[Official] Global March To Jerusalem

Destruction of the Holy City of Jerusalem

The Global March to Jerusalem is focusing on the particular issue of Jerusalem because the holy city embodies the terrible violence of an enduring occupation. Furthermore, the security of Jerusalem as a city for all of humanity is especially urgent today. Over the last several years Zionist efforts to “Judaise” the city have quickened pace in an attempt to erase Jerusalem’s physical, cultural and spiritual characteristics. This process of Judaisation includes the unrestricted expansion and funding of illegal Israeli settlements, the continued dispossession and demolition of Palestinian property, and the construction of a Separation Wall surrounding the city, all of which have changed the demographics of the holy city from a Palestinian to Jewish majority.

These apartheid policies target and exclude not only Muslims, but also Christians. Over the last twenty years government backed fundamentalist Jewish groups have taken Palestinian homes in both the Muslim and Christian Quarters of the Old City. Recently Jewish Settlers attacked a Jerusalem monastery that was built on the site where tradition says the tree used in the making of Jesus’s cross once stood. The monastery was defaced with “death to Christians” graffiti in Hebrew. On the same day “death to Arabs” was also painted on the wall of a playground of a Jewish-Arab bilingual school in Jerusalem.

According to 2011 report by Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, “the continued pattern of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined with forcible eviction of long residing Palestinians are creating an intolerable situation that can only be described, in its cumulative impact, as a form of ethnic cleansing.” However the United Nations and other international bodies have done little to prevent this Zionist aggression. In response, Palestinians are calling upon the global community to secure the status of Jerusalem as a Holy City for all humans.