Daniel sent us this one — it's Jerusalem Day, and he's wrestling with something a lot of Israelis quietly wrestle with. The day marks the unification of Jerusalem after the Six-Day War, but what it's actually become, what the flag march through the Old City communicates, and whether there's a version of this day that celebrates access to holy sites without the triumphalism — that's the knot he's trying to untie. He's asking when the practice of celebrating Jerusalem Day actually started, whether it was always like this, and how you reclaim a day when its public meaning has been captured by something you don't endorse.
The origin story here is genuinely surprising, and I think most Israelis would get it wrong if you stopped them on the street. Jerusalem Day was established in March of nineteen sixty-eight — so less than a year after the war — by the Chief Rabbinate. Not the Knesset. Not the government. The Chief Rabbinate declared it a religious holiday, a day of thanksgiving for what they saw as a miracle. The Knesset didn't get around to enshrining it in law until thirty years later, in nineteen ninety-eight.
It started as a rabbinic declaration, not a state one. That actually explains a lot about the character of it — or at least the initial character. A religious framing of unification as divine intervention rather than military achievement.
The Chief Rabbinate's original language was about Hallel prayers and thanksgiving. The early celebrations were synagogue-focused, liturgical. There was a ceremony at the Western Wall, but it wasn't the street-level political spectacle it became. The flag march — the Rikudegalim — that started later, in the mid-seventies, and even then it was a relatively small affair organized by religious Zionist youth movements. Bnei Akiva, primarily.
When does it shift? When does it go from thanksgiving to territorial assertion?
The inflection point is really the mid-nineties, and it's tied directly to Oslo. The flag march grew dramatically after nineteen ninety-three, and it wasn't an accident. The peace process created a counter-mobilization. Religious Zionist groups who saw the Oslo Accords as a betrayal — and specifically as a threat to Israeli control over East Jerusalem — began using Jerusalem Day as a platform for visibility and political messaging. The route through the Muslim Quarter via Damascus Gate wasn't the original route. That was a deliberate choice made in the late nineties to assert sovereignty precisely through the most symbolically charged Palestinian spaces.
What Daniel's observing — the sense that the main message isn't celebrating the city so much as affirming conquest — that's not his imagination. The route was literally redesigned to make that statement.
And here's where the numbers help. In the early eighties, you'd see maybe a few thousand people at the flag march. By the late nineties it was tens of thousands. In the last decade, it's been upwards of seventy thousand participants, with a very specific demographic profile — overwhelmingly young, overwhelmingly religious Zionist, and a significant minority of what you'd have to call fringe elements who use the march as cover for explicitly hostile behavior. The police have documented hundreds of incidents over the years — chants, property damage, confrontations with Palestinian residents.
The "young groups who march through Damascus Gate and hurl insults at Palestinians" that Daniel mentioned — that's not hyperbole, it's a documented annual pattern.
And it's worth noting that the broader Israeli public has a complicated relationship with this. Polling from the Israel Democracy Institute over the years shows consistent majority support for Jerusalem remaining unified under Israeli sovereignty, but much more ambivalent feelings about the flag march specifically through the Muslim Quarter. A significant portion of Israelis — including religious Israelis — view the Damascus Gate route as unnecessarily provocative.
Let's go back to the question of when the tone shifted. You mentioned Oslo as the catalyst. But I wonder if there's an earlier seed planted in the nineteen-eighties.
What are you thinking?
The Basic Law. Jerusalem, Capital of Israel. That was the moment the Knesset formally constitutionalized the unification. Before that, it was policy. After that, it was quasi-constitutional law. And I wonder if that legislative act changed the psychological register of Jerusalem Day — from a religious commemoration of access to holy sites toward a national celebration of sovereignty.
That's a sharp observation. The Basic Law absolutely reframed the conversation. It declared Jerusalem "complete and united" as the capital of Israel, and it made any division of the city procedurally almost impossible — you'd need a supermajority to amend it. So Jerusalem Day after nineteen eighty carries this additional weight: it's no longer just "we're grateful the city is unified," it's "this unification is now embedded in our constitutional framework and to question it is to question the state itself.
