At least 230 Palestinians have been killed in 11 days of violence.
The dead include 65 children and 39 women.
On the Israeli side, 12 people have been killed. The dead include
two children and two soldiers.
US President Joe Biden on Wednesday discussed the events in Gaza
with Netanyahu, telling the caretaker, without much conction, leader that he
expected “a significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire”. But
Netanyahu, speaking after the phone call with Biden, said he was “determined”
to continue bombarding Gaza until Israel’s “aim is met”.
The aim being to "mow the lawn", as they say in Tel Aviv. Which means, to destroy all public, private, Health and cultural facilities. To cause the most damage as is inhumanly possible. Pure evil, that is.
At least 184 residential buldings, houses, and 33 media centers have
been completely demolished in the Gaza Strip, with a loss value of $92 million.
Additionally, more than 1,335 housing units were completely or
severely demolished, and about 13,000 were partially damaged.
A dear friend said yesterday that he feels that in France people
are puzzled by this new cycle of violence in Gaza. They don’t really understand
why.
Therefore, from the outset, some clarification regarding the
language used to depict the ongoing violence in occupied Palestine, and also
throughout Israel. This is not a ‘conflict’. Neither is it a ‘dispute’ nor
‘sectarian violence’ nor even a war in the traditional sense.
It is not a conflict, because Israel is an occupying power and
the Palestinian people are an occupied nation.
It is not a dispute, because freedom, justice and human rights
cannot be treated as if a mere political disagreement. The Palestinian people’s
inalienable rights are enshrined in international and humanitarian law and the
illegality of Israeli violations of human rights in Palestine is recognized by
the United Nations itself.
If it is a war, then it is a unilateral Israeli war, which is
met with humble, but real and determined Palestinian resistance.
Actually, it is a Palestinian uprising, an Intifada
unprecedented in the history of the Palestinian struggle, both in its nature
and outreach. Perhaps close to the uprising in 1936, when the Palestinians fought
to keep their historical rights to their land.
For the first time in many years, since the First Intifada in
the 1980’s, we see the Palestinian people united, from Jerusalem Al Quds, to
Gaza, to the West Bank and, even more critically, to the Palestinian
communities, towns and villages inside historic Palestine – today’s Israel.
This unity matters the most, is far more consequential than some
agreement between Palestinian factions. It eclipses Fatah and Hamas and all the
rest, because without a united people there can be no meaningful resistance, no
vision for liberation, no struggle for justice to be won.
Right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu could never
have anticipated that a routine act of ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem’s
neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah could lead to a Palestinian uprising, uniting all
sectors of Palestinian society in an unprecedented show of unity.
The Palestinian people have decided to move past all the
political divisions and the factional squabbles. Instead, they are coining new
terminologies, centered on resistance, liberation and international solidarity.
Consequently, they are challenging factionalism, along with any attempt at
making Israeli occupation and apartheid normal. Equally important, a strong
Palestinian voice is now piercing through the international silence, compelling
the world to hear a single chant for freedom.
The leaders of this new movement are Palestinian youth who have
been denied participation in any form of democratic representation, who are
constantly marginalized and oppressed by their own leadership and by the
relentless Israeli military occupation. They were born into a world of exile,
destitution and apartheid, led to believe that they are inferior, of a lesser
race. Their right to self-determination and every other right were postponed
indefinitely. They grew up helplessly watching their homes being demolished,
their land being robbed and their parents being humiliated.
Finally, they are rising.
Without prior coordination and with no political manifesto, just
like in 1987, this new Palestinian generation is now making its voice heard,
sending an unmistakable, resounding message to Israel and its right-wing
chauvinistic society, that the Palestinian people are not passive victims; that
the ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Jarrah and the rest of occupied East Jerusalem,
the protracted siege on Gaza, the ongoing military occupation, the construction
of illegal Jewish settlements, the racism and the apartheid will no longer go
unnoticed; though tired, poor, dispossessed, besieged and abandoned,
Palestinians will continue to safeguard their own rights, their sacred places
and the very sanctity of their own people.
