As corporate media keeps calling for Putin's trial as a war criminal while it carries on its propaganda against Russia's military campaign in Ukraine, nothing is said about Israel's long brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Now that the Palestinians are uprising, once again, Western press keeps siding with the oppressor, although in Ukraine, they don't even show Russia's side.
There is a reason why Israel is insistent on linking the series of
attacks carried out by Palestinians recently to a specific location, namely the
Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. By doing so, the embattled
Naftali Bennett’s government can simply order another deadly military operation
in Jenin to reassure its citizens that the situation is under control.
Indeed, on April 9, the Israeli army has stormed the Jenin refugee camp, killing a Palestinian and wounding ten
others. However, Israel’s problem is much bigger than Jenin.
If we examine the events starting with the March 22 stabbing attack in the southern city of Beersheba (Bir Al Saba’) – which resulted
in the death of four – and ending with the killing of three Israelis in Tel Aviv – including two army officers – we
will reach an obvious conclusion: these attacks must have been, to some extent,
coordinated.
Spontaneous Palestinian retaliation to the violence of the Israeli
occupation rarely follows this pattern in terms of timing or style. All the attacks, with the
exception of Beersheba, were carried out using firearms. The shooters, as indicated by the amateur videos of some of the events
and statements by Israeli eyewitnesses, were well-trained and were acting with
great composure.
An example was the March 27 Hadera event, carried out by two cousins,
Ayman and Ibrahim Ighbariah, from the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, inside Israel.
Israeli media reported of the unmistakable skills of the attackers, armed with
weapons that, according to the Israeli news agency, Tazpit Press Service, cost more than $30,000.
Unlike Palestinian attacks carried out during the Second Palestinian Intifada (2000-05) in response to Israeli violence in the occupied
territories, the latest attacks are generally more pinpointed, seek police and
military personnel and clearly aimed at shaking Israel’s false sense of
security and undermining the country’s intelligence services. In the Bnei Brak attack, on March
29, for example, an Israeli woman who was at the scene told reporters that “the militant
asked us to move away from the place because he did not want to target women or
children.”
While Israeli intelligence reports have recently warned of a
“wave of terrorism” ahead of the holy month of Ramadan, they
clearly had little conception of what type of violence, or where and how
Palestinians would strike.
Following the Beersheba attack, Israeli officials referred to Daesh’s
responsibility, a convenient claim considering that Daesh had also claimed
responsibility. This theory was quickly marginalized, as it became obvious that
the other Palestinian attackers had other political affiliations or, as in the
Bnei Brak case, no known affiliation at all.
The confusion and misinformation continued for days. Shortly after the Tel Aviv attack,
Israeli media, citing official sources, spoke of two attackers, alleging that
one was trapped in a nearby building. This was
untrue as there was only one attacker and he was killed, though hours later in
a different city.
A number of Palestinian workers were quickly rounded up in Tel Aviv on
suspicion of being the attackers simply because they looked Arab, evidence of
the chaotic Israeli approach. Indeed, following each event, total mayhem ensued, with large mobs of armed Israelis taking to the streets
looking for anyone with Arab features to apprehend or to beat senseless.
Israeli officials contributed to the frenzy, with far-right politicians,
such as the extremist Itamar Ben Gvir, leading hordes of other extremists in rampages in occupied Jerusalem.
Instead of urging calm and displaying confidence, the country’s own
Prime Minister called, on March 30, on ordinary Israelis to arm themselves. “Whoever has a gun license, this
is the time to carry it,” he said in a video statement. However, if Israel’s solution to any form of Palestinian resistance was
more guns, Palestinians would have been pacified long ago.
To placate angry Israelis, the Israeli military raided the city and
refugee camp of Jenin on many occasions, each time leaving several dead and
wounded Palestinians behind, including many civilians. They include the child Imad
Hashash, 15, killed on August 24 while filming the invasion on his mobile
phone. The exact same scenario played out on April 9.
However, it was an exercise in futility, as it was Israeli violence in
Jenin throughout the years that led to the armed resistance that continues to
emanate from the camp. Palestinians, whether in Jenin or elsewhere, fight back
because they are denied basic human rights, have no political horizon, live in
extreme poverty, have no true leadership and feel abandoned by the so-called
international community.
The Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas seems to be entirely removed
from the masses. Statements
by Abbas reflect his detachment from the reality of Israeli violence, military
occupation and apartheid throughout Palestine. True to
form, Abbas quickly condemned the
Tel Aviv attack, as he did the previous ones, making the same reference every
time regarding the need to maintain “stability” and to prevent “further
deterioration of the situation”, according to the official Wafa news
agency.
What stability is Abbas referring to, when Palestinian suffering has
been compounded by growing settler violence, illegal settlement expansion, land
theft, and, thanks to recent international events, food insecurity as well?
Israeli officials and media are, once again, conveniently placing the
blame largely on Jenin, a tiny stretch of an overpopulated area. By doing so,
Israel wants to give the impression that the new phenomenon of Palestinian
retaliatory attacks is confined to a single place, one that is adjacent to the
Israeli border and can be easily ‘dealt with’.
An Israeli military operation in the camp may serve Bennett’s political
agenda, convey a sense of strength, and win back some in his disenchanted
political constituency. But it is all a temporary fix. Attacking Jenin now will make no
difference in the long run. After all, the camp rose
from the ashes of its near-total destruction by the Israeli military in April
2002.
