A 32-year-old man with the mental age of an 8-year-old child was executed by Israeli soldiers on May 30, while crouching behind his teacher near his special needs school in the Old City of Jerusalem.
The cold-blooded murder of Iyad al-Hallaq might not have received much attention if it were not for the fact that it took place five days following the similarly heartbreaking murder of a 46-year-old black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis, at the hands of American police.
The two crimes converge, not only in their repugnancy and the moral decadence of their perpetrators, but also because countless American police officers have been trained in Israel, by the very Israeli ‘security forces’ that killed al-Hallaq. The practice of killing civilians, with efficiency and callousness, is now a burgeoning market. Israel is the biggest contributor to this market; the US is the world’s largest client.
When thousands of people rushed to the streets in Palestine, including hundreds of Palestinian and Israeli Jewish activists in Jerusalem, chanting “Justice for Iyad, justice for George”, their cry for justice was a spontaneous and heartfelt reaction to injustice so great, so blatant.
Al-Hallaq’s story might appear particularly unique, as the ‘suspected terrorist’ was killed while merely walking in King Faisal Street in Jerusalem, on his way to take out the trash. He was afraid of soldiers and terrified of blood.
“He was also afraid of the armed police officers who stood along the route to the special needs center he went to, where he participated in a vocational training program,” the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported.
Al-Hallaq’s many fears, which may have appeared exaggerated by his family, turned out to be true. Even an autistic person in Palestine is not safe from the vengeance of soldiers.
But Iyad al-Hallaq did not need to die for Israel to maintain its pathological sense of ‘security’. The fact that he was already shot and wounded, and found bleeding in a roofless garbage room in Jerusalem’s Old City, was not enough to spare him that horrific fate. The fact that the man screamed in agony while hiding behind his caregiver, who pleaded with the soldiers, begging them to stop puncturing his already bleeding body with more bullets, was also not enough.
Still, the soldiers stepped forward, and from a very close range, fired three bullets into al-Hallaq’s midsection as he lay wounded on his back. Instantly, the young man, the ‘apple of the eyes of his parents’, ceased breathing.
“He was our mother’s love, her entire life,” Iyad’s sister, Diana said in an interview with +972 magazine. “She would hold his hand like he was a baby, and he would walk with her to the market, or the mosque or the clothing store. He was like her shadow. She worried about him and whether other kids would bother or hurt him.”
Caught off guard by the grisly nature of the murder and the mental state of the victim, Israel’s spin doctors moved quickly to contain the damage, initially spreading lies that al-Hallaq was carrying a toy gun at the time of the shooting, then backing off, promising an investigation.
But what is there to investigate? In recent years, the Israeli army has upgraded its code of conduct, adopting a shoot-to-kill policy of any Palestinian they suspect of attempting to harm Israeli occupation soldiers, even when the alleged Palestinian ‘attacker’ is no longer posing a threat.
In the case of Gaza, where protesters are separated from Israeli snipers by barbed wire and nearly a mile-long empty space, the Israeli military issued orders, as of June 2019, to shoot and kill ‘key instigators’ of the mass protests even while ‘at rest’. Hundreds of people have been killed in Gaza’s Great March of Return in this way, and the ‘key instigators’ included medics, journalists, young boys and girls.
Indeed, the killing of Palestinian civilians is a regular occurrence. It is the devastating routine with which Palestinians have been forced to co-exist for many years and for which Israel was never ever held accountable.
Only one day before al-Hallaq was murdered, Fadi Samara Qaad, 37, was killed by Israeli occupation soldiers while driving his car near the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh, west of Ramallah.
The Israeli military immediately claimed that Qaad “tried to ram his car into a group of soldiers” before they opened fire, killing him on the spot.
This is the go-to Israeli military pretense that is often offered when a Palestinian driver is shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. Otherwise, the Palestinian victim, whether a man, a woman, or a child, is often accused of carrying a ‘sharp object’.
Al-Hallaq’s mental disability might have spared him, in the eyes of some, from being that archetypical ‘terrorist’, although the Israeli army immediately raided his house, looking for ‘evidence’ that would implicate him and be useful in their sinister hasbara (propaganda).
In the case of Qaad, a Palestinian worker, on his way to join his wife in a nearby town to celebrate the Muslim Eid holiday, the Israeli army statement suffices, no questions asked.
