Fourteen of fifteen members of the United Nations Security Council - including permanent members China and Russia - support a UNSC statement calling for a ceasefire amidst Israel bombardment of Gaza.
Only the United States of America is blocking the statement. Using its power as a permanent member.
Which country is the threat to international law again?
As my grief and outrage mount at the predictable escalations of Israeli violence
against the Palestinians, I once again « marvel » at the chasms of
misunderstanding and miscalculations in describing events as they unfold and
the script that frames most mainstream media reporting.
The both-sides-have-their reasons-but-Israel-is-the-victim stories follow
an expected pattern.
Israeli Jews, still living in the shadow of the Holocaust, « return to
their rightful homes and then fight for every inch of what is justly
theirs. They are repeatedly faced with intractable Arab terrorists who
attack innocent civilians and must be crushed with all the might the Israeli
military has at its disposal. Never Again! » Add “barely human”
Hamas and « Iranian militants », and armed and aggressive
ultra-Orthodox Jews and settlers abetted by Israeli soldiers » defending
God’s promises and marching defiantly through Jerusalem yelling Death to the
Arabs!” and we have the narrative in place.
The United Nations, a host of human rights groups, and the International
Court protest, suggesting various crimes against humanity, while Israelis wring
their hands and cry foul. Victim again. The US remains remarkably silent given
that much of the weaponry is ours. Could both sides just de-escalate, please?
What is different this time?
While there have been uprisings of Palestinian citizens in Israel against
land confiscations and other violations, as well as in support of Palestinians
suffering in the territories (Land Day in 1976 comes to mind), now
Palestinians in Acre, Haifa, Jaffe, Lod, Nazareth, and Ramle are
protesting loudly and vigorously. The mayor of Lod may call this
“Kristallnacht” but Palestinian citizens have reached a breaking point, unable
to tolerate the 72 year history of racist and exclusionary policies by the
Israeli government, its most recent attacks in Jerusalem, and ever-increasing
rightward, tending toward fascistic, political parties.
The Israeli government may have miscalculated, although it is entirely
possible that the wily Netanyahu thinks that a war would rally the fractured
Israeli populace and improve his chances of reappearing Houdini-like as a
viable candidate and of course staying out of prison. I suspect that most
Israeli politicians believe that anything that causes a rift in the
dysfunctional Hamas/ Palestinian Authority relationship and provides an excuse
to assassinate a few Hamas leaders is also good for Israel. Israel has already
thrown a monkey wrench into the now cancelled Palestinian elections by denying
East Jerusalemites the right to vote, thus increasing the distress of the
already pandemic stressed occupied Palestinian population.
Although Israeli officials claim the usual Hamas-plot-to-destroy-Israel
scenario which I argue is an egregious attempt at distraction, the reasons for
the current eruptions of rage are much more understandable as another spike in
the ongoing Nakba that started well before 1948.
The families in the Sheikh Jarrar neighborhood
in East Jerusalem were expelled by Israeli soldiers from their homes in Haifa
and Jaffa in 1948. Twenty-eight families were settled in Sheikh Jarrar in the
1950s by the Jordanian government in coordination with UNRWA. They moved into houses built
by wealthy Palestinian families who had escaped the crowded winding streets of
the Old City in the early 20th century as well as into newly
built homes. The area was named for the personal physician of the Islamic
general Saladin, who settled there when Muslim armies captured the city from
Christian crusaders in 1187.
In the 1960s, the families made a deal with Jordan (who controlled the area
until 1967) to become owners of their homes; they received official land deeds
in return for renouncing their refugee status with its international
protections. The Jordanian government has repeatedly provided documents proving
Palestinian ownership of their properties. After the ’67 War, the Israeli
government developed a settlement plan for
the area, called the Holy Basin, which involves building a string of settler
units and parks around the Old City and the removal of Palestinian homes using
outright confiscation and endless tortured legal battles. Employing Israeli
laws that allow Jews to reclaim ownership of land lost in 1948 as well as a
host of forged documents, settlers have challenged Palestinian
ownership and repeatedly won in Israeli courts. For the Israeli government to call this merely a “real-estate
dispute” is unfathomably dishonest. Needless to say, Palestinians who have lost
homes and property in West Jerusalem or anywhere in Israel for that matter have
no such legal remedy. Twenty-thousand Palestinian homes are
currently at risk for demolition in the city.
