Another election in Israel, another heavy bombing of Palestinians in Gaza to win Israeli hearts.
At the end of this last military assault on Gaza, the Israeli government declared triumphantly that it had carried out "surgical strikes" in Gaza and had killed "terrorists". Once again, its leadership declared that the Zionist state did so because it has the "right to defend itself" and the world nodded.
But let us take a closer look at Israel's actions.
The so-called "target killing" of Islamic Jihad Commander Bahaa Abu al-Ata and his wife, Asmaa, was followed by the bombardment of several other areas around the Gaza Strip. In other words, the assassination of Abu al-Ata and Asmaa was just the beginning. As of Friday morning, Israel's "surgical strikes" have killed a total of 34 Palestinians, almost half of them civilians, including eight children and three women.
Surely there is nothing "surgical" about bombings that kill not only accused militants - without a judge, jury and trial - but also their wives, children and various bystanders. A surgeon does not kill en masse, a war criminal does.
And yet, the so-called "international community" refused once again to condemn what effectively was a series of extrajudicial killings and the reckless use of deadly bombs in densely populated civilian areas.
Avi Berkowitz, Deputy Assistant to Donald Trump and the latest leading member of his so-called "Middle East Peace Team" tweeted: "The US fully supports our partner & ally Israel in their fight against terrorism and the terrorist group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad."
The European Union, meanwhile, focused its outrageon the rockets that were fired from the Gaza Strip on Israel in response to Abu al-Ata's assassination and effectively remained silent on the killing of Palestinian civilians.
"This morning, Israel conducted an operation inside Gaza targeting a senior leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In response, rockets were fired from Gaza on southern and central Israel," a statement from the EU foreign service said. "The firing of rockets on civilian populations is totally unacceptable and must immediately stop."
I wish I could say I found these reactions shocking. But we, journalists, are used to the world's silence in the face of Israel's brutal assaults on us. For the past 20 years, even the most sympathetic statements coming from Europe only expressed worry about so-called "escalations" and completely ignored the ongoing collective punishment, repression and silencing of the Palestinians. And the "post-colonial" governments across the world proved that they learned nothing from their own history by remaining silent about the injustices Palestinians are facing at the hands of the Israeli settler colony.
"I grew up in Gaza's Jabalia Refugee Camp. I was a stateless refugee child, living with my parents, my four uncles, their wives and children, and grandparents in a total of five rooms.
I lived through the first intifada. I lived through the constant fear of soldiers raiding our home and arresting my father and uncles because of their political activities. I lived through a shooting near my kindergarten. I lived through my primary school being shot at. I lived through my prep school being bombarded with illegal white phosphorus munitions. Then I experienced the brutality of Israel's response to the second intifada. As I grew into a teenager and then an adult, I lived through countless other assaults, invasions and massacres.
Then I became a journalist, humanitarian aid worker and human rights defender.
I did so because I wanted to help my people and document Israel's horrific war crimes for the world to see. In January 2014, as I was organising protests close to the buffer zone in the east of Gaza with other youth groups, I was shot in the leg with a live bullet. At the time of the attack we were only peacefully planting lemon and olive trees. I always pushed for peaceful popular resistance in Gaza. Unfortunately, Israel rarely allows the situation to remain "peaceful" on the strip, as we have been witnessing on a weekly basis since the start of the Great March of Return in March 2018.
I was lucky to survive and get an opportunity to leave Gaza in the following months. I was traumatised because of what I happened to me, but I did not have the time to focus on how I felt. With the start of Operation Protective Edge, my people, my family came under attack once again. I had to report, tell stories and campaign while spending every second of every day worrying about my family. I embarked on a speaking tour across Europe, telling people of the plight of Gazans to the best of my ability. Soon I started an MPhil (Master of Philosophy) in peace studies and conflict transformation in Norway. I am now settled in Berlin.
