tourism industry collapsed. “Since losing that job,” she says, “I have nothing to do now.”
She is not alone. Over the years, the Old City has relied on three main types of visitor: tourists from overseas, Palestinians from the West Bank and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Now, the numbers from each of these groups have declined massively. West Bank residents are no longer able to get to Jerusalem, after Israel closed the checkpoints in response to the October 7 massacre. Recent years have also seen an almost total collapse in international tourism. In 2019, for example, some 4.4 million people visited Israel’s capital city; in 2024, that number had plummeted to just 330,000.
Meanwhile, the most recent war with Iran dashed any hope that recovery would come from domestic tourism, in the form of Arab citizens of Israel. “Under normal circumstances,” says one employee of the Waqf — the religious trust responsible for managing Islamic sites in Jerusalem — who asked to remain anonymous, “around 250,000 worshipers visit the al-Aqsa Mosque for Friday prayers during Ramadan. A large proportion of them are Palestinian citizens of Israel. During the last Ramadan, however, restrictions on worshipers entering the compound, because of the war and security concerns, meant that there were almost no visitors.”
According to Raed Sa’ada, chairman of the Palestinian Tourism Association and owner of the Jerusalem Hotel, “there used to be more than 40 hotels and hostels operating in East Jerusalem, owned or run by residents of East Jerusalem or church institutions. Because of the situation in recent years, there are now only 24 left.”
Sa’ada compares the current situation to the days of the second intifada at the turn of the century: “There’s no foreign tourism because of the security situation and there’s no domestic tourism because the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher were both closed during March due to the war. Even activists and foreign journalists have stopped coming.”
No official explanation or cause
Already facing severe practical challenges, Rami Saleh, the director of the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, claims that Israeli authorities are making life even harder for the Old City traders. He says that several traders have contacted his organization, saying that they were prevented from opening their businesses without being given any explanation or legal cause. “In one of the cases,” he tells Shomrim, “a trader in the Old City market tried to partially open his store, just to sort through his goods — but the police ordered him to close it, arguing that it didn’t have a protected space. The officers even switched the sign on the door to ‘Closed’.”
According to Saleh, the trader claims that he was subsequently banned from reopening his store at all, after which he gave up entirely on such efforts. At the same time, the trader claimed, stores in the Jewish Quarter — only some of which had protected spaces — were allowed to remain open. In other cases, Saleh says, traders were prevented from opening their stores despite no official closure notice being issued. The only stores that were allowed to open were mainly grocery stores and pharmacies.
Shomrim has written extensively about the disparity between public bomb shelter accessibility in the western part of Jerusalem compared to the east of the city: although around 40 percent of Jerusalemites live in the east of the city, they have access to just 10 percent of the city’s public bomb shelters.
Saleh says that his organization has approached the relevant officials in the Israel Police and Jerusalem Municipality to ask for legal explanations for the incidents reported to them. So far, there has been no response. He argues that the situation reflects a widespread use of discretionary authority under the guise of security concerns, lacking clear or consistent criteria. This raises questions about the nature of the policy, particularly as it resurfaces during every round of escalation.
The post No Tourists, no income: The collapse of livelihoods in Jerusalem’s Old City appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani faces growing pressure over Jewish NYPD Commissioner Tisch and over Israel from left flank
(JTA) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing increasing pressure from some on the leftmost flank of his voting coalition, and an ICE shooting Thursday led democratic socialist allies to add their voices to a major demand: dump police commissioner Jessica Tisch.
“The NYPD’s Strategic Response Group must be disbanded as quickly as possible, and Commissioner Tisch must step down,” said Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won her Democratic primary with Mamdani’s endorsement. The democratic socialist, who is expected to join Congress next year representing Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, was referring to the heavily armed police department unit that often responds to protests.
The calls for Tisch’s removal follow strident criticism of the mayor from pro-Palestinian activists on Wednesday night who called him names, including “traitor” and “Ziohran,” when he showed up at an Oct. 7 Israeli peace vigil mourning the loss of both Jewish and Palestinian lives. The demonstrators assailed him for not doing more to advance the pro-Palestinian agenda that has long been central to his political beliefs, raising questions over whether he could lose parts of his base as he pledges to be a mayor for all New Yorkers.