As Palestinians faced new evictions, tensions mounted, Ramadan was coming
to a close, and the Israeli government chose this moment to block Palestinians
from outside Jerusalem from entering the Al Aqsa Mosque on one of their most
sacred religious holidays. Violence erupted further on Jerusalem Day, a raucous
nationalistic celebration of the Israeli capture of the city in 1967, pouring
acid into the already seething wound. Israeli police stormed Al Aqsa, firing
rubber tipped bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas at praying Palestinians and
others (not surprisingly) throwing stones, (the weapon of choice for the
disenfranchised, enraged, and humiliated). Three hundred thirty Palestinians
were injured.
It is not surprising that Hamas felt obligated to respond to these repeated
provocations. I have to wonder if the provocations were indeed deliberate. Over the past few days,
hundreds of rockets from Hamas have hit several Israeli cities, killing five
civilians and two soldiers and Israeli forces have repeatedly bombed
the Strip, killing at least 145 Palestiinians, (39 children in all), in Gaza, and at least 13 in the West Bank, and with almost a thousand wounded. More death and
destruction will undoubtedly follow as Israeli forces prepare for a land invasion,
children will die, the tragic numbers in Israel will be dwarfed by the
magnitude of horrifying death in Gaza. Mothers and fathers will weep and young
men will vow vengeance. We know this story. The Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin (Benny)
Gantz stated “Israel is not preparing for a ceasefire. There
is currently no end date for the operation.” Hamas
leader Ismail Haniyeh announced that the rocket attacks would continue until
Israel stopped “all scenes of terrorism and aggression in Jerusalem and al-Aqsa
mosque”.
Now protests have erupted in the West Bank in Hebron, Jenin,
Nablus, Qalqilya, and Tulkarem.
The thing to remember is that this is not a battle
between two equal parties; this is a struggle between one of the strongest
military powers in the world, backed by the US, bent on disinheriting and
humiliating a dispossessed people. This is a frightful example of ongoing
violent settler colonialism, of the inability of the world to see Palestinians
as equally human, traumatized, and deserving as their powerful Jewish Israeli
neighbors and occupiers. If the international
community does not force Israel to deal with the root causes of this disaster,
the tragedy will repeat itself over and over again. The narrative of
Jewish liberation and entitlement has been poisoned by decades of racist,
unjust policies that have been called by many a slow genocide for Palestine. No
one wins.
It is up to the international media, governments, human rights and grassroots organizations, and communities all over the world to make this story different this time.
In 1984, Palestinian American intellectual and Columbia University Professor Edward Said famously argued that Palestinians are denied “permission to narrate”.
More than 30 years later, in 2020, Maha Nassar, a Palestinian
American Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, analysed opinion
articles published in two daily newspapers – The New York Times and The
Washington Post – and two weekly news magazines – The New Republic and The
Nation – over a 50-year period, from 1970 to 2019. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she
found that “Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed
with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist
ways – yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians
themselves.”
Nassar’s research, like many others before it, clearly
demonstrates that more than three decades after the publication of Said’s
landmark essay, the exclusion of Palestinian voices from mainstream media
narratives in the West – and the attempts to erase the humanity of the
Palestinians or whitewash Israel’s crimes against them – continue unabated.
Sadly, however, this unjust status quo has not only remained
unchanged since Said brought it under the spotlight – it has deteriorated.
In recent years, social media became a lifeline for many who want
to raise awareness about causes and struggles ignored or undermined by
mainstream media outlets.
Yet tech companies are now actively working to exclude Palestinian
voices from their platforms, thereby expanding the calculated erasure and
silencing of the Palestinians to social media.
In April, for example, Zoom, Facebook and Youtube blocked the
online academic event “Whose Narratives? What Free Speech for Palestine?”
co-sponsored by the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies
program at San Francisco State University, the Council of UC Faculty
Associations (CUFCA), and the University of California Humanities Research
Institute (UCHRI).
The event was to feature anti-apartheid activists from around the
globe, including Palestinian resistance icon Leila Khaled and South
Africa’s former ANC military leader Ronnie Kasrils.