The renewed Palestinian defensive attacks speak of a much wider geography: Naqab,
Umm Al Fahm, the West Bank. The seeds of this territorial connectivity are
linked to the Israeli war of last May and the subsequent Palestinian rebellion,
which erupted in every part of Palestine, including Palestinian communities
inside Israel.
Israel’s problem is its insistence on providing short-term military
solutions to a long-term problem, itself resulting from these very ‘military
solutions’. If Israel
continues to commit war crimes subjugating and brutalizing the Palestinian people under the current system of
military occupation and deepening apartheid, Palestinians will surely continue
to respond until their oppressive reality is changed. No amount of Israeli violence can alter this truth.
Even though the USA & OTAN condone Israel's unforgivable recurrent War Crimes.
Israeli military operation in Gaza killed, to this day, at least 253 Palestinians, including 66 children and 39 women, and seriously injured
around 2,000 others. Health authorities in the occupied West Bank have
separately confirmed 31 killed in that region, bringing the total to 279 across
all Palestinian territories. Israel said it launched a bombing campaign in Gaza
following rocket attacks from Palestinian factions.
On the Israeli side, 12 people were killed, including two children
and soldiers, in rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. The fighting, the fiercest in
years, came to a halt on Friday under a Qatar-Egypt-brokered ceasefire.
As we know. Under pressure and fearing a civil war inside its official borders, Israel agreed to halt its 11-day bombardments of Gaza.
The ceasefire was brokered by Qatar and Egypt, under pressur from Russia and
China. But even before the shooting stopped it had transformed the political
landscape. The Israel/Palestinian « confrontation »
has shifted away from focusing solely on Gaza to
multiple fronts – Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank ,
Israel itself– and an upsurge in any one of them could start a new round of
violence, as Israeli occupation navy is back to it’s favourite daily hobby
terrorizind fishermen in Gaza. Since yesterday morning, thier ships of terror
have been firin g voileys of bullets to keep fishermen from trying to put bread
on their families tables. This is a common daily practice by the IDF, the
Israeli Forces of Occupation. Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israel has
been arresting Palestinian youngsters for « activism » on social media.
Israeli police said that more than 1,550 have been arrested so far.
Events in Jerusalem ignited the present crisis and there is every chance
that they will do so again. Far-right Israeli groups, with the help of Israeli occupying
military police, are intent on tightening their grip on the city and
eliminating the Palestinian presence wherever they can. The political temperature
will stay high, simmering just below boiling point. Another flare-up in
Jerusalem would make it boil over.
Israeli leaders had hoped that the cantonisation of the Palestinians –
three million on the West Bank, two million each in Israel and Gaza, 300,000 in
Jerusalem – would fragment them politically as well as geographically. For a
time, this strategy appeared to work, but over the last two weeks the crisis in
one Palestinian canton has swiftly spread to the three others.
Israeli police efforts to evict Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah
neighbourhood of occupied Jerusalem and their use of stun grenades and teargas
in al-Aqsa mosque led to Hamas reaction firing rocket barrages from Gaza. Followed,
the harassment of Israeli-Palestinians inside Israel by Jewish Supremacists,
which, in turn provoked protests by Palestinians on a larger scale than
anything seen since the second intifada 20 years ago. On the occupied West
Bank, protesters poured into the streets in every town and the internationally
recognised Palestinian Authority was mocked and marginalised.
For all the empty talk about one- and two-state solutions to the
Israel/Palestine problem, the outcome of the fourth war centred on Gaza proves
that the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is a single
political unit. What affects one part of it affects all the rest.
The latest Gaza war showed that Israel does not have a viable military or
political strategy for fighting or engaging with the Palestinians other than
the ethnical cleansing. Israeli generals and officials claim to have degraded
the military infrastructure of Hamas, killed some of its commanders and
destroyed part of its tunnel system. Israel was certainly surprised by Hamas firing 3,700 homemade
rockets into Israel, despite being isolated in Gaza for 15 years.
Even if Hamas proved to have a little more military
muscle than expected, though, there is no doubting Israel’s superiority over
the ill-equipped paramilitary force it faces in Gaza. But this superiority stubbornly refuses to produce victory or rather that
Israel knows what such a victory would look like. It cannot realistically
expect to eliminate Hamas and carry out regime change in Gaza without
reoccupation, which would provoke even stronger Palestinian resistance ;
mostly because more and more Palestinians see Mahmoud Abbas as Vichy and the
Hamas as the only Resistance. Keeping the Palestinians there imprisoned under a
state of permanent siege, the status quo for the last 15 years, has just been
shown not to work.
Claims of Israeli military success as justification for agreeing to a
ceasefire are a smokescreen concealing Israeli failure to gain any real
advantage from a bombardment that killed 232 Palestinians, including 65
children, but did little else. Israeli commentators are franker and better
informed about this lack of success than their western counterparts. The
editor-in-chief of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Aluf Benn, calls the conflict
just ended “Israel’s most failed and pointless Gaza operation ever”.
He says that all the PR of the Israeli army cannot “cover up the truth: the
military has no idea how to paralyse Hamas’s forces and throw it off balance.