Which makes it harder to have the kind of nuanced conversation Daniel's trying to have. If the day becomes a loyalty test, there's no space for someone who says "I'm glad I can visit the Western Wall, I'm not glad about the triumphalist march through someone else's neighborhood.
And that's the core tension. The Chief Rabbinate's original framing — "thank God we have access to our holy sites" — is something that a very broad swath of Israelis can get behind, including many who aren't religious at all. The nineteenth-century Jewish attachment to Jerusalem wasn't primarily about sovereignty; it was about presence, about the right to live and pray there. That's a framing that doesn't require the negation of Palestinian presence.
The flag march as currently constituted — routing seventy thousand people through the Muslim Quarter with flags and chants — that does require the negation. Or at least the dismissal. The message isn't "we're here too," it's "we're here and you're not really here.
That's exactly what the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem experience. We should be precise about who we're talking about. There are roughly three hundred and sixty thousand Palestinians living in East Jerusalem. They're permanent residents of Israel — not citizens, residents. They can vote in municipal elections but largely boycott them, because participating is seen as legitimizing Israeli sovereignty. They live in a legal limbo — not fully Israeli, not fully Palestinian in terms of the Palestinian Authority's jurisdiction. Jerusalem Day, for them, isn't a holiday. It's a day when their neighborhoods are locked down, shops are closed, movement is restricted, and thousands of people march through their streets explicitly celebrating the conquest of their part of the city.
Daniel's point about the border only existing for nineteen years — between forty-eight and sixty-seven — is actually quite sharp. In the grand sweep of Jerusalem's three-thousand-year history, nineteen years is a blink. The division was an anomaly, not the natural state. So the unification could be framed as a restoration of normalcy rather than a conquest. But the way it's celebrated doesn't feel like restoration — it feels like conquest.
Because the nineteen years mattered. They weren't just an administrative blip. In those nineteen years, two generations of Jerusalemites grew up on either side of a sealed border. Jordan controlled East Jerusalem, including the Old City, and during that period, Jews were entirely barred from the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter. Synagogues in the Jewish Quarter were destroyed. The Mount of Olives cemetery was desecrated. So when Israelis say "never again will we be separated from our holy sites," that's not abstract. It's a specific memory of nineteen years of exclusion.
Which is why the "access to holy sites" framing has real emotional weight for Israelis who remember that period or grew up hearing about it. But here's the problem: the flag march doesn't stop at the Western Wall. It marches through the Muslim Quarter, through Damascus Gate. That's not about access to holy sites. That's about something else entirely.
It's about sovereignty display. Pure and simple. And the people organizing it would tell you that openly. It's not a secret. The march route is designed to demonstrate that Israeli sovereignty extends to every corner of the city, including the most symbolically Palestinian spaces. Damascus Gate is the grand entrance to the Muslim Quarter. Marching through it with Israeli flags is a statement: "this is ours, all of it, and we're going to walk through it as if we own it.
Because legally, from the Israeli perspective, we do. That's the tension. The Knesset passed a law. The city is unified under Israeli law. So the marchers would say: what's the problem? We're walking through our own capital. Why should we avoid certain neighborhoods?
That's where the legal reality collides with the human reality. Yes, under Israeli law, Jerusalem is a unified municipality. But under international law, East Jerusalem is occupied territory — that's the position of the UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice, and essentially every country except Israel and the United States. And more importantly, on the ground, the three hundred and sixty thousand Palestinians living there don't experience Israeli sovereignty as liberation. They experience it as occupation.
The flag march is a sovereignty parade through occupied territory, dressed up as a religious celebration. That's the uncomfortable thing Daniel is naming without quite wanting to say it outright.
And I think a lot of Israelis feel that discomfort but don't have the language for it. Because the official narrative — "Jerusalem is our eternal undivided capital" — is something they believe. But they also know, on some level, that marching through the Muslim Quarter chanting is not what the Chief Rabbinate had in mind in nineteen sixty-eight.
Let's talk about the timing question more specifically. Daniel asked whether it was always like this. The answer seems to be: no, it wasn't. It was originally a religious thanksgiving day. Then it became a national holiday with a sovereignty dimension after the Basic Law in nineteen eighty. Then Oslo supercharged it into a political mobilization tool. And somewhere along the way, the flag march acquired this aggressive edge that the original organizers probably didn't intend.
