The Occupation and the Apartheid Go On

Meet the new occupier, same as the old occupier.

Palestinians understand that the swap of one evangelical extremist as Israeli prime minister for another evangelical extremist will not change by an iota how Israel methodically goes about, day after grinding day, committing apartheid in occupied Palestine.

If there was any doubt on this predictable score, the renewed bombardment of Gaza this past week produced further proof. The new guy is as quick as the former guy to remind the world that he will use the same lethal apparatus to traumatise, maim and kill as many Palestinians as Israel wants to, whenever Israel wants to, for whatever reason Israel wants to, for as long as Israel wants to and, save for tiny Ireland, no prime minister or president is going to do or say much about it.

Still, Israel is obliged – as an inane, perfunctory public relations exercise – to trot out one of a familiar litany of “provocations” to justify traumatising, maiming and killing as many Palestinians as it wants to, whenever it wants to, by whatever means it wants to and for as long as it wants to.

This time, Israel’s $110-million-a-piece attack jets obliterated more of Gaza in sorties over several days after patches of parched, barren fields were set briefly on fire by so-called “incendiary” balloons filled with helium and tied together by Palestinian “militants” with string.

The “provocations” are a tired, exculpatory pantomime.

Whether it is balloons, slingshots, burning tyres, kites, rocks or glorified, metallic firecrackers, Israel knows it enjoys a stay-out-of-The-Hague-free permit to traumatise, maim and kill as many Palestinians as it wants to, whenever it wants to, by whatever means it wants to, for whatever reason it wants to, for as long as it wants to, and no prime minister or president outside Ireland is going to do or say much about it.

So, it does not matter a jot what the name of the latest Israeli prime minister is, which racist, boorish party he leads, or how he and his co-conspirators were able, with supposed Machiavellian-like skill, to cobble together a precarious coalition finally to get rid of the former guy. One indelible constant remains: the machinery of apartheid goes on, day after grinding day, in occupied Palestine as it has since the middle of the last century.

Here is another constant: just like the old, fanatical Israeli prime minister, the new, fanatical Israeli prime minister also knows that most Western establishment TV and newspaper editors pay fleeting attention to what Israel has done and is doing to Palestinians in occupied Palestine only when Israel decides to bomb Palestinians in occupied Palestine.

That means that every few years or so, after the “bang-bang” flares – that is reporter lingo for when the instruments of war go “boom” – usually invisible Palestinians pop up on Western cable news networks and on the opinion pages of Western newspapers to talk or write about how Palestinians have and continue to be stripped of their homes and land, jailed, tortured, traumatised, maimed and killed by a long succession of preening thugs in suits and uniforms.

This is another, by now, trite pantomime.

Offering Palestinians a little time and space to chronicle or condemn Israel’s crimes affords Israel-fawning Western TV and newspaper editors convenient cover to congratulate themselves for their equanimity and boast: “You see, Palestinians are having their say, too.”

All the while, these same TV and newspaper editors refuse to acknowledge that Israel has been found guilty by human rights groups of practising apartheid – as defined by international law and not as a hyperbolic cudgel – and has, since its engineered inception, wielded carte blanche licence not only to steal Palestinian homes and land, but to jail, torture, traumatise, maim and kill Palestinians with impunity.

Whatever discomfort they may privately harbour with the violent, illegal means Israel employs to systematically steal Palestinian homes and land or how many Palestinians Israel jails, tortures, traumatises, maims and kills, most Western TV and newspaper editors have always publicly defended Israel’s “right” to do all of the above – yesterday, today and tomorrow.

To challenge Israel’s “right” to defend itself against the existential threat allegedly posed by balloons, slingshots, burning tyres, kites, rocks or glorified, metallic firecrackers would be a sacrilegious act of geopolitical heresy.

This canonical editorial support for Israel is a near-verbatim reflection of the equally supplicant attitude towards Israel shared by most Western prime ministers and presidents whenever their ally and friend opts to unleash more “bang-bang” on imprisoned Palestinians in already grievously wounded occupied Palestine.

Here is Canadian spaceman turned foreign minister, Marc Garneau, not only rejecting – like the TV and newspaper editors who claim to hold him to account – any finding, from any quarter, that Israel is an apartheid state but implying, hysterically, that the “label” is an anti-Semitic trope.