Destroying its tunnels with powerful bombs revealed Israel’s strategic
capabilities without causing any substantive damage to the enemy’s fighting
abilities.”
Many states have faced similar frustration when fighting an asymmetric war
against a militarily inferior but undefeatable opponent that has the resolve of
Justice on their side. This happened to Britain in Northern Ireland between
1968 and 1998. The sensible response of a government that fails to get its way
by physical force is to seek political engagement with the other side to work
out a compromise.
But this is precisely what the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu
and his political partners cannot do. For almost a quarter of a century, his
strategy since he was first elected Israeli leader in 1997 has been to argue
that Israel can have a permanent peace without compromising with the
Palestinians. This view, dominant from the centre left to the hard right, held
that the Palestinians had been decisively defeated and there was no need to
concede anything to them. With all American Presidents, mainly Donald Trump
giving total support to this maximalist position during his four years in the
White House, many Israelis were persuaded that Netanyahu had been right.
Gaza looked as if it had been successfully sealed off, the occupied West
Bank broken up into Palestinian Bantustans and expanding Israeli settlements,
Jerusalem was encircled from without and increasingly de-Palestinianised from
within, while the Palestinians in Israel remained an embittered but impotent
minority. Arab states were normalising relations with Israel and the
Palestinian Question no longer figured on the international agenda.
It was all a mirage. The latest bombardment of Gaza may look like the three
previous ones in 2008-09, 2012 and 2014, but it is far more important because
the Netanyahu/Washington policy has collapsed and there is nothing much to put
in its place. The old Israel/Palestinian crisis is back and is more envenomed
and widespread than before. An ominous new feature of it is Palestinians in
Israel taking to the streets to demand equality and an end to discrimination.
Israeli illegal settlers from the West Bank have been coming back to Israel to
lead anti-Palestinian demonstrations within mixed Jewish/Palestinian towns and
cities.
Such developments do not mean that the balance of power between Israel and
the Palestinians has abruptly skewed in favour of the latter. On the contrary,
one of the problems in convincing Israelis at every level that they should
engage with the Palestinians is that they do not believe they need to. Hamas have
been energised and the Palestinian Authority further discredited by the latest resistance
of the former and coward compliance of the latter. The fact is that there is an
overall vacuum of Palestinian leadership and organisation. This is not quite
such a crippling disadvantage as it might appear since Palestinian political
movements have a long tradition of prioritising their grip on power over
everything else.
The ceasefire that came into force between Israel and Hamas early on Friday
morning ushers in a period of enhanced instability. Israel is in a state of
permanent crisis because it has no military solution to Gaza/Hamas while its
right-wing leaders are blocked off by ideological fixations of ethnic cleansing,
which keeps them from seeking to open up diplomatic and political options.
The idea of weakening the Palestinians by fragmenting them has turned out
to be counterproductive. Israeli leaders will now have to cope with four
different variants of the Israel/Palestinian crisis, each of which may, like
the coronavirus, become the dominant strain and detonate a new explosion. As
the Palestinians have nowhere to go and nothing else to do but to fight for
survival, in their own historical land.
Inside Story
Outraged at Rogue Apartheid State of Isarel's crimes against the Palestinians?
Bravo Roger Waters! I'm with you and the Palestinians!
An estimated 90,000 Muslim worshippers prayed at the nearby Al-Aqsa Mosque on Islam’s holy night of Laylat al-Qadr – or the “Night of Destiny”, the most sacred of prayers during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan – on Saturday.
Some stayed on to protest Israeli plans to forcibly expel Palestinian families from their ancestral homes on land claimed by illegal Jewish settlers in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem.
Israeli security forces on horseback and in riot gear fired stun grenades and water cannon against Palestinians who in turn threw stones, lit fires, and tore down police barricades in the streets leading to the walled Old City’s gates.
And then pro-Zionist or Coward mainstream media bring up again the outrageous rethoric of another cycle of violence ».
For
Jerusalemites and for Just people well informed and that know History, it is
frankly nauseating to hear commentators throw around cliches of “cycle of
violence”, call for a “return to calm”, and generally engage in bothsidesism,
whenever violence erupts. And in the past few weeks, it was repeated yet again :
« there are no two equal sides in Jerusalem ».
The
problem with these statements is that they whitewash the fact that Jerusalem is
a city under violent occupation and its occupier, Israel, has made its intent
to slowly uproot the native Palestinian population quite public.
In
this sense, violence is a permanent feature of the lives of Jerusalem
residents, even when outside observers perceive the streets to be “quiet”. And
it is not a matter of “both sides” de-escalating.
This
past year had been particularly violent for Palestinian Jerusalemites. The
impact of COVID-19 on our community is dwarfed by the effects of relentless
harassment, arrests, home demolition and displacement by the Israeli
authorities, ultimately aimed at the ethnic cleansing of the city.
No
one should be surprised at the amount of anger Palestinians hold towards the
Israeli occupation authorities in the city. Their encroachments on the rights
of the Palestinian community are endless and are directly responsible for any
uptick in violence.
Such
is the case with this latest violent episode which began in the first days of
the Ramadan.