I may now be safe in Europe, but thousands of children including my one-year-old niece Ela'a, are trying to survive the same abominable conditions I once did back home in Gaza. I fear that Ela'a is going to have a miserable childhood like the one I had, if not worse. If things do not change, and change fast, she is going to spend most of her childhood hiding from Israeli bombs behind chairs and under tables. And even during the times of "peace" she will have to endure horrendous conditions in a place characterised as "uninhabitable" by the United Nations."
Let's not forget that the water in Gaza by now is undrinkable. Contaminated and scarce, owing to Israel's brutal siege and bombing of infrastructure, it is causing death and disease.
Gazans also get just six to eight hours of electricity most days, sometimes not getting any for a full 24 hours. The food insecurity is also high in the Gaza Strip. Farmers are not allowed to grow food on lands in or adjacent to the so-called "buffer zone" along the fence that the Israelis have established for "security" reasons. Approximately 30 percent of Gaza's agricultural land cannot be worked without severe personal risk, causing the loss of livelihood according to PCHR. Fishermen are also unable to throw their nets freely, as the Israeli sea blockade does not allow them to fully use Gaza's territorial waters. My family's house in Gaza is 1.5km away from the sea and we regularly hear Israeli gunships shooting at Palestinian fishermen.
Debris dominates the landscape in Gaza. The siege the Israeli siege prevents construction materials from entering the strip, so after every Israeli assault, damaged and destroyed buildings do not get rebuild.
The blockade not only prevents goods from entering the strip, but also prevents people from leaving this open-air prison. Hospitals are lacking medicine and equipment and yet patients have to wait for permits from the Israeli authorities to leave for treatment elsewhere; many have died waiting.
Students who want to study abroad, explore the world and learn are also unable to leave. I was one of the few lucky ones. "Back in 2013/2014, the Rafah border crossing was open only for three days every four months and even on those days, getting the necessary documents to be allowed to leave was not easy. After more than a year of trying, struggling and waiting, only a few manage to get out", said the one who is now safe and sound in Germany.
However, what future do the children in Gaza really have? Drinking poisoned water, eating inedible food, dodging bombs and praying that one day they may obtain a piece of paper from their tormentors so they can leave the prison/cponcentration camp they were born into? Becoming yet another statistic in a UN report telling the world for the nth time what a human catastrophe Gaza is and how criminal Israel's decade-long siege and regular massacres are?
And yet, the international community continues to act as if the people of Gaza are to blame for their own suffering. As if the 365 square kilometres of land Gazans are trying to survive on is an actual country, with an army, navy, iron dome, warplanes, shelters, the latest military technology funded by the US and European countries. As if the two million people squeezed into this strip are fighting a war on equal terms with the Israelis, and are not poor refugees occupied, violated, and dispossessed for decades.
Abu al-Ata was a labeled as a "terrorist" for picking up arms against the oppression of his people, so he was "surgically" eliminated (his family being "collateral damage") without due process and that is OK - so the international community reasons.
Unarmed Palestinians were a security "threat" for protesting near the Israeli fence, so 213 of them were killed, including 46 children, two women, nine persons with disabilities, four paramedics and two journalists, while a whopping 14,115 were wounded and that is OK, too.
Two million Palestinians living in Gaza are a major demographic menace for Israel, so they are kept in subhuman conditions and bombed occasionally - and that is OK as well.
For this so-called international community all and any crimes committed against the Palestinians seem perfectly excusable.
It is in this world, under the watchful eyes of this "international community", that thousands of children will be growing up. "One day, we will remember those humans who cared and supported Paletinian struggle, and we will hold to account others who chose to be complicit in Israel's war crimes with their silence."
Israel's election: The ultimate losers wil be Palestinians, as always.
Palestinians knew from the get-go that Trump's deal would not bring an end to their colonial reality. They were sceptical not only because the deal was being drafted by a spectacularly inexperienced and staunchly pro-Israel team, but also because in Palestine, "peace" itself is underpinned by a trail of betrayal.
