JERUSALEM: Dozens of Israeli peace activists gathered on Thursday to show solidarity with Palestinians ahead of annual rallies marking Israel's capture of East Jerusalem, with the thousands-strong marches known for descending into nationalist anti-Palestinian violence.
Jerusalem Day, as the occasion is known, commemorates Israeli forces taking East Jerusalem during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
Israel considers all of Jerusalem, including the annexed Palestinian-majority east, to be its indivisible capital. The international community, however, does not recognize this.
Every year, thousands of Israeli nationalists, many of them religious Jews, march through Jerusalem and its annexed Old City, including in predominantly Palestinian neighborhoods, waving Israeli flags, dancing and sometimes accosting residents.
Under the blazing morning sun on Thursday, dozens of Israeli peace activists wearing white T-shirts and carrying colorful flowers descended the stone steps towards the Old City's Damascus Gate.
One elderly woman stood handing out yellow flowers to Palestinians crossing through the gate, while another greeted them with "good morning" in Arabic.
Clutching white flowers in his hands, 52-year-old Ilan Perez said he wanted to "show my sympathy and love with flowers".
"It was important for me to come in order to show some solidarity with the local community and say that as a Jew, as a Zionist, as someone who wants a Jewish state here, I want them to be part of it and be part of the nation with equal rights," said Perez, who works in the tech industry and had come from the city of Raanana, near Tel Aviv.
Palestinian shops shuttered
Inside the Damascus Gate, a Palestinian man was busily cellotaping a padlock shut on his storefront in anticipation of the violence expected to erupt later in the afternoon.
Shops along the march's route were shuttered, and Israeli police stood stationed behind metal barriers.
Authorities sometimes order Palestinian shops in the Old City to shut for the march, which ends at the Western Wall -- the last remnant of the Second Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, the holiest site where Jews are allowed to pray.
Near the city's Via Dolorosa, a handful of activists from the Israeli-Palestinian grassroots movement Standing Together were preparing to perform so-called protective presence, a tactic normally used to deter Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
"This day, thousands of basically settlers and right-wing fascist young and older people will be roaming the streets chanting very racist things, trying to destroy places owned by Palestinians and just terrorizing the whole place," said Rula Daoud, co-director of Standing Together.
"Our presence is to just protect people from being attacked, places from being vandalized. And we try to de-escalate this day. So we are not here to protest," she said, adding that Standing Together had around 300 activists stationed in the Old City, alongside others from different peace organizations.
Daoud said the march was becoming more violent every year, particularly after Hamas's October 7 attacks on Israel, and accused the police of not intervening to curb the violence.
Around midday, a group of dozens of revelers waving large Israeli flags and wearing stickers with the slogan "Israel is forever" streamed through Damascus Gate singing and playing loud music.