Ramadan
is a special time for Muslims all around the world, but in Jerusalem, the
festive atmosphere is simply magical, like Christian Easter and Christmas. It
is a time when Jerusalemites – young and old – come together with friends and
family, stroll through the streets of the city, buy sweets, drink coffee, and
enjoy the light displays, impromptu music shows and street performances. Jerusalem
is more alive late at night during any other time of the year. It is a special
experience that reflects the strong communal bonds among Palestinian
Jerusalemites. And it is, of course, a favourite occasion for the Israeli
authorities to harass Palestinians and spoil their festivities. This year was
no different.
On
April 12, a day before the start of Ramadan, one could notice the first signs
that the Israeli authorities were planning something. The space, benches and
steps around the Damascus Gate plaza were blocked by metal barricades. Damascus
Gate, with its three police garrisons erected in recent years, looked like a
militarised encampment.
There
was no reason to set up these barriers at a popular Ramadan hangout spot other
than to upset the Palestinians. The decision to bar West Bank Palestinians from
visiting Jerusalem to pray at Al-Aqsa, citing a lack of vaccinations as an
excuse, further riled Jerusalemites.
The
reaction was immediate: on the first day of Ramadan, April 13, a large number
of young people gathered at the Damascus Gate to protest against the arbitrary
actions of the Israeli occupier. Over the following days, the protests grew, as
Israeli provocations continued. On April 22, hundreds of extremist Jews marched
on the old city under the protection of the Israeli police, chanting “Death to
Arabs!” Palestinian youth were relentless in their resistance.
Thirteen
days into Ramadan, on April 25, the barricades fell. I arrived a little after
9pm that night, around the time when people were beginning to gather after
Taraweeh prayers. Large crowds of Palestinians marched, determined to take back
the occupied Damascus Gate. The Israeli police withdrew and the youth then
forced the removal of all barricades and poured into the space. Chanting,
singing and dancing, we reasserted our presence on our land.
The
“victory” was bittersweet, however. For almost two weeks, Palestinian youth
were subjected to brutal suppression, getting beaten up, attacked with stun
grenades and foul-smelling “skunk” water cannon, and detained. And while
foreign media paid attention to these dramatic images, it ignored completely
Israel’s other sustained campaigns of brutality against Jerusalemites.
While
Palestinian youth were resisting encroachment on their public spaces, some Jerusalemites
were facing brutal dispossession of their homes.
In
Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, 500 Palestinians from 28 families are
facing eviction from homes that have belonged to them for generations. In
February, a court ruled that six Palestinian houses where 27 people live are to
be handed over to Jewish settlers. Earlier this week, the court gave the
Palestinian families four days to “reach an agreement” with the Jewish
settlers, in which they would renounce that they own their homes in exchange
for a delay of their eviction.
The
appalling absurdity of the court decision is a prime example of Israel’s brutal
occupation and ethnic cleansing policies. In Israeli apartheid courts,
there is no justice for Palestinians. More
than 200 families in East Jerusalem are at risk of eviction due to similar
court cases filed against them.
The
Palestinian families have vowed to resist. In one video that went viral prior
to the court hearing, Sheikh Jarrah resident Muna al-Kurd is seen confronting a
settler about stealing Palestinian homes, in which he replies with a heavy
American accent “If I don’t steal it, someone else will.” Half of al-Kurd’s
home had been taken over by Jewish settlers in 2009.
Home
demolitions are another brutal Israeli practice to have continued over the past
year, even amid the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since March 2020, more than
163 homes and structures were demolished in East Jerusalem, displacing 359
Palestinians, including 167 children.
In
February, the Jerusalem Municipality requested the activation of demolition
orders against some 70 Palestinian homes in the al-Bustan area of Silwan
neighbourhood, adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem. The Israeli municipality
plans to build an archaeological park there. If carried out, the demolitions
would uproot some 1,500 Palestinians.
Jabal
al-Mukaber, a neighbourhood of Jerusalem most affected by demolitions over the
past three years, has seen homes demolished and families displaced to make way
for a planned ring road that is supposed to connect Israeli settlements in the
southern West Bank to Jerusalem. In June 2020 alone, 23 buildings belonging to
Palestinians were demolished, resulting in the displacement of 57 people,
including 34 children.
In
al-Walaja, seven buildings were destroyed and families displaced without
warning to make space for the establishment of an Israeli national park. Homes
were also demolished in the Sur Bahir area because the buildings were in a
“buffer zone”, arbitrarily determined by Israeli authorities.
Israeli
violence does not stop at evictions and home demolitions. It also extends into
the political sphere, where the Israeli authorities continue to deny the
Jerusalemite Palestinians their political rights. They regularly attack and
arrest Palestinians engaged in political activities or attempting to represent
political parties; even Palestinian Authority (PA) officials are harassed.
In
recent days, the Israeli government unequivocally indicated that it would not
allow the Palestinian legislative elections, originally scheduled for May 22,
to be also held in East Jerusalem, where nearly 400,000 Palestinians live.
Israeli police regularly raided events that promoted the Palestinian elections
and arrested Palestinian parliamentary candidates. As a result, PA President
Mahmoud Abbas officially postponed the planned elections, citing Israel’s
outright refusal for the election process to be held in East Jerusalem.
By
contrast, Israelis living in Jerusalem have been free to vote four times in the
past two years, many of them casting a ballot for the same Jewish extremists
who recently were chanting “Death to Arabs!” in our streets.
Jerusalem
may have disappeared from the news for now, but the occupiers have not left us
alone. The colonial violence has not gone away.
