Videos circulating on social media showed activists being shoved and surrounded by groups of youths wearing matching white T-shirts emblazoned with Jerusalem-themed slogans.
In one video, the youths hurled plastic chairs at a Palestinian shopkeeper while chanting “Arab sons of whores”.
The shopkeeper appeared to throw one chair back before raising a stick in warning.
SHOW OF SOLIDARITY
Some people clapped rhythmically, while others pounded on the metal shutters of closed Palestinian shops.
Authorities sometimes order Palestinian shops in the Old City to shut for the march, which ends at the Western Wall – the last remnant of the Second Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, the holiest site where Jews are allowed to pray.
Earlier in the day, on the steps outside Damascus Gate – one of the main entrances to the Old City – dozens of Israeli peace activists dressed in white handed flowers to passersby, as though apologising in advance for what was to come, the correspondent reported.
Ilan Perez, 52, said he wanted to “show my sympathy and love with flowers”, which he clutched in his hands.
“It was important for me to come in order to show some solidarity with the local community and say that as a Jew, as a Zionist, as someone who wants a Jewish state here, I want them to be part of it and be part of the nation with equal rights,” said Perez, who works in the tech industry and had come from the city of Raanana, near Tel Aviv.