This is the same stifling logic that has prevailed in Palestine for so many years, and counting. Children are killed for throwing stones at men with guns, who have invaded their homes and villages; pregnant women are gunned down at Israeli army checkpoints; men with amputated legs on wheelchairs shot by snipers while protesting and demanding their freedom.
All of this is taking place in the complete absence of any promising political horizon. Even the protracted and ultimately useless ‘peace process’ has been halted in favor of greater American backing of Israel and of the Israeli government’s mad rush to expand illegal Jewish settlements.
To secure his colonial accomplishments – read: land theft – Israel’s Prime Minister and Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro "mate", Binyamin Netanyahu, is about to reveal the crown jewel of his legacy, as he prepares for the expansion of Israel’s borders through the annexation of yet more Palestinian land.
Inspired by the common struggle that ties them with their African-American brethren, Palestinians are now left only with their cries for justice: Palestinian lives matter, hoping, for once, the world may hear and echo their screams and, perhaps, do something.
Many in the Palestine are well experienced with such tactics by security forces while living under a decades-long occupation by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip.
According to the organisations Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Researching the American-Israeli Alliance (RAIA), one common theme shared between United States and Israel is the exchange of tactics and expertise in state violence, which has been ongoing for 18 years.
Months after the September 11 attacks, US law enforcement delegates attended their first official training expedition to Israel to exchange "best practices" in "counter-terrorism".
Since then, thousands more from across the US - including agents from the FBI, CIA, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - have been schooled at these meetings in both Israel and the US, sponsored by far-right Israeli lobby organisations.
But instead of promotung effective security for communities, the programme facilitates an exchange of tactics used in police violence, submission and control, including mass surveillance, racial profiling and the suppression of protests and dissent, according to the JVP and RAIA's 2018 report titles Deadly Exchange, which details the extent of the cooperation (PDF).
Among the thousands of US law enforcement officers who have reportedly participated in the exchange over the years was Anoka County (North Minneapolis) Sherrif James Stuart, who travelled to Israel in December.
Israeli Eran Efrati - executive director of RAIA, who has studied the subject for the past decade - says that when training with Israel, US police delegates witness "live demonstrations of repressive violence in real-time, in protests across the West Bank, patrols in East Jerusalem, and visits to the Gaza border. "Delegates meet with the Shin Bet and chief officers in Israeli military prisons to discuss investigation tactics, with Palestinian Authority agents and police, to learn about how Israel uses their collaboration in suppressing Palestinian dissent, and with representatives from the Department of Defense and others to learn about Israel's security expertise."
Leila, a campaign organiser at JVP who asked that only her first name be used, said the exchange programme is just one aspect of violent policing in the United States that has existed for decades. "The violence that we're seeing today in the US is 100 percent the result of white supremacy and anti-blackness and institutionalised racism in the US. The exchange programmes create the opportunity for US armed forces and Israeli armed forces to come together and swap tactics, and deepen the harmful practices and policies that already exist in both countries."
Among the topics covered during these exchanges, delegates learn how to suppress and infiltrate demonstrations, and how to coordinate with the media over coverage, Deadly Exchange found.
The training also involved sales of "crowd-control" weapons exchanged between the two governments, including US-made tear gas canisters that were heavily used in protests in Oakland, California in 2011 and Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, as well as Israeli surveillance technologies.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is among those to have criticised police - including departments in Oakland, Baltimore, Ferguson and Boston - for contracting tech companies to use surveillance software to profile residents based on their religion, race and political affiliation, the report said.
Some US practices have been influenced by the infamous Israeli infiltration of Palestinian communities as well.
Lawrence Sanchez, a CIA officer who worked to establish the New York Police Department's (NYPD) "Demographics Unit", which consisted of informants known as "mosque crawlers" spying on Muslim communities, acknowledged the team drew inspiration from Israeli practices in the occupied Palestinian Territories, according to the report.
The NYPD has also sent undercover officers to infiltrate Black Lives Matter protests and collect multimedia records of protester identities, activities and text messages.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security justified their surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists by referring to them as "Black Identity Extremists" and "domestic terrorists".