Palestinians learned long ago that in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, "peace" takes a particularly twisted dimension. It is often associated with "solutions" to the Palestinian "problem" which fail to deliver justice or equality for the Palestinian people. This has been the case with the failed 1993 Oslo Peace Accords and this is undoubtedly going to be the case with Trump's "ultimate deal".
The attempts to bring "peace" to Palestine often focus on offering Palestinians "economic opportunities" to convince them to give up their struggle for a free and dignified existence in their homeland and to accept the conditions imposed on them by Israel. Trump already showed he is not going to break away from the fold in this regard when his team revealed the "economic part" of their "peace plan" - a proposal to give the Palestinians $50bn to help their economy - without addressing the Israeli military occupation, which is at the core of Palestine's myriad economic, political and humanitarian problems.
Palestinians are sceptical of any attempt to reach a socio-political resolution that emphasises the notion of peace because we know such attempts reduce our struggle to a mere inconvenience. The Western and Israeli sellers of peace see our resistance as a burden and a testament to Middle East peoples' alleged inability to co-exist in peace. This is why they keep telling us that to achieve peace, we first need to be "tolerant" - meaning we should accept the theft of our land and the apartheid state that we currently live in.
Palestinian resistance, both violent and non-violent, is constantly branded as an "obstacle to peace". Meanwhile, Israel regularly evokes the mantra that it has the "right to defend itself".
Just last Week Binyamin Netanyahu uttered those very words after Israel's assassination of Islamic Jihad leader Baha Abu al-Atta and his wife in Gaza. The same was said when Palestinians are peacefully protesting against fully armed soldiers.
While the Palestinians are constantly being accused of committing violent acts, the violence unleashed on them constantly is never recognised. When they are not bombed or sniped down by the hundreds, they are humiliated, oppressed and violated on a daily basis - whether it is when going through a military checkpoint, facing a new Israeli discriminatory law, getting evicted from their homes, trying to eat in the dark because of a power cut, struggling to prove their innocence in Israel's military courts, trying to survive in Israel's prisons or enduring the pressure from the de facto police states that their governments really are.
Even the simple task of trying to be with who you love sometimes means suffering through a variety of microaggressions by the occupation since Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza and the rest of historic Palestine are physically and legally divided from one another.
And yet efforts for "peace" in Palestine always require the Palestinians - and never the Israelis - to make a concession and settle for less: less sovereignty, less freedom and fewer rights. Year after year, negotiators, diplomats and politicians, ask us to accept as normal the existence of a hostile settler colony on our ancestral lands and the oppression we endure at the hands of the Israeli occupiers
This is why Palestinians always find themselves worse off after every attempt to achieve "peace". The Paris Protocol (a corollary of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords), for example, increased the Palestinian economy's dependence on Israel, while Oslo itself allowed for de facto Israeli control of more than 62 percent of the West Bank.
Palestinians are still expected to accept any offer that is dressed up as "a step towards peace" and are criminalised when they do not. A rejection of a peace plan becomes an emblem of Palestinian unwillingness to achieve peace, rather than a recognition of the flawed nature of a proposed solution which does not recognise the need for justice.
Peace is undoubtedly something the Palestinian people want. But they aren't leading a war. They have no official army, no official borders; they have no control over their resources and lands; and even their politicians are sometimes assassinated or incarcerated. If peace is seen as something separate from and more crucial than "justice", then it turns into a quest for normalising colonial oppression and a quiet and distracted population.
When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, "peace" is a euphemism for the prolongation of the status quo and the continued deterioration of the living standards of Palestinians.
This is why it is time for the actors who are trying to deliver a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to focus their efforts on delivering justice first. This entails the end of the colonial oppression of our people, the end of the restrictions on our movement, the end of apartheid, the end of us being treated as less than human in their homeland.