“The position of the Liberal government is extremely clear on the question of the apartheid label,” Garneau said recently. “We reject it categorically … and we, of course, are completely against any anti-Semitism.”

When he is inevitably replaced as foreign minister by another pedestrian, cue card-reading mannequin, Garneau could well become an editorial writer at any of Canada’s newspapers that pen their standard apologia each time Israel traumatises, maims and kills Palestinians with its unlimited arsenal of “bang-bang” furnished by agreeable arms dealers in Ottawa and beyond.

The corollary to this stubborn phenomenon is, of course, that when the big, sustained displays of “bang-bang” stop, most Western TV and newspaper editors cease inviting Palestinians to talk or write about how Israel keeps stealing their homes and land, and jails, tortures, traumatises, maims and kills Palestinians with impunity in occupied Palestine.

Invariably, this translates into a lot fewer “live hits” by TV reporters – largely from the safety and welcoming bosom of Tel Aviv – describing the most recent “spasm” of the decades-old, “tit-for-tat conflict” that has caused death and suffering on “both sides” in almost equal measure.

And the lucky “voices” who got a rare snippet of time and space on cable news networks and in newspaper columns to air the Palestinian “perspective” during Israel’s 11-day deadly turkey shoot in Gaza vanish because their token presence is no longer required to provide audiences with the patina of balance and fairness.

Indeed, that Israel has resumed bombing Gaza no longer even registers as “news” for a lot of ho-hum Western TV and newspaper editors, most of whom – when the “plight” of Palestinians is concerned – possess the attention span of a frightened squirrel.

Anyway, “war” has not broken out again – yet. When it does, they will return to take a momentary peek. Until then, it is promptly back to rhetorical business as usual: Israel has the “right” to defend itself blah, blah, blah and those “militant” Palestinians just keep asking for a bloodied nose.

Meanwhile, Palestinians are left to endure, alone, and mostly out of sight, the trauma, indignities and provocations that long ago became a routine aspect of day-to-day life under Israel’s suffocating military occupation.

This is apartheid by stealth.

Militant, flag-waving Israeli religious zealots can descend on Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, shouting “Death to Arabs” and “may your village burn” and the TV and newspaper editors shrug.

A brother and sister who took to social media to expose the likely expulsion of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood by rabid force are arrested and the TV and newspaper editors shrug.

More than 2,000 Palestinians are corralled like cattle and jailed shortly after a “ceasefire” is announced for resisting the inexorable destruction of occupied Palestine and its peoples, and the TV and newspaper editors shrug.

Heavily-armed Israeli hoods – euphemistically called “security forces” – storm the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and fire rubber-coated steel bullets, tear gas and stun grenades, injuring scores of worshippers, and the TV and newspaper editors shrug.

An 11-year-old Palestinian boy, Mazen Bessam, is arrested and “detained” by the aforementioned hoods – presumably to keep Israel safe – while his younger sister wept and pleaded for his release, and the TV and newspaper editors shrug.

As Human Rights Watch and others have documented in precise, persuasive detail, Israel’s execution of apartheid never ceases. It is committed against Palestinians before, during and after the voluble sounds and sights of “bang-bang” that temporarily attract the preoccupied eye of TV and newspaper editors who would much prefer, I suspect, to talk and write about the lunatic musings of Donald Trump.

The “bang-bang” is part of the ruthless continuum of Israel’s state-sanctioned and systemic persecution of Palestinians throughout occupied Palestine.

The wilful reluctance and failure of Western TV and newspaper editors to admit this demonstrable fact and fundamentally recalibrate their coverage of what is happening to Palestinians “on the ground” in occupied Palestine makes them complicit in the explicit, inhumane and disfiguring consequences of Israel’s persistent and unapologetic practice of apartheid.

The occasional appearance by a Palestinian on TV or in print whenever Israel reprises its explosive show of “bang-bang” is hardly redress for this pervasive, shameful blindness.