I think that's right. And there's one more layer I want to add, which is the demographic shift within the march itself. In the early years, the march was led by religious Zionist youth movements — Bnei Akiva, Ariel, Ezra. Over time, as the march grew, it began attracting more extreme elements. The Lehava organization, the "Price Tag" activists, people who are explicitly anti-Arab in their rhetoric. And the mainstream organizers have struggled with this. They don't want to be associated with overt racism, but they also don't want to disavow the more hardline elements because those elements are the most enthusiastic participants.
The classic "we can't control everyone who shows up" problem, except at a certain scale, the failure to control becomes a form of endorsement.
When seventy thousand people march and a few hundred are chanting racist slogans, the organizers say "those aren't our people." But if it happens every year and you keep marching the same route, at some point the distinction collapses.
That brings us to Daniel's second question — the philosophical one. If you're someone who values Jerusalem, who wants to celebrate access to holy sites and the historical Jewish connection to the city, but you're repulsed by what the day has become, what do you do? Is abstention the right move? Or does abstention just cede the ground entirely to the people whose vision you reject?
This is the genuine dilemma. And I want to be honest about the fact that there's no clean answer. If you stay home, you're effectively saying "Jerusalem Day belongs to the flag marchers now." You're surrendering the meaning of the day to the people who've captured it. But if you participate, you're implicitly lending your presence to an event whose dominant message you find troubling.
It's the "good person at a bad parade" problem. Your individual intentions don't change what the parade communicates to the people watching.
And the people watching include the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, for whom the message is unambiguous regardless of your personal feelings about it. Your quiet, respectful presence doesn't change the fact that the march is routing through their neighborhood as an assertion of dominance.
What are the options? Daniel seems to be reaching for a third way — a celebration that doesn't endorse the hate, that doesn't dismiss the reality on the ground. Is there a model for that?
There have been attempts. Some left-leaning religious groups have organized alternative Jerusalem Day events — interfaith gatherings, joint Israeli-Palestinian cultural events, educational programs about the city's diverse history. The problem is they attract tiny numbers compared to the flag march. A few hundred people at most. The gravitational center of Jerusalem Day is the flag march, and it's not close.
The alternative events end up feeling like a footnote rather than a genuine counterweight.
And part of the issue is that Jerusalem Day isn't just a day — it's a symbol in a much larger political conflict. You can't depoliticize it because the status of Jerusalem is literally the most contested issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Every gesture, every celebration, every march is interpreted through that lens. There's no neutral ground.
Which is why Daniel's question about "how do you wrest back meaning" is so difficult. It's not like a holiday that's been commercialized, where you can just opt for a more authentic version. The meaning of Jerusalem Day is contested because the meaning of Jerusalem is contested.
The contest isn't symmetrical. One side has a state, an army, a municipality, and a seventy-thousand-person march. The other side has residents who largely stay indoors on that day and view the entire affair as a provocation. When Daniel talks about "the feelings of the other half of the city," he's naming an asymmetry that makes any inclusive celebration almost impossible. You can't celebrate unification when one half of the unified city experiences that unification as subjugation.
Is the answer that there is no answer? That's unsatisfying.
I think there's a distinction between "no answer" and "no comfortable answer." The uncomfortable answer is that Jerusalem Day, in its current form, is structurally incapable of being the kind of inclusive celebration Daniel wishes it could be. The very premise of the day — celebrating Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem — is fundamentally at odds with the political aspirations of the Palestinian population. You can't bridge that gap with better programming.
That doesn't mean you have to accept the flag march version either. There's a space between "I endorse the triumphalist march" and "I don't celebrate at all." It's just a small, uncomfortable space.
What would that space look like to you?
I think it looks like what the Chief Rabbinate originally intended, minus the sovereignty display. Maybe a quiet visit to the Western Wall on a different day. Not as a political statement, but as a genuine religious practice. The problem is that once you attach a date to it — once it's on the calendar as Jerusalem Day — the political freight is unavoidable.
You're describing a kind of privatization of the day. Take it off the streets, put it back in the synagogue. And I think there's something appealing about that, but it also feels like a retreat. Like you're saying "the public square belongs to the extremists, I'll just practice my Judaism quietly indoors.