The demand for Tisch’s removal came after an ICE agent shot and wounded a Dominican man in his car on Thursday afternoon while his 5-year-old son was in the back seat. Avila Chevalier, who joined protests against ICE on Thursday, wrote on X that the NYPD “spent more time protecting a militia that just shot someone than protecting New Yorkers.”
Mamdani’s decision last year to retain Tisch — a self-described “proud Zionist” who comes from a prominent Jewish family — was seen as a reassuring move by moderates and establishment Jewish organizations including UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council. (70 Faces Media, the parent company of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and New York Jewish Week, receives UJA funding.)
A number of progressives were skeptical of the decision at the time, citing her background as an appointee of Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, and her past criticism of campus pro-Palestinian protests. Some viewed her as an impediment to criminal justice reform.
Meanwhile, some on the left have dinged him for not yet following through on campaign promises 10 months into his term, including dissolving the Strategic Response Group, or backing down from his vow to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a plan which he later said he did not have the power to execute.
Anti-Zionist groups including Pal-Awda, Within Our Lifetime and a number of student organizations who rallied against Mamdani at the Oct. 7 vigil accused him of succumbing “to Zionist pressure.” Protesters called him a “traitor” and a number of chants rang out including, “Mayor Mamdani you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” drowning out speakers at the vigil and forcing the organizers to move it behind police barricades to keep the protesters from overrunning the event.
Among those protesters’ many gripes with the mayor was his decision to retain Tisch. One sign at the demonstration depicted Mamdani with the text, “Chief Executive of the NYPD SRG” with a Star of David in the middle, and a name tag on the mayor’s chest reading, “Ziohran.”
Criticism was also directed at Mamdani for not stopping Israeli real estate events at synagogues, and for his strategy to combat antisemitism, released last week, which allocates funds to a number of community-based organizations aimed at preventing hate crimes. Some critics have charged that some of the funding will aid Zionist organizations.
“The Jewish community is a large part of New York and it should be cherished. But you cannot fund these Anti-Defamation Leagues that prioritize Zionism over Judaism,” a John Jay College student protester, who declined to be named, told JTA during the demonstration.
On Thursday, the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter — which Mamdani has called his “political home” — wrote that Tisch “must end NYPD complicity with ICE” and that if she “cannot put a stop to these injustices, she must be fired.”
“Abolish ICE. Disband the SRG. Fire Tisch,” wrote Illapa Sairitupac, a fellow democratic socialist who won the Democratic nomination for a Lower Manhattan State Assembly district. Mamdani endorsed both Sairitupac and Avila Chevalier this past year.
While some protesters at the vigil said they were Mamdani voters — and one speaker even identified herself as a former intern for the now-mayor — some of the mayor’s allies have stressed that the crowd protesting him was not representative of his base.
“If I had to gamble, I would gamble that the vast majority of them were people who never supported him,” activist Abby Stein told JTA on Thursday night, during the Mazals gala held by left-wing group Jews for Racial & Economic Justice. Mamdani was due to attend the JFREJ event, but because of the ICE shooting was instead in the Bronx, where he denounced the federal agency and demanded that it cease its operations in New York City.
Many of the signs excoriating Mamdani at Wednesday’s protest outside of City Hall were signed with the name of the Maoist Communist Union, an organization that opposed Mamdani before he took office. Some protesters were handing out copies of Spartacist, the Trotskyist International Communist League’s journal.
“We certainly didn’t support Mamdani or vote for him,” said Erica Jones, among the Trotskyist protesters. “We knew he was running as a Democrat and he would be as big of a sellout as AOC and Bernie Sanders and all the rest of those who claim to have, at one time, stood for socialism but in reality, stand for the capitalist masters who are oppressing us all.”
Stein, a member of the DSA in addition to JFREJ, called out some of the protesters’ rhetoric and the choice to crash the Israelis for Peace Oct. 7 vigil. But she also acknowledged that there was overlap between their demands and her views, including over the police commissioner.
“There are things that people are upset over that I think are legit — like keeping Jessica Tisch on, for example,” Stein said. “A lot of us were not very happy about it.”
Ultimately, Stein said there is “always going to be something to protest” with any politician, and pointed to a quote from New York’s mayor in the 1970s and ‘80s, Ed Koch: “If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Mamdani faces growing pressure over Jewish NYPD Commissioner Tisch and over Israel from left flank appeared first on The Forward.