 AJ+: The U.S. Media has a Palestine Problem 

 

PALESTINA

AJ+: How the Watermelon Became a Palestinian Symbol of Resistance

INTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix

The Guardian: Sharing their house with Israeli illegal settlers

Addameer

OCHA

Palestinian Center for Human Rights

B'Tselem 

International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

Defense for Children 
Breaking the Silence

BRASIL

Carlos Latuff Twitter

The Intercept Brasil

AOS FATOS: As declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas

Reality Check: USA & OTAN vs Russia and China

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is trying to find its way back to “normalcy” after four years of drama under the fitful leadership of former US President Donald Trump.

This will prove a challenging task. NATO seems to have lost its mojo after Trump deformed its strategic vision and values and cast doubt over its shared destiny, albeit rhetorically.

But the advent of the trans-atlanticist Joe Biden is breathing life and vitality into the pact, as the US president tries to assure European allies of his administration’s seriousness in rebuilding trust and restoring harmony.

This is not the first time the alliance is recovering after an internal crisis.

In fact, during the past few decades, there has been an eerie perception of some sort of a NATO crisis or another: a “profound crisis”, a “deepening crisis”, a “fundamental crisis”, a “general crisis”, an “unprecedented crisis” and even – a “real crisis”.

But NATO has always recovered.

Even before the end of the Cold War, NATO had its share of rift and discord whether over the Suez crisis, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the presence of authoritarian regimes within its ranks. Still, fear of the Soviet Union during the Cold War helped unite its members regardless of their discord. The greater the threat perception, the deeper the unity.

When the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989, the alliance which was created to keep the Soviets out, the Germans down and the Americans in Western Europe, lost its raison d’être. Disagreement within NATO persisted, shifting to enlargement towards the East and the ward and various military deployments in the greater Middle East.

In 2001, 24 hours after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, NATO invoked Article 5, the cornerstone of its collective defence, for the first time in its history. But fighting asymmetrical wars outside its long-defined area of operation, notably in Afghanistan, proved a thankless endeavour and a source of tension.

Over the past 30 years, NATO still managed to keep its unity, going through a number of cosmetic and structural surgeries to restore its vitality. It even almost doubled its membership from 16 to 30 members.

The alliance has repeatedly overcome internal discord through adaptation and compromise. It will do so again on June 14 in Brussels, hoping to enhance its appearance and performance in an ever more competitive world. Biden’s high popularity in Europe in comparison to Trump will certainly help.

NATO will once again rely on the fact that there is more that unites its members than divides them.

That, in my opinion, is first and foremost protecting their common economic and financial interests. With a population of almost a billion people and half of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP), NATO has decidedly been the military arm of a privileged club of Western capitalist democracies.

Today, the alliance faces two major strategic challenges, rising China and resurging Russia, which pose cyber-, space, and geopolitical threats, including in “the Global South”, where Beijing and to some degree Moscow are expanding.

All other issues that have been raised in public, such as climate change, human security, and development, etc are window dressing. This is not because they are not important – they most certainly are – but rather because they are more G7 than NATO material.

But since the Trump psychological rupture, some Europeans are said to be wary of being overdependent on the US for their security, as they were over the past seven decades.

NATO’s junior members have been especially traumatised by the erratic president’s behaviour, while the more senior continental members, like France and Germany, have been wary but also savvy in their reactions. They are exploiting the American debacle to call for a greater European security autonomy and a more equal partnership with the US.

They have also embraced a more nuanced, less dramatic view of the challenges posed by Russia and China than the Biden administration has. They would rather avoid Cold War rhetoric and emphasise engagement over confrontation with Russia and Beijing.

And they have a point.

Russia, as former President Barack Obama put it, is today no more than “a regional power” whose bellicose actions are an expression of weakness rather than strength.

It is better to contain Russia through political and economic engagement than alienate it through strategic confrontation.

And while rising China presents a whole new geopolitical puzzle, it is no Soviet Union.

Despite its enormous economic power and strategic ambition, it espouses no alternative vision for the world. And since joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, Beijing has integrated its economy into the Western-led world economic system and enjoys tremendous windfall from its trade with the West.

The Europeans see China as an economic competitor or at worst, a rival, and are content with a multipolar world. But Washington looks at China through a different lens. It reckons China is determined to become an Asian hegemon and insists on containing its rise before it becomes the world’s leading power. America wants to remain the world’s undisputed superpower.

This means the Biden administration will have to charm and bully its divided but prosperous European partners into getting behind it.

