When we arrived at the checkpoint, they told me that my eleven-year-old son could not accompany me. "I insisted, and do you know what the policeman yelled at me? 'Either he leaves or I shoot him dead in front of you,' explains Omar – not his real name –, 53 years old, as he leaves the one o'clock prayer in front of the esplanade of the mosques of Jerusalem.
The cell phone rings. It's her son. She waits for him nearby. Omar breathes. Can the story be invented, after prayer, under strict police control in the old city of Jerusalem, desolate, with businesses closed and without tourists? Can. If the journalist – veteran but not infallible – believed this, he would not include the testimony in the chronicle.
-What have you done?
–My son is gone. They make you feel miserable. I am born in Jerusalem, I was born here and here I will die. Hope? None.
The Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are symbols of Arab Jerusalem, which is increasingly a minority. Like everything here, it is sacred ground. And this Friday is a day to gauge the extent of each other's anger. Muslims were able to pray in front of Al Aqsa, with one condition: the checkpoints only allowed those over fifty years of age to pass.
At the end of the prayer, uphill along Bab El Silsi street, the Muslims parade without fanfare. Today Jerusalem could have burned but this time no one wanted it to be that way. Not these Arabs – there are two million in Israel, 20% of the population – who feel humiliated in their city, Jerusalem.
–I told the soldier at the checkpoint: what would he think if someone prevented him from entering the synagogue? –explains Taisir, 70 years old– Today there are not even five hundred of us, in normal times we come in thousands.
Jerusalem, the thrice-holy city, accuses war. The atmosphere is tense, tourism has disappeared and even the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the body of Jesus Christ rested, is empty. Few but very faithful, yes. And without the religious who compete for their plot in another temple as symbolic as it is parceled out.
A cat, who thinks he is handsome, guards the access. Even the felines seem hidden, they roam around ancient Jerusalem like princes.
“This time it's different. There have never been so many deaths. I came from Moscow 29 years ago and I assure you that no Israeli soldier would kill children in cold blood as happened on October 7,” says Igor, 58, on historic Jaffa Street.
There is only life in the Mahane Yehuda market, the eve of the Sabbath. There, an octogenarian approaches. He is Sephardic, born in Türkiye, and speaks Ladino, intelligible and beautiful. “I'm thinking and it doesn't hurt me at all,” he says, lest I think badly. Ben Zion wants to sing a song. Like everything, it carries history, the lost Sepharad. He says like this: “Open your closed door, I curse your beauty.”
-And how do you see the situation?
–There are always slaughterhouses here, always.
