Joint Israeli-Palestinian memorial event faced with suppression and attacks

Israeli hardliners disrupted a joint Memorial Day event this week in Tel Aviv as Israeli authorities withheld permits for Palestinians attending the ceremony.

The Memorial Day event is held on May 1 as an alternative to mainstream celebrations in Israel and brings together both Israelis and Palestinians who have lost relatives in the conflict.

For the first time in 12 years, however, no Palestinians were able to attend this year's event.

Israeli authorities denied one day permits to 225 Palestinians slated to attend the ceremony, which sees both Israeli and Palestinian speakers commemorate victims of the conflict and their "shared pain," organisers say.

The move was announced after a Palestinian on a one day permit stabbed four people in Tel Aviv, but was condemned by the organisers, who labelled the decision "another assault on bereaved families and parents, who have paid the most painful price of all for the conflict." 

Barring Palestinians from entering the event in Israel "demonstrates the state's unwillingness to listen to or even recognise the suffering of the other side," they added.

Palestinians instead gathered in Beit Jala, south of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank, to watch the event as their pre-recorded video messages were played to the crowd.

The event itself, attended by some 4,000 people, was disrupted by dozens of Israeli far-right activists who gathered outside to protest the joint ceremony, calling Jewish-Israeli participants "traitors", "Nazis," and "Amalek", an enemy of the Jewish people in the Old Testament. 

One Israeli activist shouted, "I hate Hitler – not for what he did, but for not finishing the job and killing you," at participants entering the event, The Jerusalem Post reported.

Prior to the ceremony, organisers were also threatened by Israeli rightists who bombarded them with thousands of death threats and hate messages online.

Several years ago, the Israeli settler movement tried to shut down the ceremony, going so far as to release a video featuring anti-Semitic caricatures and suggesting that Israeli human rights activists are paid for by Nazis.

The joint Memorial Day was founded by Combatants for Peace, a group comprised of former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters, and has been held for 12 years.

The ceremony is one of the few events bringing together Israeli and Palestinian civilians to promote dialogue, reconciliation, and nonviolence.

It has faced criticism from Palestinians, who see such events as "normalising" Israel's military occupation and equating the suffering of Palestinians and Israelis despite the clear asymmetry in power, fatalities, and violence in the conflict.