In fact, some of the pressure is already bearing fruit as Europeans are increasingly distancing themselves from China, especially in the technology and investment fields, and the UK has demonstratively deployed an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea.

Practically speaking, NATO will sooner than later try to embrace a new strategic assessment along the lines of its 2010 strategic assessment, but one that contains more emphasis on political cohesion and coordination. The Europeans will demand greater parity and lobby Washington to act less unilaterally as it did under Trump or when the Biden administration decided on withdrawal from Afghanistan with virtually no real consultation until the last minute.

For its part, Washington will continue to insist, as it did over the past decades, that Europe must pay for a greater say in NATO and show greater commitment to their collective security. It may also bring the Asian powers, Japan and South Korea, to the picture under the pretext of “defending democracy” in East Asia.

Easier said than done? Perhaps.

But the greater challenge lies in defining NATO’s new role and mission in light of Washington’s insistence on using the alliance to do what it must to maintain America’s world supremacy, which is certain to lead to a new cold war with China.

Biden wants to use the NATO meeting to rally the alliance behind America before his June 16 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, knowing all too well that China is watching closely.

Pushing for enlarging the alliance further into Ukraine and Georgia or for extending its force projection, in the future, are sure to provoke both Moscow and Beijing and push them closer together, with grave ramification for world security.

Biden should be careful what he wishes for; it may just come true. 

Israel vs PALESTINA

After 12 years, Israel finally inaugurated a new prime minister. While being hailed by many as the opportunity for a fresh start, Naftali Bennett is at best a continuer of Netanyahu’s policies and at worst an ideologue whose positions are to the right of Netanyahu’s.

In 2013, as Middle East peace talks were set to resume after a five-year freeze, Bennett reportedly proclaimed to Israeli National Security Adviser Ya’akov Amidror, “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that.”

In 2014, Bennett, who had previously been the director of the Yesha Settlements Council, contradicted Netanyahu by asserting that all Jewish Israelis living in the West Bank, even those living in outposts that violate Israeli law, should remain under Israeli sovereignty, and called for more settlement construction. “This is the time to act,” he said. “We must continue building in all corners of the Land of Israel, with determination and without being confused. We are building and we will not stop.”

In 2016, as Israel’s Minister of Education, Bennett called on Israeli Jews to “give our lives” to annex the West Bank. While this might seem relatively innocuous, it was not. Bennett’s remarks invoked Kahanism, a Jewish supremacist ideology, based on the views of Rabbi Meir Kahane, that calls for violence and terrorism to be used to secure Israel as an ethno-nationalist state. In 1994, Israeli settler and Kahane follower Baruch Goldstein massacred Palestinians in the West Bank Ibrahimi mosque. In 1988, the Kach party was banned from running for the Israeli Knesset. In 2004, the US State Department labeled Kach a terrorist organization.

Sunday, June 13, 2021, right before he was inaugurated to replace Netanyahu as the prime minister of Israel, Bennett doubled down on his anti-Palestinian views proclaiming  that his government would “strengthen settlements across the whole of the Land of Israel.”

It’s not only on the Palestinian issue that Bennett is a far-right ideologue. Bennett uses his adherence to orthodox Judaism as cover for his opposition to gay marriage. “Judaism doesn’t recognize gay marriage, just as we don’t recognize milk and meat together as kosher, and nothing will change it,” he declared.  Netanyahu, by contrast, touts himself as being pro-LGBTQ+ rights. As recently as 2018 he wrote: “I am proud to be the prime minister of one of the world’s most open and free democracies… Israel consistently upholds civil equality and civil rights of all its citizens regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.”

So why then are progressive politicians and organizations responding so positively to the change in Israel? Bernie Sanders, known for his progressive stances and for being a congressional champion of Palestinian rights, said in a video that he was “hopeful” that the new government would be one “we will be better able to work with.” Americans for Peace Now, the sister organization of Shalom Achshav, Israel’s preeminent anti-settlement/pro-peace organization, released a statement that it “welcomes the swearing-in of Israel’s new government.” On Sunday night after the new government was sworn in, thousands of Israelis took to the streets in Tel Aviv — considered Israel’s bastion of secular liberalism — and celebrated into the night.

