"Who Belongs in Jerusalem? The Attack on an Armenian Child and the Logic of Exclusion" By Carlo Coppola
La versione italiana di questo articolo di Carlo Coppola dal titolo "Gerusalemme: l’arbitrio di chi decide chi ha diritto di esistere" è apparsa sul giornale "La Fiaccola" diretta dall'avv. Paolo Scagliarini al seguente link:
During Yom Kippur, in Jerusalem's Mamilla neighborhood, a 9-year-old Armenian Christian boy was pepper-sprayed for riding his bicycle and wearing headphones on the holy day. The suspect, a 22-year-old from the Haredi-majority settlement of Ganei Modi'in, was arrested by Israeli police in the north of the country. The episode is not an isolated one. For years, the Armenian community of the Old City has endured spitting, insults and assaults. An investigation by Ynet, Israel's leading news website and the digital edition of the daily Yedioth Ahronoth, documented 61 physical attacks against clergy and laypeople in 2025, including spitting, pepper spray and beatings. In July 2026, in the disputed area known as the "Cow Garden," the Patriarchate's chancellor, Aghan Gogchyan, reported that assailants had used pepper spray and other chemical substances against seminary students, many of whom were taken to hospital.
To understand what lies behind these events, we must look beyond the news reports. At the root is the claim by one group to decide unilaterally who has the right to be in a place, who is "inside" and who is "outside." This is the logic contained in a phrase attributed to Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910: "Wer ein Jude ist, bestimme ich!", "I decide who is a Jew." Lueger, an antisemitic politician, reportedly uttered it to justify exceptions granted to his own Jewish acquaintances. It revealed the absolute arbitrariness of a power able to bend identity and belonging into a political instrument.
Today that same logic reappears, with the opposite sign, in a religious and nationalist extremism that seeks to redefine Jerusalem's public space. An Armenian child was punished, as a Christian, for breaking a rule of a holiday that is not his own. The Armenians, present in the city since the fourth century and now reduced to about 2,000 residents, are a people who have known genocide and bear no responsibility for the conflict. When national identity and religious extremism fuse, the idea of belonging shrinks. It excludes Christians, Muslims and other historic residents, but also those Jews, the religious among them, who reject the ultranationalist drift and dissent from it.
This is therefore not merely a dispute over land and property in the Armenian Quarter, but a cultural and ethical battle. Those who use violence against a child, or against the symbols of a centuries-old community, act from the same authoritarian matrix: the conviction that their own strength gives them the right to erase the presence and the memory of the other. To oppose it is to reaffirm that human dignity cannot depend on the unilateral decisions of those with the power to impose them.
By Carlo Coppola
