Protesting in the Holy City

Last night, I attended a protest in the center of Jerusalem. I'm rather surprised by the lack of media coverage of it; it seemed like a big deal, with thousands of people marching down King George and Ben Yehuda, culminating in one very full Kikar Tzion. Yet, somehow, it wasn't mentioned in either the Jerusalem Post or the English edition of Ha'aretz. (There is a Ha'aretz article here.) The best coverage I can find is from EuroNews. (Note that the guy holding the flag in the first frame is Andy Dubin, one of my former teachers from high school.)

After reading that article, I have to wonder--what were we actually protesting? The protest was billed as

“Taking back the city, by walking!”
Secular, religious and masorti Jews:
say put an end to attempts of haredi coercion
and unite to restore sanity, freedom
and mutual respect to the city!

which is entirely consistent with the newspaper articles. Yet, what is it specifically that we were protesting? According to EuroNews, we were protesting the Haredi protest of Intel, which I didn't even know about until now. According to Facebook and the Masorti movement, we were protesting the arrest of Nofrat Frenkel at the Kotel. I couldn't understand the speeches because they were in Hebrew, so I don't actually know what we were officially protesting. All I could really catch were a few phrases about Jerusalem belonging to everyone--which, of course, I fully agree with. I was told that the general message was "Why do we let a minority who doesn't even serve in the army control our capital?" but I have to take other people's word for that. It's gotta be true; why would they lie?

Anyway, I hope that we actually accomplished something with our march/rally/protest combination. I'm not particularly hopeful considering the lack of media coverage, but maybe we at least sparked something. Maybe. And with that, I leave you with some footage of the event itself, courtesy of my and Alexis's cameras. Mine's the one that sucks.