One answer lies in how fed up people inside and outside of Israel had become with Netanyahu’s rule. His tenure was marred by corruption charges and shrewd maneuvers to remain in power, and what had become an endless cycle of Israeli elections, during which the government was paralyzed and unable to pass a budget for the past three years.

The other answer, however, is that this was the best change that could be obtained from a government that prevents about five million people living under its rule from being able to vote. Here’s the situation: About 20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinian. They can vote in all Israeli elections and have representation in Knesset. This election saw the first Palestinian party join an Israeli majority government coalition. However, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship represent only about one-third of the Palestinians living under Israeli rule and military occupation.

Though the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are the official governments of the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, Israel is the absolute power in charge. Israel controls the borders, the currency, and the central bank. It collects taxes on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA), maintains the right to carry out military operations on Palestinian land, and controls the amount of freedom, or lack thereof, that Palestinians are granted.

Israel approves only about half of the permits that residents of Gaza apply for to travel outside of Gaza for vital medical treatment. In 2017, 54 people died while awaiting a permit to travel for medical treatment, leading to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, to release a joint statement calling for the blockade of Gaza to be lifted.

Reasons for denying people in Gaza necessary medical treatment are often absurd, such as denying travel because a relative at one time moved from Gaza to the West Bank without Israeli permission. Even when not carrying out a massacre, such as the May 2021 one that killed 256 Palestinians, Israel regulates the fuel and building materials available to Gazans. At times, it has even controlled the number of food imports according to the number of calories Gazans should consume.

Israel controls not only the exterior borders of the West Bank but what goes on inside as well. While the Palestinian Authority manages utilities and infrastructure for much of the West Bank, Israel is the ultimate authority.  Israeli settler regional councils control 40% of West Bank land. Even in areas like Ramallah, supposedly under complete Palestinian Authority control, Israel reserves the right to enter the city at any time, close streets and shops, burst into homes, and make warrantless arrests.

While the PA does maintain a judicial and penal system, one that itself is incredibly repressive, Palestinians are also subject to Israel’s military court system and laws such as Military Order 101, which bans peaceful protest. Though they are prosecuted in Israeli military courts and serve time in Israeli military prisons, Palestinians have no say over who is appointed to run the Israeli military, let alone the military courts.

Jerusalem was captured by Israel in 1967 and formally, and illegally, annexed in 1980. Common sense might follow that Israel would have then absorbed the East Jerusalem Palestinians, now numbering around 370,000, and made them Israeli citizens.

Rather than holding citizenship, however, Jerusalem Palestinians hold the status of permanent residents, allowing them to vote in municipal, but not national, elections. While this may at first seem a move in the right direction, a closer look reveals careful manipulation of demographics to ensure an at least a 70% Jewish majority at all times. Through such policies as exorbitant taxation, requiring constant proof of residency, and denial of family unification, since 1967 Israel has managed to revoke the residency of 14,595 Palestinian Jerusalemites.

Right now Israel’s courts are in the process of ethnically cleansing the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Before the Nakba, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and lands to establish the state of Israel, two Jewish trusts purchased a plot of land in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. When Israel was established, the Jewish families living in Sheikh Jarrah left for West Jerusalem as that section of the city was now part of the new state of Israel while East Jerusalem came under Jordanian and UN control. In 1956, Jordan and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees resettled 28 Palestinian families who had been forced out of their homes inside the new state of Israel into Sheik Jarrah. In exchange for giving up their rightful refugee status, the 28 families were to receive ownership of the Sheikh Jarrah properties, but they never got the deeds to their properties. Israel is now trying to return the properties to the Jewish trusts who later sold them to Nahalat Shimon, a real-estate company registered in the US state of Delaware. The kicker is that while Israel regularly uses this tactic to remove Palestinians from East Jerusalem, Israeli law bars Palestinians from recovering property they lost in the Nakba, even if they still reside in areas controlled by Israel.