"These practices reflect the increasing use of security rhetoric to justify the surveillance and infringement of rights of US citizens and residents based on their race and political positions, a practice already fully institutionalised in Israel," Deadly Exchange said. "Like Palestinians who are arbitrarily defined as security threats and put on the Shin Bet's list, people of colour and racial justice activists in the United States are subjected to systematic surveillance and can be placed on gang databases or government watch lists with little recourse or opportunities to hold the state accountable."
The campaign to end the "deadly exchange" started in 2017 and has so far seen a few successes.
In 2018, Durham, North Carolina became the first city in the US to ban police training with foreign militaries - including with Israel - after a coalition of community organisations successfully lobbied the city council.
Aman Aberra, a coalition member of the group Demilitarize From Durham2Palestine that spearheaded the campaign, said it came together by combining the Palestine Solidarity Movement and Black organisers in Durham. The key to the campaign, Aberra said, was to unite visions of divesting from Israeli "apartheid" and occupation, and to ensure public safety locally especially for marginalised, Black and poor communities often targeted by police.
"What Demilitarize is trying to do is build an internationalist movement to build a better world for everyone that's safe, where we have structures that support us, where we have healthcare and housing, and where we're not being threatened by state violence."
In Brasil we have the same problem of military "cooperation" with Israel. This rogue country is the biggest producer and exporter of repression and agression tactics in the world.
PALESTINA
The Jewish people are the Chosen Ones, but only in your heads.
Your narrative of oppression throughout history has been profusely documented. You have suffered incredible harm to your Community under Nazism (as well as Gypsys, homossexuals, handicapped, communists, and Just Germans), but your rituals and rules continue wherever you go and however many you bring to conversion by marriage. Your economical, cultural and political network is strong all over the world. That is your strength of survival and dominance. Your hasbara (propaganda) has predominated in radio, TV and newspapers inducing sympathy for the Zionist project of theft of Palestine. Holocaust has been used to describe such catastrophes as in nuclear holocaust but of course, thanks to people like Eli Wiesel and other Zionists, it has been appropriated to have almost the exclusive meaning of the Jewish genocide of WW2.
The Jewish people may often in the past been victims of anti-semitism, but the world has turned around. News to you, you are now the oppressors in Israel regarding the Palestinians, and even towards many of your own - notably Ethiopian Jews, other African Jews, and even very old, surviving ‘Holocaust’ victims who live a life of abject poverty amongst the well-endowed, politically and economically protected Ashkenazim.
Your Israeli "left" cannot understand that the oppression experienced by black Americans in the US has equivalence among the Palestinian population under occupation by Israel. One likely reason is that you have no history of fighting for other people’s rights; only for stealing the land of Palestinians and oppressing them during your two years of blizz in the army, when you learn to collect palestinian children knee caps by whooting them like rabbits.
The issue and question in Israelis’ minds is "how can comparing what happens on a regular basis to American minorities be in any way similar to how Palestinians are treated in Israel"!.
Well, well, well, the comparisons are extremely similar in many fundamental ways.
In many ways, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine a Palestinian under occupation saying, “Oh, if only to be black in the United States of America.” Being a poor black in Washington is a lot better than being a wealthy Palestinian in Jerusalem.
Blacks are still second class citizens in the US but have succeeded and been accepted in politics, economics, the arts, and all other aspects of life. The ridiculous notion that Americans are beyond racism because they elected a black president was a prevalent feeling, but mostly among white liberals and media pundits who thought racism has ended with a president who has done as much if not more harm to the average African American citizen than any president before him. Where the average black family stands now is no reason for celebrating a post-racial society. Still, among every measuring stick, whites are still the dominant racial group, and will likely remain so, especially after this latest insurrection is crushed, and likely by the inaction or subservience of the ‘black misleadership’, as Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report calls them.
As to Palestinians under occupation, they are not even citizens of their own ancestral homeland.
African American cities in the US are occupied by the police and its people are often brutalized physically, mentally and legally.
However, every Palestinian is at the mercy of Israeli police and the IDF - Israeli Occupation Forces - every single second of every single day since 1967.
What Black families went through in southern Klu Klux Klan states is quite similar to what happens with Palestinian citizens of Israel (20%) and far less humiliating than what happens to Palestinians in the West Bank at the 140 Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank and the blocked prison-concentration camp known as the Gaza Strip.
The police in the US usually get away with cop killings whereas in Israel they make a sport of it.