Yes, the ongoing violence was instigated by Israeli provocations
in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. However, the story was
never about the ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Jarrah alone. The beleaguered
neighborhood is but a microcosm of the larger Palestinian struggle.
Netanyahu may have hoped to use Sheikh Jarrah as a way of
mobilizing his right-wing constituency around him, intending to form an
emergency government or increasing his chances of winning yet a fifth election.
His rash behavior, initially compelled by entirely selfish reasons, has ignited
a popular rebellion among Palestinians, exposing Israel for the violent, racist
and apartheid state that it is and always has been.
Palestinian unity and popular resistance have proven successful
in other ways, too. Never before have we seen this groundswell of support for
Palestinian freedom, not only from millions of ordinary individuals across the
globe, but also from celebrities – movie stars, footballers, mainstream
intellectuals and political activists, even models and social media
influencers. The hashtags #SaveSheikhJarrah and #FreePalestine, among numerous
others, are now interlinked and have been trending on all social media
platforms for weeks. Israel’s constant attempts at presenting itself as a
perpetual victim of some imaginary horde of Arabs and Muslims are no longer
paying dividends. The world can finally see, read and hear of Palestine’s
tragic reality and the need to bring this tragedy to an immediate end.
None of this would be possible were it not for the fact that all
Palestinians have legitimate reasons and are speaking in unison. In their
spontaneous reaction and genuine, communal solidarity, all Palestinians are
united, from Sheikh Jarrah, to all of Jerusalem, to Gaza, Nablus, Ramallah,
Al-Bireh and even Palestinian towns inside Israel – Al-Lud, Umm Al-Fahm, Kufr
Qana and elsewhere. In Palestine’s new popular revolution, factions, geography
and any political division are irrelevant. Religion is not a source of divisiveness
but of spiritual and national unity.
The ongoing Israeli atrocities in Gaza are continuing, with a
mounting death toll. This devastation will continue for as long as the world
treats the devastating siege of the impoverished, tiny Strip as if irrelevant.
People in Gaza were dying long before the Israeli airstrikes began blowing up
their homes and neighborhoods. They were dying from the lack of medicine,
polluted water, the lack of electricity and the dilapidated infrastructure.
We must save Sheikh Jarrah, but we must also save Gaza; we must
demand an end to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine and, with it, the
system of racial discrimination and apartheid. International human rights
groups are now precise and decisive in their depiction of this racist regime,
with Human Rights Watch – and Israel’s own rights group, B’tselem, joining the
call for the dismantlement of apartheid in all of Palestine.
Speak up. Speak out. The Palestinians have risen. It is time to
rally behind them.
«When I first visited Israel in
1976 after spending three years in Northern Ireland working on my second
degree, I was struck by the similarities between the situations in the two
countries.
It is therefore entirely appropriate that on the same day that the
Israeli-Palestinian crisis was exploding this week, an inquest in Belfast was
reporting on a mass killing by the British Army in Belfast half a century
earlier.
This was what became known as the Ballymurphy Massacre which took place
between 9 and 11 August 1971, when 10 Catholics were shot and killed in the
working-class district of Ballymurphy in west Belfast. The British government
and army claimed for years that the dead were IRA gunmen or had been throwing
petrol bombs. But the inquest determined this week that all the dead were
innocent civilians – and the army’s actions were “unjustified”. Boris Johnson
has apologised unreservedly for the killings.
An important parallel between Northern Ireland then and Israel/Gaza today
is that, in both cases, grossly excessive military force was and is used to try
to solve political problems that it only succeeds in exacerbating. In the case
of the Ballymurphy shootings, which took place during the introduction of
internment without trial, the British government managed only to delegitimise
itself, to spread hatred against itself and to act as the recruiting sergeant
for the Provisional IRA.
As in Northern Ireland half a century ago, the Israeli security services
keep announcing that they are winning famous victories and killing enemy
commanders, as if local leaders of the rag-tag paramilitary forces of Hamas and
Islamic Jihad were irreplaceable military technicians. Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu says that Hamas and Islamic Jihad “will pay a heavy price
for their belligerence.” No doubt they will, but the heaviest price will be
paid by civilians in Gaza, like in the last such conflict in 2014 when 2,000
Palestinians and 73 Israelis were killed in a ‘war’ lasting 67 days.
