No gay pride march today in the streets of Jerusalem. The controversial Gay Pride march has been cancelled and been replaced by a rally in the Jewish University stadium. Not even the Supreme court, which gave the parade the go-ahead, has been able to do anything against pressure from Jerusalem’s police chief, who is worried about the situation.
 
Anathemas and clashes. The organisers of the parade, under the auspices of the Open House association, have been working in a very fraught climate since the very beginning. The Mea She’arim area has been the fulcrum of the protest from the most fanatic Jews, but protesting voices have also been heard in the Muslim and Christian communities in what is for the three monotheist religions the holy city. While ultra-Orthodox Jews have clashed in Jerusalem with police forces, throwing stones at them and setting fire to rubbish skips (with a total of 11 arrests), Pope Benedict XVI has sent a note to the Foreign Minister in Tel Aviv expressing the Catholic Church’s “sorrow” at the choice of Jerusalem as the venue for the Gay Pride march, just as his predecessor did in 2001 when the march was held in Rome. If the Pope limited himself to criticising the march, the Rabbinical Court of the ultra-Orthodox Eida Haredit sect, led by rabbi Shmuel Papenheim, went much further. The jurists have in fact announced that they will decide at the last moment whether or not to launch a “pulsa datura” (an Armenian expression meaning “burning whip”)against the participants and any police who might stop ultra-Orthodox Jews from blocking the parade. “Pulsa Datura” is a curse that comes from cabalistic mysticism, guaranteeing the death within a year of anyone who it is launched against. A piece of nonsense maybe, except for the fact that it was previously launched by rabbis from the extreme right against the then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was subsequently killed by an ultra-Orthodox fanatic in 1995, and gain against former prime minister Ariel Sharon, after the retreat from Gaza in the summer of 2005, who then suffered a stroke on 4 January and has been in a coma ever since.
 
March of joy or fear? The organisers’ reaction has been composed, except for an act of vandalism carried out against the Geulat Yisrael synagogue in Tel Aviv on 12 November when an unidentified group threw stones at the windows of the house of worship and daubed the walls of the building with the ominous words: “If you don’t let us march in Jerusalem, you won’t be able to walk in Tel Aviv”. Apart from this, however, the Israeli homosexual community showed its willingness to cooperate with the authorities by accepting requests from the Jerusalem police and changing the route of the march so that it no longer ventured outside the “ministry quarter” and avoided going near the ultra-Orthodox area of Jerusalem. Last year, Open House (which is also involved in fighting for the rights of homosexual Palestinians) wanted to organise the annual Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem, but in the end the march was postponed so as not to create problems for the security forces who at the time were involved in clearing the Gaza Strip. The authorities asked the organisers to cooperate with them in order to avoid provoking the ultra-Orthodox Jews, who were already furious at the settlers being kicked out from what the fundamentalists believe to be Israel land. The organisers did, however, decide to go ahead with a demonstration on a national level, and during the parade a young ultra-Orthodox Jew armed with a knife managed to wound three people. The Israeli police believed that this year the risk would be even greater and consequently decided to deploy 12,000 officers, but in the end the gay community agreed not to hold the parade. The symbolic value of Jerusalem for religious believers is very strong, but the attention given to the reaction of the representatives of all the religions involved seems excessive when compared with the violence suffered every year in different parts of the world by homosexuals who want to hold their annual parade. Evidence of this was seen at  the last few editions of the parade. In 2002 in Zagreb, people taking part in the parade were attacked by a group of skinheads, while the same thing happened in Warsaw, in 2005, where three people were injured and dozens arrested, and last year, in Bucharest, the Gay Pride Parade was attacked by extremists from the far right, with the result that 10 people were injured and 52 arrested.