#14 Via Dolorosa, 2026
The horrible scenes we witnessed in Jerusalem — hundreds of Israeli youth marching menacingly through the alleys of the Old City — are not just another violent news item. They are the clearest reflection of colonially engineered social structures.
On one side, you see the present and future of Israel: children educated and raised on hate, fascism, the mythology of the Temple, the gangsterism of displaying power, and the drive to invade the local and indigenous environment. What looks like spontaneous adolescent thuggery is in fact a well-organised, orchestrated "holiday" heavily funded by the occupation municipality of Jerusalem, the Prime Minister's office and other ministries, and several Zionist NGOs.
For the Palestinians who have lived and worked in those alleys for generations, the structure is different. The inability to defend your own home and small shop, the absence of people, the closure of most places — this is a structure that has been designed against Palestinians in Jerusalem for decades.
Israel systematically targets every form of Palestinian social and cultural organisation that takes root in Jerusalem. For the Israeli state, any communal framework that extends beyond the individual or the family represents a political threat. Any expression of belonging — to the city, and especially to the Old City, the heart of Jerusalem — is treated as a political act, and therefore as a security threat to be neutralised.
The emptying and evacuation of Palestinians from the Old City is Israel's greatest obsession.
This is how Israel has treated organisations such as the repeatedly shut-down Al-Hakawati Theatre (the Palestinian national theatre in Jerusalem), Burj El-Laqlaq (one of the most prominent Palestinian organisations working for social, cultural and sporting development in the city), and the harassment of Yabous (one of Jerusalem's leading cultural spaces).
Palestinians in Jerusalem now number more than 400,000 — openly treated by the Israeli regime as a "demographic threat." The colonial method of neutralising them, of ensuring colonial superiority and absolute authority, is to dismantle their sense of collectivity: to prevent any gathering that strengthens belonging, shared interest, mutual understanding, and power. █