When a black man is arrested and accused of anything, he is booked, charged, tried, and usually sentenced. His life is now nearly ruined with this record. But it is an individual punishment, although sometimes unfair.
For a Palestinian, not even to be adjudicated, his home is destroyed because his crimes of resistance are dealt with by military courts and system, with 98% conviction, not civilian, like for a Jewish Israeli, if it would ever go that far in the judicial system for committing a crime against a Palestinian - let us not forget that a boy as young as 12-year-old can be sentenced to 20 years in prison for the "crime" of defending himself throwing stones at soldiers who shoot him with rubber or live bullets (what a strange name, "live", for mortal bullets).
The Israeli "left" and right like to throw around ‘anti-semitism’ as the catch phrase for any criticism of Israel, especially in regards to its illegal occupation. They are able to use that to intimidate fair minded people worldwide who otherwise would objectively see similarities between how they oppress their minorities and how Israel deals with the Palestinians, and judge Tel Aviv severely.
Is the Israeli "left" correct in saying there can’t be a comparison between the struggle for the Black Life Matters movement and freedom movements, like BDS Movement, in Palestine?
Yes, they can, because the struggles are indeed disproportionate.
Black Americans are part of a fabric yet they are free to struggle to break free of its generational chains; moreover, they are citizens, with the right of movement, of life, of property and of residence.
Palestinians aren’t even recognized as fellow human beings by the Israelis.
When a Palestinian launches a poorly designed rocket that can only scare a cat out of a tree it is met with F-14s strafing a neighborhood in Gaza.
The action is disproportionate but Western mainstream media "reports" Israeli press releases or violence on "both" sides.
This level of disproportionality is similar to black oppression in the US to Palestinian oppression in "Greater Israel", and especially under occupation.
The anti-semitism of comparing the two is only in Israelis’ heads.
The fight against anti-semitism is also a fight for freedom for Palestine, full enfranchisement for African Americans, and the struggle for freedom for all people, all over the world fighting to be free.
BRASIL
Meanwhile, in Brasil, led by Jair Bolsonaro, a man more concerned with protecting his sons from a corruption probe than safeguarding his citizens from a global health crisis, you see a different manifestation.
It locks in from both sides of the political spectrum like a vice: From the left, Zionists&Evangelicals are deemed responsible for putting in power a crazy petulant "minion", authoritarian ignoramus who downplays a pandemic because he’s incapable of dealing with it, while powerful voices from the right tell Jews that if they don’t support Bolsonaro (who’s "doing his best" to fight the coronavirus) then they "ain’t Jewish."
Brasil is now second only to the United States in confirmed COVID-19 cases (558,000 and rising). That makes perfect sense if you observe how closely the president in Brasilia is echoing his conspiracy enthusiast colleague to the north.
Besides shoving the Trump-touted "miracle drug" chloroquine so hard down the public’s throat that it pushed his health minister to resign (after he fired the previous one for contradicting him on social distancing, all in the span of six weeks), Bolsonaro also borrowed one of Trump’s most controversial plays, and then ran it a step further.
Bolsonaro doesn’t just support anti-lockdown demonstrations by tweet, he attends them, accompanied always by a standard bearer carrying three national flags: those of Brazil, the United States and, yes, Israel.
He’s been doing it every Sunday for a month now. The rallies are led by far-right and Evangelical supporters calling for shuttering the Supreme Court and a return to a military dictatorship. For one of the last events, Bozonaro (as we call him in Brasil, in reference to the clown; and here I beg the clown for forgiveness!) rode out to greet his fans on horseback.
Weeks before, he was filmed talking to paramilitary supporters, some of whom reply by flashing what looks like a Nazi salute. Last month, Bolsonaro's coronavirus slogan ("Work, unity and the truth will set Brazil free") was criticized for its proximity to the Nazi motto on the gates of Auschwitz.
And it's the man, with no culture at all, who supports rogue Israel and is inspired by Trum and Netanyahu.
He doesn't really understand what being a fascit mean, as he's been welcoming foreign troops to Brasil - Israeli's and US's - and at the same time, praises Hitler. Or else, Bozonaro is simple demonstration of the proximity between Nazism & Zionism; how much they are alike; how the two ideological projects were-are supported by the same kind of people: narrowminded crazy people incapable of empathy who do not care about humanity or human beings, at all.
AOS FATOS:Declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas
The Intercept Brasil
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