Twenty-seven days before the first rocket was fired from Gaza this week, a squad of Israeli police officers entered the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, brushed the Palestinian attendants aside and strode across its vast limestone courtyard. Then they cut the cables to the loudspeakers that broadcast prayers to the faithful from four medieval minarets.
It was the night of April 13, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramzan. It was also Memorial Day in Israel, which honours those who died fighting for the country. The Israeli president was delivering a speech at the Western Wall, a sacred Jewish site that lies below the mosque, and Israeli officials were concerned that the prayers would drown it out.
The incident was confirmed by six mosque officials, three of whom witnessed it; the Israeli police declined to comment. In the outside world, it barely registered.
But in hindsight, the police raid on the mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, was one of several actions that led, less than a month later, to the sudden resumption of war between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, and the outbreak of civil unrest between Arabs and Jews across Israel itself.
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That deterioration has led to the worst violence between Israelis and Palestinians in years — not only in the conflict with Hamas, which has killed at least 145 people in Gaza and 12 in Israel, but in a wave of mob attacks in mixed Arab-Jewish cities in Israel.
The crisis came as the Israeli government was struggling for its survival; as Hamas — which Israel views as a terrorist group — was seeking to expand its role within the Palestinian movement; and as a new generation of Palestinians was asserting its own values and goals.
And it was the outgrowth of years of blockades and restrictions in Gaza, decades of occupation in the West Bank, and decades more of discrimination against Arabs within the state of Israel, said Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Israeli Parliament and former chairman of the World Zionist Organization.
The prayers at Aqsa for the first night of Ramzan on April 13 occurred as the Israeli president, Reuven Rivlin, was making his speech nearby. The mosque leadership, which is overseen by the Jordanian government, had rejected an Israeli request to avoid broadcasting prayers during the speech, viewing the request as disrespectful, a public affairs officer at the mosque said. So that night, the police raided the mosque and disconnected the speakers.
In another year, the episode might have been quickly forgotten. But last month, several factors suddenly and unexpectedly aligned that allowed this slight to snowball into a major showdown.
A resurgent sense of national identity among young Palestinians found expression not only in resistance to a series of raids on Al Aqsa, but also in protesting the plight of six Palestinian families facing expulsion from their homes. The perceived need to placate an increasingly assertive far right gave Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s caretaker prime minister, little incentive to calm the waters.
Israelis had been complacent, nurtured by more than a decade of far-right governments that treated Palestinian demands for equality and statehood as a problem to be contained, not resolved.
The loudspeaker incident was followed almost immediately by a police decision to close off a popular plaza outside the Damascus Gate, one of the main entrances to the Old City of Jerusalem. Young Palestinians typically gather there at night during Ramzan. To Palestinians, it was another insult. It led to protests, which led to nightly clashes between the police and young men trying to reclaim the space.
Most Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and later annexed, are not Israeli citizens by choice, because many say applying for citizenship would confer legitimacy on an occupying power. So they cannot vote.
Many feel they are gradually being pushed out of Jerusalem. Restrictions on building permits force them to either leave the city or build illegal housing, which is vulnerable to demolition orders. So the decision to block Palestinians from a treasured communal space compounded the sense of discrimination that many have felt all their lives.
On April 21, just a week after the police raid, a few hundred members of an extreme-right Jewish group, Lehava, marched through central Jerusalem, chanting “Death to Arabs” and attacking Palestinian passers-by. A group of Jews was filmed attacking a Palestinian home, and others assaulted drivers who were perceived to be Palestinian.
Foreign diplomats and community leaders tried to persuade the Israeli government to lower the temperature in Jerusalem. But they found the government distracted and uninterested, said a person involved in the discussions, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Netanyahu was in the middle of coalition negotiations after an election in March — the fourth in two years — that ended without a clear winner. To form a coalition, he needed to persuade several extreme-right lawmakers to join him. One was Itamar Ben Gvir, a former lawyer for Lehava who advocates expelling Arab citizens whom he considers disloyal to Israel, and who until recently hung a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish extremist who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, in his living room. The police said they were responding to violence by demonstrators in Sheikh Jarrah, but video and images showed they engaged in violence themselves. As the images began to circulate online, the neighbourhood turned into a rallying point for Palestinians not just across the occupied territories and Israel, but among the diaspora.
The experience of the families, who had already been displaced from what became Israel in 1948, was something “every single Palestinian in the diaspora can relate to,” said Jehan Bseiso, a Palestinian poet living in Lebanon.
And it highlighted a piece of legal discrimination: Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim land in East Jerusalem that was owned by Jews before 1948. But the descendants of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled their homes that year have no legal means to reclaim their families’ land.
On April 29, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority canceled the Palestinian elections, fearing a humiliating result. The decision made Abbas look weak.
Hamas saw an opportunity and began to reposition itself as a militant defender of Jerusalem. On May 4, six days before the war began, the head of the Hamas military, Muhammed Deif, issued a rare public statement. “This is our final warning,” Deif said. “If the aggression against our people in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood does not stop immediately, we will not stand idly by.”
War nevertheless seemed unlikely.
The most dramatic escalation happened when police raided the Aqsa Mosque on May 7. Police officers armed with tear gas, stun grenades and rubber-tipped bullets burst into the mosque compound, setting off hours of clashes with stone-throwing protesters in which hundreds were injured, medics said. The police said the stone-throwers started it. Several worshipers said the opposite.
Whoever struck first, the sight of stun grenades and bullets inside the prayer hall of one of the holiest sites in Islam — on the last Friday of Ramzan, one of its holiest nights — was seen as a grievous insult to all Muslims.
“This is about the Judaization of the city of Jerusalem,” Sheikh Omar al-Kisswani, another leader at the mosque, said in an interview hours after the raid. “It’s about deterring people from going to Al Aqsa.”
That set the stage for a dramatic showdown on Monday, May 10. A final court hearing on Sheikh Jarrah was set to coincide with Jerusalem Day, when Jews celebrate the reunification of Jerusalem, by dint of the capture of East Jerusalem, in 1967.
Jewish nationalists typically mark the day by marching through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City and trying to visit Temple Mount, the site on which the Aqsa Mosque is built.
The looming combination of that march, tensions over Al Aqsa and the possibility of an eviction order in Sheikh Jarrah seemed to be building toward something dangerous.
The Israeli government scrambled to tamp down tensions. A supreme court order barred Jews from entering the mosque compound. But the police raided the Aqsa Mosque again, early on Monday morning. Stun grenades and rubber-tipped bullets were fired. The government rerouted the Jerusalem Day march away from the Muslim Quarter, after receiving an intelligence briefing about the risk of escalation if it went ahead.
But that was too little, and far too late. By then, the Israeli army had already begun to order civilians away from the Gaza perimeter. Shortly after 6 pm on Monday, the rocket fire from Gaza began.