Israel
does its best to make life for Jerusalem’s Palestinians a misery and a constant
struggle. It does everything to make Palestinians disappear. But they will not.
Every day, they face police brutality, arrests, home evictions and demolitions,
impoverishment and a denial of basic human rights. The occupier’s violence is a
permanent feature of Palestinian lives.
However,
the Palestinians are determined to fight for their city and remain, no matter
what Israel does in its tireless effort to erase them.
That said, after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville,
North Carolina, and then President Donald Trump responded by saying there were
“good people on both sides,” people who abhor white supremacism stood up, took
notice, and condemned the marchers. Anti-racists would be wise to do the same
about the far-right march that took place at the end of April in Jerusalem.
The situation in Jerusalem began with clashes between
Palestinians and sraeli forces over new restrictions placed on the Damascus
Gate entrance to the Old City. Then, the far-right Jewish group Lahava called
for a “demonstration of national dignity.” Leaked WhatsApp messages revealed
calls to lynch Palestinians.
As the
Jewish-Israeli extremists marauded through the streets on Thursday, April 22,
Israeli forces fired rubber-coated steel bullets at Palestinian
counterprotesters. The remarks of a young orthodox Jewish girl went viral on social media. “I don’t want to burn your villages, I just want you
to leave and we’ll take them” she said. On her shirt was a sticker reading
“Rabbi Kahane is right.” Kahane’s group was placed on the US terror list in
2004.
105 Palestinians were injured, twenty-two requiring
hospitalization. Twenty Israeli police officers were also injured. The next
morning, Israel’s Internal Security Minister Amir Ohana released a statement condemning “attacks by "Arabs".” He said nothing of the violence committed by Jews.
US State
Department spokesperson Ned Price condemned the “rhetoric of extremist protestors.” However, the US embassy in
Jerusalem’s statement that they were “deeply concerned” declined to weigh in on
the issue of Jewish extremism.
Avi Mayer of the
American Jewish Committee tweeted: “The individuals perpetrating it are as foreign to me and my Judaism as
are skinheads, white supremacists, and other racists around the world.” But
those who chanted “death to Arabs” in Jerusalem are a normalized, accepted part
of Israel’s government.
Members of
Lehava, the group that organized the extremist march in Jerusalem, are
followers of Kahanism, a Jewish supremacist ideology based on the views of Rabbi Meir Kahane. Inspired by Kahane, in 1994, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinians in the West Bank Ibrahimi mosque. As recently as
2014, three members of Lehava were charged with setting fire to an integrated bilingual Palestinian-Jewish
school.
In 1988, the Kach
party was banned from running for the Israeli Knesset. In 2004, the US State
Department labeled Kach a terrorist organization. However, the Kahanist movement has
recently made its way back into Israel’s government where it is being met with
open arms.
During Israel’s
recent election, Netanyahu, willing to do anything to hold onto his prime
ministership, encouraged voters from his own Likud party to cast their ballots
for the anti-Arab Extremist-Religious Zionism slate, which included the
Kahanist-inspired Otzma Yehudit party, so that they could make it over the
election threshold. Extremist-religious Zionism won six seats, bringing Kahanism back into Israel’s Knesset for the first
time since the 1980s.
As Netanyahu is
proving unable to form a coalition, attention is now turning towards Naftali
Bennett, the next most likely candidate to become Israel’s prime minister.
In 2016, Bennett called Israelis to be willing to “give our lives” to annex the West Bank”,
evoking the Kahanist view that terrorist acts against Palestinians are a
patriotic act of martyrdom. Bennett’s negotiations as he hopes to form a government, have included meetings with Religious Zionism.
Such statements
as Bennett’s call for violence have surely led to increased levels of unrest in
the Holy Land. After last week’s extremist march in Jerusalem, clashes
continued between unarmed Palestinian protestors and Israeli heavily armed forces.
In solidarity with the Palestinians from occupied West Bank, homemade rockets were launched from Gaza and the Israeli military responded with heavy
bombings, Finally, on Sunday, April 25, Israel’s police commissioner gave in and ordered the barricades at Damascus Gate be removed.
Though the
situation in Jerusalem has now calmed, the floodgates of Jewish extremism have
already been flung wide open.
The neo-Nazi
march in Charlottesville and Trump’s response rightfully alarmed the world.
Though Trump has been ousted from office, we all know that the violent racist
movement that blossomed during his presidency did not begin with him and is far
from gone. We would be wise in the aftermath of Israelis’ “death to Arabs”
march in Jerusalem to also speak out against Kahanism, the banalization of
Israeli apartheid, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the destruction of
Jerusalem’s historical population.
PALESTINA
On April 27, the leading international NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW)
issued a 213-page report, titled “A Threshold Crossed”, condemning Israel for
“committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against
Palestinians” in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT) and in Israel
itself.
The report undoubtedly marks the crossing of a threshold for the rights
group, which has long been shying away from such overt and comprehensive
criticism of Israel, to the frustration of Palestinians and advocates of Palestinian
rights.
But the threshold that the report’s name ostensibly refers to is a legal
one that, in HRW’s analysis, Israel has finally crossed. “While much of the
world treats Israel’s half-century occupation as a temporary situation that a
decades-long ‘peace process’ will soon cure, the oppression of Palestinians
there has reached a threshold and a permanence that meets the definitions of
the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director
of HRW.