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A planned non-Zionist Jewish school in Boston hopes to ride the momentum of the left
(JTA) — BOSTON — In the middle of a conversation about her future children, it dawned on Leah Robbins that the school she imagined for them did not exist.
Robbins envisioned a Jewish school where children studied Jewish texts, history and observance, as she did at the school run out of her Conservative synagogue in northern Florida. But having long ago rejected the allegiance to Israel that was entwined with her education, she could not fathom sending her children to a school that promoted Zionism — which ruled out all the Jewish day schools she knew.
“I was just overwhelmed with a sense of grief that my kids could be less Jewishly educated than I was,” Robbins, who has lived in Boston for 10 years, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I would never ever consider sending my kids to any of the local day schools because of total values misalignment.”
Four years after that conversation, Robbins is building her own institution for the children she hopes to have. She plans to open Achvat Olam, a “diasporist” day school whose name translates to “global solidarity” in Hebrew, in the Boston area in fall 2029. The school aims to launch with eight to 10 families, starting with a kindergarten and adding grade levels until ultimately becoming a K-8 school.
Achvat Olam is fiscally sponsored by Beloved Builders, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that supports progressive Jewish projects. Robbins, who has a background in fundraising for Jewish nonprofits, hopes to raise $625,000 for the launch. She said she has met about 20 local families who expressed interest, and will start formal recruitment efforts, including focus groups and open houses, next year.
Achvat Olam will teach about Jewish history, cultures and languages outside of Israel, while engaging with Hebrew and Israel’s history from a non-Zionist perspective. The school’s website includes a page on “Israel/Palestine,” saying its community will share a belief that “the pursuit of justice, dignity, and thriving for all people is a Jewish moral imperative.”
“This includes an age-appropriate, honest confrontation with Zionism and the ongoing Nakba against the Palestinian people,” the website says, using the Arabic word for the displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians at the time of the State of Israel’s founding. The school also says that students will consider “the complicity and support of the US government and Diaspora Jews.”
Micah-Shalom Kesselman is the parent of a 4-year-old in Medford, Massachusetts, and participates in local left-wing Jewish groups such as the Boston Workers Circle. He’s disappointed that his son Oren will age out of Achvat Olam by the time it is scheduled to open as a kindergarten. “I would super want Oren to attend something like what Achvat Olam is shaping up to be,” he said.
Kesselman, who studies Yiddish with his son, explained that he would like Oren to be steeped in Jewish traditions and culture. But as a parent who is “not a supporter of Zionism,” he said he has found few Jewish educational opportunities that match his beliefs.
Diverse day school histories
Jewish day schools have historically encompassed a range of orientations toward Israel, according to Jonathan Krasner, a historian of American Jewish education at Brandeis University. The modern day school movement was born in the 1920s and initially dominated by orthodox schools, some of which did not emphasize Zionism. In the 1950s, secular Yiddishist schools taught varied attitudes toward Israel. Some yeshivas in the orthodox Haredi movement still today oppose Zionism on religious grounds, believing that Jewish sovereignty should only be established through the coming of the Messiah.
But Krasner could not name another day school that has Achvat Olam’s goal: education for Jewish families who disavow the current-day political realities of Israel and Zionism. In the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, many day schools went the opposite direction, adding curricula to strengthen solidarity between Diaspora Jews and Israel.
“The initial response of the organized Jewish community was, understandably, to circle the wagons and to reinforce their connections to Israel and to the Israeli people,” Krasner said.
Jack Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish history at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, isn’t convinced that Achvat Olam will change that trend. He said he was “highly skeptical” that Robbins could attract enough families to sustain a school. According to historical data, he said, Jews who lean more politically left tend to be less engaged in Jewish life.
“From what I know, the overwhelming majority of parents who are interested in sending their children to Jewish day schools are pro-Israel,” said Wertheimer.
Nonetheless, Robbins believes that the market for her school is growing. Survey after survey has captured a drop in Americans’ support for Israel since the Gaza war, and Jews are not an exception to the trend. After decades of being treated as fringe in many of their communities, left-wing Jews who are anti-Zionist — or simply do not see Israel as part of their identity — say that instead of adapting to their congregations and Jewish schools, the institutions should adapt to them.
