MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Israel vs Palestina: Third Nakba in view?

The outburst of Palestinian protests and Israeli “security” measures in Jerusalem since July 14 continues a saga that has pertained since Israeli occupied the West Bank in 1967 in order to steal land and natural ressources, but with a few significant new twists this time. Here are some of them in this ongoing battle between Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem.

The power of sustained, mass, non-violent protest by Palestinian civilians, with a precise focus and specific demands, caused Israel to drop all the new “security” measures it said were needed at the Al-Aqsa compound. The success and power of such mass protest will have major implications for the future. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children who placed their prayer mats on the ground in the open air and prayed near their Islamic holy site sent a critical message to multiple audiences: Israel, the Palestinian leadership, the Arab-Islamic world, and the international community.

To the Israeli government and its rightwing colonial-settler Zionist fanatics, the message was that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem will stand their ground when they feel their rights are threatened, and they will kneel to no one, literally, but to God, as they do when they kneel in prayer.

To the divided and broadly hapless Palestinian national leaderships (Fatah and Hamas) that cling to power without serving their people very well, the message was that Palestinian men and women can take charge of their own interests and well-being when they need to; and they can negotiate with the Israelis to achieve better results than Fateh and Hamas have ever achieved. An important new development in this instance of Palestinian-Israeli confrontation in Jerusalem was the role played by the four-member religious leadership of the Islamic holy places waqf (endowment), in close consultation with local community leaders.
To the Arab-Islamic world, where support for the Palestinians in occupied Arab East Jerusalem was sporadic and erratic, the message was that it would be childish of them to try and establish close political, economic, or security links with the Israeli government while Israel was still taking measures to consolidate its control of all Jerusalem against the wishes of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab residents of the city.
This is particularly relevant to continuing attempts by Israel, with apparent U.S. support, to develop more normal relations with Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states, as a confidence-building measure to prod all concerned in the Arab-Israeli conflict towards a negotiated peace. The Palestinians on the ground showed that their confident assertion of their presence and their rights in Jerusalem was the way to push Israel to change its Policy.
To the rest of the world, the message was that the international community should stop falling for the old Israeli ruse that strict controls on Palestinian movement and actions must be put in place for “security” reasons. Israel dropped all the “security” measures it had taken unilaterally — cameras, gates, railings, metal-detectors — when it saw itself confronted by the collective will of hundreds of thousands of unarmed men, women, and children who took to the streets every day and night to affirm only that they are Palestinians who have the right to live in dignity in their own ancestral city.
Some people will say that this particular show of mass collective self-assertion by the Palestinians was due to the fact that it was a religious site — the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound — that they felt was being threatened and besmirched by Israeli actions. That is only partly correct. The more accurate and complete picture is that this incident exploded into a major confrontation because of the complex interactions between religious and political identity that converge in Jerusalem as they do nowhere else in the world. The Palestinians of Jerusalem have found themselves vulnerable, unrepresented, unprotected, and leaderless for many decades since 1967, because neither the occupying Israeli authorities nor the fragmented Palestinian leaderships look out for the best interests and basic human rights of the Jerusalemite Palestinians.
After the Israelis removed all their “security” measures and the waqf leadership announced that public prayers would resume in the mosque, the lengthy and boisterous Palestinian street celebrations were a rare instance of this community enjoying a collective success. All these aspects of the episode suggest that more organized local coordination among religious and civic leaders in Arab East Jerusalem is likely to occur, especially because Israeli continues to find ways to continue the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs that it wants to drive out of the city.
The latest example is an Israeli move to redraw the borders of occupied Arab East Jerusalem as Israel defines them, which would exclude over 100,000 Palestinian Arabs from being residents of the city. If this happens, the Arab proportion of Jerusalemites would shrink further, making them more vulnerable to Israeli pressures and incentives to emigrate. The lessons to be learned from this round of nationalistic confrontation in Jerusalem will be pivotal for future developments in the city where Arabism and Zionism have battled for control for many decades now, and the battle goes on.

The "apolitical" aproach of Palestinian water crisis

Water deal tightens Israel's control over …

Binyamin Netanyahu is proposing that Palestinian citizens of Israel be stripped of their citizenship under a “peace” deal that would place them in a future Palestinian entity.