So, according to the group, Israel’s crimes against Palestinians have
reached such severity that they can now be considered as crimes against
humanity – crimes deemed by the international community to be some of the most
serious, potentially warranting the most serious punishment.
But the designation of
Israel’s settler-colonial endeavour as a form of apartheid is nothing new. The
legal term “apartheid” has long been used to characterise Israel’s actions
against Palestinians.
The 1973 Apartheid
Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court define
apartheid as systematic and institutionally entrenched domination and
repression by one racial group over another through “inhumane acts”. Among such
acts are: “arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial
group”; measures “designed to divide the population along racial lines by the
creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or
groups”; “forcible transfer”; “expropriation of landed property”; and denial of
“the right to leave and to return to their country, [and] the right to a
nationality”. All these have been part and parcel of Israel’s settler-colonial
project in Palestine since the very beginning. And UN diplomats, legal scholars
and activists have applied the concept of apartheid to Israel since at least
the 1970s.
In 1975, the United
Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism to be a
form of racism – later rescinded due to Israeli pressure. Although not defining
Israel as an apartheid state, the Resolution made that association explicit. It
based its equation of Zionism with racism on previous resolutions, including
the 1963 Resolution 1904 (XVIII), which affirmed that “any doctrine of racial
differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable,
socially unjust and dangerous”. Resolution 3379 also drew a line tying Israel
to “the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa”, which were “organically
linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the
human being”. Other UN debates in this period also recognised the “collusion”
of Israel, Zionism, and South Africa’s apartheid regime, as in Resolution 3151
of 1973.
After visiting the Holy
Land in 2002, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, widely regarded as “South
Africa’s moral conscience”, said what he saw in Israel’s treatment of
Palestinians reminded him “so much of what happened to us Black people in South
Africa”, an observation he has since reiterated. Since 2005, student activists
on campuses across the globe have been organising educational events during
“Israel Apartheid Week”. These events are staged to raise awareness of the
Palestinian liberation struggle and to highlight the similarities between
Palestinians’ efforts and the South African anti-Apartheid movement. And in
2017, ESCWA, a UN body, issued a report on Israel’s apartheid practices against
Palestinians.
Although the HRW report
refers to some other applications of the concept of apartheid to define
Israel’s actions against Palestinians, it focuses on presenting “a detailed
legal analysis based on the international crimes of apartheid or persecution”.
More than just a legal category, however, the notion of apartheid is a moral
and political designation, and this is what makes it so contested and powerful.
By giving their report announcement the hashtag #Courage2FightApartheid, HRW
acknowledged how political this legal analysis really is, perhaps also hinting
at why it has taken the group so long to publicly accept a reality recognised
by so many across the world for decades.
Whether HRW’s decision to
recognise Israel as an apartheid state will be a watershed moment in the
decades-old Palestinian struggle and instigate political change remains to be
seen. Recent events – such as the February 5 International Criminal Court
decision affirming its territorial jurisdiction over the OPT, the January
report by Israeli NGO B’Tselem also labelling Israel an “apartheid state”, and
pitched battles over the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s
definition of anti-Semitism that seeks to silence criticism of Israel – already
suggest that a tipping point may be approaching.
Indeed, as Israel’s
Jewish supremacism became more explicit in recent years, it has become harder
to argue against its classification as an apartheid state. How can a rights
organisation, or anyone else continue to deny that Israel is an apartheid state
after the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, proudly stated that
“Israel is not a state of all its citizens … Israel is the nation-state of the
Jewish people and them alone”?
How can they deny that
Israel is committing the crime against humanity of apartheid after the Israeli
parliament passed the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law which denies the rights of
Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 20 percent of the country’s
population?
The HRW
report is undoubtedly a positive development and a step in the right direction.
But the question we are facing today is not whether Israel is an apartheid
state. The question is, when will the international community act in concert to
put an end to its obvious and obviously reprehensible system of oppression?
During the first Cold War between the United States & West Europe
against the Soviet Union injustice and human rights increasingly became a
central issue. This ought to have been a positive development, but it was
devalued by partisan use and the issue turned into an instrument of propaganda.
The essence of such propaganda is not lies or even exaggeration, but
selectivity. To give one example, the focus was kept on very real Soviet
oppression in Eastern Europe and away from the savage rule of Western-backed
dictators in South America. The political weaponisation of human rights was
crude and hypocritical, but it was extremely effective.
As the USA enter a second Cold War against china and Russia, there are
lessons to be learned from the first, since much the same propaganda mechanisms
are once again hard at work. Western governments and media unrelentingly
criticise China for the persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province, but
there is scarcely a mention of the repression of Kashmiri Muslims in
Indian-controlled Kashmir. Diplomatic and media outrage is expressed when
Russia and the Syrian government bomb civilians in Idlib in Syria, but the
bombing of civilians during the Western-backed, Saudi-led air campaign in
Yemen, remains at the bottom of the news agenda.
Governmental and journalistic propagandists – for journalists who take this
selective approach to oppression are no better than propagandists – can see
that they are open to the charge of hypocrisy. People ask them how come that
the mass incarceration, disappearances and torture suffered by the Kashmiris is
so different from similar draconian punishments inflicted on the Uighurs?