2021 marks 54 years of occupation, including 14 years of the siege of Gaza, and 28 years since the signing of the Oslo Accords that were supposed to create a Palestinian state. 600,000 Israeli citizens now live in the approximately 200 illegal Israeli settlements that cover the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

A breakdown of who is and isn’t allowed to vote between the Jordan river and the sea reveals Israel’s motivations: * Number of Jewish Israelis living in Israel proper, and East Jerusalem, and West Bank settlements: 6.589 million (Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics) : * Number of Jewish Israelis living in Israel proper, and East Jerusalem, and West Bank settlements: 6.589 million (Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics)

* Number of Palestinian citizens of Israel (Palestinians who can vote in national elections): 1.5 million (Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and Jerusalem Municipality)

* Number of Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza who cannot vote in Israeli national elections: 4.88 million (Palestinian Authority Central Bureau of Statistics)

As we get to know Israel’s new prime minister and government, as we continue to watch Israel forcibly remove Palestinians from East Jerusalem, as we worry about a next massacre in Gaza, and as we continue to hear the absurd label of Israel as a democratic state, let’s not forget that the right to vote is only granted to 60% of the total population and only one-third of Palestinians who live under Israeli rule had any say Naftali Bennett becoming Israel’s thirteenth prime minister. 

The Listening Post

Reality check on Palestinian Rights

The potential toppling of Binyamin Netanhahu as Israeli prime minister is even more important than it looks because it follows closely on two significant changes in the Israel/Palestinian political landscape earlier this year.

These changes were the replacement of Donald Trump, prepared to do whatever Netanyahu asked him to do, with President Biden, who is reverting to the traditional pro-Israel US posture, but without endorsing a fanatical far-right agenda. Secondly, the outcome of the 11-day Gaza “war” in May showed that the Palestinians cannot be marginalised and ignored as Trump and Netanyahu tried to do.

The permanent fall of Netanyahu remains highly uncertain, but if it does happen, it will end the career of the most powerful Israeli politician since its first prime minister David Ben-Gurion. Netanyahu, first elected prime minister in 1996, was the pioneer for a generation of populist nationalist leaders, with many features in common, who have since popped up all over the world. All rely on exacerbating and exploiting polarisation, and inflating real and imaginary threats for their own political advantage.

Netanyahu’s former chief of staff and likely successor, Naftali Bennett, is to the right of his former boss, but will lack his personal authority and international connections. Overall, the three new factors in the situation – the departure of Netanyahu, the arrival of Biden and re-emergence of the Palestinian question – have produced a period of maximum fluidity in Israeli/Palestinian politics.

Bennett may want to prove to his far-right followers that he has not betrayed them by launching airstrikes on Gaza if a single rocket is fired from there, and may push ahead with the expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank. The centre-left in his eight-party coalition may not oppose this in their desperation to get rid of Netanyahu and they want, in any case, to give priority to improving relations with the Biden administration.

Most likely the anti-Netanyahu coalition is too fragile to do anything that will split it – “a Government of National Paralysis”, as one observer described it, though this does not make it markedly different from its predecessors. Yet preserving the present Israel/Palestinian status quo is not as benign or risk-free a policy as it might sound, for the situation is deteriorating. Israeli settlers and security services are putting escalating pressure on Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israel itself. It was aggressive new evictions and restrictions that provoked the Palestinian upsurge last month.

Foreign governments sense that the Israel/Palestinian confrontation is erupting once again, and have returned to spouting moth-eaten cliches about “a two-state solution”, safe in the knowledge that this is not going to happen. On the contrary, such empty and discredited rhetoric about a non-existent peace process serves only as an excuse for not seeking practical ways to improve the lives of the seven million Palestinians – the same number as Israeli Jews – living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

Pursuit of a chimerical Palestinian state that, in any foreseeable political situation, is not going to be more than a collection of beleaguered Bantustans, has become a culpable diversion from seeking equal civil rights and personal security for Palestinians.

A ground-breaking examination of an alternative option is spelled out by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the US/Middle East Project in a detailed study called Breaking the Israel-Palestine Status Quo. This proposes a rights-based approach, notably freedom for the Palestinians from dispossession and discrimination and the assertion of their right to freedom of movement. This would confront and seek to reverse what the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch have both denounced as a system of apartheid, enforcing inferior status on Palestinians.

The study points out that this rights-based approach “has the benefit of being more consistent with the Biden administration’s overall foreign policy posture”. It would foster much increased sympathy for the Palestinians in the US, particularly in the Democratic Party and among anti-Trump Americans.

One can see this radical shift in opinion in much of the US media, such as The New York Times, which carried pictures of each of the 67 Palestinian children killed in Gaza in May on its front page. An intelligent even-handed documentary on the origins and course of the Israel-Palestine conflict called The Tinderbox by filmmaker Gillian Mosely has just started being shown.