The Israeli prime minister recently told American officials, according to a report in Haaretz, that “Israeli-Arab communities could move under Palestinian control” as part of a final status agreement.

“In exchange,” the Tel Aviv newspaper wrote, “Israel would annex some West Bank settlements.”

Commonly referred to as “transfer,” this proposal amounts to ethnic cleansing. It is not a new idea, but Netanyahu’s broaching it represents a further step in the Israeli government formally adopting policies once considered taboo even by many Israelis.

The area Netanyahu has in mind – at least initially – is Wadi Ara, a region in the north, including the major town of Umm al-Fahm.

Some 1.5 million Palestinians have citizenship in Israel. They are the survivors and their descendants of the Nakba, the Zionist ethnic cleansing of the vast majority of the Palestinian population from what became Israel before and after it was established in 1948.

The idea that this would be an “exchange” is clearly absurd since none of what Netanyahu proposes to swap is Israel’s to begin with: West Bank settlers live on land stolen from Palestinians in violation of international law.

Meanwhile, the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel – who in any such move would be deprived of the right of determining their own fate on land that is theirs by birth – are not a gift from Israel, which was established by force and conquest in their country at their expense.

So-called population exchanges have an ugly history; they were practiced before the modern era, when it was accepted that rulers treated people like property.

But the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other norms enshrined after the atrocities of the Second World War, vested rights in individuals and outlawed forced displacement and the arbitrary removal of citizenship and nationality.

But as I argued in my 2014 book The Battle for Justice in Palestine, Israel’s claim that it has a “right to exist as a Jewish state” cannot be realized without the massive and constant violation of the most basic principles of human rights, equality and anti-racism.

This can be seen by following the logic of Netanyahu’s proposal. He talks about the transfer as part of a “final status” deal.

But what kind of a “peace” would Netanyahu contemplate? In his first White House meeting with US President Donald Trump in February, the Israeli leader would not commit explicitly to any sort of “two-state solution.”

He insisted though that in any deal Palestinians must recognize Israel as a “Jewish state” and Israel “must retain overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River.”

So adding all the elements together, Netanyahu’s plan would take Palestinians in Israel, who currently possess rights as citizens – albeit limited by law and inferior to Jews – and move them to a situation where like the rest of the Palestinians under perpetual Israeli military occupation they would have no rights at all.

In March, a landmark UN report concluded that “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”

“The mission of preserving Israel as a Jewish state has inspired or even compelled Israel to pursue several general racial policies,” the report states. These include “demographic engineering, in order to establish and maintain an overwhelming Jewish majority in Israel.”

Netanyahu’s latest proposal precisely fits into this mold, and therefore is further confirmation that Israel practices apartheid.

The UN report also noted that while Israel maintains a formal democratic system for citizens of the state, it prohibits anyone from using that system to challenge the regime’s fundamentally racist set-up: “Israeli law bans organized Palestinian opposition to Jewish domination, rendering it illegal and even seditious.”

Netanyahu would do away with the merest threat of Palestinian citizens of Israel using their votes to challenge this domination by stripping them of their citizenship.

The UN report, quickly suppressed by the UN secretary-general on American orders, stresses that it does not directly compare Israel to apartheid South Africa.

Rather, it measures Israel against the definition of the crime of apartheid in international law, which is includedin the founding statute of the International Criminal Court.

Netanyahu’s proposal does nonetheless indeed follow closely the precedent set by apartheid South Africa.

As that racist regime came under increasing pressure to end white supremacist rule in the late 20th century, it created a system of “bantustans” – nominally independent Black-ruled states.

If Black people wanted to vote, the apartheid government said, they were welcome to take citizenship in one of the bantustans – impoverished strips of land stretched across remote areas of South Africa.

But the “independence” of these states – not recognized by any country – was a total sham. They were tin-pot dictatorships run by collaborators with the white racist regime.

The bantustans were a mechanism to remove Black people physically – by encouraging or forcing migration to them – and politically from South Africa, while providing no real rights.

It is difficult to find any difference with what Netanyahu – who has made clear his aversion to seeing Palestinian citizens of Israel vote – is proposing.