In some respects, not much has changed since then, but that in itself is
significant because Donald Trump was the most pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian
president ever to occupy the White House. He and his son-in-law Jared Kushner
enthusiastically endorsed Netanyahu’s thesis that Israel can achieve a lasting
peace while at the same time keeping the Palestinians in a permanently
subordinate position as a defeated people.
That was never going to work, but the speed with which it has unravelled
over the last week, and within months of Trump leaving office, is still
surprising. The ‘Palestinian question’, what one British diplomat used to call
“the poison of Palestine”, is back on the international agenda, as unresolved
and explosive as it has been for the last hundred years.
Perhaps the biggest effect of the hype and spin of the Trump era was to
breed self-destructive hubris among Israelis at all levels of authority.
Israeli officials felt free to expand settlements on the West Bank, evict Palestinians
in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of Jerusalem, and order the police to throw
stun grenades and use tear gas around the Al-Aqsa mosque.
In one respect, the crisis is already more intense and wide-ranging than in
past ‘wars’ centred on Gaza in 2008/9 and in 2014. The new element is the
involvement of the two million Israeli Arabs/Palestinians who make up 20 per
cent of the Israeli population. In mixed towns and cities like Lod, Jaffa, Acre
and Haifa, synagogues and mosques, shops and cars, have been attacked and
individuals beaten. In Lod, for instance, where the rioting has been most
intense and is right next to Ben Gurion airport, the population is made up of
47,000 Israeli Jews and 23,00 Israeli Arabs/Palestinians.
The similarity between Israel and Northern Ireland goes beyond an
exaggerated and counter-productive use of military superiority to solve a
political problem. At the most fundamental level, both countries contain two
hostile communities of roughly equal size living intertwined in a small place.
In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants each number about one
million, while in the more politically fragmented area between the Jordan River
and the Mediterranean Sea live 14 million people, seven million of them Israeli
Jews and seven million Palestinians. The area may be divided by fortified walls
and frontiers, but it is essentially a single political unit, as the spread of
violence from Jerusalem to Gaza to Israel and to the West Bank has demonstrated
in the last few days.
In Northern Ireland in 1971, the British government made the disastrous
mistake of using the British Army to prop up what was sometimes called “the
Orange State”. This meant that Catholics would have to accept a second-class
status in a state run by Protestants, something that – regardless of their
acceptance or rejection of physical force – the Catholics were never going to
do.
The determination of the Catholic community not to roll over should have
been obvious from day one of The Troubles, but it took the British government
thirty years to take this on board. When it finally did so the outcome was the
Good Friday Agreement of 1998 which shared power between two communities with
very different identities, culture and loyalties.
It would be nice to think that the same process might one day happen in
when it comes to Israel and Palestinians, but there are differences as well as
similarities between the two situations. Compromise in Northern Ireland
required a certain balance of power between the two communities and a recognition
by all, particularly by the British government and by Irish Republicans, that
neither side was going to win a complete victory.
Holding back any such compromise between Israel and the Palestinians is
that the balance of power appears to be overwhelmingly in favour of Israelis.
They do not feel the need to compromise because they have total military
superiority and the support of the United States and other powerful nations.
Palestinian weaknesses, several of them self-inflicted, include very poor
leadership and political organisation. Hamas can fire lots of rockets into
Israel in a show of defiance, but this is politically counter-productive since
it enables Israel to frame its actions as defensive and part of a war on
terror. The Palestinian National Authority based in Ramallah hasn’t held an
election for 15 years, with the latest attempt being postponed indefinitely
last month — and is now deeply compromised as a representative of its people.
The best strategy for the Palestinians should be to use their great numbers
in a peaceful mass campaign demanding civil right and an end to discriminatory
restrictions.
The Palestinians do hold a card of the highest value, which is that Israel
will not have won until the Palestinians declare that they have lost. The
events of last week showed that this is not going to happen. Israel wins trick
after trick at the political and military card table but can never be declared
the winner because it is playing a game that does not end.» By
Patrick Coburn.
Gaza Fights for Freedom
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário