MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Rogue Apartheid State of Israel vs Palestine

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?