Sirens always make me pause. I fall silent and count one off, praying that there won’t be another. Because two sirens mean a string of them will follow.
Distant memories from the last intifada segue into those of summer last. Somehow, the rise of conflict in Jerusalem always comes along with the rising temperatures. But after the emergency meetings, the touring politicians, the dramatic headlines, there comes the first rain, and everything calms down. Then the countdown begins for next summer.
Some, though, aren’t content with just counting the days.
Jeremy made aliyah from D.C. six years ago. A reserve paratrooper officer, he rides his bike to work, halfway across town, each time reassuring his mother, thousands of miles away, that he wasn’t anywhere near the most recent attack. Two weeks ago, he joined a crowd of 5,000 to watch Matisyahu, the Jewish American rapper, perform outside the Old City walls. “Jerusalem If I Forget You gets a whole new meaning these days,” the singer tweeted, referring to the ancient prayer he borrowed for one of his songs.
Michal is a mother of four. Over the last few nights, after putting her children to bed, she has been going downtown, where she volunteers for a group seeking dialogue with angst-filled youth bent on revenge. To her ever-concerned sister, she vows never to leave Jerusalem, with its crisp, cool air and still-low crime rates. The following morning it’s her husband who drops off the kids at school, where they are taught about the complexities of living in a mixed city where you have to defend yourself with one hand and reach out to your would-be enemies with the other.
Ibrahim is a Hebrew University law student and a resident of Ras el-Amud, a Palestinian suburb of Jerusalem shaken by recent events. Despite intimidation from Hamas supporters, he goes online every day, trying to convince people to stop the cycle of violence. Friends have tried for a long time to convince him to relocate to Ramallah or the United States, but he clings to his naive faith that there’s still hope. Meanwhile, he alerts the authorities to suspicious happenings, and a few days back confiscated a knife off a 15-year-old brainwashed neighbor kid.
Then there’s Batia. She is an ultra-Orthodox woman. Every day she walks to work at City Hall. Despite having recently bought a canister of tear gas as a precaution, she prefers to put her faith in God and the police. Just before Shabbat, she went up to some police officers and gave them portions of fish, meat and chicken to make their shift a little more pleasant.
Jerusalem keeps going not through pompous statements, but through the hard work and devotion of its people, some elected officials, some social entrepreneurs and some ordinary citizens, united by relentless optimism and a profound love for their city. When things started getting really bad, I put out a call for an emergency meeting of Jerusalem civil society organizations. Within three hours, representatives from 33 organizations sat around a conference table at City Hall. It came as no surprise; even during “normal” times, the amount of people willing to sign up for civilian “reserve duty” is astounding.
There are teenagers handing out Israeli flags. Elderly people handing out small gifts to security personnel. Psychologists supporting youth in distress, activists helping out local businesses, and a string of independent online campaigns. These ordinary citizens allow the city to keep on living its life.
This energy, this drive to take responsibility and think out of the box, are precisely what is needed to resolve the complexity of current events. We have to crack down on violence, while empowering moderate leaders; fight incitement on both sides and defend the right to freedom of worship for every man and woman; and make sure East and West Jerusalem get their share in infrastructure investments.
It’s time for this fresh perspective to rise from the bottom up. We are tired of instant solutions, quickly denounced by this side or the other of the political map. We are tired of those who take turns making political gains out of our hardship. Jerusalem is a different place, and requires a different point of view. The one we, young people of Jerusalem, discovered 10 years ago, when everyone else said the city was lost.
And from this point of view, there is a lot of good to see. And even more to do.
Hanan Rubin is a Jerusalem City Council member and a co-founder of the solution-oriented political movement Wake Up Jerusalem, which focuses on quality-of-life issues for all Jerusalem residents.