This is a very reasonable question, but propagandists have developed two
lines of defence against it. The first is to claim that whoever asks « what
about Palestine », “Kashmir or Yemen” is fostering “whataboutism”,
culpably diverting attention from crimes committed against the Uighurs and
Syrian civilians. The nonsensical assumption here is that denouncing atrocities
and oppression in once country precludes one from denouncing them in another.
The real purpose of this gambit from the point of view of those waging
information wars is to impose a convenient silence over wrongdoings by our side
while focusing exclusively on theirs.
The second line of defence, used to avoid comparison between the crimes
committed by ourselves and our friends and those of our enemies, is to demonise
the latter so thoroughly that no equivalence between the two is allowed. Such
demonisation – sometimes called “monsterisation” – is so effective because it
denies the other side a hearing and means that they are automatically
disbelieved. In the 1990s, I used to write with copious evidence that UN
sanctions against Iraq were killing thousands of children every month. But
nobody paid any attention because sanctions were supposedly directed against
Saddam Hussein – though they did him no harm – and he was known to be the
epitome of evil. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified by claiming
that Saddam possessed WMD and anybody who suggested that the evidence for this
was dubious could be smeared as a secret sympathiser with the Iraqi dictator.
Simple-minded as these PR tactics might be, but they have been repeatedly
shown to be highly effective. One reason why they work is that people would
like to imagine that conflicts are struggles between white hats and black hats,
angels and demons. Another reason is that this delusion is fostered
enthusiastically by parts of the media, who generally goes along with a
government-inspired news agenda.
With President Joe Biden seeking to rebuild the international image of the
US as the « home of freedom and democracy » in the wake of the Donald
Trump presidency, we are back to these classic information strategies. For the
USA to bounce back unsullied in the eyes of the world, it is essential to
portray Trump, with his embrace of autocrats and denunciation of everybody he
disliked as a terrorist, as an aberration in American history.
Yet much of the planet’s population will have watched the film of Derek
Chauvin slowly asphyxiate George Floyd and may not look at America in quite the
same light as before, despite the guilty verdict in Minneapolis this week.
Asked about the impact of that verdict internationally, the US National
Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that America needed “to promote and defend
justice at home” if it was to credibly claim to be doing the same abroad. But
he dismissed as “whataboutism” and unacceptable “moral equivalence” the
suggestion that US protests about the jailing and mistreatment of Alexei
Navalny in Russia and China’s actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, was being
undermined by the fact that the US holds 2.4 million of its citizens in prison,
one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.
Contrary to what Sullivan and other establishment figures say about
refusing to compare the US with Russia and China, “whataboutism” and “moral
equivalency” can be strong forces for good. They influence great powers, though
not as much as they should, into cleaning up their acts out of pure
self-interest, thus enabling them to criticise their rivals without appearing
too openly hypocritical.
This happened during the first Cold War, when the belief that the Soviet
Union was successfully using the American racial discrimination to
discredit the US as a protagonist of democracy, played an important role in
persuading decision-makers in Washington that civil rights for blacks was in
the government’s best interests.
Once “whataboutism” and “equivalence” become the norm in media reporting,
then the US government will have a powerful motive to try to end the
militarisation of America’s police forces, which shot dead 1,004 people in
2019. This also holds true for how the police handle race.
Cold War competition between global powers has many harmful consequences,
but it can also have benign ones. One forgotten consequence of the Soviet Union
launching Sputnik, the first space satellite in 1957, is that it led to a
spectacular surge in US government spending on scientific and general
education.
For the most part, however, the first Cold War was an arid exchange of
accusations in which human rights became a weapon in informational warfare. Can
anything be done to prevent the same thing happening as the second Cold War
gets underway?
It would be naïve to imagine that governments will not go on maligning
their enemies and giving themselves a free pass unless propelled to do better
by public opinion. And this will only happen by going beyond selective
reporting of human rights abuses and demonising all opponents of their national
governments as pariahs.
PALESTINA
Israel
is committing “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution” against
Palestinians and the international community must reevaluate diplomatic
relations with the state, a leading human rights group said in a report on
Tuesday.
The
213-page report from Human
Rights Watch (HRW) details how Israel has sought to maintain Jewish-Israeli
hegemony over the Palestinian people from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean
Sea.
“While
much of the world treats Israel’s half-century occupation as a temporary
situation that a decades-long ‘peace process’ will soon cure, the oppression of
Palestinians there has reached a threshold and a permanence that meets the
definitions of the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” Kenneth Roth,
executive director of HRW, said. “Those who strive for Israeli-Palestinian
peace, whether a one or two-state solution or a confederation, should in the
meantime recognise this reality for what it is and bring to bear the sorts of
human rights tools needed to end it.”
As
always, rogue Israel dismissed the organisation’s report, calling it
“propaganda”.
The HRW report follows a
conclusion reached by Israeli rights group B’Tselem, which published a study last
January that found Palestinians, divided into four tiers of inferior treatment,
are denied the right to self-determination.