This event was in fact a repeat of an open classroom co-organised
by Dr Rabab Ibrahim Abudulhadi (AMED Studies) and Dr Tomomi Kinukawa (Women and
Gender Studies) of San Francisco State University that Zoom initially censored
in September 2020. Then, as now, Zoom and other social media companies said
they decided to block the event from their platforms due to the planned
participation of Leila Khaled. They claimed, as Khaled is affiliated with the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a “US-designated
terrorist organisation”, allowing the event to proceed would be in violation of
US laws prohibiting material support for terrorism.
As repeatedly asserted by numerous legal experts, the argument put
forth by the social media companies is without merit. It not only ignores all
relevant legal precedents and falsely alleges violations of US law, but also
amounts to an attack on academic freedoms.
Indeed, in an open letter to Zoom executives published in October
last year, experts from Palestine Legal and other legal organisations stressed
that Zoom’s censoring of the AMED event constitutes “a dangerous attack on free
speech and academic freedom, and an abuse of your contract with our public
university systems”. They added that “[Zoom’s] status as an essential public
service does not give you veto power over the content of the nation’s
classrooms and public events.”
These warnings, however, went unheeded, with Zoom and other social
media companies completely ignoring the growing criticism of their biased
policies and escalating their efforts to silence Palestinian speech on their
platforms.
In April, after Zoom refused to host the “Whose Narratives?” event
for the second time – following pressure from an Israeli government app and
several right-wing Zionist organisations – Facebook not only took down
publicity posts about the event, but also deleted the page of the AMED Studies
program from its platform in its entirety, effectively erasing a vast archive
of talks, discussions and documents on the Palestinian liberation struggle and
its relationship to freedom movements from around the world. These materials
were being intentionally shared and stored on Facebook for academics,
activists, organisers and the community at large to be able to engage with them
free of charge and without restriction.
Coming on the heels of Zoom’s repeated attempts to arbitrate what
is and is not acceptable speech in academia, Facebook’s deletion of the AMED
page made clear Big Tech’s modus operandi when it comes to Israel-Palestine:
censor material related to the Palestinian struggle on Israel’s demand, and
ignore any criticism of these unlawful and unjust actions.
Israel and its allies are not only pressuring Big Tech to silence
the Palestinians from outside. Facebook’s oversight board, an independent body
tasked with deliberating on the platform’s content decisions, includes former
director-general of the Israeli ministry of justice, Emi Palmor. Palmor
personally managed Israel’s Cyber Unit in the past, which successfully lobbied
for the removal of thousands of pieces of Palestinian content from Facebook.
While it is only logical to assume Palmor’s presence on the oversight
board is contributing to Facebook’s anti-Palestinian actions, Big Tech’s
routine silencing of Palestinian voices cannot be blamed on such overtly
pro-Israeli actors in its higher echelons alone.
Since the very beginning, social media companies have gravitated
towards and aligned with centres of power in the US capitalist and imperialist
structures. They even partnered with the US Department of Defence, coordinating
surveillance and big data analysis. So it is not that a few powerful
pro-Israeli voices are coopting social media companies into silencing dissent;
the industry itself is rotten to its core. Let us not forget how Big Tech
executives and employees have orchestrated a huge land grab and gentrification
in the San Francisco Bay Area, displacing thousands of working-class and poor
communities of colour.
The AMED Studies Facebook page has not been restored. But as the
event organisers have also rightfully noted, the problem is not only Big Tech
censorship: after the censoring of the AMED event, university officials refused
to offer alternative platforms for the event to take place and engaged in
messaging and programming that effectively delegitimised it.
Universities are far from being neutral arbiters in this story: by
conceding to the monopoly of tech companies over pedagogical programming and by
normalising anti-Palestinian rhetoric, they are complicit in these companies’
overreaching erasure of Palestine and Palestinians from the curriculum.
And the repression of Palestinian voices on social media extends
far beyond academia. In recent days, many individuals documenting Israeli
settler and state violence against Palestinian families in the occupied East
Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah reported that Facebook, Twitter and
Instagram (owned by Facebook) has been “systematically censoring” their
content.
In the latest chapter of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of
Palestine, the Palestinian families of Sheikh Jarrah face imminent forced
removal from their homes and are contending with violent repression that is
sanctioned and enabled by all levels of the Rogue Israeli state.