Only then can Palestine achieve real peace - a peace defined not by the absence of overt violence, but by the ability of all inhabitants of this land to live, move and breathe freely.
PALESTINA
When Amnesty International launched a campaign in June 2017 marking 50 years of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, calling on states not to sustain the illegal situation created by Israeli settlements in the West Bank as is required under international law, we knew that achieving its objectives would not be easy.
However, one thing that offered a ray of hope was plans announced by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to make public a database listing companies involved in activities in the illegal Israeli settlements. For us, the database was set to be an important tool to ensure transparency around these activities and prompt companies to rethink their operations in the context of a brutal Israeli military occupation and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians.
The UN Human Rights Council, in an innovative move, had charged the High Commissioner for Human Rights with creating a database, to be updated annually, of business enterprises involved in activity that, “directly and indirectly, enabled, facilitated and profited from the construction and growth of the Israeli settlements” and “raise particular human rights violations concerns.”
Specific activities include the supply of construction and surveillance equipment, the supply of surveillance, security, banking and financial services, the exploitation of natural resources and, more generally, the supply of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements.
The purpose of the UN database is quite simple: it is meant to help businesses, and the states in which they are based, take steps to ensure they are not committing or contributing to gross human rights abuses of Palestinians.
Despite being initially due to be finalized by March 2017, the publication of the database has been delayed repeatedly by the OHCHR, initially under former High Commissioner Zeid al-Hussein and now under his successor Michele Bachelet. The exact timing of the database’s release has yet to be announced.
It has become increasingly clear that the delay is in part because certain states are bringing extensive political pressure to bear, not just to put off the database’s release, but to stop it being made public at all. In other words, some powerful states in the UN are lobbying the High Commissioner to simply ignore the mandate she has been given by the Council, or to interpret the mandate in a way that strains all credibility: either by not mentioning companies’ names or not releasing the database at all.
For years, Amnesty International and other international, Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations have documented how Israel’s policy of developing, expanding and guarding its settlements is inherently discriminatory and results in a wide range of human rights violations affecting every aspect of Palestinians’ lives.
In our latest report on this issue, published in January 2019, we documented the involvement of leading online tourism companies in illegal Israeli settlements. We argued that any business activity in or with settlements unavoidably contributes to sustaining an illegal situation and that companies engaged in these activities directly or indirectly contribute to, and profit from, the maintenance, development and expansion of settlements, which amount to war crimes under international criminal law.
The report welcomed an announcement by Airbnb last year that it would remove all listings in settlements in the occupied West Bank excluding East Jerusalem, but, disappointingly, the company reversed its decision in April 2019.
Even more disturbingly, the current Israeli government is more emboldened than ever to pursue expansion of settlements. In April 2019, for the first time ever, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly called for official annexation of parts of the West Bank. He repeated this call in September 2019.
All of this is occurring against the backdrop of a clear international consensus: Israeli settlements are illegal and have devastating consequences for the human rights of Palestinians. A UN Security Council resolution adopted in December 2016 stated that Israel’s settlement activity constitutes a “flagrant violation” of international law and has “no legal validity”. It demanded that Israel stop such activity and fulfil its obligations as an occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
However, for decades, official condemnation and quiet diplomacy have failed to bring about necessary change. Now more than ever is the time for concrete action. States must use the next Human Rights Council session on Palestine to demand the release of the database.
The UN has the potential to change the status quo in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The OHCHR should fulfil the mandate given to it by the UN Human Rights Council by compiling, publishing and regularly updating a database of businesses operating in illegal Israeli settlements. We along with 100 other organizations, expressed the hope that these important steps would be undertaken urgently in an open letter addressed to High Commissioner Michele Bachelet in August.
UN member states can play their part by insisting that the High Commissioner should comply with the Human Rights Council’s mandate without further delay. This will bring much needed transparency to business activities in Israeli settlements, facilitate states’ compliance with international law and expedite companies’ progress towards respecting human rights.
BRASIL
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