There are signs that this group makes up a substantial portion of Jews in the United States. About 30% of Jewish adults believe that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, according to a June poll of 1,022 Jews from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which had a 5% error margin. Less than 40% said that “supporting Israel” was crucial to their Jewish identity.
Younger Jews emphasize traditions
At the same time, among adults who identified as religiously Jewish, younger people said they emphasized Jewish traditions more than their older counterparts. Younger Jews were more likely than older ones to say that “celebrating Jewish holidays” and “celebrating or marking Shabbat” were important to them, while Jews over 45 placed more emphasis on “remembering the Holocaust” and “supporting Israel” than younger ones.
This finding could reflect the growing share of younger Jews who are Orthodox. It also comes amid a boom in Jewish leftist organizations that explicitly ground their activism in religious tradition. IfNotNow, an anti-occupation group that has grown from 1,000 dues-paying members in 2023 to 7,000 this year, says it is “growing a community rooted in Jewish values and ritual.” The anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which has amassed 32,000 dues-paying members, often frames its protests through Jewish holidays, texts and prayer.
Robbins is betting that a significant pool of younger Jews, many of them now parents to young children, are seeking avenues to both protect their Jewish traditions and reset their community’s relationship with Israel for the next generation. Instead of supporting Israel, Achvat Olam says that its students will learn a curriculum of “collective liberation at home, globally, and in Israel/Palestine.”
“This is a very experimental moment in Jewish history. The Jewish left is growing by leaps and bounds,” said Robbins, referencing estimates of dozens of anti-Zionist congregations and prayer groups sprouting across the country. “There is hunger for this.”
Boston is a hub for such new organizations. Since 2024, the city has hosted the Conference on the Jewish Left at Boston University, a gathering of left-wing Jewish scholars, students, activists and faith leaders. The first annual meeting drew 300 people, the second 700, and the third in February saw more than 900 participants. A poll of Greater Boston by Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the central fundraising arm of Boston’s Jewish community, found earlier this year that 38% of Jews aged 18 to 29 identified as “anti-Zionist,” and another 30% said they were “uncommitted” to Zionism or anti-Zionism.
Rabbi Greg Hersh left his congregation at Temple Emmanuel in Wakefield, north of Boston, in 2024. He said he became increasingly alienated from his congregants after Oct. 7. Hersh felt that the congregation, focused on supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism locally, did not share his anguish about the deaths of Palestinians.
Last year, Hersh founded V’ahavtah, a mostly Cambridge-based congregation devoted to “practicing Judaism beyond Zionism.” V’ahavtah joined Jews, like him, who felt uncomfortable with the norm of Israeli flags flying inside synagogues. Their Shabbat services regularly draw 30 to 40 people, numbers he said he never saw in Wakefield. He believes that is proof of growing demand for non-Zionist Jewish institutions.
“You take Israel out of the equation and the Jews will show up, and that’s what happened with V’ahavtah,” said Hersh. “My expectation is Achvat Olam is going to be very well poised to fill that void.”
On the ground, Robbins faces formidable obstacles to funding Achvat Olam. Jewish day schools struggle across the country to attract enrollment in the face of tuition that many families can’t afford, along with budgets strained by economic uncertainty and heightened spending to ward off security threats. Earlier this year, MetroWest Jewish Day School in Framingham, a suburb of Boston, shuttered and said that its “model of highly individualized Jewish day school education is no longer sustainable.”
Heavy investments from local philanthropies have helped day schools offset high costs. Prizmah, a national network of 305 day schools, recently reported that it saw enrollment rise across denominations for the first time last year, thanks in large part to philanthropy.
But many groups that fund Jewish education hold values that are antithetical to Robbins’ — including CJP, which calls itself a “pro-Israel, Zionist organization.” Prizmah and CJP declined requests for comment from JTA.
The individual donors who fund Jewish schools also tend to be older, more conservative than Robbins and more motivated by support for Israel, according to Krasner.
“The people who are most likely to be in a financial position to support day schools with generous philanthropic gifts are demographically very different from the population that Leah is trying to attract,” he said.
Robbins admitted that funding challenges meant the success of Achvat Olam was not “any sort of inevitability.” But she believes there is inevitability to the political momentum that could drive families toward such a school. “Something I want to convey to people is that the train has already left the station,” she said. “There is no stemming the tide of the growth of the Jewish left.”