Last Friday, more than 200 people were wounded when Israeli police
shot rubber bullets and threw stun grenades at Palestinians in Al-Aqsa mosque.
Israeli forces tried to prevent medics from treating the injured and at least
three Palestinians lost an eye as a result of the attack. On Monday, Israeli
occupation forces again fired at Palestinians, who had gathered at Al-Aqsa to
pray and protect the site from settler violence, with rubber-coated bullets,
stun grenades, and tear gas; reporters, journalists and medics were among the
wounded. In the latest act of collective punishment, Israel began a ruthless
bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip on Monday night, flattening civilian infrastructure
and media offices. The current death toll is estimated to be at least 65, 16 of
whom are children, with 365 wounded, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
On Wednesday night, settler and police violence against Palestinians in the
city of Lydd (also known as Lod) peaked as hundreds of Israelis stormed the
city, attacking Palestinian protesters following the murder of 33-year-old
Palestinian man, Musa Hassouna. Israeli Border Forces were eventually
transferred to Lydd from the West Bank. Furthermore,
fascist Israelis participated in an attempted lynching of a Palestinian man in
Bat Yam, forcibly removing him from his car and beating him unconscious.
The Israeli Supreme Court has since delayed the Sheikh Jarrah
forced removals for 30 days, but activists have identified this as a stalling
tactic meant to diffuse momentum and support for the Sheikh Jarrah residents.
In a recent CNN interview, Mohamed El-Kurd, a Palestinian poet and
activist from Sheikh Jarrah, powerfully turned the age-old media trope of
Palestinians being inherently “violent” on its head by responding to the
reporter’s leading question with one of his own: “Do you support the violent
dispossession of me and my family?” As usual, US mainstream media organisations
attempt to hide the asymmetrical nature of rogue Israel’s aggression by
defining its latest and ongoing attacks on the Palestinian people as “clashes”
or a “conflict”.
Mainstream media’s ongoing efforts to whitewash Israel’s deadly
occupation, coupled with the dire and rapidly escalating situation of
Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah as well as all Palestinians resisting in support
of them, make unrestricted access to social media especially crucial for
Palestinians and their allies.
But rather than amplifying the righteous struggle of Palestinians
resisting violence and displacement, social media companies are furthering the
interests and agenda of the very government attacking them.
This latest round of social media censorship of Palestinian posts
about Sheikh Jarrah is part of a larger pattern of repression, given the long
and well-documented complicity between Israel and social media companies in
regulating and censoring Palestinian content and accounts. Instagram officially
attributed these latest deletions to a “global technical issue”. Twitter
likewise claimed the restriction of the account of Palestinian writer Mariam
Barghouti, which was subsequently reinstated following a huge social media
outcry, was an “accident”. Activists and watchdog organisations have expressed
doubts about such explanations, given the targeted nature of the removals and
censures.
Decades after Edward Said’s criticism of the US media’s insistent
refusal to allow Palestinians to narrate their own stories, the voices in
support of the Palestinian liberation struggle are being silenced not only by
mainstream media organisations but also social media companies.
But we must not give in. Despite efforts by social media companies
and media organisations to silence Palestinians, those who truly believe in
equality, justice and freedom should continue to endorse and amplify the calls
to save Sheikh Jarrah, stop the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, end
all military funding for Israel, and bring an end to Israel’s occupation of
Palestinian lands and state-sanctioned discrimination against Palestinians. We
should also support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, until
Israel agrees to cease its colonial and apartheid practices for good. Media
organisations and social media companies can try to control and distort
narratives about Palestine, but they cannot hide the truth and silence
Palestinians’ righteous calls for justice forever.
This does not mean we should not try and expose the unethical and
unlawful practices by these companies and organisations. We must fight the
targeted, cross-platform censorship that echoes and reinforces the rogue Israeli
state’s ongoing structural oppression of Palestinians and systematic erasure of
Palestinian voices. By engaging in such behaviour, social media companies are
practicing digital apartheid. We can not sit idly by. Now more than ever, we
need to continue to expose and resist this discriminatory silencing as part of
the larger fight for Palestinian freedom and liberation.
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