Ines
Abdel Razek, an advocacy director for the Ramallah-based Palestine Institute
for Public Diplomacy organisation, said the HRW report is a welcome development
in shifting the goalposts of international engagement towards applying
international law and human rights – rather than “sanctifying a two-state
solution as an empty mantra that has only comforted Israel in its impunity. [It]
is clearly of major political importance in order to advance the urgent need to
reframe the political understanding about Palestine and Israel,” she told Al
Jazeera, “although frustrating for Palestinians to see that the world
needs validation from international or Israeli NGOs spelling out what we have
been documenting, analysing, saying and writing for decades.”
For
Mouin Rabbani, a co-editor of Jadaliyya, an independent research website, the
existence of apartheid has been “voluminously substantiated” by Palestinians
and their supporters for decades. “It is thus not Israel but rather HRW that
has crossed a threshold,” he said. “HRW is the industry leader in its field,
and that it has finally caught up with reality is in my view a significant
development. The report’s significance lies in HRW
“explicitly denouncing Israel as an apartheid regime, calling for Israel to
face real and serious consequences for what the report terms ‘crime against
humanity’. Perhaps most surprisingly, given its record on such
matters, [HRW] is for once not ‘balancing’ its analysis of Israel with ritual
denunciations of Palestinians,” Rabbani added.
HRW’s
report lists a range of Israeli abuses committed against the Palestinians:
sweeping movement restrictions against Palestinians in the occupied
territories, the demolition of homes and “near-categorical denial” of building
permits, the military occupation, land expropriation, and rejection of the
residency rights of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
In
fact, the Israeli government’s own words and actions – such as the 2018 nation
state bill, which defined Israel as the “nation-state of Jewish people”, and
its unrelenting settlement expansion policy, all point to its intent to
preserve its domination, HRW said.
For
Israel the term “apartheid” is explosive, vigorously rejected by itself and its
supporters. It has long described itself as the only “democracy in the Middle
East”, but its rejection of the label “apartheid” is in keeping with Israel’s
tradition of denouncing any criticism as “anti-Semitic”.
Even
as Israeli politicians openly speak of annexation, expansionism and of
maintaining presence in the occupied territories, the Israeli government points
to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, a fraction of the total Palestinians
under its control, as proof that it is not an apartheid regime, given their
ability to vote and be represented in the highest levels of government. They
constitute a fig leaf which ultimately fails to negate that Israel continues to
control the majority of the Palestinian people without recourse to rights.
By
responding to criticism or condemnation of its policies, Israel resorts to
delegitimising and, where possible, criminalising its critics and using the
anti-Semitic card as the core of its response.
It’s
a well-worn playbook, often augmented with other dirty tricks and various forms
of propaganda, such as denouncing critics as terrorists. Anti-Semitism has been
deliberately redefined by the Israeli government and its supporters to equate
with any criticism of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. The very
problematic International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of
anti-Semitism explicitly includes as an example that calling Israel an
‘apartheid state’ is anti-Semitic.
The
HRW report recommends that the international community adopt a rights-based and
accountability approach regarding engagement with Israel – including
conditioned military aid and vetting all forms of trade and cooperation –
instead of relying on the so-called peace process, which has been deadlocked
for years and has only served Israel to continue its policies with impunity.
Which
is sure is that there can be no peace or negotiations in the current power
structure, and as long as Palestinians are denied their fundamental national,
political and civil right. The current focus should be on increasing the cost
of sustaining Israeli hegemony and the continued denial of individual and
collective rights for Palestinians. Policymakers must shift their focus away
from securing a political solution that might herald peace, and instead fight
back against a trajectory of expanding Israeli territorial consolidation and
Palestinian dispossession in the entirety of the land.
Forced
evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem is an example of a systematic state
policy by the Israeli government that the international community can impose
punitive measures on, regardless of whether a peace process is ongoing or not.
Palestinians
have described their struggle as one against apartheid and settler colonialism
for decades, but the international community has largely refrained from
defining the Palestinian pursuit of rights in those terms.
While
a leading rights group using the term “apartheid” to describe Israel’s policies
against Palestinians is a step forward, it is nevertheless still unrealistic to
expect it to have a direct impact on foreign policy.
This
report could serve as a valuable educational resource and assist in advocacy
efforts and, as noted above, can serve to mainstream discussion of the issues
it raises, including potentially at the political level. In calling out Israeli
apartheid, HRW, as the industry leader and a prominent US organisation to boot,
makes it more acceptable to have discussions about Israeli apartheid, and how
Israel should be held to account, in polite society and mainstream media,
particularly in North America and Europe.
Actually,
the framework put forth by HRW is “incomplete” as it omits the context that is
embedded in settler colonialism. A ‘threshold’ has not been passe. In fact,
Israel’s settler-colonial project to conquer and systematically displace,
dispossess and fragment Palestinians, who they consider a ‘demographic threat’,
to replace them with Jewish settlers has been in place since 1948.
Although
it is clear that Israeli Jewish and international human rights organisations
coming to embrace using the word “apartheid” is indicative of a shift in how
the Palestinian struggle is being seen on the international stage, the policy
and political worlds are still lagging.
The
finding by HRW that Israel is practising the crime of apartheid foreshadows a
future where it will be increasingly difficult for international governments to
maintain the myth that Israel’s occupation and its control over Palestinians
are temporary. This is a necessary realignment in terms of how international
governments and organisations understand the reality in Israel/Palestine today,
and eventually, will make it harder for stakeholders to engage with the Israeli
government without accounting for this reality.