That's the tension, isn't it? The public square does belong to them, in practical terms. The question is whether fighting for it is worth the cost of being associated with what happens there.
Let me offer a historical parallel that might be useful. In the United States, Columbus Day underwent a similar transformation. It started as a celebration of Italian-American heritage, became a federal holiday, and over time became deeply contested because of what Columbus represents to Native Americans. The response wasn't uniform — some places replaced it with Indigenous Peoples' Day, some kept it but reframed it, some just let the controversy simmer. But the key dynamic is the same: a day that was originally about one thing took on a different meaning as the political context shifted, and people who valued the original meaning had to decide whether to defend the day, abandon it, or reinvent it.
The reinvention option — that's what Daniel's reaching for. But the Columbus Day parallel also shows how hard that is. Once a day becomes a proxy for a larger political conflict, you can't just rebrand your way out of it.
No, you can't. And I think the honest thing to say is that Jerusalem Day, as a public event, is probably irredeemable for someone with Daniel's sensibilities. The flag march is the main event. The alternative events are marginal. The political valence is fixed. So the question becomes: can you find personal meaning in the day without participating in the public spectacle?
I think the answer is yes, but it requires accepting that your personal meaning is not the public meaning. You're not reclaiming the day — you're finding your own version of it, and you're at peace with the fact that most people won't share it.
That's a very sloth-like answer. Quiet, private, unhurried.
I'll take that as a compliment.
It was meant as one. But I want to push a little further on something Daniel mentioned — the idea that not celebrating at all is "almost giving into racism." I understand the instinct, but I think that framing might be backwards. Refusing to participate in an event that has become a platform for racist behavior isn't giving in to racism — it's withholding legitimacy from it.
That's a fair push. But I think Daniel's concern is different. He's worried that if everyone who finds the flag march distasteful stays home, the only people left on the streets are the ones chanting. And then Jerusalem Day becomes entirely defined by that fringe. The public meaning gets even worse.
That's the collective action problem. If a critical mass of moderate Israelis showed up and effectively drowned out the fringe, you could change the character of the march. But that critical mass doesn't exist, because most moderate Israelis don't feel strongly enough about Jerusalem Day to march at all. It's not a day off work. It's not a family barbecue holiday like Independence Day. It's a niche observance that most secular Israelis barely register.
That's actually an important point. Jerusalem Day is not a mainstream Israeli holiday. It's observed primarily by the religious Zionist community. Most secular Israelis don't celebrate it in any meaningful way. So the public face of the day is the face of the community that cares most about it — and that community skews heavily toward the political right.
Compare it to Yom Ha'atzmaut, Independence Day. That's a broad celebration — barbecues, fireworks, concerts, everyone's out. Jerusalem Day is nothing like that. It's a sectoral holiday that gets disproportionate attention because of the political controversy surrounding it.
The dilemma is even sharper than Daniel framed it. It's not just "how do I celebrate this day in a way that aligns with my values?" It's "this day is already claimed by a specific political camp, and any participation, however well-intentioned, is participation in their event.
And I think that's why so many Israelis who are uncomfortable with the flag march simply ignore Jerusalem Day altogether. They don't wrestle with it. let it pass. It's a Thursday in May. They go to work. They come home. They don't think about it.
Which is its own kind of statement, even if it's a passive one.
And I want to complicate something I said earlier about the march organizers. It's easy to paint them as extremists, but for many religious Zionists, the flag march is joyful. They're not marching to intimidate anyone — they're dancing. They're singing. They're celebrating what they see as a miracle. The problem is that joy is experienced by Palestinians as a threat. And the organizers' insistence on routing through the Muslim Quarter makes it impossible to separate the joy from the provocation.
Intent versus impact. The classic tension. And in this case, the impact is so predictable and so severe that you have to question whether the intent really is as innocent as claimed.
I think for the mainstream participants, the intent is celebratory. For the organizers who choose the route, there's more ambiguity. They know exactly what message the Damascus Gate route sends. They've been told, repeatedly, by Palestinian leaders, by Israeli security officials, by left-wing groups. They choose the route anyway. At some point, the impact becomes part of the intent.