There is one key difference: unlike with apartheid South Africa whose bantustans met universal rejection, many in the so-called international community, including Barack Obama when he was president, have eagerly adopted Israel’s racist and segregationist conception under the slogan of “two states for two peoples.”

The idea of racial gerrymandering has found favor with some of Israel’s most ardent admirers.

Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state who has a long list of war crimes on his record including the killing of millions of people in Southeast Asia, advised Israel in 2004 to “transfer territory with significant Arab populations from the northern part of Israel to improve the demographic balance.”

In recent years, there have been two main Israeli proponents of the idea of further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, marketed as “land swaps.”

Avigdor Lieberman, the West Bank settler who is currently Israel’s defense minister, has long advocated this approach.

A decade ago Lieberman said he would support a “two-state solution” as long as it provided for real segregation by getting rid of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

“The guiding principle must be an exchange of territory and of populations,” he said. “It’s not that we’re against the solution of two states for two peoples,” Lieberman added. “On the contrary, we support it: two states for two peoples, not a state and a half for one people and half a state for the other.”

In Lieberman’s view, the risk of a two-state solution without transfer was that Israel would end up as “half a state” – meaning that Jews could not guarantee their domination in an entity with more than 1.5 million non-Jewish citizens who expect equal democratic and civil rights.

Lieberman recently reaffirmed in a posting on Facebook that the Jewish state should eventually be ethnically cleansed of virtually all Palestinians.

“There is no reason why Sheikh Raed Salah, Ayman Odeh, Basel Ghattas or Haneen Zoabi should continue to be Israeli citizens,” he said in reference to prominent Palestinian politicians, three of them at the time members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

The other key proponent is Tzipi Livni, the ostensibly “dovish” former foreign minister who is sought for questioning in war crimes inquiries by prosecutors in several countries.

In 2007, Livni said: “The Palestinian state to be established will not be a solution just for the Palestinians who live in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. It is designed to provide a comprehensive national solution – for those living in Judea and Samaria, and the refugees camps, and even for the [Arab] citizens of Israel.”

As part of the government of Ehud Olmert the same year, Livni formally raised the idea of transfer with Palestinian negotiators, explaining: “Our idea is to refer to two states for two peoples. Or two nation states, Palestine and Israel living side by side in peace and security with each state constituting the homeland for its people and the fulfillment of their national aspirations and self determination.”

Since no Israeli leader has ever seriously proposed giving a Palestinian state the same rights and sovereignty Israel claims for itself, these declarations are barely disguised calls for a continuation of Zionism’s historic process of dispossessing Palestinians and calling it “peace.”

A few days ago, senior Israeli minister Tzachi Hanegbi even threatened Palestinians with a “third Nakba” – a reference to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967.

One wonders if Netanyahu’s latest proposal is what he meant.

Eletronic Intifada VIDEO: Israeli soldier shoots, beats fleeing Palestinian teenager…

Eleven years after the 2006 Gaza beach massacre that killed seven members of her family, Huda Ghalia has just received her Law degree at the Islamic University of Gaza.

On the afternoon of June 6, 2006, the Ghalia family were picnicking on the Sudaniya beach near Beit Lahia in northern Gaza when Israeli artillery and naval shelling struck them, killing seven members of her family, including her father and five siblings.

Onze anos após o massacre da praia de Gaza em 2006 que matou sete membros de sua família, Huda Ghalia acabou de formar-se em Direito.

Recapitulando sua desgraça, na tarde do dia 6 de junho de 2006, sua família estava fazendo um piquenique na praia de Sudaniya, perto de Beit Lahia no norte da Faixa de Gaza quando foi bombardeada pela artilharia naval israelense. Sete membros de sua família foram mortos, incluindo seu pai e cinco irmãos. As imagens dela chorando a morte do pai rodou o mundo.

Hoje, seus irmãos também estariam cheios de vida e adiantados nos estudos, se não tivessem sido assassinados naquele dia.

THIS IS PALESTINE follows the journey of Riverdance founder and award-winning producer and director John McColgan through Palestine with Trócaire, an Irish human rights charity. It aims to "raise awareness of the human rights abuses that have been happening and are still happening in the West Bank and Gaza as he explores the impact of ongoing occupation on the people who live there. The documentary was co-produced by Tyrone Productions and Trocaire in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of the military occupation of the West Bank.