Robbins has turned to funding from left-wing organizations, which already siphon much of their resources to grassroots activism, legal defense and awareness campaigns.
“It can be hard to get in the face of people to make the case for something that requires long-game thinking,” she said. “I’m trying to make the case, when the last fire has been put out, what’s going to be left if we’re not building it right now?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Protesters in Toronto: ‘We will honor all our martyrs’ after 3 years of Gaza war
(JTA) — TORONTO – Hundreds of protesters marched through Toronto’s downtown core via Yonge Street Saturday afternoon, chanting more loudly as additional people joined the demonstration. “We will honor all our martyrs, all our children, sons and daughters!” and “In my lifetime I will see Palestinians living free!” the crowd yelled in unison.
Separated by metal barricades and police officers, a much smaller group of counterprotesters waving Israeli and Iranian flags stood at the southern end of Sankofa Square, where the demonstrators gathered before the march to mark the third anniversary of the war in Gaza.
Trailing behind a white Ford F-150 equipped with speakers, protesters at one point shouted, “Overthrow the Epstein class,” a slogan referring to disgraced Jewish financier Jeffrey Epstein to decry the global elite and call for the ultra-wealthy to be stripped of power. Tensions briefly flared when a man wearing a Turning Point Canada sweatshirt confronted a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
Otherwise, the protest was largely peaceful. Toronto police said that one individual was arrested at the demonstration after being recognized by officers as someone wanted in connection with an unrelated incident.
The protest was part of a broader international wave of demonstrations, with the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs counting 17 protests in Canada planned for Saturday through Wednesday, including in Montreal and Ottawa.
The demonstrators included Jews and Israelis who are highly critical of the prosecution of the war in Gaza and Zionism as a whole. “I went to school in Haifa, and I saw how Palestinians are treated,” said pro-Palestinian protester Shlomit, 65, who didn’t provide a last name due to concerns for her safety. “I grew up in a very Zionist family, but being in Israel actually changed my mind about things.”
Shlomit said she had mutual friends with Vivian Silver, a Canadian-Israeli peace activist who was murdered on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, launching the Gaza war. She said she was emotionally impacted by Silver’s death, and believes the kind of work like Silver’s was critical to building peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
“I knew all these people who were connected to [Vivian]. She was a peace activist, and what happened to her was distressing to me,” said Shlomit, who wore a pin labeled “Jews Against Occupation.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney mentioned Silver in a statement on Wednesday, the three-year anniversary of Oct. 7 itself. “Canada unequivocally condemns Hamas, which must play no role in the future governance of a demilitarised Palestinian state,” read Carney’s statement. “We stand steadfastly with the Israeli people in their pursuit of a safe and secure Israel as part of a two-state solution.”
The statement continued by commemorating the Canadian lives lost to the Hamas attack, mentioning Silver and eight others. “We remember them for the lives they lived and the people they loved – and we honour the families and friends who continue to mourn their loss. May their memory be a blessing,” he said.
Other demonstrators expressed solidarity with issues beyond the Middle East. Caelen Leizer-Romalis, 24, was attending the protest as part of the Revolutionary Communist Party. “We have an obligation as Canadians to stand up to imperialism,” said Leizer-Romalis, who is Jewish. “In order to liberate the people of Palestine, we need to liberate the workers here as well.”
Despite being outnumbered, pro-Israel demonstrators — all of whom carried either an Iranian flag or a picture of the last shah of Iran before his ouster in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 — waved their flags as “Tel Aviv” by Omer Adam blasted from a boombox.
Mahya Tayabi, 38, decided to come to the protest to demonstrate unity between Israel and Iran. “I’m Persian, but I love Israel. I love Jewish people. Bibi and the IDF helped my country,” said Tayabi, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by his nickname. As Tayabi spoke, the boombox switched to playing an EDM beat featuring the lyrics “Ayatollah Khamenei is dead!” Israel and the United States killed the ayatollah at the beginning of the war on Iran that they launched in late February.
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs expressed concern regarding the weekend’s protests.
“Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre has warned about the consequences of turning a blind eye: when targeting of the Jewish community becomes frequent and normalized, it can push susceptible individuals toward violence. Events praising the ‘resistance’ responsible for the October 7 atrocities as communities gather to mourn the murdered demands moral clarity from civic leaders about what is acceptable in our society.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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