There's a phrase I've been turning over in my head. "The cruelty is the point." I don't think it applies to everyone in the march, but for the element that's chanting and harassing residents, it absolutely applies. And the mainstream organizers' refusal to change the route suggests they're at least comfortable with that element being present.
That's the uncomfortable conclusion. And it's why I think Daniel's search for a version of Jerusalem Day that doesn't endorse the hate is so difficult. The hate isn't an accident. It's not a few bad apples. The route itself is designed to communicate dominance, and dominance communicated through a Muslim neighborhood inevitably reads as hostile.
Where does that leave us? Let me try to synthesize. Jerusalem Day started as a rabbinic thanksgiving holiday in nineteen sixty-eight. It was institutionalized in law in nineteen ninety-eight, but the real transformation happened in the nineties as a reaction to Oslo. The flag march became the centerpiece, and the route through the Muslim Quarter became the defining feature. The day is now primarily a religious Zionist observance with a strong sovereignty message, and it's experienced by Palestinian East Jerusalemites as an annual provocation. For someone who values Jerusalem and wants to celebrate access to holy sites but rejects the triumphalism, the options are limited: find a private, personal observance, join one of the tiny alternative events, or simply let the day pass.
That's a fair summary. And I'd add one more option, which is to engage politically — to advocate for changing the route, to support organizations that promote a more inclusive vision of the city. But that's not a Jerusalem Day activity. That's a year-round commitment.
Which is probably the real answer, isn't it? If you want Jerusalem Day to mean something different, you have to work on what Jerusalem means the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year. The day is just a concentrated expression of the underlying reality.
The problem isn't Jerusalem Day. The problem is Jerusalem. A city that is legally unified but practically divided. A city where two populations live side by side with completely different relationships to the state. A city where one group's miracle is another group's catastrophe. Until that underlying reality changes, Jerusalem Day will continue to be what it is.
Changing that reality is — to put it mildly — not a small project.
It's the project. It's the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict in microcosm. Jerusalem is the hardest part of the hardest conflict. And Jerusalem Day is the day when that hardness is most visible.
Daniel's discomfort with the day is, in a way, a discomfort with the unresolvedness of Jerusalem itself. The day forces you to confront something that's easier to ignore the rest of the year: that the city is unified on paper but fractured in every other way.
And I think that's actually a useful function of the day, even if it's an uncomfortable one. It surfaces the contradiction. It makes denial harder. You can't pretend Jerusalem is just a normal city when one day a year seventy thousand people march through a Palestinian neighborhood celebrating sovereignty over it.
The day as a diagnostic tool. It reveals the underlying condition.
And the condition is chronic.
What would you say to someone in Daniel's position? Someone who feels caught between rejecting the day and endorsing something they find troubling?
I'd say the discomfort is the point. Sit with it. Don't try to resolve it by picking a side or finding a perfect middle ground. Jerusalem Day is uncomfortable because Jerusalem is uncomfortable. The discomfort is honest.
That's very donkey-like. Embrace the discomfort.
I contain multitudes.
You contain citations, mostly.
But I think the serious answer is that wrestling with Jerusalem Day — wrestling, not just dismissing it or embracing it uncritically — is itself a form of engagement with the city. It's better than indifference. It's better than pretending the day doesn't exist or that it's just a harmless celebration. Daniel's prompt is, in its own way, a Jerusalem Day observance. He's marking the day by thinking seriously about what it means.
That's a generous reading. I think he'd appreciate it.
I hope so. And I hope he doesn't take away from this conversation that there's a right answer. There isn't. There's just the ongoing work of holding contradictory truths: Jerusalem is unified, and Jerusalem is divided. Jerusalem Day celebrates something real, and Jerusalem Day inflicts real harm. Both things are true. Living with that tension is hard, but it's more honest than pretending one side of it doesn't exist.
That's probably where we should leave it. Not with a resolution, but with an honest acknowledgment of the tension.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the late sixteen hundreds, Tibetan scholars developed a specialized ink for calligraphy that incorporated powdered turquoise and yak marrow, believing the chemical composition would imbue sacred texts with protective properties. The ink was used exclusively for manuscripts written in the cursive Uchen script, never for the more angular Ume script used in secular documents.
Yak marrow ink.
Might need some of that for the comment section on this episode.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts dot com, or search for us on Spotify. Until next time.