Despite very real changes, it is naive to expect Israel to dismantle restrictions on Palestinians, regardless of who is prime minister, because the balance of power is tilted so decisively in favour of Israel. Netanyahu may be disliked by a large swathe of Israeli voters, but his policies towards the Palestinians are popular.

Israel’s political and military strength, though, is not the sole reason why the Palestinians have been unable to put up more effective resistance to discrimination and the denial of their human rights. Israeli dominance is more vulnerable than might at first appear, as was shown by the recent mass protests and strikes in Israel, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Prolonged peaceful mobilisation of millions of Palestinians on the streets, wherever those streets may be, is their most powerful card and one which Israel would find it difficult to counter.

“This is a moment for the Palestinians to get their act together,” says one veteran commentator. “But their Achilles’ heel is the poor Palestinian leadership. The Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah is politically paralysed, a sort of Israeli proxy regime running a few semi-autonomous zones.” Hamas may have increased its credibility among Palestinians by confronting Israel last month, but it has no effective political strategy and its sectarian Muslim ideology makes it easy to isolate internationally.

Surprisingly, it may be in its relations with the Palestinians rather than the Israelis that the Biden administration could do most good without spending much political capital in the US – something it is averse to doing. It should stop pretending that the PA president Mahmoud Abbas, who has not held an election since 2005, represents more than an authoritarian clique. It should support the democratic election of real Palestinian representatives and not supinely accept the repeated postponement of elections.

Everywhere between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, the US should support equal rights and oppose the subjection of one community by another. It needs to roll back some of Trump’s measures favouring Israeli settlements on the West Bank, but steer away from pretending to disinter a moribund peace process in pursuit of a final settlement which nobody believes in and which has become a charade, excusing inaction on real issues.

As for the Palestinians, there are opportunities in the current turmoil, hobbled though they are by their useless leadership. This is not going to be displaced or relax its grip on formal power any time soon, but it could be bypassed. The best way forward for the Palestinians would be to establish a broad-based civil rights movement to mobilise their communities everywhere, using their great numbers to challenge systemic oppression and prevent further erosion of their rights. 

PALESTINA

Israel's constant harassement and violence against journalists in Palestinian Occupied territories.

The dust has barely settled from Israel’s latest bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip, but the post-traumatic stress has only just begun. A new round of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that is, on top of the trauma of decades of occupation and daily humiliations, and the bombings of Gaza in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2018, and 2019.

Shocking reports have been surfacing from during the bombardment and since the ceasefire over the past few weeks. A 14-year old Palestinian boy committed suicide following the death of all his family members. Eleven of the 67 Palestinian children killed in Israeli airstrikes, aged between five and 15, were participating in the Norwegian Refugee Council’s “psycho-social programme aimed at helping them deal with trauma”.

It is not just children traumatised. Palestinian youth know their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are also suffering, keeping up a brave face as they deal with their long-term PTSD. Nobody can become resigned to such continuous systemic violence.

I did not experience this recent onslaught, but I have been under Israeli bombs, and it brought its own PTSD, mild and not comparable to what the Palestinians have experienced, but enough to relate. Indeed, when I watched the Israeli bombing of the 11-storey al-Jalaa tower – which also housed Al Jazeera and the Associated Press – it triggered flashbacks.

In the July 2006 war on Lebanon, I was volunteering with the Syrian Red Crescent at the Masnaa border crossing between Lebanon and Syria. We would flag down vehicles coming from Lebanon to offer people water and food, and ask if they needed any medical attention. What struck me the most was the anguish, the deep pain in the faces of elderly women in the front passenger seat, fleeing bombs and conflict for the umpteenth time, having experienced the 1976 and 1982 Israeli invasions, the civil war, and other Israeli attacks.

Every bombing reopens wounds, causes the heart to beat faster. Before crossing back into Lebanon in August 2006, I had only heard bombs in the far distance – the IRA bombing in London in 1993, in Cyprus the Americans shelling Lebanon in 1984, and the bomb that killed Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2004. But I had never seen or heard a one tonne bomb.

