"We will not surrender to despair - We will stand together! Jews and Arabs march together in Jerusalem - Saturday night, Oct. 17…"
The left-wing Israeli peace group Gush Shalom is participating in an Arab-Jewish march for peace tomorrow night in Jerusalem:
Demonstration Saturday night in Jerusalem
We will not surrender to despair - We will stand together!
Jews and Arabs march together in Jerusalem - Saturday night, Oct. 17. Starting point - at 8.30 at Gan HaSus, Jerusalem.
Arabs and Jews want to live in security. Real security, without occupation and without killing. We know that only with a just solution to the conflict will be able to stop.
Regardless of what you may think about this, I think all of us should be able to agree that a failure by the Israel Police to protect these marchers, and any failure by police and the criminal justice system to arrest and credibly prosecute any right-wing or racists opponents to the march who break the law, would clearly show the world that the government of Israel is not the open democratic state it claims to be.
It is only weeks after police failed to protect the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade resulting in six stabbed marchers and one dead teenage girl. In that case, police officers were reprimanded and suffered some sanctions, but none of them was seriously investigated for the crime some of them likely committed – turning a blind eye to the possibility of the attack because they hated LGBT people and were not particularly interested in protecting them or in seeing gays march in Jerusalem.
Another incident like that, even one that has no fatalities, would only further prove that Israel is not the state many of us from all political and Jewish religious outlooks hoped it would be, the state many of us once worked very hard and long to support.