On my first evening back in my apartment in Beirut, I sat down to try to relax in the lounge before dinner. Then the bombs began to drop. My body shook, it felt as if I was physically lifted from my seat. My heart did more than the rumba, it was ready to pop out of my chest. It scared the living daylights out of me. I leapt from the couch, grabbed my passport and some cash, and was ready to leg it out of the building when I realised the bombs were dropping on Beirut’s southern suburbs (dahiyeh), several kilometres away.

That night, after quaffing a few strong drinks, I went to sleep. An hour later I was nearly shaken out of bed; another onslaught of US-made bombs being dropped by Israel. I drifted off again. Around 5am, the same jolt as the bombing started again. A psychological onslaught for those not immediately under the bombs. That morning I put cellotape across all the windows in case they were blown in, to prevent being wounded by shattered glass.

Some days later I was working on the seventh floor of a building overlooking the dahiyeh. We all looked up from our desks as Israeli jets hit one, then two then three high-rise buildings that disappeared from sight, clouds of dust obscuring the southern Beirut skyline. Seeing a 40-plus metre building being reduced to less than 10 metres of rubble is, for lack of a better word, extraordinary, or as the US propagandists call it, shock and awe. It is not something you want to see again, apart from maybe a controlled demolition.

There were to be some 30 bombings and assassinations in Beirut between Hariri’s killing and 2014. Each one I heard brought up bile, and what had gone before. Israeli overflights would do the same, especially the sonic booms that caused windows to warp in and out, car alarms to go off, and people’s hearts to race – is it another bombing?

For me, that I had some form of PTSD became apparent in late 2006 when I tried discussing that summer’s events with family. They could not really relate. For a while I was only truly comfortable interacting with people that had experienced the same.

That I was emotionally rattled by it all became apparent when I was in McLeod Ganj, near Dharamsala, in India. Watching a harrowing documentary about Tibetans escaping across the Himalayas to India, I had to go out on the balcony I was so overwhelmed with emotion. Another trigger was a visit in 2011 to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum – about the 1945 atomic bombing of the city. A superb museum, with a clear mandate of no more nuclear weapons (it correctly lists Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons on its map of nuclear warmongers). At the exit there were computers to write to your mayor to express your opposition.

The museum has ample grounds to let one reflect. I sat on a bench very near the site of the explosion that immediately killed around 80,000 people, and thought of nuclear war, the July 2006 war, the one tonne bombs. Emotion welled up inside, and I thought no one should ever experience such horror ever again.

In the museum’s bookshop I had acquired the first of the 10-part manga series Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa, loosely based on his own experiences as a Hiroshima survivor (the books should be on every school library’s shelves). On finishing it on the train on the way out of Hiroshima, the tears that I had been suppressing for days finally flowed. I had to go to the toilet to avoid the curious gazes of my fellow passengers, and to cover up my embarrassment, although there was nothing to be self-conscious about really.

But that is the problem with PTSD, it can rear its head at any time, and in strange ways: being emotional, sad, suddenly angry. I cannot fully imagine what Palestinians, Lebanese, Afghanis, Yemenis, Syrians have experienced for far too long. The toll is ultimately unquantifiable, but it has made Palestinians have one of the highest rates of mental illness in the world – as discussed in the latest Latitude Adjustment podcast.

But as Palestinian psychiatrist Samah Jabar has argued, here and here, the Palestinians’ experience goes beyond the PTSD label, being largely a Western construct: “PTSD better describes the experiences of an American soldier who goes to Iraq to bomb and go back to the safety of the United States. He’s having nightmares and fears related to the battlefield and his fears are imaginary. Whereas for a Palestinian in Gaza whose home was bombarded, the threat of having another bombardment is a very real one. It’s not imaginary. There is no ‘post’ because the trauma is repetitive and ongoing and continuous.”

I fit into that category with returning soldiers, as many foreign correspondents know only to well, exemplified in Andrew Feinstein’s brilliant documentary about the global arms trade and the damage it causes, Shadow World.

What is particularly scary about ongoing trauma is that it can be handed down to to the next generation, through epigenetics. While psychotherapy may reverse epigenetic changes caused by trauma, for Palestinians and those experiencing ongoing occupation and conflict, there is no post-trauma. It is ongoing Traumatic Stress Disorder. The dust from the bombings never truly settles.  

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